2/93 Misc. Newsletter

(Incorporating four Stranger columns)

HILLARY’S JUST GOT IN;

ALREADY HALF

THE CAREER WOMEN

IN AMERICA

HAVE FOOTBALL-HELMET HAIR!

n the remote chance that you care, here at Misc. we spent the morn of 1/20 sitting warm in our electric-heated apartment, watched the swearing-in on crystal-clear cable, and felt sorry for all the folks here in Liberalville waited so long to see a Democrat inaugurated, only to have the power knocked out. No, we won’t make tapes of all the festivities for you. Besides, you don’t want to see Barry Manilow‘s opening act on the pre-inaugural special (a potential harbinger of disappointments to come?).

THE BUZZ OF THE NATION: Note that Pepsi was a sponsor of that same TV special. Traditionally, Coke was the Democratic pop (owned by Atlanta Dixiecrats) and Pepsi was the Republican pop (owned by Wall St. investors). During WWII, FDR pushed sweetheart deals to give Coke extra sugar rations and to let it build plants wherever our troops landed. In the ’50s, Nixon deliberately staged his “kitchen debate” with Kruschev in front of a Pepsi display at a New York trade fair. In the ’80s, Pepsi’s rise in the “cola wars” (under a management full of ex-military officials) mirrored the GOP’s power surge; as the Dems compromised and struggled, Coke lost its way with New Coke and ill-advised Hollywood investments. Now, it’s Pepsi that’s going weird at one end (with dumb ideas like Crystal Pepsi) and digging in at the other (buying fast-food chains to insure a captive market for its drinks). Clinton himself claims to be a Coke loyalist.

ENGULFED II: Predictably, the old order wouldn’t go away without one last blow by the GOP sleaze masters — the unilateral restarting of a war in hopes that the new guy would have to continue it, and thus continue the military spending levels and foreign-policy arrangements tied into it. History will, I predict, conclude that practical Republicanism, like practical Communism, was a system for preserving the rights of the privileged no matter what the cost to the nation as a whole, no matter how much it contradicted its own official ideology. If we’re lucky, maybe we’re over both of them.

SEARS CATALOG, 1886-1993: I suppose there’s little purpose for the Big Book in today’s malled and Wal-Marted America. Still, when any longrunning periodical dies, it’s a loss to the national scene. The Sears book, like the Wards book created (and died) before it, was a pioneer in what us art snobs now call interactive literature. You read the words and looked at the pictures. You imagined how the furniture would look in your home, you took your own measurements. Some of you tried to figure out the mysterious demarcation between Girls, Misses and Juniors. You could use it for bad toilet paper, worse cigarette paper, and cheap anatomy lessons via the underwear section. Now the masses have to shop in person, while the elite can stay home with their L.L. Bean and Victoria’s Secret books.

CATHODE CORNER: After honing his act for several years on assorted local cable channels, Spud Goodman has blossomed into a bright little show on regular TV (if that’s what you can call KTZZ), punctuated by outstanding live local-band segments and snappy graphics. Goodman’s own act consists of rambling interview/discussions that get interrupted by the large studio cast before they can get anywhere. While he treats himself as a god (“healing” viewers from the sin of having seen Bodyguard), everyone else treats him with patronizing indifference. The studio regulars don’t let him finish a sentence. The cameras, aping either experimental filmmaker Stan Brakage or AT&T ads, turn away toward people’s hands or goofy props. The tape editor cuts in fake poetry or meaningless location footage. Either they all disdain him, or they’re protecting him from the risk of boring the home viewer….Phoenix residents can now see The Maury Povich Show dubbed into Spanish, by accessing the same “Second Audio Program” signal used with some HBO movies. What a great way to teach our li’l kids to be bilingual! Forget those cute storybooks about spunky waifs back in the Old Country. Give us the wives who’ve become best friends with their husbands’ mistresses; that’ll hold anybody’s attention.

NITE LIT: Insomniacs such as myself have found a great companion and aid toward tiredness in USA Cable’s Up All Night, which takes old drive-in sex movies and cuts out the sex, making them even duller. Book lovers deserve their turn, so I propose a new book club. Boring Books Inc. would issue special editions of the classics, condensed to skim over the exciting parts and leave in all the tedium. (They’ll also help you write book reports when you’ve only seen the movie versions.) Just imagine the possibilities! The BBIMoby Dick: Just the documentary accounts of the whaling business. The BBI Lady Chatterly’s Lover: Just the passages about the decline of England’s agrarian society. The BBI Razor’s Edge: Just the gossip about Somerset Maugham’s rich friends. The BBI Fear of Flying: Just the parts about being a lonely affluent American in Germany, waiting for her weekly dose of The New Yorker. The BBI Thomas Hardy: Everything he ever wrote.

THE FINE PRINT (from the back of the Bradford Exchange Simpsons collector’s plate): “A decorative accessory. Not to be used for food consumption. Pigments used for color may be toxic.”

`POST’ MORTEM: There used to be a U-District jewelry store owner who tried for years to ban street posters. He said they were desecrating the neighborhood, that the Ave ought to look more clean-cut, more like Bellevue. Now, the Washington Music Industry Coalition and the Northwest Area Music Alliance have announced a campaign to get clubs and bands to stop postering light poles. This would further force music promotion into paid media (like here). Admittedly, it’s wasteful to make hundreds of nondescript big-type posters aimed at passing cars, that may only attract a few dozen people to a particular gig. Still, there’s something to be said First Amendment-wise for the right to poster. And, as shown in Instant Litter, Art Chantry‘s book of local gig posters from 1977-85 (still at remainder racks), the illustrated poster aimed at pedestrians is a vital art form. Some are more creative than the advertised bands.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Wall St. Journal correction, 12/28): “A spokeswoman for News Corp.’s Fox Broadcasting said the show In Living Color is part of a “long tradition of sketch comedy,” not sex comedies, as reported. The spokeswoman was misquoted in an item in Thursday’s Advertising column.” Runner-up (P-I headline, 12/29): “Sadomasochism gaining influence in dominant culture.”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints finally came out a bit late for Xmas giving, but is still a quality alternative to your standard art calendars. Written and collage-illustrated (anonymously) by Talking Ravencollaborator James Koehnline, it’s a glorious celebration of the world’s free spirits and insightful thinkers, represented through 15 months’ worth of alternative “saint’s days”. February alone gives you found art and short texts about Bob Marley, Sir Thomas More, Russian anarchist Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Susan B. Anthony, Copernicus, and Tex Avery. Available at Left Bank and A.K.A. books….Ex-Wire publisher, ex-KCMU DJ and ex-Stranger music reviewer Brian Less is back in business with Urban Spelunker, another free monthly tabloid about the local scene. As is the case with many aging music scenesters moving on to new interests, Less’s new mag is just a little about bands, plus a little about experimental-highbrow music, poetry, politics, and other stuff (but why did that David Fewster piece use an old quote from me, calling for more serious Northwest fiction, as the premise for a page of coffee jokes?)…Memo to IEM: If you’re gonna run Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream tributes, don’t call yourselves a local art mag. And what do those letters stand for anyway?

PHILM PHACTS: Robert Altman’s making a film cobbled together from pieces of Raymond Carver stories — only relocated, says,USA Today, “from Carver’s Pacific Northwest to suburban southern California.” Carver was arguably the best portrayer of pre-Yup Northwest society, a world of repressed Presbyterians who sit around brooding mournfully and talking very plainly. Can you really see Carver’s world enacted by light-haired Porsche drivers among the palm trees?

WHY THE COMMONS IS A DUMB IDEA: South Lake Union is Seattle’s version of the “cheap merchandise district” depicted in Ben Katchor’s great comic, Julius Knipel, Real Estate Photographer (seen sometimes in The Stranger and collected in the book Cheap Novelties). Every thriving city needs a low-rise, low-rent district adjacent to downtown, for all the commercial activities that need to be near the center but can’t afford tower rents. We need the suppliers, distributors, and photo studios that are there now. The problem is that to civic planners, there are no old low-rise buildings — just redevelopments that haven’t happened yet. The visionaries don’t see the needs of the real city, just the fantasy of an “Emerald City.” They can’t see the beauty of the Washington Natural Gas and Pacific Lincoln-Mercury neon. They demand their “piece of the country in the heart of the city.” They can’t see the beauty that’s already there. They can’t see that urban landscapes can have their own beauty. They can’t see the city for the trees.

SHAMAN ON YOU: Commercial exploitation of indigenous spirituality descends to a new low as Time-Life Books offers “a free hand-carved Zuni animal fetish” with The First Americans, a coffee-table book series picturing historical artifacts and the like. The ad copy proclaims, “Hand-carved by artists of the Zuni nation, these stone fetishes are believed to house the spirits of the animals they represent….The Zuni people believe that fetishes contain a spirit force that can be of great value to the owner. They can have many uses — in Native American rituals, on the hunt, for healing, for long life, for personal protection — and are considered very powerful.” Having conquered their land and destroyed their livelihoods, Anglos now turn native people’s most intimate beliefs into corporate kitsch in the name of “tribute.”

PRESSED: My Mirror job gives me access to the periphery of the daily journalism biz. These folks seem to attend so many meetings, you wonder how they get a paper out every day. One topic at these meetings: how to appeal to younger readers. It seldom dawns on them that maybe young people aren’t reading papers ‘cuz papers are so downright hostile to people born after about ’54. In the 1/12P-I, John Marshall applied his tiresome aging-boomer-sneering-at-those-kids-today routine to examine grunge (if he’s only heard about it now, he doesn’t deserve to be an arts writer); his highest compliment is that some of it sounds just like ’60s music (gag!). The same day’s Times ran a wire story about PBS going after “the youth vote” with shows about those fresh young teenybopper idols Elton John, Bob Dylan and Paul Simon!

BODY OF EVIDENCE DEPT.: Lollipop’s is a new Eugene no-booze strip joint open only to ages 18-20. “Lots of the kids come in to play pool,” the owner told Newsweek; “they don’t even watch the girls.” Apparently the boys of Deadheadville take the name of Seattle’s Déja Vú strip chain literally: Nothing you haven’t seen before.

MONOCULTURE: The Weekly still claims to be an “alternative” paper, only its apparent idea of “alternative” is to be more conservative than the dailies. Last December it and its sister paper Eastside Week ran a long essay on “The Downside of Diversity Training.” In it, EW staffer Ted Kenney whined about the inconvenience of affluent white guys at corporate training sessions, forced to think about the concerns of non-whites and non-guys. Its research was heavy on anti-affirmative-action position papers from think tanks “associated with a free market stance.” The author’s insensitivity only proves a need for diversity training. All this from a company that to my knowledge has never had a prominent nonwhite employee (please prove me wrong on this). To the Weekly, diversity means putting white male Reagan Democrats next to white female Reagan Democrats.

LIGHTS! CAMERA! MOSHPIT!: Here’s more about Seattle Backstage, the TV show about local music discussed here in January. It’s 13 half-hours, taped at the Backstage (natch), to premiere in Feb. or March on KCPQ. UW-discovered centerfold model Angela Melini hosts feature segments; KNDD’s Norman Batley is the main host. Michael Harris, who’s co-producing the show with the Backstage’s Ed Beeson, says he’s close to a national syndication deal. Bands already taped include locals (Tiny Hat Orchestra, Mudhoney, Posies, Sadhappy) and secondary national acts (Toad the Wet Sprocket, L7, Sarah McLachlan). This show is not to be confused with the separate team, led by Doug Bray (a UCLA Film School grad) and Steve Helvey, making a feature-length documentary. Tentative title: Fabulous Sounds of the Pacific Northwest (from an early EP by Bray’s old pals the Young Fresh Fellows, who took the title from a 1962 phone co. promotional record). They’ve held special filming concerts with the Posies, Fastbacks, Chemistry Set, Love Battery, 7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Coffin Break, Hammerbox, Mono Men, Supersuckers, and Gas Huffer. Future sessions are scheduled with Tad, the Young Fresh Fellows, Girl Trouble, Seaweed, Beat Happening, Mudhoney, and Dead Moon. Bray has unnamed investors, three Super 16 film cameras with synchronized time codes, digital sound recording. What he doesn’t have yet is a distributor.

(latter-day note: Seattle Backstage never made it to the air. Pray’s film, now called Hype, was finished but still looking for a distributor as of July 1995.)

CLUB ETIQUETTE: Remember, anytime you go to see a band at a bar that’s supposed to be cool, there will be uncouth ruffians to watch out for. These people will prey on anyone they perceive as weak — harassing women, fag-bashing men, “accidentally” shoving against people in order to spill their drinks. Fortunately, these goons are easy to spot. They travel in male pairs or trios (very rarely in coed couples). They’re always the most clean-cut looking guys in the bar, with the biggest jawbones, the costliest “ordinary” haircuts, the widest game-show-host smiles. You’re safe with the people who look like freaks; it’s the suburban slummers you must never speak to. This may change, should “designer grunge” make it to the malls. But by then we’ll all be wearing something else (most of us already do). Speaking of which…

DESIGNER GRUNGE UPDATE: That “Seattle fashion” craze invented in New York has reached Europe, according to articles in the London Sunday Times and Italian Glamour. The Sunday Times piece called Seattle “almost Canadian in its boringness.” Wish I could translate what the Italians said about Kurt, Courtney, et al.; the pictures all show the NY designer ripoff product, with no local images seen. Italian Vogue, however, has had photographers really here.

IF I HAD TO DO THE SAME AGAIN: The Wall St. Journal reports that the Next Big Thing in London clubs is upscale cover bands with names like the Rolling Clones, the Scottish Sex Pistols, and an ABBA tribute named Bjorn Again. Does this mean we can finally stop aping every new UK music fad? Can we stop buying those costly air-shipped copies of Melody Maker and I-D telling us what styles we must slavishly follow in order to be properly “alternative”?

‘TIL MARCH, remember this faux pearl of insight from one of the Amy Fisher TV movies: “I love him ’cause he loves me so much. We have great sex. And he fixes my car.”

PASSAGE

AutoWeek publisher Leon Mandel, quoted on the sales surge in big pickup trucks: “Something in the American spirit likes great size and a lack of subtlety.”

REPORT

Two bad colds in one month have interrupted my regular research rounds (and made much of the rest of my life into a minor hell). God, hope I last long enough to see this health care reform jive come to pass.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Hypaethal”

1/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:

`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Flocculent”

AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

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

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

11/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WOODY’S STILL A FILM GENIUS!

I DON’T CARE WHAT THEY SAY

ABOUT HIS AFFAIR WITH CHILLY WILLY…

Be sure to stay tuned after this issue of Misc. for our “focus group” session, where we talk to a group of undecided readers in a West Seattle living room to learn their feelings about the column’s character issues.

INDECISION ’92: Not voting is exactly the same thing as voting for Bush. No matter how much you call it a protest, officialdom will still call it apathy. I have one and only one overriding goal this Nov. 3: the defeat of the right wing sleaze machine. C-SPAN’s reruns of the Kennedy-Nixon debates revealed that campaigns once offered detailed discussions of policy minutiae; after 12 years of Reagan/Bush, Americans are so accustomed to being treated like idiots that even Perot’s stand-up routines seem comparatively refreshing. No matter how impure or insufficient, I support every politician whose election will aid in the removal from direct political power of Pat Robertson, Jesse Helms, Manuel Lujan, Rush Limbaugh, et al.; who’ll stand up against the funny-money financial lobbies and the junk bond peddlers, against the NRA and the drug companies, and do what it takes to stop this country from becoming a neo-Dickensian disaster zone. Maybe Clinton/Gore won’t go as far as I’d like, but it’s still better than what we’ve got now. Besides, you’ve gotta root for a prez-to-be whose wife (sez Newsweek) used to be on Sesame Street‘s board of directors. At least there’ll be one person in D.C. who knows how to add.

DEJA VU ALL OVER AGAIN: The Wall St. Journal sez an ’80s nostalgia theme nightclub is about to open in NYC. It’s a hopeful sign that the more wretched aspects of recent history might be past us. The question is, now that the Age of Sleaze might finally end, how will it be remembered? I fear that the ’80s could end up fetishized like the ’50s, whose most preposterous images are mistakenly perceived as the truth of American life then (or even as it had always been). For anyone reading this in the future, Reagan was not as universally popular as he claimed to be (or as his cowered opponents were too willing to believe); his economic “miracle” was a trick engineered by financial funny-money; the Religious Right was no great mass movement (Robertson’s regular viewership is half that of feel-good preacher Robt. Schuller); lots of people opposed the wasteful arms buildup and the gulf war; and violent action movies coincided with an actual decline in the moviegoing audience (the Stallone/Schwarzenegger killfests depended on a few addicts coming back repeatedly for their adrenaline fix).

PUTTING THE `HELL’ IN HELLENIC: A female UW student got partly blinded from a bottle-rocket thrown from a frat house toward a rooming house where some football players, some black, were throwing a party on the weekend before the start of fall quarter. She says the bottle came from the frat; its prez claimed at first that black players were responsible for everything, then began to back off from his assertions. (Frats are known cesspools of racism in admissions policies and behaviors, including an infamous minstrel show one year.) At one time, the Greek system was supposed to have symbolized the highest standards in scholarship and upright campus living. Now, even policewomen can’t walk Frat Row on a Saturday night without getting sexually harassed by Bluto wannabes whose rich daddies keep them out of jail. The UW administration seems unwilling to even condemn this behavior; while the city seems more interested in preventing blacks and 20-year-olds from having a place to dance. While everyone was making a fuss about making Belltown safe for the rich, a neighborhood full of the state’s young sons and daughters was allowed to become a snake pit. It was also in questionable taste for KNDD to go ahead with its “toga party” promotion the Fri. night after the tragedy.

ON THE TOWN: We seldom report about private events, but must admit that there won’t likely ever be a performance art piece as surrealistic as the Seafirst employees’ Oktoberfest. Lederhosen-clad oom-pah bands bellowing through the retail levels of the sterile Columbia Center. World-weary CPAs and perky tellers waiting in line in the Food Court area for free sausages, soft pretzels and microbrew (in specially painted steins that they got to keep).

GREAT NEW GAME: Since the Times now publishes wedding pictures only once a month, you can look through all the faces and exchange guesses about which couples have already broken up.

PAT ROBERTSON BUYS MTM ENTERPRISES: The company that once turned out some of the most progressive shows theretofore seen, now in the hands of Mr. Bigotry himself. What would Mary say?

A FRIEND WRITES: “So far, Tina Brown’s New New Yorker is like a crumbling but funky old apartment building that’s been “restored” into tacky luxury condos. All the humanizing qualities of the old format have been replaced by bland, “tasteful” flourishes. And most of the cartoons still suck (`I am a member of the legal profession, but I’m not a lawyer in the perjorative sense’); though it’s good to see Jules Feiffer joining Roz Chast as a beacon of real humor. Seattle readers should note Terrence Rafferty’s review of Last of the Mohicans: ‘(Michael) Mann gives Hawkeye rock-star hair, and precisely the right kind… a straight, stringy alternative-rocker mane (think Nirvana or Pearl Jam). This hair is exquisitely judged; greasy enough to shine with rebel integrity, yet not so disgusting that we start wondering what Hawkeye smells like.'”

MORE HAIR NEWS: Malaysian authorities have banned music videos depicting male long hair, claiming the need to “curb yellow culture” and prevent the subversion of impressionable youth. If they saw the crew-cutted boys on our Greek Row, they wouldn’t be so scared of a few tresses.

OFF THE WALLS: The best visual art show of the year so far (even surpassing fantastic photos by Patricia Ridenour and Mark Van S.) could be Dennis Evans‘s The Critique of Pure Writing at the Linda Farris Gallery. Twenty-six stunning collage installations combining old books, provocative display texts, and seductive graphics, positing a series of books containing the secrets of the universe. See the exhibit (until Nov. 15) or its commemorative book, then on Dec. 5 see the thematically and visually similar Prospero’s Books at the Neptune.

ALONG THE WATCHTOWER: Paul Allen won his bid to lease the ex-SAM Modern Art Pavillion for his proposed Jimi Hendrix memorial, over opposition by local art critic Matthew Kangas. He claims to have nothing against the Hendrix project (though he has something of a grudge against “the weight of the commercial entertainment industry”); he just wanted the building kept for fine art. It’s on the high-traffic Seattle Center grounds; it has high ceilings and perky ’60s white light; leasing it would remove it as a Bumbershoot venue. And face it, Allen can afford his own building.

STRIKING: KING’s Compton Report on 9/27 was aflutter about the need to preserve baseball from owners’ greed and waning fan interest. But the sport has a bigger problem, a bad rep among the young jocks needed to fill future rosters. The Mariners’ inability to find decent players directly results from the lack of good athletes getting into the game. It’s thought of as squaresville, the favorite sport of wimpy and/or right-wing authors, invoked by hypocritical “family values” advocates in “Get high on sports, not drugs” posters. In our anti-authoritarian society, it’s a slow game that emphasizes control and authority. In bowling, a perfect game is when everything happens. In baseball, a perfect game is when nothing happens. The sport’s best hope is for thawing U.S. relations with Cuba, bringing a new supply of great players who love the game.

FINAL MANGO TANG UPDATE: Ana Hernandez arranged for her cousin to smuggle a case of various Tang and “Frisco” brand 1-liter packets across the Mexican border; I now possess the contraband sugar/citric acid powder. The mango drink looks more orange than the Orange Tang and tastes vaguely like mangoes, but is too thin and sugar-gritty to make a convincing replica. The guava, melon, lemon and (especially) lime flavors are closer to the mark.

THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger has more info about “the baseball cap on the rear dashboard thing,” his topic of a previous letter: “these people one sees on the road display their goddamned baseball caps in their cars’ rear dashboards…Some tacky array of dime-a-dozen nylon mesh and foam things with a team/beer/tobacco/auto parts co. emblazoned on the H.G.W. Bush-type high-forehead brow thing”.. Thanks for the extra info; I still have no insights of my own on this…

FOR THE ACTIVE LIFE: The marketing of big-time men’s sports to female fans reaches a new level with Kimberly-Clark’s (no relation) offer for “Future Husky Fan” or “Future Cougar Fan” infantwear in exchange for Kotex proofs of purchase. Wouldn’t baby stuff make a more appropriate promotion for the Seahawks?

CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE: Nearly two dozen young caucasians were arrested for assorted rowdy behavior at the G n’ R Kingdome show. And yet you never hear any community lobbyists call for a crackdown against white music or the closure of white clubs. Also, the P-I‘s Roberta Penn curiously commented that since no female fans took their tops off during the concert, it was a possible sign that “women are refusing to let their bodies be used as entertainment”. (Dome officials asked the band not to flash its regular “Show Your Tits” notice on the Diamondvision screen.) If I were her, I wouldn’t invoke Axl lovers as representative models of their gender. Besides, a voluntary revelation of natural beauty could arguably be a more wholesome entertainment than that provided by the band.

LAST DAY OF OUR ACQUAINTANCE DEPT.: Sinead O’Connor expressed her displeasure with the pope on Sat. Nite Live, to the expected condemnation of church authorities and supporters. As if an Irishwoman wouldn’t have a legit gripe against an institution that keeps divorce, contraception and abortion severely restricted there. As if anybody watching at 1 a.m. Sunday would be at Mass later that morning. Then, in her very next public appearance, she was booed off the stage at Sony Records’ all-star Dylan tribute show. So much for the open-mindedness of the ’60s generation. Also, David Letterman complained about being stuck in a meeting with network brass for three hours after he did a list of O’Connor’s “Top Ten List Complaints About the Pope.” He didn’t say that NBC censored the list after the show was taped. VCR freeze-framers report catching one stray frame of “No. 8: His Holier-Than-Thou Attitude,” which was otherwise taped over with “No. 8: The Way He Snubbed Her at the Grammys.”

AD OF THE MONTH: The promoters of a Regional Transit Project latched onto the slogan, “We’re a big region now. Maybe it’s time to act like one.” In the Nov. 18 Stranger I wrote, “Seattle is a major American city, damn it, and ought to start acting like one.” Nice that they know where to get top-notch material.

THE FINE PRINT (on the Sparkle Fun Crest Neat Squeeze package): “This product contains no sugar, like all ADA-accepted toothpastes. To prevent swallowing, children under six years of age should be supervised in the use of toothpaste.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Hydro Legends is the journal of the Hydroplane and Race Boat Museum, a work-in-progress that collects and restores the boats, engines and memorabilia of Seattle’s peculiar hometown sport. The 32-page tabloid’s chock full of wacky vignettes and history about such hydros as Savair’s Miss, Such Crust, Burien Lady, Smythe the Smoother Mover, Miss Bardahl, and the five Slo-Mo-Shuns; plus ads for commemorative hydro gold jewelry and silver ingots. Available from 1605 S. 93rd St., #E-D, Seattle 98108.

FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: At the opening ceremony before the first “true World Series” game, the Atlanta color guard brought out a Canadian flag with the maple leaf upside down. And this is the town that’s hosting the next Olympics?

SPOOKED: Two Spokane grade schools cancelled their Halloween parties this year, due in part (according to an AP story) to “complaints from parents who believe the day has satanic associations.” I believe Linus would call this the case of a very insincere pumpkin patch.

DID YOU THC WHAT I SAW?: It’s not completely true that the War on Drugs is a war on blacks. The white-dominated pot biz is also getting hit hard, with agents using infrared detectors and power-company records to seek out hidden halogen hothouses. Now they’ve got an 800 number for you to rat on those mysterious neighbors who don’t like having strangers in their basement. While I don’t do the stuff myself, I believe that with all our other problems, maybe we shouldn’t be acting like a police state over a mild sedative.

ON THE CALENDAR: Dave Barry will speak in Nov. at a Seattle Public Library benefit, with tix from $15 to $50. My advice is the same as it was for the Live Aid album: Donate direct.

ON THE STANDS: Allure cover blurb, 9/92: “Sophia Loren, The Goddess Next Door.” Vogue cover blurb, same month: “Genna Davis, The Goddess Next Door.” For an upstart little mag, Allure seems to have landed in a ritzier neighborhood.

ON THE AIR: The title of Rosie Black’s excellent report in the 10/19 Stranger, “The End of KCMU,” was more ominous than she knew at the time. KNDD/The End’s frequency was once occupied by KRAB, a pioneer listener-supported station founded in ’62 by Beat Generation legend Lorenzo Milam. It offered a highly diverse mix of programming, from big bands and Asian-language music to feminist talk shows. KNDD’s Norman Batley was one of KRAB’s volunteer DJs. But in the early ’80s, around the time KCMU turned from a broadcasting-class lab to a community station, KRAB’s management tried to “mainstream” the station’s programming, to attract a blander but larger base of donating listeners, to support new ventures like a state-of-the-art mobile recording studio. Shows with dedicated volunteers and listeners were canned or consolidated. Many old listeners stopped donating; too few new listeners replaced them. The station’s new softer focus didn’t make many new listeners love it enough to give money. Faced with mounting debts, the station sold out to commercial interests. The parent entity, the Jack Straw Foundation, continued to run the recording unit and to seek a new slot in the 88-92 FM “educational band.” It failed in attempts to take over the frequencies of KCMU and KNHC. It now runs a low-power station in Lynnwood; people tell me it runs great eclectic stuff, as good as KRAB’s peak years or better. It would presumably still like to grab the first 88-92 spot in Seattle that opens up whenever a current public station fails.

`TIL WE RETURN at the close of the year, visit the exquisite Rosalie Whyel Museum of Doll Art in Bellevue (which isn’t displaying the new doll that wets amber liquid into a clear plastic potty), get ready for the computerized Star Trek playgrounds coming to a mall near you (or, if you can’t wait, see the Playspace at Crossroads Mall), find creative uses for those plastic bowls from all the “Raisin Nut Bran Challenge” street giveaways, and ponder the thoughts of Cindy Crawford on the supermodel stereotype: “A lot of us aren’t educated. But that doesn’t mean we’re stupid.”

PASSAGE

Charita Bauer, near the start of her 35-ish-year stint on Guiding Light: “I’ve heard it said, the more simple people are, the more complex they seem to other people, because those people are so complex that they don’t understand simplicity.”

REPORT

Not only have no job offers come in direct response to my several pleas in this space, but one guy told me that he thought it was a gag, since he just assumed that I lived off trust funds and just wrote as a hobby. Let me repeat: This newsletter is not a parody. When I say something, I mean it. Not kidding. Duh.

In brighter news, The World of Zines by Mike Gundelroy and Cari Goldberg Janice (Penguin TPB, $14) calls Misc. “a wry observer of modern life in a progressive city (Seattle) and tells us things we didn’t even know we needed to know.” Now if they’d only printed the current address with the listing…

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lambent”

7/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Is John McCaw Batman?

A warm, warm greeting to another distinctively cool edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t decide which is sillier: calling Hollywood producers “cultural elitists” or calling them “cultural”.

HOT WEATHER DRESSING: Misc. still wears its baseball caps with the brim in front, the way Abner Doubleday intended. Besides, you can tell when a fashion trend has outworn its welcome when they start making custom caps with frat-house letters printed only on the back.

IN YOUR EAR: Last week, Misc. showed several people the Times picture of a half-dozen acupuncture needles stuck into a heroin addict’s ear to reduce his dependency; only ear-pierced women gasped “Gross” at the sight. The therapy combines the popular trend of body piercing with a sadly “hip” form of self-destruction (Seven Year Bitch guitarist Stefanie Ann Sargent died of an apparent overdose on 6/27; many other local musicians are said to use heroin). Trendy rockers are bound to imitate the look for fashion’s sake. I only hope people will take the real acupuncture or otherwise try to clean up. Remember: hard drugs are a tool of people in power to silence opposing voices.

PHILM PHUN: Here in the town that was among the first in the U.S. to discover the Dutch and Australian new waves, Hong Kong movies are the certified Next Big Thing. They just can’t churn out Chinese Ghost Story installments or vicious/spectacular gangster films fast enough. “But what,” you ask, “is gonna happen to these filmmakers in ’97, when Beijing’s butchers take over the colony?” Many of Hong Kong’s production companies, along with the crime syndicates that allegedly provide financing as well as subject matter for some films, have begun their own 5-Year Plans by setting up offices in Vancouver. Just think: we’ll have a genuine full-time Northwest feature industry, and Canada will finally make movies that don’t look like Hollywood on a discount.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Muttmatchers’ Messenger is a bimonthly photo-ad tabloid promoting “Companion Animals for Adoption.” Photos of forlorn cats and dogs appear, accompanied by a description and phone number. Some are part of display ads, “sponsored in the interest of animal welfare” by Realtors, insurance agents, lawyers, a garage, and a clinical psychologist.

NATIONAL LAMPOON, 1970-1992?: “The Humor Magazine for Adults” was more like a college paper’s April Fool edition, only with good writers and great artists. It was a true rebel without a cause. Its purpose was not to make you smile but to stare you down. Born as the student protest movement passed its peak, its only message was its own sense of self-righteous superiority to the world. No wonder original co-editor P.J. O’Rourke emerged as a right-winger, and Belushi’s character in the NL movie Animal House became a senator. Like the teen/college generation that grew up with it (mine), its only sacred cow was the Almighty Ego Trip. Some people insist that it used to be funny, before its original staff dispersed to Saturday Night Live and elsewhere. I wouldn’t give it that much credit (though it did nourish the career of a few great cartoonists, including Seattle’s own Sherry Flenniken and her droll Trots and Bonnie). The magazine’s officially on “a six month hiatus” (its NYC office is closed and it hasn’t published since February). It may not come back. But its spirit lives on, in thousands of rude stand-up comics.

SPURTS: Still no hope for NHL hockey here, but the Canadian Football League‘s considering its own southern invasion. It’s being courted by Portland, which had a team in the short-lived World Football League. See if they can live with a 110-yard, three-down game where scores of 57-36 are common. Heck, it’d still be better than either Oregon college team. Just make sure it doesn’t get an Indian-motif team name, ‘cuz the Portland paper won’t print it.

STUFF YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE HEARD: Over half of the 18,000-ish arrests after the LA riots were against Hispanics; the sweep has given the Immigration and Naturalization Service a chance to ship hundreds of immigrants back to Mexico and Central America, while others languish for failure to pay exorbitant bail (sez the Nation).

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Ralston Purina’s Batman Returns cereal is far better than the cereal made for the first Batman film (I didn’t like the first movie much either). The new cereal contains the following “fun-shaped” marshmallow pieces: “White bats, purple Penguin hats, tan Batmobiles, blue cat heads.”

CATHODE CORNER: The Seattle City Council is thinking about taking over the local cable TV franchises as a city-owned company. Do we really want politicians deciding whether we’d get to keep MTV, let alone the Playboy Channel?

FOLLOWING FASHIONS LIKE CATTLE: The San Angelo, TX Standard-Times (it’s called that even during Daylight Savings) reports that “the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo adopted new market steer regulations calling for animals to have no more than one-fourth inch of hair any place on their body, besides the tail switch.” Reporter Jeanne Serio quotes a show official: “The sculpting of long hair has become so intense in junior market steer shows that we have lost sight of the original intent of this competition, to teach young people responsibility, knowledge about the care and raising of animals, and skills in choosing and raising market animals with proper body structure and conformation.” I say if long hair is good enough for the entire male student population at Evergreen, it’s good enough for other neutered beasts.

PRESSED: Ever wonder if newspaper headline writers actually read the articles? A 6/24 USA Today cover blurb went, “Book Buying in Dumps: Are We Doomed?” The article itself noted that “spending on adult consumer books increased 10.7% between 1985 and 1990″ and kids’ book sales were even higher. (The story didn’t mention that newspaper circulation in that era was flat and network TV viewership dropped.)

HAD TO HAPPEN SOMETIME: The Beatniks are a new-music cover band, giving totally straight copies of your favorite R.E.M., Violent Femmes and Nirvana songs in between the more typical stale Beatle tunes. It brings to mind an idea: how about some smart promoter forming multiple “Sounds of Seattle” cover bands, all assembled from scratch, to perform your grunge-rock favorites in every Sheraton dance lounge in America.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #1: When I ask folks why don’t they like Clinton, they offer vague allusions about an unattractive personality or a simple “isn’t it obvious?” His groomers are working to give him this image. He’s being handled the way Carter, Mondale and Dukakis were, by party leaders who believe America will elect a “lite right” candidate who doesn’t bash conservatives too much and says as little as possible about non-suburban issues, all for the mythical “Bubba” vote in the south (where Jacksontook seven states in the ’88 primaries). Party leaders ignore the concrete examples that this approach will never work. Clinton’s the “beneficiary” of a primary system in which Demo fundraisers anoint the candidate most likely to run a consultant-controlled campaign — and most likely to lose the election.

STRATEGY FOR DEFEAT #2: Winds-o-change are a-blowin’, and coffeehouse leftists may worry about the threat of actually attaining a voice that people might listen to. No problem! Just use these handy steps to let the right wing win every time: Don’t vote. Don’t run for office or support anyone who does. Never try to respectfully persuade new people to your views. Call everyone who doesn’t already agree with you a redneck, a fascist, or both. Keep using that strident us-vs.-them rhetoric that worked so well in the ’60s to turn people away from progressive causes. Shun modern media and communications, so the right can monopolize them. Do this and you can keep complaining about the world without ever having to do anything.

SIGNS OF THE MONTH (handwritten flyer on downtown light poles): “Public Information Notice. If you are in a high plant pollen area, it is a good idea if you properly wrap your vegetable scraps, bread scraps and meat fat, vegetable oil-soaked paper towels-rags and tie the top of the bag securely. Wrap your cigarette, tobacco scraps separately, making sure that they are not ignited before you dispose of it. If you have meat that is `bad’ or milk that has soured, wrap it in two plastic bags and tie the top or seal it and then put it in a paper bag, writing on the paper bag `Bad Meat’ before you dispose of it, so that if anyone does look through the garbage they will not construe it as something healthily eatable. If you go to a park or a bench, instead of putting your cigarette out in the dirt or sand, bring a container along with you that is metal, like a small canister or cough drop box, and make sure that the tobacco and/or tobacco filter is no longer ignited before your dispose of it. If you wash your garbage containers on a regular basis, it will make your environment healthier also. Please try to do these things, for it will lessen the possibility of infection for yourself and others in the area. It will lessen the chance of food poisoning and may also reduce the amount of emergency intake at hospitals. Thank you for your cooperation.”… Handwritten note with a Sylvester sticker, taped to a garbage can at 3rd & Blanchard: “In our area, look for a solid wall of windows that can’t be opened by guests. The Rabbit.”

TABLED: I remain perplexed by this phony “Northwest cuisine”. In the P-I, Stouffer Madison Hotel chef Rene Pax insisted that “Seattle food means fresh food and the best of the fresh produce.” If there really is a culinary tradition here, it would have to take into account our short growing season (the freshness obsession comes from LA-trained chefs used to year-round growing) and our frontier heritage, particularly of the days before highways or rural electrification. Truly traditional NW foods would be those with brief seasons (cherries), or are made to keep (evaporated milk was invented here). A cuisine that reflects the character of the local populace (as opposed to laid-back fantasies) would stay modest and unpretentious, at least fun. Nothing gaudy or cutesy. An honest smoked salmon, adequate white wine, plain tossed salad, and the quiet elegance of an Almond Roca dessert.

WAITING FOR THE CLAMPDOWN: The authorities made their second move to silence the Seattle music scene (after banning Pearl Jam from Gasworks) by shutting down the funk nights at Jersey’s Sports Bar. It must be noted that Jersey’s mostly-black crowd was, on the whole, no more or less rowdy than the white suburban crowd at local yup meatmarkets.

TRUE CRIME: I’ve had two reports of skinheads bashing homeless people outside the New Hope Mission next door to 911 Media Arts on the night of 5/2. Apparently, the skins claim to be Army men, despite their swastika tattoos and designer boots. They repeatedly kicked and beat men sleeping under the I-5 overpass to the point of major internal injuries. Despite frequent emergency calls, the attacks were unresponded to by cops too busy standing watch over Westlake Center.

VIBES: My Pleasure vibrators may be the first women’s product endorsed by porn queens (“Personally Chosen by the Girls Who Know Them Best”). According to a blurb on the box by one Ginger Lynn, “I like a vibe that’s of exceptionally high quality, and with variable speed control. Because I like sexual control. And I am quality.” What if sex stars as role models catch on? Would beauty standards come to be based on what men seem to like (instead of what women think men like)? Would women reshape themselves toward plump torsos with fat silicone lips and catatonic eyes? Would they imitate porn “acting” by slurring their words and staring blankly into space?

BET ON IT: The new Tulalip Reservation casino was described by a spokesperson on KUOW as “a touch of Las Vegas with a Northwest Indian motif.” What’s that, a Thunderbird totem stitched on the back of a silk jacket?

HYPOCRISY ON PARADE: Rupert Murdoch fired Fox TV executive Stephen Chao, at a Murdoch-convened symposium at an Aspen, Colo. hotel on “the threat to democratic capitalism posed by modern culture”, filled with the usual conservative media-bashers. Chao gave a routine anti-censorship speech at the meeting, claiming violence was more obscene than sex or nudity. On cue, a man in a hotel uniform revealed himself to be a male stripper hired by Chao; he stood nude for 30 seconds before the shocked panelists (including Defense Secretary Dick Cheney his wife, Nat’l Endowment for the Humanities head Lynne Cheney) while Chao talked about how people have to get over their hangups about the human body. Murdoch, who made his first fortune with the toplessPage Three Girls in his UK tabloids, called Chao’s spectacle “a tremendous misjudgment” and sacked him on the spot.

THE REAL CULTURAL ELITISTS: The state Republican convention, as dominated by the religious right and at least tolerated by top GOP officeholders, condemned abortion rights, homosexuality, divorce, sex education, foreign aid, the UN, arts funding, civil service, and the teaching of non-western cultures. It also denounced “channeling, values clarification, relaxation techniques, meditation, hypnosis, yoga, Eastern religious practices, or similar ideas.” My yoga teacher might call that sort of bigotry a fiery ball of negative energy, that impassions people but can also engulf them. Meanwhile, some Nevada Republicans officially denounced that over-publicized Elvis stamp as glorifying “a habitual drug user.”

EYES WITHOUT A FACE: It’s nice that the Mariners are finally a local team again. But why won’t team investor and car-phone tycoon John McCaw appear in public? When the papers ran pictures of the other new owners, they put a blank box above his name. At press conferences, he sent a lawyer to speak for him. Is he ashamed to show his face with the hapless M’s? Will he show up in the owners’ box with a New Orleans ‘Aints paper bag on his head? What if he’s a mystery man, who can’t appear in public lest someone discern his crimefighting secret identity? We invite you to send in (a) a picture of what you think he looks like, or (b) a written explanation of his seclusion. Accuracy doesn’t count, since we don’t know what he looks like either. Stranger employees and people who’ve seen McCaw are ineligible. Results will be published here in three weeks.

ROBERT E. LEE HARDWICK, 1931-1992: Before what we now call “talk radio” took off here, he ran a chat show with a few records. He was adamant that non-rock radio needn’t mean “middle of the road.” He ruled Seattle radio (adult division) from the late ’50s to 1980, when new KVI management decided his postwar-jazz sensibility was an anachronism. He spent a decade wandering from station to station, supported in some years only by commercial endorsements. Sponsors loved his straightforward, no-nonsense persona; station managers hated it, because it contradicted the hype and hustle of modern radio. He was a Scotch-on-the-rocks guy in a wine-cooler world. Two months after losing his last gig (on KING-AM), he drove into the Cascades and blew his brains out. The KING-TV newscast that announced his death had one of his commercials (for Honda dealers).

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be sure to go to the Seattle Hits exhibit of local pop culture at the Museum of History and Industry (including the gallant return of Bobo the stuffed gorilla), visit the exquisite Collector’s Doll Store on 35th and Northlake, and ponder this Cynthia Tucker commentary from the Times: “Successive tides of human progress have rolled back slavery, the subjugation of women, and more recently the oppression of communism.” About time we stopped oppressing communism, don’t you agree?

PASSAGE

A Tri-Cities community college student’s guide to life from Shampoo Planet, the forthcoming new novel by Generation X author Douglas Coupland: “Flippant people ask stupid questions and expect answers. Secrets divulged under flippant circumstances aren’t valued. People don’t value other people’s secrets, period. That’s why I keep my secrets to myself.”

SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT

My computer novel, The Perfect Couple, is supposed to finally come out on disk this summer. Contact Eastgate Systems Inc., (800) 562-1638.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Adumbration”

EVERY VEGETARIAN I KNOW SMOKES THE HIGHEST-TAR CIGARETTES AVAILABLE.

ARE THEY TRYING TO GET EXTRA PROTEIN OR WHAT?

3/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN THE PAPERS SAID

MISSILE CUTS AND AIRLINE RED INK

COULDN’T POSSIBLY HURT BOEING?

At Misc., we feel Tsongas’ primary success will turn out to be a great boon to the stand-up comedy industry. Imagine: a Presidential candidate who talks like Elmer Fudd! We also finally admit that the “Seattle sound” has arrived after seeing an arena organist playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” during a hockey telecast. An LA Kings game, natch.

UPDATE: I’ve now talked to more people who saw different parts of January’s Broadway riot. They describe how a few demonstrators and counter-demonstrators acted like jerks, but their consensus is that the cops went bonkers and started beating up on everybody in sight, shoving innocent bystanders into walls, threatening to arrest people who were just trying to walk home. (There’s a lot more on this in the 2/5 Seattle Gay News.) Last time, I chastised those who provoked the bashing; that does not excuse the cops who too eagerly escalated the violence.

CRUELTY, MISTAKEN FOR A VIRTUE: The State Legislature’s playing a sick game of one-downsmanship, with leaders of each party competing to see how many destitute and mentally ill people they can force out onto the streets. Most so-called “welfare reform” does nothing for people, only against them. Beware of any legislation that seeks to institutionalize the bigoted attitude that “those people” must be perpetually disciplined and humiliated. Poor people are not different from any of us, as increasing numbers of us are finding out.

GRAPHIC LANGUAGE: The Weekly‘s new look may be a sign that it’s ready to acknowledge the existence of non-yups. They’re even writing about the black community now (maybe next year they’ll even hire a black writer). But they were never alone in rejecting the Demographically Incorrect. For a decade TV morning shows, magazines, and daily papers have narrowed the definition of their primary community to the point where you only count if you were born from 1945 to 1954, went to college, and can afford the investments discussed in “Your Money” columns. Bush, Clinton, and Tsongas tailored their economic fixes to appeal to the “Your Money” audience, knowing it’d get noticed by editors who belong to the upscale 20 percent. Journalists won’t address the non-upscale population except as “those other people,” because their bosses don’t want their precious demographics sullied by non-upscale readers. Millions have been removed from the realm of political discourse because they’re outside the ad market for luxury products. In a real way, demographics could kill democracy.

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The Univ. of BC engineering students, who briefly stole the UW Rose Bowl trophy, are known for their pranks. One year, they rigged the lights on Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge to flash in Morse code: “UBC Engineers Do It Again.” UBC’s female business students hold an annual Lady Godiva Run, donning bikini bottoms and long wigs to race on horseback through the woods of the university’s Endowment Lands. The event’s always denounced by male writers on the student paper, who tell the women what’s the right and the wrong way to be liberated.

FORGIVE ME: I didn’t fill out the opinion survey for the Boeing/P-I/KIRO Crisis in the Work Force: Help Wanted project. I couldn’t answer its questions except with more questions. The first page asked, “What’s causing our problems?”; its choices were “Too much government regulation,” “Decline in American work ethic,” “Businesses taking a short-term approach instead of planning for the future,” “Rising rates of illiteracy in the U.S.,” “The federal budget deficit,” “Demands for higher wages by American labor unions,” etc. I didn’t get to write in “Weighted questions on opinion polls.”

THAT `N.W.O.’ PHRASE WON’T GO AWAY: Leftists still utter those three words in every second sentence, a year after Bush said it just once as a throwaway line. Stuck-in-the-sixties left-wingers, as much as demagogic right-wingers, yearn for the good old days of American imperialism. Neither wants to believe that we’re in relative socioeconomic decline. Instead of seeking today’s answers, they’d rather pretend we still had yesterday’s problems. Kuwait was not Vietnam. We weren’t colonizing anybody; we weren’t claiming to bring them “democracy” or even “free enterprise”. We sent an army-for-hire to restore a 70-year-old mercantilist monarchy on whom the western economy had become dependent. If there really is a new world order (that’s questionable, considering how disorderly the world is getting), its nexus isn’t in Washington, D.C. but in Tokyo and Berlin. This doesn’t mean the end of America. It could be our renewal. For moral-righteousness types, there are advantages to a country off the cutting edge of world dominance. It’s easier to make your ideals into your country’s national policy when you’re in a backwater to the currents of conquest (cf. Sweden).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 2/14): “…the Canadian government measures, aimed mostly at consumer electronics and small appliances, won’t stop the flow of about 30 million Canadians who cross the border into Washington state every year. Most are shoppers.” An impressive figure, except there aren’t 30 million Canadians.

SPURTS: It may be better that the M’s produce their own telecasts, as they’re threatening to, instead of leaving it to Prime Sports Northwest, whose offer is hitting delays. I recently saw a PSN repeat of a UW-WSU basketball game that ended abruptly with a minute to go and the outcome in doubt. An announcer hurriedly apologized for technical difficulties and read the final score…TheOregonian will no longer mention sports team names that allegedly demean native Americans. The editor calls such names “stereotypes that demean the dignity of many people in our society.” They’ll still print the name of the Oregon State Beavers.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: P.O.V. is the monthly newsletter of the Pacific Northwest Film and Video Association. The Feb. issue contained a fascinating piece on the economics and politics of high-definition TV. While HDTV might eventually make film obsolete, P.O.V. sez the short-term result of the changeover will be to increase TV/video work shot on film. The new technology will eventually be the standard, but it hasn’t been perfected yet. Therefore, the only way to be sure your production will transfer well to hi-def is to shoot on film and transfer later to whatever HDTV system we eventually get.

GUY STUFF: After I saw SAM’s opening night, I was just as impressed by the photo show at Benham Studio across the street, including male nudes by female artists. I’ve since seen two films by R.E.M. videomaker James Herbert that used male bodies as the chief images in hetero-erotic scenes. Finally, there was the life-size male nude sculpture smiling from inside the window at the Donald Young Gallery (a cheesy mannequin to which a Calif. artist stuck on hyper-realistic fiberglass genitals). I concluded that I was attracted to female images that represent people I’d like to be with, and to male images that represent people I’d like to be. In most art and literature by both women and men, the female body is the land where sex lives, while the male body is portrayed as the instrument of work. Our strongest non-gay male images are of muscular action: athletes, rock stars, socialist working-man art, SAM’s Hammering Man. It’s only since ’70s porn that we’ve had straight male sex objects, viewed with admiration by other straight men. While the porn business treats men as soulless stimulus machines (a view it shares exactly with the anti-porn crusaders), it led to men looking at other men as sexual creatures. Contemporary artists are going further in demystification, showing that a phallus is an awkward work of biology, not the iron rod or missile invoked by sexists of both genders. These artists are affirming that men are people too.

WIRE, 1982-1992: For three years, back while the now-acclaimed Seattle music scene was really a promotion and art-direction scene, Denis Twomey and his editors ran a local music magazine that was about music more than about style or attitude. It’s tough to discuss aural art in print; even the prosperous UK music papers emphasize celebrity (sometimes in the guise of “alternative” celebrity). But it never recovered from devastating debts, including an ad default from Sub Pop.

AD VERBS: AT&T promoted its new TTD public phone/computer terminals for the deaf with a totally soundless commercial. The most attention-getting device yet; why didn’t anyone think of it before?… KIRO sold sponsorships for its “bumpers” updating what would be on each night’s Olympic coverage. To my knowledge, no other station’s sold advertising during its own advertising. Maybe we’ll get back to the old days when every nonfiction show would have sponsor logos decorating the scenery…. Plymouth has commercials with talking cars, under the slogan “The Intelligent Choice.” Need we remind you what make of car Christine was?

FREDERICK & NELSON, 1890-1992: Department stores were the retail flagships of mid-century America. They set the aesthetic/cultural tone for their towns, both in the styles they promoted and in the newspapers their ads supported. Seattle had the middlebrow Bon Marché, the lowbrow Penney’s and Sears, and the also-rans Rhodes, Best’s, and MacDougall-Southwick. But Frederick’s was the queen, the setter of style. Its distinction wasn’t just Frangos or a doorman. In our rough-hewn port city it was a bastion for the traditionally feminine arts of fashion, decorating, interior design, food, and society. It was headquarters for a clientele of women with upbringing and money but not jobs. It was considered such a female institution that it set up a special Men’s Grill where gentlemen could take a respite from shopping among all the ladies. Its decline was predicated on a series of tightfisted owners (starting when longtime owner Marshall Field’s wouldn’t let it build a Northgate store). But its dominance really passed in the ’60s when Nordstrom expanded from shoes into clothes, selling flashy career outfits to women who had more to do during the day than sit in Frederick’s tearoom. Frederick’s reacted by turning inward, taking pride in its refusal to change with the times. (It only admitted blue jeans in an obscure corner under a plain “Today Casuals” sign.) The store was made weak, prime for a series of raiders to bleed it dry. But now, maybe too late, people are looking back fondly at a store that had real standards of quality and service, without the designer-trash styles and motivational sales-zombies found across the street. No matter what happens to the store buildings, the impending loss of Frederick’s is a major turning point in our history.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see the gorgeous Until the End of the World, and ponder role-playing-game creator Steve Jackson‘s policy on not depicting fantasy swordsmen/women in G-strings: “Battle is not the place for recreational nudity.”

PASSAGE

Swedish author Par Lagerkvist imagining the sayings of a Delphi oracle in The Sibyl (1956): “We gather knowledge which we call truth from those in whom we least believe, and unconsciously let ourselves be led by what we most heartily detest.”

IMPORTANT NOTICE

This may be your last free issue of Misc. With the Stranger now running weekly excerpts from the report, I’m severely cutting back on the number of drop-off points for the main newsletter. It’ll still be around at about 20 spots, but the rest of you really ought to subscribe.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Obstreperous”

12/91 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating the first four Stranger Misc. columns)

Elegance? What Elegance?

Welcome back to the sixth year-ending edition of Misc., the newsletter that hopes the end of the cold war will mean the end of gratuitous mushroom-cloud shots in experimental films. And despite recent tragic events, we still root against all LA sports teams.

Silence = Debt: You may have heard how KIRO’s top brass censored a report on 7 UW football players with police records (basic jock crimes like speeding and assault). You may not have heard another TV censorship tale. The KCTS Arts and Performance Group had its entire funding cut by its sole patron, Puget Sound Bank, after a Seattle Men’s Chorus show with transvestite segments. (The bank and the station denied any cause-and-effect accusations.) The unit must now hustle for funding for individual events (insuring more conformity to corporate tastes). It may be about time to give up on allegedly “public TV,” set up financially by the Nixon administration expressly to be beholden to big business. KCTS has shunted documentaries like Tongues Untied to the wee hours, while devoting prime time to animal shows, Kissinger interviews, and Lawrence Welk reruns. The ’90s, the one regular forum for true independent points of view, is now only seen on KCTS at 3 a.m. Thursday mornings. Nationally, shows that don’t suck up to corporate America don’t get (or stay) on. Mobil asserts a lot of creative control over Masterpiece Theater and Mystery serials; nothing goes on that doesn’t support the British class system as a model society. It’s time to find a real alternative distribution system for professional, independent video.

The Fine Print (card wrapped with a Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers figurine in a Frosted Flakes box): “Parents: The toy in this package meets or exceeds currently applicable government and voluntary toy industry standards. As with any toy, we suggest you provide guidance to your children regarding proper use.”

Notes: The local media made a big to-do about Nirvana having to buy out an LA band’s claim to the name. In fact, this sort of thing happened a lot in the punk days. The beloved late English Beat was known as just the Beat everywhere but in North America, where a lame Calif. band had already released an LP as the Beat. A fledgling Seattle band had to stop calling itself The News after Huey Lewis’s lawyers showed up. In 1979, there were unrelated bands in NY, SF and Detroit all called the Mutants… For two minutes of video airtime, M. Jackson ceased to be a bland, commercial imitation of weirdness and became a real provocateur. Of course, that footage had to be dropped.

What’s In Store: The downtown Bon has been running this big “Return to Elegance” ad campaign. Seattle’s newcomers might be fooled into thinking this was some grand dame of merchandising that had lost its focus before recovering its past glory. But we know better. We know this is the same place that used to have flannel fabrics and a great homely budget floor and acres of Qiana and stretch pants and a quintessentially 1977 boutique called “Annie’s Hall.”

News Item of the Month (P-I correction, 10/24): “The jicama is a brown, crisp-fleshed tuberous vegetable; the kiwano is a fruit with orange, spiky skin and green, seedy pulp. Due to a typesetting error, a story in the Oct. 16 editions confused the two.”

Ad Verbs: There was this wonderful USA Today story on 10/31 about national ad campaigns that didn’t make it. Along with the usual everyday rejections (a 3 Stooges fax-machine ad rejected by the Japanese product manager who never heard of the Stooges), there was an ad that would’ve warned against taking an inferior 4 x 4 into remote rugged terrain where it might leave you stranded: “Drive a Landcruiser or drink your own urine.” Then there was a magazine ad with a simple before-and-after equation, with a tube of Clearasil photographed on the Before side and a wrapped Trojan on the After side. Wrote the Clearasil managers: “This promise cannot be substantiated.”

Xmas ’91: One place you might not think to look for gift ideas is the American Bar Association Journal. There you can find a sweatshirt bowdlerizing Shakespeare to read, “The first thing we do, let’s kiss all the lawyers.” Another outfit, Legal Artworks of Chester, Conn., offers framed reproductions of “distinguished works of art with legal subject matter: trial scenes, lawyers, jurors, etc. by Daumier, Thomas Hart Benton, others.”

Still Earning Their 10 Percent: The Curtis Publishing Co. (the Indianapolis right-wing couple who run the nostalgia/revival version of the Saturday Evening Post) now has a subsidiary, the Curtis Management Co., merchandising agents for about 100 sports and entertainment celebrities, most of whom are dead (Twain, Abbott & Costello, Buckwheat, Bogart, Garland, Belushi, Hank Williams Sr., Satchel Paige, Babe Ruth). The company’s PR documents identify its living clients (the third Benji and some ex-football players) with an asterisk denoting “Available for personal appearance bookings”).

When Will the Madness Cease?: Thenext victim of upscaling is the legendary Valhalla Tavern in Ballard, now the Old Pequliar Ale House.

Getting Mighty Crowded: I’ve had little positive to say about Joe Bob Briggs, the redneck-pretending to be a yuppie-pretending to be a redneck who writes lovingly about bad movies. But in a recent issue of his We Are the Weird newsletter, he noted that “in Seattle, which used to be one of the friendliest places in America, people will very openly tell you how much you are not welcome there, especially if you intend to build a house, open a new shopping center, or for that matter just move there to live with your idiot cousin.” His advice to Seattle and other “anti-growth” places: You don’t have to sell a house. Don’t say you’re against growth and then beg United Airlines to move its HQ to your town. If you don’t want more traffic, don’t demand that builders include so many parking spaces. And “watch it with the `I was here first’ syndrome. Seattle, after all, is a man’s name. He was an Indian.”

Junk Food of the Month: Fun Food Inc. of Portland offers a line of kiddie microwave breakfasts, including mini-servings of “wacky” waffles, French toast and pancakes (all with turkey sausage) and an egg-muffin sandwich. The foods are moist enough to eat without syrup; the names include My Dream Breakfast and SuperSports Breakfast.

Local Publication of the Month: Where’s Dan Quayle?, the The Waldo-parody drawn by Puyallup’s Bron Smith, is the first non-Trudeau political-cartooning book on the bestseller list in recent memory. Like the Waldo books and Quayle himself (and unlike traditional political cartoons), it’s obsessively “light.” I’ve said that mandatory “happiness” is a hallmark of sleaze; the book’s creators display this more effectively than any blatant editorial cartoon ever can.

Art in Form, 1981-91: It lived and died as a store selling fancy (often costly) books on progressive art and art theory. Its greater value for 10 years was as a gathering place for smart people. The merchandise is being cleared in a “deconstructing” sale. The space will live as a world-music shop serving the same clientele, but it won’t be the same.

Painful Realization for the New Millennium: By the time I’m 60, tourist towns will hold upscale rap festivals with mostly-white casts and all-white audiences sipping wine and basking in what they’ll call the first art form of the 21st century. The music will sound like Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs backed by bad jazz. Already, a jazz combo has covered Grandmaster Flash’s The Message.

Sign of the Month (on a city Landscape Dept. truck): “A city without trees isn’t fit for a dog.”

The Drug Bug: The new Pay n’ Save on 2nd & Union has Seattle’s first inside drugstore espresso bar. And I still remember Seattle’s last drugstore soda fountain…

Happy Returns?: The Init. 120 turnout helped Seattle gain its first predominantly-female city council. The networks chose not to cover this election; CBS preferred to run a cheap made-in-Vancouver movie about three women (why do women in TV movies and modern novels run around in packs of three?) who defy possessive boyfriends by posing for Playboy…. As the next “on-year” election approaches, the Repo men insist that the recession’s over, based on obsolete “leading indicators” and other financial data that don’t relate to real un-/underemployment or shrinking real wages. A pro-business government that’s good at nothing but doling out favors, borrowing money, and destroying people/things is a perfect match for an economy that’s good at nothing but advertising, distribution, and “earning” paper profits.

Another Local Publication of the Month: Adam Woog’s Sexless Oysters and Self-Tipping Hats: 100 Years of Invention in the Pacific Northwest is the kind of book I’ve always wanted to write, but could never get away from the need for a day job long enough.

The Mailbag: About a dozen of you responded to my plea for suggestions on turning this into a more self-sufficient enterprise (thank you). Zola Mumford said I should market Misc. to young adults about “to make Kerouacian journeys westward…for Seattle’s `Golden Country.’ You could sell Misc. to them before they come here, and they can be just as hip as you and me.” Thanks, but I don’t run a Hipster Chamber of Commerce. I’m here to expose harsh realities, not for smug boosterism. Besides, the Northwest is not, nor has it ever been, Paradise. I mean, the Elks lodges started here. How hip can we be?

Writes & Wrongs: In my day job at the Comics Journal, I was phoned by a Univ. of Chicago intellectual writing an article on “the declining role of words in American society.” He pumped me for any info that would support his presupposition that we (or our younger peers) have become non-reading, non-writing, non-talking image addicts. I replied that we’re really more inundated with words than ever: in little publications like this, piles of documents in schools and offices, computers and fax machines, hundreds of specialty magazines, thousands of paperback novels. Talk radio, phone sex, rap, and virtually all TV (except commercials and music videos) depend on the spoken word. My caller refused to consider my arguments. He sounded like one of those non-thinking highbrows who blissfully assume that “those kids” have all gone to hell since his generation was in young-adulthood (whether his generation is that of 1945 or of 1968 doesn’t matter; the syndrome’s the same). So-called “serious” writers can be the most reactionary people in the cultural world, so pathetically conservative about everything in life except politics.

Philm Phun: The Addams Family, despite pans by fuddy-duddy critics, is the best macabre comedy since Young Frankenstein (or at least since Santa Sangre). It could’ve been an all-time classic if it hadn’t been ruined by product placements and the obligatory out-of-place hit songs (by Hammer). It’s intensely appropriate that Grandmama was played by Judith Malina, a founder of NYC’s Living Theatre, which believes in unleashing desire and imagination to defeat conformity and free the human spirit. Just the message of the most life-affirming Hollywood movie of the year.

We’ll return in the next year with our annual In/Out list. ‘Til then, be sure to visit Castle Cash and Carry on U. Way and Mr. Haney’s Curio Emporium on Ballard Ave., and recall the words of archy and mehitabel creator Don Marquis: “When a man tells you he got rich through hard work, ask him whose?”

PASSAGE

Harvard Russia-watcher Russell Seitz, in the 11/4 NY Times, on the USSR’s increasingly desperate deals to sell any technology that might attract hard currency: “Nobody ever contemplated that the Soviet military-industrial complex would end up in Chapter 11. It’s the yard sale at the end of history.”

REPORT

For an undetermined amount of time, excerpts from recent Misc. issues will be reprinted in The Stranger, giving thousands more potential readers a glance at the wonders to be found here.

If anyone can help me distribute future newsletters, please leave a message at 524-1967.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Indivuous”

IS THERE ANYTHING MORE STUPID LOOKING

THAN FOOTBALL UNIFORMS WITH BARE MIDRIFFS?

9/91 Misc. Newsletter

Bug-Proof Pantyhose

Welcome back to an autumnally-seasoned edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that’s fond of noting that in the Robt. Venturi design with its vertical relief stripes, the name SEATTLE ART MUSEUM appears to be spelled with dollar signs.

THE RED SQUARES: On Mon., 8/19, I wrote in my ongoing computer file, “There are moments in the life of the world that make it tough to be a humor writer, even a world-weary, cynical humor writer.” Then the attempt at bringing back eight men’s sorry vision of the “good old days” disappeared faster than the stock at a Russian butcher, and I could retain my generally hopeful worldview about democratic progress in all countries except mine. I also reaffirmed how much I can hate public radio sometimes: call me a traditionalist, but world-crisis bulletins shouldn’t be combined with easy-listening background music (I refuse to call that Windham Hill-style music they use “jazz”).

A MOVING EXPERIENCE: Within weeks of the Weekly “discovering” my neighborhood, my landlord raised the rent significantly. Don’t let this happen to you! Took the increase as an opportunity to move (for only the second time in seven years; more desperate finances made me run from the upscalers eight times from ’81 to ’84). I will miss parts of the Broadway neighborhood, but will not miss the BMW car alarms malfunctioning at all hours or the ceiling that became a giant loudspeaker for the upstairs apt.’s stereo.

FILM TITLE OF THE MONTH: Child’s Play 3: Look Who’s Stalking.

FRAMED IN PUPPETLAND: The hoopla over Pee-wee, and all the child psychologists talking about how to tell your kids the sad news, is pathetic. The poor idol of millions hasn’t even been convicted yet. You’ve got to remember this was in south Fla., home of the 2-Live-Crew-busters, where there may have been official pressure to track down a white celebrity to harass in order to maintain a pretense of impartiality. Actually, it turns out that the arresting officer was part of a three-man squad assigned solely to make arrests for the most victimless sex act of all. (It’s such a Pee-wee sort of activity, too; self-possessive, compulsive, fantasy-possessed). For the record, he was watching straight porno films; a semiotics book a couple years back noted that the Pee-wee’s Playhouse characters are based on common gay-camp personas.

WILD IN THE STREETS: KING and KIRO dumped Sat. AM cartoons for news (and local commercials). Now, when there’s violence on Sat. morning TV, the victims won’t be alive in the next scene. Both newscasts are heavily supplemented with filler satellite footage from other stations around the country. The stations chose just the right week to start their Sat. morn news, the morning after the traditional biggest Fri. night of brawl of the year. The Seafair riots are wimpy compared to riots in other cities for more substantial celebrations such as winning a Super Bowl, but our minor street brawls and our hydro-drunks keep the old rowdy Seattle spirit alive despite the annual proclamation that Seafair has, at last, become a “true family event.” The expectedly strident pre-parade anti-war rally was met by a Christian country-rock band sponsored by KMPS, singing “I love A-Mair-i-Kuh / I love the U-S-A” (with a military snare-drum riff) and shouting afterwards, “You know the line, if you don’t like it you know where the door is.” The TV stations, also expectedly, allowed no significant time for the protesters to tell why they were there and plenty of time for officials to insist how everybody besides a few foul-mouths is in total unquestioning obedience to our national authorities.

CATHODE CORNER: Employees of Telemation, once Seattle’s biggest video production facility, spray-painted the outside of the building the Fri. night after the company was shut down by its out-of-state buyer, the Home Shopping Network. By early Mon. morning, all offending statements (including the blacking-out of the parent company’s name) were whitewashed over….

On 8/15, KING discovered a Northwest angle to the latest Royal scandal: Di’s petite 2-piece bathing suit (that made the cover of every UK tabloid) was designed by Oregon’s Jantzen. (In The Mouse on the Moon, the film sequel to The Mouse That Roared, a BBC announcer proclaimed a British connection to the Grand Fenwick space program in the form of the astronauts’ wristwatch.)

MODULATIONS: KNDD (“The End”), the new “cutting edge” format on the old KRAB-KGMI frequency, is like Old Wave Night at the Romper Room. Instead of the greatest hits of Phil Collins, they play the greatest hits of U2. Their last format was for folks whose musical tastes stop at 1970; this is for folks whose tastes stopped in ’87. (At least they play Thrill Kill Kult in light rotation.)

TRUE CRIME: A Montana fugitive was spotted on 8/1 by his old warden when they inadvertently met at an Ms game. In any previous year he’d never have had to worry about anybody finding him there.

HOBSON’S CHOICE ’92: Rebecca Boren and Joel Connelly are reportedly feuding over who’ll get to cover the ’92 US Senate race for the P-I. On KCTS panel shows, Connelly has shown to be fond of possible Republican candidate Rod Chandler and unfond of possible Democratic candidate Mike Lowry.

AD VERBS: NutriSystem’s running flashy ads pointing with pride to an endorsement by Healthline magazine. Weight Watchers announced it was promised the same endorsement, but refused to pay the magazine for favorable coverage.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH: The NY Times piece (8/6) on minor Florida theme parks: ones you might not know (Flea World, the Elvis Presley Museum, Gatorland, and “Xanadu, Home of the Future”), are in the works (the Transcendental Meditation park “Maharishi Veda Land” planned by magician/TM devotee Doug Henning), the USSR/US friendship park Peristroika Palace), and ones that never made it. The latter included Bible World, Western Fun World, Hurricane World (“a glorified wind tunnel that could transport tourists into the eye of a storm”), Little England (“a grandiose re-creation of an ancient British village,” sounding like an old G. Vidal story about Disney buying all of England), and Winter Wonderlando (“skiing in central Florida. Great name. Lousy concept”).

Runner-up: The 8/1 Wall St. Journal report that “Kanebo Ltd. in Osaka plans to test US markets this year for pantyhose embedded with microcapsules that moisturize while the wearer walks. It sells scented pantyhose in Japan, where it just introduced insect-repellent hose.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH: The Ballard law office storefront “Mullavey, Prout, Grenley, Foe and Lawless.”

AGIT PROPS: The Downtown Seattle Assn. call for censorship against one of the In/Public sets of artist’s aphorisms, echoing a woefully ignorant and arrogant P-I editorial calling the project “not art but arrogance,” is itself an arrogant act.Bold verbal statements are indeed an artform. They have been so at least since the 10 Commandments were etched in stone. The postmod incarnation of this art takes the boldness of current T-shirt/bumpersticker philosophy and turns it around so it challenges, instead of reinforces, the consumer culture (perhaps the real reason the retailers hate it). It demands the right to not be “cheerful” or “colorful,” as a merchant spokesperson described his idea of good art. In an allegedly image-drenched era, it affirms the power of the written word. It has it limits, though, as evidenced by theGuerrilla Girls posters at the Greg Kucera Gallery. The GGs really to nothing to help female and minority visual artists; they just point out that nobody else in the mainstream art elite does. It could also be argued that declaring all female artists to be one class or even one genre, regardless of what any of them does, only keeps the artists’ own voices stifled.

A SUCCESSFUL WOMAN THE GUERRILLA GIRLS WOULDN’T LIKE: A new bio claims Time-Life heiress Claire Booth Luce, archetypal career woman and wielder of unprecedented power in politics and publishing, obtained a great deal of her influence by sleeping with politicians, editors other than her husband, generals, theatrical producers, etc. A first reaction might be that she’s betrayed, from beyond the grave as it were, the millions of women who came after her fighting for a similar degree of influence on the basis of merit alone. But if she hadn’t done what she did, would there have been as much opportunity for those who followed her? (Probably.) Will today’s women live without her for a role model? (Undoubtedly; the Republicanism she espoused is the nemesis of current feminists.)

STOP THE PRESSES: At least three Misc. readers have been sending me clips from that awful Dave Barry, the “humor” columnist whose one-note theme is “Yeah, so I’m an affluent, dull white guy, so what?” Once, humorists had fun getting involved with the exciting parts of their cultures (jazz, early movies, wild fashion) and sneering at the dull and complacent. Nowadays, dorks like Barry and R. Baker take pride in their geezerdom and sneer at anything or anybody with real character. They pander to the whitebread suburban mentality of most newspaper editors, who keep making papers duller and more irrelevant while blaming the resulting circulation losses on public apathy.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Misc. subscriber James Koehnline is planning a World’s Columbian Jubilee Calendar of Saints, to celebrate the 500th anniv. of Columbus by proclaiming an end to “the Work and War Machine.” Koehnline is looking for names of cool people for saint’s days on the calendar (“no living persons, no Popes, no heads of state”). For info send $1 to Koehnline, Box 85777, Seattle 98145-1777.

CHAINED: QFC wouldn’t display the Vanity Fair pregnancy cover, claiming the image of a woman with child wasn’t “family oriented” enough (!), unfit to belong in the same store with the beer and cigarettes they sell every day (or on the same periodical racks with tabloids, serial-killer paperbacks, and rich-bitch novels).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH (from the Wall St. Journal, 8/13): “Calgene Inc. wants federal regulators to declare its genetically engineered tomato officially ‘food’…. The tomato, named the Flavr Savr, includes a gene that blocks the production of an enzyme that causes them to soften and rot.”…

Calif. now has a snack food sales tax, and is trying to figure what’s junk and what’s untaxed “real” food. On which side would you put fructose-laden “energy bars”?

THE NAKED TRUTH: The long articles in the Times and the Weekly about table dancing clubs sold sex more sneakily than the more honest commerce of the clubs themselves. The sleaziness of the clubs’ operators, as described in the articles, seems little worse than that of some mainstream entertainment promoters I’ve known and/or read about. Nude dancing can be seen as a metaphor for our entire consumer culture (all tease, no fulfillment); the sadness that pervades those places, beneath a screaming air of mandatory “happiness,” betrays a deprivation of true connectedness in such a culture.

‘TIL OCTOBER presumably finds us much cooler, celebrate the 10th anniv. of KCMU (it’s actually longer; Robin Dolan and I were playing new music there in 11/80), and heed the wisdom of Gracie Allen in The Big Broadcast (1932): “If I died I’d like to come back as an oyster, so I’d only have to be good from September to April.”

PASSAGE

Restroom sign at a Frisco coffeehouse: “In a society that replaces adventure with mandatory fun, the only convenient adventure left is drinking good coffee.”

REPORT

Please note the new address below for subs, orders for my novel The Perfect Couple on Mac disks ($10), and other correspondence. I’m still soliciting suggestions or investors toward turning this into a self-supporting enterprise.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Terpsichorea”

WHY ARE MOST JAZZ FESTIVALS HELD IN ALL-WHITE TOWNS?

1/91 Misc. Newsletter

`IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE’ RERUN COUNT,

NOV.-DEC. 1990: 22

Welcome to the first 1991 edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can’t help but wonder what was the last comedy Norman Cousins saw before he died, and whether its makers are responsible for making him insufficiently lighthearted. It couldn’t possibly have been Haywire.

SNOW STORIES: For the first time since I was 8 or so, Xmas looked like the cards and ads always said it was supposed to look like. Astounding! (Of course, in those New England Colonial days, people simply understood they’d be home from Nov. thru March)…A guy on KPLU mistakenly called convergence zone a harmonic convergence…A whole mature elm on the east slope of Capitol Hill fell over and took a Honda with it…People who commute out to the suburbs took 5 hours to get back into town the night of 12/18. I went to a bus stop on Roosevelt Way at 4 p.m. and got right on a bus — a 2:20 bus — only to be unceremoniously booted off by a defeatist driver on Eastlake and Roanoke an hour later…The roof caved in at Northgate, the original shopping mall; what a symbol for reality crashing in on the nice-day artifice of modern commercial America…70 abandoned school buses were officially missing as of 12/21. Did the drivers tell the dispatcher that the dog ate them?…

THAT SINKING FEELING: Could Tugboat Annie have saved I-90? Don’t know, but I do know that even the 20-year flood spared my mom’s antique shop in downtown Snohomish (though she’ll probably retire before the next threat)…The end of the Stena Line to Victoria follows the end of the beloved Princess Margeurite (named for a Dutch princess born in exile in Canada during the war), now seized by the BC government on behalf of Stena creditors.

ARMED FOR ACTION: Will ’91’s big fashion thing be a sleeveless dress that lets you fully show off your contraceptive implants?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Before Columbus Review is a newsprint journal produced on the UW campus, involved in not just indigenous American cultures but a variety of ethnic issues…The Everett Herald wins praise (and a church-organized protest campaign) by listing gay and lesbian “marriage” ceremonies in a new Celebrations section. Makes me almost proud it was my hometown paper.

CATHODE CORNER: On the 10th anniversary of J. Lennon’s death, the Bon unveiled a commercial with cherubic tots singing his “Merry Xmas (War Is Over).” Wake me when they make a spot out of “Imagine no possessions…”…A Penn State psychologist claims some kids are genetically predisposed to become “chronic TV watchers.” I wonder if anybody’s born to become a maker or reader of silly pseudoscientific surveys?…Night Flight, once the hippest show on cable, is now syndicated (on KING 2:30-4:30 am Fri nites/Sat morns). Segments include the “poignant serial” Twin Geeks (really scenes from the infamous siamese-twin exploitation film Chained for Life).

AD VERBS: The original British Boy Scouts are selling sponsorships on merit badges and accompanying manuals. The “Hobbies” badge bears the logo of Dungeons & Dragons games; sports badges carry the trademarks of equipment and shoe companies.

Revenge or Set-Up for Conquest?: As 1/15 approaches, Newsweek says ABC hired a private spy satellite and found no evidence of a massive Iraqi buildup in or near Kuwait; you know, the buildup that was supposed to have one Iraqi soldier for every Kuwaiti.

CLIPPED WINGS: We’re extremely disappointed that Pan American Airways probably won’t exist any more, ‘cuz we won’t get to ride a Pan Am passenger space shuttle in the year 2001. (That was perhaps the first paid “product placement” in a movie, unless you count De Beers Consolidated Mines paying Ian Fleming to use the title Diamonds Are Forever for a novel that became a movie). Meanwhile, Black & Decker is suing 20th Century-Fox for cutting its product-placement scene from Die Hard 2. I’d be glad to have not been in that loser (but then, I wasn’t). Besides, the company doesn’t need any more association with murder and mayhem. In late-’70s Europe, “to Black & Decker” became a verb for applying a power drill to someone’s knees. (Don’t try this at home.)

SPROCKETS: The foreign control of Hollywood studios won’t affect the (largely horrible) state of movies, because films are already increasingly controlled by Asian and European investors. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie was financed by a Hong Kong firm that normally backs regular ninja movies; Disney’s relying on a limited investment partnership based in Japan. These syndicates want films for a worldwide audience — stateless fantasy and male-violence films…The historic Ridgemont Theater is slated to be replaced by (what else?) luxury condos. To think of all the couples who fell in love during the year and a half that A Man and a Woman played there, not to mention all the divorced guys who relieved their loneliness during the year it was a porno house, when the comedy-tragedy masks on its marquee were changed so they were both smiling (mandatory, unrelieved “happiness” is an identifiable mark of sleaze). Cineplex Odious is closing the Market Theater this month, but at least one party wants to reopen it and return to alternative programming.

SIGN ON AURORA: “Olympic Ballot Theatre Presents Nutcracker.” If nobody showed up due to the snow, would the performance have been a secret ballot?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Official Seahawks caramel popcorn, only $2.95 a pound at Frederick’s.

LATE GIFT SUGGESTION: Turning the Tables, a board game created by two Seattle folks, all about waiting tables. The first player to collect $250 in tips wins. Along the way, you have to face, via instructions on the cards, unruly customers, constantly changing “menus,” broken wine glasses, and other fun facets of modern restaurant work. Another impressive local board game: Earth Alert, “the active environmental game”…Parker Bros.’ Careers for Girls game received major flack from Small Business Administration chief Susan Engeleiter. The six “careers” players can choose are Supermom, schoolteacher, rock star, fashion designer, college graduate and animal doctor. Careers in ecology, space, sports, the arts, politics, big business, farming and the movies were in previous versions of the game but dropped for the new edition. The company responded by noting that the game was developed and packaged by an all-woman team.

RE-TALES: Portland now has Nike Town, a 20,000 square foot “shoe experience”. Each line of shoes has its own “environment,” complete with background music and stereo sound effects for a particular sport or activity. The hottest new retail concept for Seattle, meanwhile, is a franchised laundry-tavern combo called Duds `n’ Suds. Cute, but nothing like Miami’s laundry/topless bar (could you wash all your clothes there?)…Pay n’ Pak is the first hardware chain to take the American Express card. I’m reminded of an old radio spot for Amex’s dying competitor Carte Blanche: “After all, why would you pay for a meal in a fine restaurant with the same card you use to have your swimming pool cleaned?”…The Dutch Oven restaurant on 3rd is gutted, now to become a Bartell’s. In its most glamorous moment, in the 1978 TV movie The Secret Life of John Chapman, Ralph Waite (Pa Walton), as a college professor slumming among the working class, walked in front of the Capitol in Washington DC, then turned a corner and ended up inexplicably on 3rd Ave., entered the Dutch Oven, got a job watching dishes, and went home with waitress Susan Anspach.

BLACK & WHITE ISSUES: Seattle photographer Mel Curtis won a $140,000 copyright case against an ad agency that used one of his pictures in a “comp” for a proposed General Dynamics corporate image ad, then substituted a new, almost-identical picture when the ad was published.

UNSUNG HERO: Martha Wash, one of the boisterous 2 Tons of Fun/Weather Girls of “It’s Raining Men” fame, turns out to have been the real singer behind songs credited to Black Box and Seduction, two svelte disco girl-groups assembled by manager-producers on the basis of looks. Ex-Seattle singer Marni Nixon (singing voice of the female leads in My Fair Lady, The Sound of Music, The King and I, West Side Story, and other musicals) was quoted in the P-I as saying, “Voice dubbing will always be with us.” But was it really her saying that, or…?

PUNK LIVES! (SORT OF): The KOMO reactionaries discovered the evils of hardcore again, thanks to a Federal Way thrash-nostalgia band whose only provocative aspect is its name, Date Rape. Everything else about it is really tired — slam dancing, flannel shirts tied around the waist. This stuff’s older now than hippie stuff was when punk started. At least it lets KOMO condemn music by white kids, for a change. Geov Parrish, meanwhile, writes that straight-edge rock (discussed last ish) is four or five years old and “already pretty much played out.” Furthermore, Hare Krishna recruiting out of that scene started a couple of years ago but “the word is spreading and they’re getting fewer converts that way.”

RESPONSE: A postcard signed with a scrawled one-word name beginning with “A” takes issue with my claim that “sci-fi” was an OK term since 20th Century-Fox used it in a corporate ad: “Since when have the ad writers been the arbiters of taste or literacy?” I was almost ready to side with A. when across my desk at The Comics Journal came a catalog for cassettes of “filk,” listing singers whom the catalog’s readers were expected to already know. Nowhere did the brochure describe or define filk. I finally learned that it’s pop tunes with new lyrics poking ever-so-gentle fun at sci-fi movies, TV shows and books, performed by the lyricists at fan conventions. People this obsessed with excessively-serious trash art deserve any nickname I can give.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH (when, if we’re at all lucky, we’ll not be out killing people), read The Ascent of Mind by UW neurobiologist William P. Calvin, join our kudos to Charles Johnson for his National Book Award, don’t read American Psycho (more proof that literature is not necessarily the most enlightened of the arts), and stay warm.

REPORT

The 28 people who attended the first Lite Lit reading 12/16 appeared to have fully enjoyed the experience (except one guy who wrote in later, suggesting I should learn to speak more like the Red Sky poets. Sorry, but monotone rants hurt my throat). I’m sure the audience at the following Wednesday’s reading would have been equally entertained, had anybody shown up. Watch for a re-schedule in February.

VISION OF HELL #2

Being trapped in the chair of a hair stylist whose radio station plays all stupid songs (Bread, America) — and who sings along.

VISION OF HELL #3

Being trapped in the only restaurant open in a small town Xmas Eve, with big-screen TVs blasting continuous NFL Films retrospectives of Super Bowls X thru XX.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Pish”

INS AND OUTS FOR 1991

Our fifth annual In/Out list follows the same rules as the previous ones: We’re predicting what will become big in the next year, not declaring what’s already big now. In the past, we correctly picked Winona Ryder, Roseanne Barr, plaid, women singers, The Simpsons, pantsuits, Arsenio Hall, minor-league hockey, crystals, fax machines, Anne Rice, nose rings, and minivans.

11/90 Misc. Newsletter

TIMES EDITORIAL, 10/25: ‘ART IS SOMETIMES RUDE’

Welcome to the grand and sumptuous 50th edition of Misc. I began this little venture in 1986 under the guidance of Alice Savage (now on her way to Texas), who kindly offered a regular space in the old Lincoln Arts newsletter for me to use in any manner. The first few editions were typed in and printed out in a tiny office at 66 Bell St.; today I have subscribers in art-lofts in that same building. The feature went from the ill-fated Lincoln Arts to the independent mag ArtsFocus. Just over a year ago, it became the sprightly little self-contained sheet you see here. If things work out, it will continue to grow.

To answer common questions: We don’t run sex gossip, not even involving gallery owners and members of public-art juries. I’m not a put-on like that fictional Joe Bob Briggs; to the best of my knowledge, I really exist. The newsletter’s name is Misc., not “et cetera.” I would consider a new name if anybody offered a better one (nothing to do with rain, slugs, or emeralds, please). The corporate name, Fait Divers, is French and should be pronounced “Fay Dee Vare.” My own last name does not and never has had an “s” at its end.

FOUR YEARS AGO, could anybody have predicted that a chess match would be a major entertainment attraction in New York City (while the musical Chess still has yet to open)? That R.E.M. would provide the theme song to a sitcom on Fox? That there would be such a thing as Fox? (Its owner Murdoch is over-extended, with huge deficits from his home-satellite network in Europe. Now you see why he needs every Simpsons T-shirt royalty.)

UP A GREASED POLL: A national survey (NYT, 10/5) shows more and more people are unwilling to participate in surveys….According to the UK sci-fi mag The Dark Side, by a 33-27 percent margin British males believe Thatcher is more frightening than Freddy Krueger. (Yes, I insist on calling science fiction “sci-fi.” If 20th Century-Fox, the studio of Star Wars, can use “sci-fi” in a Publisher’s Weekly ad hawking foreign novelization rights to Alien III and Predator II, then so can I. “SF” is for those who are (1) too snotty to say sci-fi, or (2) too snotty to say Frisco.)

THE FINE PRINT (from the Star Trek Official Fan Club catalog): “The plot and background details of Prime Directive are the authors’ interpretation of the universe of Star Trek and vary in some aspects from the universe as created by Gene Roddenberry.”

PHILM PHACTS: Samuel Goldwyn Jr., one of the few surviving independent movie distributors (Wild at Heart, Stranger Than Paradise), is buying up the Seven Gables Theaters. Maybe he likes the way the Chesterfields taste here…I wish interactive movies were available. I’d like to have had the option to keep watching the Black musicians in the opening credits of Great Balls of Fire.

WHAT WOULD GARY PUCKETT SAY?: A Union Gap, Yakima County, man’s hand was cut off with a chainsaw by two robbers after his wristwatch and jewelry. Just the sort of event one expects to read about taking place Somewhere Else, in some Evil City, not in the small-town America that National Public Radio keeps telling us is the home of quaint eccentricities and clean, albeit smug, living.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 10/8): Urinette Inc. of Pensacola, Fla. announced a new invention, the she-inal, a ladies’ urinal (to be put in private stalls). The best part of the story was the delicate descriptions by the company: “The device resembles the traditional urinal used by men except for a gooseneck hose and funnel. A handle on the funnel allows women to adjust it to the proper position and height. Clothing need only be moved a few inches out of the way. When finished the user simply rehangs the funnel on the hook inside the unit and flushes. Hovering and covering are no longer necessary.”

STAGES OF LIFE: Chicago’s Annoyance Theater is performing, twice weekly, The Real Live Brady Bunch. An actual Brady Bunchscript is performed completely straight by an all-adult cast.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The plastic squeeze tube with a representation of a dog’s head on top. Squeezing the accordian-like tube forces a puce-green liquid candy out of the dog’s mouth. This was made by Topps Gum and designed by Mark Newgarden, the respected alternative cartoonist who created the Garbage Pail Kids.

TREAD ON ME: Leaders of the Pacific island nation of Tonga are petitioning Gov. Gardner to speed up the proposed sale of tens of thousands of used tires from Washington. The shredded remains of Arrivas and Tiger Paws will be incinerated to become cheap electricity.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Café Olé is a free slick local monthly that consummates the Weekly’s food fetish by being solely devoted to a single consumption product, espresso. It’s well produced and decently written, but how much can be said about coffee (without getting into sensitive areas such as the lives of the people living in coffee-growing countries).

DEAD AIR: KEZX, another of the once-locally-owned radio stations sold off to out-of-state speculation chains, has dropped not only progressive music but any music worthy of the name. Instead of Richard Thompson and Tracy Chapman, now it will play Carly Simon covers recorded by an anonymous studio orchestra. The station has regressed to its original beautiful-music format of 1971-81, when it made its chief profits from renting “subcarrier” radios to offices and medical reception rooms, pre-set to receive a commercial-free version of its syrupy automation tapes. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re using the same tapes as before.

LAST CALL: The Central Tavern, Seattle’s longest extant outlet for bands that play their own material, has been sold and will no longer feature live music. At least we have, for the time being, the OK Hotel as a refuge from the grating George Thorogood impersonators at all the other Pioneer Square clubs…USA Today reports of two lawsuits in Los Angeles against selective niteclub admissions. The concept of keeping people out just because they don’t look hip enough dates back at least to the cokehead corruption of Studio 54, and was adopted by the Mudd Club and other NY new wave palaces that were supposed to have been too fresh, too pop for that tired old disco culture. Thank goodness our best clubs don’t do that, at least not too much. Of course, our best clubs are generally desperate to get folks in even if they dress at Clothestime…

FROM THE LAND OF JOHN WATERS: A Baltimore man acquired what sounds just like a Norwegian accent after suffering a stroke. A medical convention report called it the “Foreign Accent Syndrome.”

BIG STOREWIDE SALE: Does Frederick & Nelson’s money-back guarantee apply to the whole store? And when will current owner David Sabey stop whining about the price he paid for the chain and start working to bring back the F&N we knew and loved? At the very least, he needs to bring back the Paul Bunyan Room.

CATHODE CORNER: The P-I notes that the new Seattle Today format, with its rust-earth scenery and long segments of not-necessarily-local interest, is tailor-made for edited showings (under another title) on The Nostalgia Channel, a cable network in the Southwest…Also from the P-I, a Seattle Today staffer bought KING news director Bob Jordan a congratulatory explicit cake by Marzi Tarts, only to see an unamused Jordan smash the anatomical pastry on the selfless giver’s desk.

WHY I HATE HALLOWEEN (the grownup Halloween, that is): (1) Do we really need another excuse for 40-year-old adolescents to get drunk in large groups while regressing to infantility? While dressed as Elvis and Marilyn at that? Or in monster regalia that’s become irrelevant in a society where the real monsters are the “nice” guys in suits? (2) OK, call me jaded. Maybe mass-market macabre has ceased to thrill me. Maybe I’m just burned out on the flavorless manipulations of the S. King/C. Barker/J. Saul books and the tired grim images of the W. Craven/T. Hooper/Friday the 13th movies. Maybe horror just hasn’t been the same since directorWilliam Castle (Homicidal) died.

THE PLANE TRUTH: Northwest Airlines grounded 10 DC-9 planes, after a mechanic mistook liquid hand soap for hydraulic fluid. With some airline soap, it’s hard to tell…

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES: The Camlin Hotel’s legendary Cloud Room had a bad fire, three days after I last visited there. The place hadn’t really been the same since they fired piano player Gil Conte anyway. Though I hope the goofy water fountain on the outdoor terrace survived…

KING FOR A FEW DAYS: A Boston man, 37, wins $3.6 million in a lottery, then promptly dies two weeks later of a heart attack. “Stress,” sez his sister-in-law.

BOOZE NOOZE: Homosexuals’ drug and alcohol abuse rate may be three times national average. This only shows two things: (1) the stress of living a secret or semi-secret life, and (2) the special difficulty of staying sober in a subculture whose social institutions are almost all bars.

WHAT? NO SHEEP PAC?: According to the Christian Science Monitor, the following are minor parties competing in New Zealand’s parliamentary election: The McGillicuddy Serious Party (advocating a return to the Scottish monarchy, under the slogan “A Great Leap Backwards”), the Cheer Up Party, the Blokes’ Liberation Front (“let the women run the country for a few thousand years”), the Wall of Surf Party, the Free Access Socialism Party, the Gordon Dinosaur Party.

‘TIL OUR ALL-STAR HOLIDAY SPECIAL (sorry, no Claudine Longet), vote yes on the growth-management initiative and no on 35, read Mark Leyner’s My Cousin My Gastroenterologist (did I mention this one already?), observe the Berlin Wall-like erection of pillars and concrete slabs along the eastern side of I-5 north of N.E. 50th St., and work for peace.

PASSAGE

Graphic novelist Moebius, in the afterword to one of his tastefully-drawn stories of spaceships, pyramids and breasts: “I never give the keys to my stories. My stories are not like a box of spaghetti, they don’t come with the instructions on them on how long you must put them in boiling water before you eat.”

REPORT

Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Lachrymose”

LITE LIT

(Excerpts from Wildlife by Richard Ford, transcribed by Gyda Fossland)

Page Passage

2 He was a smiling, handsome man…

8 She smiled at him.

11 “Hello there, Jerry,” the man said, and smiled…

13 …he said, and smiled at me…

14 He smiled at me.

21 …he said, and smiled…

22 She smiled at me…

27 …looked around at him and smiled.

31 He was smiling and looking at me…

34 …my mother smiled at me, a smile she had smiled all her life.

37 She smiled up at me…

37 …he smiled when he shook my hand.

38 …my mother said, still smiling.

38 He smiled as if there was something he liked about that.

40 …and she was smiling.

40 She smiled at him.

44 She smiled and shook her head.

48 She smiled.

52 …she was smiling.

52 …and one of them smiled.

53 …my mother said, and smiled.

53 …and smiled at me.

56 …she said, and smiled at me.

63 She looked around at me and smiled.

70 …he was smiling.

72 …then she smiled at me…

72 She was smiling…

73 He looked at my mother and smiled the way he’d smiled at me the way he’d smiled at me out on the front steps…

75 She smiled…

77 Warren…smiled across the table at my mother.

77 She smiled at me.

82 …he looked up at her and smiled…

82 She looked at me and smiled.

84 He was standing there smiling…

88 …the woman was smiling…

90 She smiled at me.

91 …smiling and fanning herself.

92 My mother smiled.

92 Warren…smiled at my mother.

93 She smiled at him.

100 My mother smiled at me.

101 She smiled at me again.

101 Her face looked different…less ready to smile.

104 She smiled at me again…

110 He was standing…and smiling…

111 …my father’s clean smiling face…

120 She smiled at me…

122 She smiled at me…

123 She smiled…

131 …looked at me and smiled…

133 She looked up at me and smiled…

134 She smiled.

136 She smiled at him.

136 He was smiling.

136 And then she smiled at him again.

137 She smiled at him…

139 My father smiled at me.

143 …smiled at her.

143 …and smiled.

143 …and smiled again.

144 And she smiled in a way that was not a smile.

154 …and he was smiling.

170 I almost felt myself smile, though I didn’t want to.

8/90 Misc. Newsletter

BUY A PEPSI (OFFICIAL GOODWILL GAMES POP)

FROM THE QFC (OFFICIAL STORE)

IN NORTHGATE (OFFICIAL MALL)

Time for all first, second, and third-generation Hanford mutants to settle down with a refreshing glass of cherry-flavored iodine and the August edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that could spend its lagging mental energy thinking about important things, but instead is obsessed with the strange case of the Miss Washington who’s really from Oregon. Portland’s Lynnae Thurik, 26, claims to be a pageant-legal Washingtonian because her ad-sales job for a little Oregon magazine includes a few accounts in Vancouver, Wash. The obvious angle: Are Washington women really less pretty than Oregon women, or just too smart for this sort of thing?

MARK MCDONALD R.I.P.: He died very suddenly. His Spkn Wrds productions, experimental works with unpaid actors, played before no more than 60 people per show. Yet they proved very influential in both the local theatrical and literary communities. He brought people of disparate disciplines together, something this town needs much more of. Several times after something didn’t work right, he threatened to shut down the series. In the end, only a horrible virus ended his work.

PUMPED DRY: Weeks before environmentalists charged that Seattle drivers used the dirtiest gas in the nation, Shell Oil, the Euro-based giant whose U.S. operation began here with a one-pump filling station on Eastlake, selling its last 55 Puget Sound stations to Texaco as of next January. (Folks who grew up in other states have fond memories of plastic coins of U.S. presidents Shell used to give out in some contest that, for some reason, was illegal in Washington.) The sale leaves the local gas market with only six majors (Chevron, Unocal 76, Exxon, BP, Texaco, Arco) and two minor chains (Time/Jackpot and the ironically-named Liberty, Arco’s new off-brand). Of the remaining brands, only Exxon and Unocal don’t have a refinery in Washington; will they be next to go?

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE: With German unity, we have to say goodbye to the funky East German Ostmark money (pictures of smoke-belching factories and quaint technicians in lab coats). But now Easterners can enjoy such tastes of freedom as Nonstop-Ratzel, the West German magazine that combines two of the world’s most popular editorial elements: (1) pictures of topless women, and (2) crossword puzzles.

CAN’T WIN FOR LOSING: On the same 7/1 that’s the first German Unity Day and maybe the last Canada Day, a guy pitches a complete-game no-hitter but loses the game on walks and fielding errors. The best part is that it happened to that traditional team-you-love-to-hate, the Yankees. (I personally have nothing against the Yanks, reserving all my booing for those bloated, spoiled-rotten Dodgers.)

ALSO ON THE SPORTING FRONT, ’twas nice to see the Goodwill Arts Festival proportionately outsell the Goodwill Games, as I predicted in my Ins/Outs for ’90. It fulfills Jim Bouton’s remark at the end of Ball Four about Seattle, “Any city that cares more for its art museums than its ball park can’t be all bad.” The Games themselves are, if nothing else, the biggest production ever made specifically for cable TV. Ted Turner’s investment works out, per hour of air time, to a little less than the cost of big-three prime time programming (though, unlike those shows or the colorized Knute Rockne Story, the Games will have little rerun value). And this UW grad just loved seeing video footage of the McMahon and McCarty dorms turned into an exotic Athletes’ Village. The record should also note that Lamonts cleared out official T-shirts and souvenirs at 25 percent discount over a week before the opening.

WHAT PAPER D’YA READ?: Tacoma News Tribune front-page headline, 7/9: “Bush: No Soviet bailout.” P-I front page, same day: “Bush will offer aid to Soviets.”

THE FINE PRINT (from a Stouffer’s Lean Cuisine French bread pizza box): “Stouffer’s prefers conventional oven preparation. When time is a factor, enjoy the convenience of microwave cooking in the microwave sleeve.”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Metro Joe is a little carton of milk, coffee and sugar (for the Latte flavor) plus cocoa (for the Mocha flavor, much like Nestlé’s Quik with a kick)…Madelena’s Masterpiece Calzone, made by Madeline Peters of Redmond, is a pouch of frozen pastry that rises to twice its height in the oven. Inside is “over a cup” of cheese and just a “flavored-with” quantity of pepperoni.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Bellevue Journal-American, under its new Hawaiian owners, has adopted the slogan “The Eastside’s Community Newspaper.” This is more than just an excuse for not having the relatively thorough coverage of the Seattle papers. Its local coverage emphasizes a small-town-paper notion of “community affairs.” A lot of the miniscule news hole is given to large-type PTA listings, obituaries, birth notices, and police-fire-court records. (“Someone took a ring in a towel at the Seattle Club in the 10400 block of N.E. 8th St. Saturday while the victim was working out…The window of a car parked in the 200 block of 98th Ave. N.E. was smashed out Friday. Sometime the night before, someone smeared toothpaste on the same car and the victim believes the two incidents might be related…A resident of the 15400 block of S.E. 11th St. reported getting a number of nuisance telephone calls in which the caller said nothing. On Saturday alone, the victim received 15 to 20 calls.”) These notices help Eastsiders believe they’re in the country atmosphere they thought they were moving into, instead of an almost continuous mass of tract houses and strip malls with a total population close to that of Seattle itself.

AD OF THE MONTH (in Vanity Fair): “Mercury Capri. Think of it as a steel bikini.” I know it sounds uncomfortable, but it’s still better than the commercial by NY area Pontiac dealers with images of a Japanese takeover of famous U.S. landmarks, while a narrator warns: “Go ahead, let it happen. Buy a Japanese car.” If the domestic-car dealers had cars you would want to buy without having your patriotism questioned…Weekly classified, 7/25: “Frustrated? We need five people w/leadership and mgmt. ability. Must desire exceptional income. Unique oppty. with natl. company formed to help end world hunger.”

CENSORY OVERLOAD: The Stalin wannabes of the censorship movement are all wrong about art and human nature, but very astute in picking targets. 2 Live Crew was chosen for persecution because they’re black and (like last year’s harassment target, Jello Biafra) self-published. The simple truth is that much second-rate rap is, like all second-rate rock, about sexual posturing. Early rocker guys tried to impress girls; rap (and metal) guys try to impress other guys with boasts of their prowess. (Andrew “Dice” Clay is even worse. With pre-pubescent backwards logic, he “proves” his manhood by having nothing to do with women.) It’s occurring when most areas of society, including mainstream pop music, are more co-ed than ever. (First-rate rap and metal, meanwhile, is about fighting for identity in the hostile terrain of corporate culture.)

SOUTH END STORY: The good news is that Sears’ 1st Ave. location (the company’s oldest extant store) is staying open, even though the upstairs catalog warehouse is becoming office spaces. The bad news is that I missed the laser light show held at some of the suburban Sears outlets (newspaper ads promised “a surfer flying out from a giant washing machine…Larger-than-life images will dance over you, around you and across the Sears store”).

DID YOU SAW WHAT I SAW?: The BC government, finally becoming concerned about public-image effects of its industry-at-any-cost philosophy, is spraying grass seed from helicopters over massive clear-cut areas near the coasts of Vancouver Island, so they’ll not look ravaged from tourist boats. This sort of environmental make-believe is not likely to fool many, and can at best postpone a full backlash against the province’s rapid growth. That backlash may turn ugly if it gets racial (the nervous rich of Hong Kong are among the most visible of today’s BC investors).

THE UNBEARABLE LITE-NESS: Mathis Dairy of Decatur, Ga. is planning a new cholesterol-free “milk product,” nonfat milk withvegetable fat added to simulate 2-percent milk. Ice cream-type desserts with the “fake fat” Simplesse are now out; a similarly-engineered fake milk will presumably follow. There’s even Spam Light now!

FROM THE LAND OF NANAIMO BARS: For years, there have been lighthearted legends of an “Ogopogo” Monster allegedly living in depths of BC’s Lake Okanagon (one of the names I always loved to hear on the Vancouver Francophone radio station); now, researchers hired by a Japanese TV crew claim to have spotted the long, thin creature on sonar. Somehow, I can’t give this any more credibility than the mysterious “field circles” appearing in the English countryside (since proven to be a hoax).

MAYBE JAGGER’S NOT A TOTAL HAS-BEEN: The Rolling Stones were playing Wembley Stadium, in a rare concert appearance in their former homeland, on the same night of the crucial England-Germany World Cup soccer semifinal. As fans, cheering and booing to their Walkmen and portable TVs, began to boo the disallowing of an English goal, the band struck up a rousing rendition of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” .

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times letters column, 7/24): “Children are not the same as a BMW or Cuisinart.” Higher maintenance costs for one thing, and no warranty…

UPDATE: The CBC lives on Seattle cable, at least on TCI Cable. The cable giant backed off from plans to drop the respected Canadian network after a deluge of calls and letters, resulting in a long, apologetic newspaper ad. TCI went ahead with plans to bring back the Rev. Pat Robertson’s CBN (renamed The Family Channel), subject of an intense lobbying campaign to TCI by Robertson followers; the move shuttled Black Entertainment Television to daytime-only status, to the highly vocal displeasure of many viewers. Viacom, meanwhile, is planning its own channel overhaul. This is likely to last a while. As they say on CNN, the news continues. (Remember when there were only six stations to watch, and two of them weren’t even on in the daytime?)

CATHODE CORNER: The KCTS miniseries Free Ride was similar (but not really that close) to a series a Misc. subscriber and I have been trying to sell, but that’s not the only reason I liked it. Its segments on local “unique personalities” showed much more respect for their subjects than you find in segments like them at the close of local newscasts. It did, however, get cloying in the linking segments involving a comedienne-cab driver, and it did give quite a ride to Puget Sound Bank, which paid partly for the four-part show and in return got its branches driven past quite a bit…KING’s Seattle Today is now carried on The Nostalgia Channel, a national cable network not carried locally. This may explain why the show seems to have less local-oriented stuff these days, and more traveling book-pluggers and beauty-makeover artists.

LET US MAKE A PLEDGE to meet in September; ’til next we meet, be sure to visit the Pure Manifestation health food store in the beautiful Madrona district, see The Unbelievable Truth, read Kitchen Sink Press’ comic-book collections of a nasty little strip calledSteven, and remember these words in Moby Dick that don’t make it into most adaptations: “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than with a drunken Christian.”

PASSAGE

Vaclav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace: “It’s important that human life not be reduced to stereotypes of production and consumption, but that it be open to all possibilities; it’s important that people not be a herd, manipulated and standardized by the choice of consumer goods and consumer television culture…It is important that the superficial variety of one system, or the repulsive grayness of the other, not hide the same deep emptiness of life devoid of meaning. “

REPORT

As you can see, the advertising threatened last time is still not here yet. Something has entered my life (someone, actually), leaving me without the time to hustle for sales. Anyone interested in advertising in the bottom space on this page may contact me at 524-1967 (days) or at the subscription address.

My long-announced novel The Perfect Couple will be available in a limited-edition trade paperback as soon as I can find a publisher or an appropriate self-publishing bid (184 pp., white stock with 2-color smooth card stock cover, perfect bound, 8.5″ x 5.5″).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“autonomasia”

12/89 Misc. Newsletter

Seahawks Keep Losing,

Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties

Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.

MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.

TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!

THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”

PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!

BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.

STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.

HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.

INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).

BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.

SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.

`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”

VOICES

Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:

“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”

FORUM

We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Olefiant”

INS/OUTS FOR ’90

This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.

Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.

This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.

5/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

PENTAGON BRASS PREDICT

GLASNOST WILL FAIL

(THEY CAN ONLY HOPE)

Here at Misc., where we’ve always brought disparate elements together, we don’t understand this “cold fusion” fuss. As a scientific discovery, it’s far less important than the new technique to remove old tattoos with lasers.

With this installment, Misc. has graced Seattle’s more open-minded restaurants, theatres and retailers for three years. That’s longer than the Ford Administration or the original run of Star Trek! Alice Savage, who ran what was then the PR paper for the Lincoln Arts Association, said I could write anything I wanted to. As ArtsFocus has grown under Cydney Gillis into this fiercely-independent sheet, that policy’s stayed. Another policy iterated in the first edition still holds: This column does not settle wagers (not that we’ve been asked to).

Eat Your Heart Out, Updike: The Brasil restaurant on 1st showed scenes from the latest Rio samba parades as part of its Sunday-night film series. Among the 18 “schools” (each with at least 3,000 amateur performers) were several save-the-rainforest parades and one in honor of Brazilian author Jorge Amado (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, et al.). Can you imagine giant floats, musicians, singers, children, feather-headdressed men and topless women parading for a living American writer? Brazil has serious problems, but at least it has people who actively participate in their own culture.

This participation is largely what Abbie Hoffman fought for. During his heyday and on his death, the media’ve depicted him as an ego freak, no more sincerely subversive than John Belushi. (The radicals who really were ego freaks became Republicans.) Hoffman’s `68 Demo Convention protest and his square-people-bashing at the subsequent trial might have set back support of the anti-war movement, letting Nixon and Reagan vow to protect “real Americans” from “those kooks.” Still, especially in his books, he had much to say on real democracy vs. money-power whoring and how folks must stop being easily led.

Dead Air: KJR’s resident reactionary Gary Lockwood became Millstone Billboard Man #2, standing in a giant “coffee cup” downtown for an airshift (if I only had some tomatos to throw, some ripe, young tomatos). Lockwood’s “those kids today” commercials, denouncing anything recorded since 1970 and anybody born since 1950, are just like the Mitch Miller/Lawrence Welk defenders during the so-called “classic rock” era. To think KJR was once co-owned by Danny Kaye, who worked to bring attention and respect to youth. Also on the retro beat, the speculating Floridians who bought into Seattle radio promptly sold KZOK (to KOMO) and KQUL, née KJET (to Viacom’s KBSG). I’m heartened, though, by the formation of an anti-nostalgia lobby, the National Association for the Advancement of Time. Corporate America’s obsession with 1956-69 resembles the religious “Age of Miracles” doctrine, in which great things are said to have really happened but cannot happen anymore. The only way to really preserve the spirit of the ’60s is to stay fresh, to live in what Flip Wilson called “what’s happenin’ NOW.”

Update: New Cannon Film owner Giancarlo Parretti’s bids for the New World and DeLaurentiis studios collapsed. Maybe he should’ve sent Chuck Norris to see some dissident shareholders.

Local Publications of the Month: Twistor is a “hard science fiction” book by UW prof John Cramer, in which a machine in the UW Physics Bldg. becomes the portal to a parallel universe…. Lawrence Paros’s The Erotic Tongue is back in print. The area’s foremost expert on word origins (and briefly the best columnist in the P-I) gives fascinating histories on our terms for sex and/or love.

Cathode Corner: Rude Dog, the T-shirt mascot owned by Frederick & Nelson’s David Sabey, will have his own Sat. morn cartoon on CBS this fall (produced by Marvel)…. Bombshelter Videos resurfaced on KTZZ, where even Soundgarden’s an improvement over get-rich-quick and save-your-hair “shows.”

Ad of the Month (on a 76 banner): “Our three unleaded gasolines: Cleans fuel injectors best.” Runner-up (in the N. Seattle Press): “Since 1984, Gibraltar Savings: Serving families for over 100 years.” Then there was the Ross Dress for Less clearance ad with the “Men’s” listings printed between the jumping female model’s legs.

News Item of the Month (Times, 4/22): “A letter writer suggests that car-pool lanes should be open to cars with two drivers.” Let’s hope they’re driving in the same direction.

Politix: Veteran ad man David Stern, whose mom’s on the county council, is running for mayor. His best qualification is having invented the Happy Face, the quintessential politician’s stance. (It’s also become a symbol of neo-psychedelia, ironically since he made it to give Univ. Fed. Savings a wholesome family image in contrast to the image of the U-District in `69)…. Let’s try to get this straight: Our state’s Tom Foley’ll be House Speaker if Jim Wright has to quit over moneymaking schemes, including his wife’s unspecified work for our state’s Pacific Institute (the success-seminar outfit whose payroll also includes Emmett Watson and legend-in-his-own-mind DJ Bob Hardwick). It’s almost as juicy as the discovery of a real Texas oilman named J.R. Ewing, implicated in the Iran-Contra cash flow. After involving so many guys with cartoon names (Casper, Poindexter, Felix), it’s fitting the scandal include other parts of the American mythos.

Junk Food of the Month: White Castle Frozen Burgers. After following the elaborate heating instructions (involving foil and paper towels), you get something that looks and vaguely tastes like the food at an East Coast restaurant chain of undeserved reputation…. WSU’s launching a “distinguished professorship in fast food management,” underwritten by Taco Bell.

‘Til June, wear lotsa Parfum Bic, visit the Speakeasy café on Roosevelt (latter-day note: No relation to the later Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown), and try to be patient during the remaining 14 months ’til the Goodwill Games.

10/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

SOON YOU CAN SEE JAPAN

(LAND OF COMPANY-RUN UNIONS)

VIA CONTINENTAL

(AIRLINE OF NO UNIONS)

Here at Misc., we must apologize for the lateness of the last issue, stuck in a Belltown computer during the blackout. I can assure you I had the gag comparing Quayle to Pat Sajak days before Johnny Carson did.

The blackout is the top Seattle news story so far this year. The daily papers did an awful job of covering it, giving relatively scant coverage and not really discussing the havoc it played on people’s lives until Day 3. It was over a week before they mentioned the construction crew that started it, though the crew had been visible days before the outage. In the tales of survival dept., the Virginia Inn stayed open with beer served from picnic coolers, constantly re-iced (signs pleaded with customers to be nice to the staff). KJET played four hours of blackout-related songs on Day 2: “Electricity,” “Power to the People,” “The Power and the Passion,” and tunes by the Power Station and the Power Mowers (but not the Blackouts). On the night the juice came back, the Ralph’s Grocery readerboard was ready with “I SAID BUD LIGHT.”

Junk Food of the Month: Langendorf Creme-Filled Carrot Cakes. Now you can enjoy the guilt trip of junk food and the martyrdom trip of health food in the same bite.

Local Publication of the Month: Lifeline America!, a slick national mag from local ad legend Jerauld Douglas Miller. Its tabloidesque graphics and stories cover survival with & life without painful addictions (booze, drugs, food binges, boyfriends). Best part: the cover photo of Liz Taylor’s unretouched face, showing just how much she’s gone through. Worst part: endorsing Ed Meese’s Gestapo tactics against small-time drug users, fueling their own victim self-images while diverting funds away from treatment….The Daily Journal of Commerce now has its own “A&E” section, only with them it’s not Arts & Entertainment but Architecture & Engineering (natch).

Invisible Red Ink: The Soviet Union’s admitted it falsified maps for decades. Military installations were whited out, Moscow streets rearranged, and entire towns moved or obliterated. Our own govt. threatened for years to blow the Russkies off the map, only to find they’ve been doing it themselves.

Tourist Trappings: At Seattle Center, Westlake and the waterfront (no, Mr. Royer, I won’t call it “Harborfront,” a euphemism newly deployed to gussie up its image as everything BUT a real harbor), the future of the city is being debated: Will residents’ taxes be used to make Seattle more liveable or more visitable? In each case, City Hall has chosen to subsidize tourism while vital local needs are put aside (or held hostage). Gore Vidal once wrote a story about Disney buying all of England as a huge theme park, with residents expected to live in costume as milkmaids and other “colorful characters.” It could essentially happen here, as it essentially has to parts of California and New Mexico. Let’s build a better town, but a better real town.

Everything Old Is Neo Again: The next big early-’70s comeback, besides solar energy, could be conceptual art. Our sources count three new Manhattan galleries devoted to various hybrids of visuals, video, performance, and such. Interest in early conceptual, performance, and especially video art is rising. It’d be a great time to screen the early video-art tapes donated to the Seattle Public Library a decade ago, except nobody seems to know where they are now.

The Secret Word Is Love: We normally don’t print sex gossip, but couldn’t resist the rumor that ex-Rocket art director Helene Silverman is to wed cartoonist/Pee-Wee’s Playhouse designer Gary Panter. Silverman’s now at NY’s architecture-design magMetropolis; we can only hope she’ll spread the Panter influence to real-life buildings.

Phast Phashion: Fashion magazines are getting thicker than the models pictured within them. Re-use your copies of Vogue and Elle as inexpensive workout weights…. The “Reeboks Let U.B.U.” campaign could pleasantly remind one of Pere Ubu (the play and/or the band)…. Urban “street” imagery is all over this fall’s ads for suburban-only clothing chains, from J.C. Penney to Lamont’s. If they think inner cities are so cool, why won’t they have stores in ’em?

Loco Biz: Fred Meyer may be a little late in its “We Support Northwest Firms” promotion. There are fewer and fewer of them to support, now with the Seahawks and Seven Gables Theaters going to Calif. clutches (as noted by John Marshall in the San Simeon, Calif.-owned P-I).

Philm Phacts: Home-video bucks for new independent films are drying up. Reason: the big studios are pressuring video stores to stock more and more copies of fewer and fewer films…. Will the UK firm that bought Technicolor stick a “u” into its name?

Headlines of the Month: “Japan’s big boost for state” (P-I, 9/10); “Little yen for NW: Japanese investments going elsewhere in U.S.” (Times, 9/11).

Music Notes: Billboard now has a Modern Rock chart every week. The first #1 is Siouxsie and the Banshees, the last original UK punk band in operation to this day…. The NY Daily News’ recent worst-songs-of-all-time poll is much like the one I did in ’81 (latter day note: that was done for the UW Daily), down to the #1 entry: “You’re Having My Baby.”

Bods vs. Beers: The grand old Rainbow Tavern is now a no-booze “showgirls” establishment. It’s nice that some guys are finding drug-free entertainment, but from a hetero-male standpoint it’s disadvantageous that we’re getting more places to look at women, but fewer places to meet them. (Most of the picketers outside it, claiming it demeans women, were men, mainly regulars from the nearby Blue Moon. Imagine Blue Moon people calling someplace else sleazy!)

To close, be sure to see the 911 Homes for Art and the two non-911 Jardin des Refusées homes, hear the new locally-backed remake of Orson Welles’ radio War of the Worlds, read Pete Hamill’s piece in the Sept. Cosmo on the “Awful ’80s,” and fight for all the park space at Westlake we can still get.

7/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

The Reds Will Never Get Our Military Secrets —

They Can’t Outbid the Private Sector

Ahh, what better reading for the Age of the Greenhouse Effect than Misc., the column that always keeps its cool?

STUFF: Now that we’re through booing the Lucking Fakers for another year, we can examine Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s purchase of the Portland TrailBlazers. Will fancy computer analysis come to basketball? Will it result in increased throughput?

THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE continues, with Union St.’s beautiful Post Office Grocery and the legendary Market Theater the latest victims (of development and Reaganomic monopolization, respectively). The next front is the Music Hall Theater. Allied Arts is striving to keep the Clise Agency from razing the ornate movie palace for yet another cheap “luxury” hotel. Other interests are trying schemes to keep the Paramount standing. But don’t look to Royer Roi for any help; the onetime “people’s mayor” now acts as a stooge for those who would destroy Seattle in order to save it. (Speaking of hotels, the finally-done Convention Center won’t rent space to local people unless they’ll bring at least 1,000 out-of-towners to area hotels.)

MODULATIONS: The local airwaves are now safe for cool music. KJET is apparently sticking around for a while, and has added more hours of live programming. And the FCC declined to let the Jack Straw Foundation knock KNHC off the air. Straw, whose old KRAB devolved from beatnik eclecticism to hippie senility before it made a quick buck selling its frequency, will now start a small station in Everett, where people talk almost as slowly as the old KRAB announcers did.

CATHODE CORNER: The CBS special on the plight of local Vietnam vets was a great piece of filmmaking, marred at the end by an obscene promo for the network’s newest Joy-of-Violence cop show…. The long-announced Boris & Natasha movie is now in production, with #1 hoser Dave Thomas recently cast opposite Sally Kellerman. Variety ads, made to lure investors while only Kellerman was signed, show a male model in a Boris suit with a hat over his face…. MTV’s Museum of Unnatural History was an amazing lesson in the contradictions of commercial surrealism, even more bizarre by being in the recursive maze that is Bellevue Square. The exhibits scattered along the mall (and decorated in Late Pee-wee) included two banks of 24 video screens each. One had Pontiac ads, the other a montage of MTV promo spots including a shot of singer Mojo Nixon (but, alas, not his great song “Burn Down the Malls”).

UPDATES: The end of the ’80s (discussed in a prior column) was celebrated in a mock funeral by NYC performance artists The Blue Man Group, cremating a deconstructivist print, a model of a postmodern office building, and a yuppie doll…. The ’70s revival continues, as dinosaur rock and neo-disco race up the charts while several late-’70s celebs stage publicized comebacks (Devo, Patti Smith, Jimmy Carter)…. The Monthly, a local ad trade paper, asked 10 ad-biz experts about the new Rainier Beer ads. The only guy who liked them works for the brewery.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (USA Today, 6/21): “Wives of economic summit leaders wave as they leave on a boat tour Monday… Absent: Denis Thatcher.” Runner-up (P-I “Correction,” 6/10): “The relish tray (at Le Petit Prince) comes with an original dip made on the premises, not a sort of Green Goddess dip as suggested by the reviewer.”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Hardball, best of the many local sports rags, takes the familiar “literary fan” approach to baseball, covering the three local pro teams and assorted other aspects of the game…. Pacific Northwest’s cover on films made and/or set in the Northwest is astounding. Richard Jameson included many memorable NW movies but did neglect my favorite, Ring of Fire (1961). Long unavailable, it featured Mason County deputy David Janssen abducted by three teen hoodlums led by Frank Gorshin. They wander the woods and inadvertently start a raging forest fire, but not before Janssen and seductive hoodette Joyce Taylor share a quiet embrace, followed by shots of a tall tree and rolling hills.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Linda’s Lollies are “hand made lollipops” in many sophisticated flavors, including Samduca (a licorice taste with three real coffee beans inside). At Paper Moon in the Market…. Godfather’s now has a “Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza,” complete with pickles.

ON A ROLL: By the time this comes out the Suzuki Samurai jokes may have come and gone (dealers with high turnover, the teal-blue car it takes a real man to drive, etc.). The best and most real comment is that Univ. Village uses a Samurai with “Security” boldly painted on the side. Just don’t ask me to go after shoplifters across speed bumps in it.

LEFTOVERS: As usual, there’s just too much going on in Our Wacky World to fit the column, so we can’t talk much about Reagan vs. the Native Americans (only a movie cowboy with a mistaken sense of reality could call massacres and the reservation system “humoring”); George Bush (sez he’s less elitist ‘cuz he only went to Yale, not Harvard); the plan to put casinos in Detroit (buying their cars is a gamble enough); the censoring by US West and the state of phone sex and porn books, respectively (threatening all expressions of politically incorrect lifestyles); and the Mariners’ latest woes (why couldn’t they at least be lovable losers?).

‘TIL OUR AUGUST EDITION (our first ever), see Baghdad Cafe and the Burke Museum’s Far Side of Science, don’t see The Morton Downey Jr. Show (not even to “love to hate it”), see the Ivar’s fireworks (accept no substitutes), and register to vote. See ya.