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MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”
MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)
Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).
All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.
It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.
In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)
WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.
This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)
(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)
The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:
(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)
OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?
8/93 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating three Stranger columns)
AREN’T YOU GLAD BUDWEISER’S GOT BRANCH PLANTS?
Here at Misc., where we can’t help but repeat what you all must have thought about Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts (i.e., surely he could have picked better), we think the next Brit blue-eyed soul singer, Mercer Island blues babe, or frat-boy funk band that pretends to be black should have to earn it. Get thrown out of Denny’s, get hassled by cops just for standing outside, get rejected for jobs and mortgages for no good reason, see your band blackballed from almost every venue and rental hall in town while blue-eyed party boys imitate your music at showcase clubs every week. Only then you could boast about how much soul you’ve got.
UPDATE: Remember when we talked about the old Seattle band that had a logo instead of a written name and a yelp instead of a spoken name? They’ve re-formed! Look for ’em in the club listings any week now, printed as “Aiieee!” or something similar.
ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: During the Stranger‘s recent off week, some folks with access to DTP and too much time on their hands created a 12-pp. spoof, the Whimper. It’s OK and sorta funny, ‘cept for the “Miscue” column. I’ve been spoofed two or three times now, and nobody’s gotten it right. Keep trying.
1991 NOSTALGIA: I’d forgotten, as many of you likely forgot, that no Democrat gets nominated for President without the support of pundits and interest groups that demand a business-as-usual foreign policy. By starting Gulf War Lite, the Pentagon’s acting just like the Irish and Mideast vigilante armies that answer opponents’ isolated acts of mindless terror with their own. The week before the missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ, the new Wired had a short article claiming tomorrow’s warfare would be “infrastructure war”: precision raids against electronic and information targets. Maybe Wired really is the magazine o’ the future it claims to be.
LACTOSE INTOLERANCE: Tower Records Pulse! sez Danken’s licensed “Strawberries and Pearl Jam” ice cream won’t come back from its limited production engagement, partly ‘cuz some band members are anti-dairy vegans. One potential successor: “Nirvanilla.”
THE SAME OLD SAW: KIRO’s running a half-hour infomercial paid by the timber industry. Washington Private Forest Report, hosted by ex-KIRO anchorman Jim Harriott, is a self-congratulatory paean for timber management’s current environmental practices, with edited remarks by corporate, governmental, tribal and environmental “leaders” who all back the industry line about “a balanced solution” between ecological and commercial needs (i.e., letting the big companies cut all they can get away with). The show only discusses practices on company-owned lands, without directly mentioning the dispute over clearcutting old growth on Forest Service lands, though its “trust us” message is clearly meant to apply to public as well as private lands. Shows like this reduce issue politics to the level of campaign politics: the side with money gets to say anything in the media at any time; the side without money only gets a few words in real newscasts, edited by station employees and “balanced” with words from the moneyed side.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Zealot claims to be Seattle’s first-ever motorcycle zine (there’ve been bicycle and scooter zines), by and for the local rider community (more intelligent, and more co-ed, than old biker stereotypes suggest). A glance at the staff box reveals the street integrity here: 14 people listing the bikes they personally ride, plus one business manager who admits to having a Toyota Corolla. Within the free tabloid are bike photos, hot bike comix, repair tips, race reviews, and Dana Payne’s essay on the differences between riders and non-riders: “They look at us and see lemmings, chattering happily down the road to destruction. We look back at them and see the eyes of rabbits, of guinea pigs. Soft. Dewy. Fearful.” And not a single precious Young Republican Harley in the whole paper….When Adam Woog wrote his book about local inventors, I said it was the kind of book I should have written. His and Harriet Baskas’s new Atomic Marbles & Branding Irons is a book I have tried to write (the backing never came through). It’s a guide to “museums, collections and roadside attractions in Washington and Oregon.” You get all about the General Petroleum Museum on Capitol Hill, Dick and Jane’s Art Spot in Ellensburg, the Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle, the Advertising Museum in Portland, and the “world’s largest hairball” at Oregon’s Mount Angel Abbey (but not Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere). Recommended.
MAD RAGS: You can now get the most realistic G-word-wear from one of the authentic sources used by the original musical creators. Yes, the Salvation Army store on 4th Ave. S. has opened an “Alternative Gear” boutique, complete with 15-percent discount flyers for “ripped flannel.” (G-word insiders prefer Value Village or Goodwill.) Meanwhile, USA Today (which boasts to advertisers that, “compared with the general population,” its readers are “23 percent more likely to dance/go dancing”) ran a pic of a truly stupid designer-G-word teen couple taken from the JC Penney Back To School ’93 collection. Maybe if the chain likes the Seattle urban look so much now, it’ll think about having a store in town again.
LOVE’S LABOURS: We now know that several weeks back, Kurt was arrested and went to jail for three hours on a domestic-violence rap, before being released without charges. Cops say they went to his place on a neighbor’s noise complaint. There,Courtney supposedly said they’d argued about his gun-buying binge and their busted $300 juicer; they supposedly shoved each other, he supposedly dragged her to the floor and choked her. (So much for juiceheads being laid-back.) She insisted to the P-I that it was all a big misunderstanding, that they’d argued but not physically fought, that he’s still a great guy and an ardent feminist. She echoed these remarks at the Hole gig at the Off Ramp: “This is a song about domestic violence, not! I don’t mean to joke about it, I know it’s a serious issue and shit…” The show itself was one of those gigs where the band valiantly keeps efficiently chopping away throughout the frontperson’s half-drunken stumblings (she gave up on guitar playing in the middle of a couple of songs). In short, a definitive sloppy old-fashioned punk show. Perfect.
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer title on the public-access show H.A.R.D. TV (Hardbody Alternative Rock Digest)): “All bands on this show sound 500% better live. This audio is the worst (and we know it).”
WHERE AMERICA SHOPPED: It’s one thing for Sears to kill its catalog, but to remove the candy counter at its 1st Ave. flagship (its oldest surviving U.S. store) is unforgivable. That little stand between the first-floor escalators was the heart and soul of the place. They might as well stop selling DieHards.
PHILM PHACTS: Free Willy is a new mid-budget “family film” about a boy who helps a lonely killer whale escape a nasty, fictional “Great Northwest Water Park.” Execs from Sea World, the Anheuser-Busch-owned theme park chain with 18 performing killer whales (all named Shamu), have reportedly been to the San Juans, hobnobbing with area whale experts to help assemble their anti-Willy PR campaign. They’re telling you that captive orcas have great lives and are treated fine, that no Willys need ever be freed….I got to see a few scenes from Sleepless in Seattle some months back, and the finished film is every bit as stupid as those scenes cracked it up to be. Yo, Hollywood: We’re not all rich boomer airheads here.
NOTES: The Chamber of Commerce’s idea of Seattle music, Kenny G, will play the Coliseum in Sept. with Peabo Bryson. He’s the male half of most of those sappy love-song duets at the end of dumb blockbuster films (new catch phrase: “The movie ain’t over `til Peabo sings”). He oughta have a giant screen behind him showing closing credits through his entire set.
GRAFFITO OF THE MONTH (outside B. Dalton Books on 1st): “Read less. Live more.”
THE NOAM-MOBILE: Congrats to all of you for making Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media one of the biggest documentary hits in a long time, even though I don’t agree with much of it. Chomsky treats the mass media as one monolithic, unstoppable force exercising mind control over all America (except for himself and his East Coast intellectual pals). He can’t, or won’t, notice how tentative that hold really is. People who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming. Compare the faux-ironic, “air quotes” speech patterns of MTV viewers with the blind-faith naiveté of tube-loathing neohippies. A typical TV viewer takes nothing by faith, treats everything with (excess?) skepticism. A typical nonviewer is ready to believe almost anything, as long as it’s told in the proper “alternative” lingo by recognizably “alternative” faces. The Robertson right, the Perot moderate-right, and the Chomsky left all hate the commercial mass media. Everybody’s a “rebel” these days, and the press is one of the few universally recognized symbols of what everybody’s rebelling against. Newspaper circulation is flat, and ad revenues have plummeted. (Ratings and ad revenues for TV news are also down.) Most people are already aware that their local newspaper is beholden to its town’s business and political bigshots. It doesn’t take listening to three hours of Chomsky to figure out that national and Eastern-regional media might be similarly beholden to the NY/DC bigwigs. The New York Times is, after all, the Cadillac of American newspapers: it’s bigger, and it’s got more luxury features, but it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train.
Just as leftist economists talk as if the world’s economy was still based on heavy industry, so do media critics like Chomsky still “analyze” an American media comprised only of three networks, two wire services, two weekly news mags, five opinion mags, and two or three big Eastern papers. Can Noam adapt to a media, and a nation, that are becoming more decentralized and diffuse (but perhaps no more “progressive”)? Stay tuned.
RE-PRESSED: At least Chomsky does sometimes get around to telling you his worldview, instead of just dissing other media worldviews. That’s the problem with most leftist “media analysis,” especially the syndicated “Media Beat” columnists in the Saturday Seattle Times. Those two guys give only a shadow of the “reality” they claim exists. They keep telling us that the papers aren’t telling the whole truth about some issue, but they expend little or no space telling us what their idea of the “true story” is. I wanna throttle those guys and dare ’em: “Yeah yeah, I know these other people aren’t telling me the whole story; so why won’t you tell it to me already?”
NOT MY GENERATION: The Weekly still treats rich baby boomers as the only people (besides political-corporate bigshots) it wants to talk about. Its preview of summer music festivals treated tame boomer nostalgia music as a refreshing novelty, not the reactionary albatross that’s helped keep original music off bigger stages for two decades. The same issue had Walt Crowley with one of those puff pieces about how great it was to be young 25 years ago (ostensibly a review of a book about old underground papers, like the one he used to edit). Like most such articles, it depicted a Sixties America populated only by middle-class college boys. Unlike most, he didn’t treat it as a gone-forever “age of miracles.” Instead, he wished young’uns would follow the path set by elders like himself, without saying how. It’d be unwise to do everything like it was done then. Hippies made a lot of mistakes: they appropriated Black Power slogans while doing little to integrate their own world; they abrogated 50 years of leftist heritage by stereotyping all working-class people as redneck fascists. We’ve gotta learn from that time, including its mistakes, to do better. Don’t live in the Sixties, be radical now.
MIA ZAPATA, 1965-1993: In the past three years I’ve said goodbye in print to six members of the local music/arts scenes, some I’d known personally and some only through their work. They all died needlessly and too soon. This may be the most senseless death of them all. Zapata, a poet, painter and singer-lyricist for the Gits, was found strangled in an alley near 25th and S. Washington, an hour and a half after she left a small get-together at the Comet, honoring the one-year anniversary of her friend Stefanie Sargent’s fatal overdose. Zapata died a week before she was to have recorded vocals for the Gits’ second CD. I knew her only as a presence on a stage, a dynamic presence delivering some powerful and fun tunes, a voice rooted in the early notion of punk rock as a statement of positive defiance, not just a lowbrow lifestyle.
Some 300 friends of Zapata and the band attended a wake at the Weathered Wall, which included the surviving Gits and friends playing her songs one last time (the band won’t continue without her) on a stage filled with candles and yellow roses. Some people ask me how Seattle bands can be so strident and negative, contradicting the official image of Seattle as heaven on earth. I tell those people to look around themselves: There’s a madness here, subtlely different from the madness in the nation at large. Due partly to our western boomtown heritage and surviving Greed Decade attitudes, far too many people here believe they have the right to do anything they want, to whomever they want. Seattle’s “nice” image is at best a cover-up, at worst an emotional repression. Beneath the enforced attitude of passivity sometimes called “the Northwest lifestyle,” you’ll find a barely-contained force of sheer terror. There’s no running away from it; you’ll still find that terror in the white-flight suburbs and the hippie-flight countryside. Don’t move out, stay and reclaim the public space. Do that and we can help fulfill the pledge shouted by the people at her wake, “Viva Zapata!” (A reward fund is being formed to help find her killer, in cooperation with King County Crime Stoppers. Any info that might lead to Zapata’s killer can be given anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 343-2020.)
‘TIL WE MAKE A PLEDGE to meet in September, be sure to see the digitized Snow White, be courteous to foreign Seattle Sound tourists, and ponder this thought from Night of the Living Dead master George A. Romero: “People are operating on many levels of insanity only clear to themselves.”
PASSAGE Chris Stigliano in the Sharon, PA zine Black to Comm: America’s Only Rockism Magazine:
“Don’t you miss the days you could turn on your fave UHF station and watch any of the Nick at Nite programs without the computer animation and with those great car salesman ads? Me too….You can pay upwards of $30 a month to see ’em presented in a yuppie/disco manner that ultimately insults them (and you), but ain’t television supposed to be free and not controlled by spoiled brat cokeheads with little understanding of what we (as noncorruptable, wild rock & roll reactionaries) are?”
REPORT
Almost finished with the first draft of my book chronicling the Seattle music scene since 1976. All you who’ve been holding back on offering your stories and reminiscences: Drop me a line already. All you who have offered, but haven’t heard back from me yet: Be patient a week or two longer.
I’m thinking of offering official Misc. T-shirts, stickers and the like. Any favorite slogans you’d like?
WORD-O-MONTH
“Orphic”
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.
“Obstreperous”
7/91 Misc. Newsletter
DOES ANYBODY REALLY CARE ABOUT
JULIA & KIEFER NOT GETTING MARRIED? REALLY?
Misc. is back, the pop-culture newsletter that can still remember when we all used to scoff at the USSR’s idea of fun — tanks and missiles on parade, “honoring” those who obeyed orders fighting to prop up dictatorial puppet regimes.
DOWN THE PIKE: Three food booths in the Pike Place Market were gutted in late May for one huge eating table with only four chairs, one of which broke the first morning. This is not how they’re going to raise revenues to buy out the New York investors and pay off both sides’ immense legal bills.
REQUIEM FOR AN ECCENTRIC: Vic Meyers, who died in late May, was one of the true northwest characters, a jazz musician who got elected to the normally meaningless post of lieutenant governor on a joke campaign and managed to keep getting re-elected on the privileges of incumbency, much to the disgust of the real politicians. One such pol was Gov. John Langlie, who felt trapped in the state during his two terms, unable to fly to the other Washington for lobbying work out of fear that Meyers would become temporary acting governor, call a special session of the Legislature and issue who knows what disorderly executive orders. Finally Langlie got a chance when Meyers was himself off on a fishing trip; until Meyers heard Langlie was gone, and Langlie heard Meyers was rushing back to Olympia. Langlie hurriedly chartered a plane to fly him back west in the middle of the night, landing in Spokane just minutes before Meyers showed up at the state capitol to call the special session he was no longer authorized to call.
DOG DAZE: The UK is trying to eradicate all pit bulls from its soil, as a probable preliminary step toward exterminating soccer hooligans and perhaps even, if they’re lucky, the unspeakable foods they make out of the variety meats.
CLOTHES HOARSE: A national fashion trade magazine noted the increasing prominence of Seattle menswear designers, but the Times tried to stick a nonexistent spin onto the story by noting that these designers “show no Seattle influence” — by which the paper means they don’t have prints of outdoorsy scenes, but instead show a variety of influences from around the world. What rubbish! Seattle is, if you haven’t noticed (and a lot of reporters haven’t), a real city, an international trade center and home of the machines that made the Jet Set possible. A fashion style that mixes the best of America, Canada, Europe and particularly urban Asia could be about as distinctly Seattle as you’re likely to get.
SHOE BIZ: How appropriate that a cache of Nike shoes, lost at sea a year ago, would wash ashore along the Oregon coast the day before the Portland TrailBlazers were eliminated from the NBA playoffs. Almost poetic, no?
CATCHING `EM WITH THEIR PANTS DOWN: Seattle’s American Passage Media Corp., a company that began selling term paper “guides” and now handles various ad ventures, wants to put up ads in high-school locker rooms. Called “GymnBoards,” they’d be like Whittle Communications’ ad posters in doctor and dentist offices, a little bit of consumer info surrounded by slick ad messages. (Whittle, originator of the sponsored classroom newscast Channel One, is under fire from mainstream media reporters who don’t want ad dollars to cease subsidizing reporters’ salaries) Too many teens are already almost fatally self-conscious, without having diet, food, or grooming products confronting them while nude.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Johnny’s Fine Foods of Tacoma has launched a line of salad dressings with offbeat names: Jamaica Mistake, Honey! You’re Terrific!, Garlic: The Final Frontier, Poppy Love, Great Caesar, and Gorby Light: A Kinder, Gentler Russian. (The back label of the latter sez, “…unleashes the flavor of good Russian and eliminates those harsh old overtones…”)
GOOD NEWS!: The Clark bar is being saved, by Pittsburgh financier Michael P. Carlow. He bought the venerable candy from Leaf Inc. of Illinois, which had basically let it slide before announcing plans to sell or scrap it.
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #6: On-Your-Tie Cookies are no more. Neither are Uncle Billy’s Pasta Chips, Frutta di Terra dried tomato products, or seven other companies listed in the 1989 membership list of the Specialty Foods Group of Washington. According to the Puget Sound Business Journal, 10 other local specialty-food companies are struggling to survive.
FROZEN FOOD FOR THOUGHT: Whatever happened to the New World Order, anyway? This term was used only once by Bush as a justification for the war, but has remained as a catch phrase used by Leftists for every dishonorable aspect of Reagan-Bush foreign policy. T-shirts proclaim that it’s really an “Old World Odor;” bumper stickers insert swastikas between every word. I don’t know what the band New Order thinks of it all.
LIFE IMITATES LYNCH, PART 2: According to the authors of the new book The Day America Told the Truth (a survey of moral/ethical attitudes by region), the quintessential Northwest personality might be that of bad ol’ Leland Palmer. According to James Patterson and Peter Kim, roughly one in four Northwesterners is a clinical sociopath, four times the national average. “Pac Rim [their name for a “moral region” of the Northwest and northern Calif.] respondents were much less likely to have strongly developed consciences than were individuals in any other area…Coupled with the observation that Pac Rimmers are the regional respondents least likely to present themselves to others as they really are, it seems that David Lynch may be onto something”…By the way, I still believe Twin Peaks has been 32 of TV’s best hours ever. It taught me how to write Northwest fiction that has imagination and wonder, that doesn’t reek of godawful God’s-country pretentiousness. The show’s “failure” only proved that ambitious genre-splitters may not be meant to be ongoing series, especially when erratically scheduled and poorly advertised. Lynch is now working up a feature; my choice would be a string of TV movies.
MORE ON SEATTLE TODAY: The old-clips final episode claimed the show had been on for 17 years, but it was really 40 years old (even older than I said last issue). I still have the TV and T-shirt I won on it on separate occasions in the mid-’70s. Under that name as well as TeleScope, The Noon Look, Good Company, and Northwest Today, it formed a part of the daily rhythm of the city that will be missed, even if the show itself had become stale (the same old fashion tips, the same old recipes, the same old touring psychics, the same old itinerant book-pluggers).
HOME TOWN NEWS: AÂ Marysville woman got stung in a supermarket by a scorpion stuck onto the sticker of a Del Monte banana. In a lawsuit, she’s blaming the store for a miscarriage she had weeks later.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Weekly “Clarification,” 5/2): “In a Discovery item last week, Kit Hughes was quoted as saying that before she used Aqua Mirabilis Bath Salts she was a `shallow person.’ Hughes was a shower person. In a different story in the same issue, Jim Bailey was quoted as describing Lori Larsen (Tales of Larsen) as `wild and horny.’ What Bailey said was corny.”
ADS OF THE MONTH: I was slipped a newspaper ad promoting a shopping-mall appearance by Gerardo, the Latin Rapper. But the ad to the left of that won gets this month’s honors. It’s for Lovers Package (“Try One On for Sighs”) a chain store offering “Wonderfulwedding things meant to be seen,” including “lingerie, cards, games, bachelor & bachelorette party prizes.” Half the small ad consists of a photo of a model in gartered stockings, bra, panties, and a wedding veil. Reminds me of the old nudist-camp-wedding joke, where you can always tell who the best man is… Sears ran an ad for an electronics sale that showed dozens of dazed customers wandering into the mall, carrying out big-name products at “shocking” prices. What’s delicious about it is that the whole commercial makes no sense if you’ve never seen Dawn of the Dead. In a similar old-movie reference, a Brut as has Kelly LeBrock discussing the “Essence of Man.” That was also the name of a device in Barbarella, in which the women of the corrupt sky city smoked from water pipes connected to a male prisoner in a water-filled glass cage. (By the way, a G-rated cartoon version of Barbarella has been optioned for TV series development.)
THE DRUG BUG: The Tobacco Institute, a venture of the big cigarette companies, offers free booklets entitled Tobacco: Helping Youths Say No. Hmm: an industry acknowledging that its product should be kept away from kids. Or is it? Not having read the book, I imagine it might be like all that counterproductive anti-drug propaganda of the past 25 years. You know, where the only “role models” of non-users are obnoxious jocks and hopeless squares…
BODY LANGUAGE: Pat Graney’s dance performance eloquently succeeded in contrasting healthy, natural sensuality with the clumsy, contrived “sexiness” of modern life as exemplified in that symbol of everything ex-hippie women despise, high heel shoes, at one point compared by Graney dancer Tasha Cook to Chinese foot-binding. (That many younger women have found a source of power in black dresses and uncomfy shoes is dismissed in the course of the piece, with the dancers eventually shucking off their im-ped-iments of needless discipline.) One must also mention the last of Graney’s four segments, in which she and her six other female dancers crawled across the floor nude (mostly with spines arched out to the audience). That this was accompanied by Mideval-inspired music (by Rachel Warwick) did not seem the least bit sacrilegious. Indeed (in a twist on liberal orthodoxy), Graney implied that old religious-based cultures held more respect for both body and spirit than current secular society.
TROUBLE IN FANTASYLAND?: French culture mavens, the Chicago Tribune reports, are predictably miffed at the rising upon their shores of Euro Disneyland: “A cultural Chernobyl” and “a black stain on the soul of France.” One of the American construction supervisors was quoted, “I know there were good political reasons for building it in France, but I wish they’d picked a country where the work ethic is a little more highly developed, like Germany.”
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #7: Working Women magazine lists the two hottest careers for 1991 grads as bankruptcy attorney and “outplacement specialist” — counseling the newly-unemployed.
NOW IT CAN BE TOLD (it was told in the Smithsonian last year; I just found it now): Before Muzak moved its HQ to Seattle, three-quarters of its 4,000-selection library had been recorded by a Czechoslovakia radio orchestra. The old owners liked its price and tolerated its admittedly odd musical flavor. It’s being steadily replaced by new tunes recorded mostly by synthesizers and “electronically enhanced” quartets. You have to wonder, though: what if Commies were hiding secret subliminal messages that got into offices and factories across America, messages like “Lower your productivity” or “Let America become a second-rate industrial power”?
CLEANING UP: Toronto entrepreneurs have brought one of Playboy’s most common and inexplicable images to life by starting the first commercial topless car wash. It’s apparently all legal (there is no contact with the customer’s body, only with the customer’s car). Perhaps this proves what Toronto’s own Marshall MacLuhan used to say about a car being essentially modern man’s new outer skin or something like that.
‘TIL AUGUST, when we might have warmth, visit Jersey’s Sports Club on 7th (a “sports bar” where people actually play sports inside instead of just watching them on TV), and resist the turning of Seafair into even more of a pro-war spectacle than it already is.
One of the lines of the pathetically insufferable couple in the KBSG commercial, describing how only the sappy pop music of their childhoods saved their marriage: “We almost broke up over the wallpaper.”
Following the “Misc.@5” anniversary show, I’ll probably hold another reading in August, as part of a COCA series. More in the next issue.
Kim Thompson insists that Mariel Hemingway’s line at the end of Manhattan was “NOT everybody gets corrupted;” somewhat diff. from my quote last time. All I can say is it ain’t the way I heard it.
Subscriptions are $7/yr., prepaid; fax subs are $9/yr.
My hypertext novel The Perfect Couple is available in photocopy-galley form for $10 prepaid.
“Comogonic”
4/91 Misc. Newsletter
ENNUI IS: FINDING ZIPPY’S SLOGAN
“ARE WE HAVING FUN YET?”
ON A GARFIELD POST-IT NOTE
We open the unsafe-at-any-speed 55th edition of Misc. with a wake for the beautiful Ness Flowers neon signs, a University Way landmark immortalized in a lovely postcard by John Worthey. The store has moved to an earthier-looking space up the street. Nearby, Peaches Music (where you can still buy records!) has torn up its Walk of Fame for an espresso cart; while the University Bistro joins the hundred or so other members of Seattle Club Heaven.
CATHODE CORNER: You could tell it was all over when The Tonight Show came on at 11:30 again….I’ve dissed KOMO in the past, but now must congratulate them on being the last local station to hold out against program length commercials. KING even ran one instead of a network war bulletin.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: During the six-day-war-times-seven, many instant publications appeared. The most professional looking was The Peace Pulse, the two-page weekly bulletin and event calendar from the Seattle Coalition for Peace in the Middle East. Associates of the PeaceWorks Park movement put out three issues of Time for Another, including one extensive survey of conscientious objection and draft resistance. An independent anarchist group put out No World Order, labeling Saddam and Bush as “two sides of the same coin” and reprinting scathing statistics on the official Saudi and Kuwaiti repression of women. Another group, the Peace News Network, created five issues of Peace News, gathering short bulletins of under-reported events with reproduced pages from other sources, including letter-writing lists. Anonymous zines included Stop This War Now (amazingly well-photocopied photos and statements from different sources, including the anarchist punk band Crass) and Read My Lies (a simple listing of contradictory Administration quotations). One pro-war zine was the metal mag The S.L.A.M. Report, listing Saddam twice as Asshole of the Month.
STILL ENGULFED: We have killed perhaps as many as 100,000 people to save a country of fewer than 600,000 citizens (plus 1.5 million resident workers). Do not ask me to be proud of the deliberate massacre of an already-defeated army, or of the preceding destruction of cities far from Kuwait. It’s no more noble a victory than my ancestors’ slaughter of the original Northwesterners. (Yes, I also condemn the Iraqi invasion, occupation and pillage; I’m just insisting we could have resolved it less hypocritically.)… Ackerley ran a “Support the Troops” billboard on Aurora until somebody defaced it with a spray-painted “Bring Them Home Alive.” Within a day, it had been replaced by a new image, from the company’s artists-at-work series…. I’m still baffled by a term consistently used in letters-to-the-editor to stereotype anti-war protesters. Just what is an “ultraliberal“? I know liberals, and I know radicals, but I’ve never heard anybody describe themselves as an “ultraliberal.” Is that somebody who wants to smash the state but keep the Weather Service? Or somebody who wants to demolish multinational corporations but only if he can still get Kenyan coffee and keep his Walkman?…. NBC News v.p. Timothy Russert on C-SPAN acknowledged that the Pentagon was not restricting news access to protect military secrets but to ensure good news. “This was managing the news, pure and simple.”
TURN OUT THE LIGHTS: MTV’s hype show about the premiere of the Doors movie was co-sponsored by De Beers, the diamond monopoly based in South Africa. But then, Morrison’s approach was to the bohemian-aesthetic side of his era, not its political side; and the Doors’ relationship to black America was that of all hip musicians, to quarry from the blues/jazz mine while retaining Caucasian socioeconomic privileges.
A FRIEND WRITES: “Sometimes I don’t know whether to admire or abhor the New Yorker, that surviving bastion of northeastern paternalism. But the 3/4 issue had a fascinating Talk of the Town piece about Archie McPhee’s owner Mark Pahlow at the New York Toy Fair, plus two local mail-order ads for costly knick-knacks: a hand-painted porcelain turtle and a miniature marble reproduction of de Rossi’s statue Hercules and Diomede, in which one of the nude wrestling warriors appears to be using a very unorthodox “hold” on the other.”
THE LAST TRADE-IN: Cal Worthington had his “I’m Goin Fishin'” sale, then stayed in business another two years. Now he has suddenly, quietly sold off his Fed. Way dealership. Can’t rightly say that I miss the guy…
STUFF: NBC finally televised a basketball featuring the Portland TrailBlazers, who have had the best record in the league most of the season. The Blazers get so little respect, they can’t even get a national endorsement contracts with Portland’s own Nike.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL CO. (KING’s purchaser): Its titular property is an arch conservative paper that devotes so much attention to the “human interest” angle of every local news story that you end up knowing all the emotions of the story’s participants and precious little info. The company’s owning family includes one patriarch who died in a bicycle accident with many suspicious circumstances, around the time that he was trying to open a printing plant that would have muscled in on job-printing accounts allegedly held by mob-controlled companies. Or so says a former Rhode Islander who claims to have the inside scoop on all this.
TITLE OF THE MONTH: The Stroum Jewish Community Center of Mercer Island’s winter youth theater production, Mazeltov Cocktail: A Musical Explosion!
SOCK IT TOME: A Portland entrepreneur has launched a new line of paperback genre short stories published for $1.99 as “DimeNovels.” They come in 12 genre-flavors from “sensual romance” through “mystery.” The first batch reads a lot like the 1982 No-Name Fiction line, but without the intentional self-parody. They concentrate the bad-novel experience down to the expected plots and spectacles, with none of that annoying stuff like imagination. I’ve long believed that the problem with short fiction is that they always have to fit in with other material in a magazine or a compilation book. Exceptions include the Little Blue Book series at the turn of the century, religious tracts, and two recent illustrated text magazines marketed as comic books, Cases of Sherlock Holmes andBeautiful Stories for Ugly Children. Pulphouse Press plans to launch Short Story Paperbacks in June, publishing sci-fi and speculative stories, one story at a time.
MORE PROOF THAT LITERATURE IS THE MOST OVERRATED ART: A Calif. computer expert claims to have programmed Jacqueline Susann’s writing style into a Macintosh and churned out a complete artificial-intelligence-generated novel, entitled Just This Once.
OFF THE MAP: Pacific Northwest magazine, having absorbed the slightly-better Washington mag, is abandoning its one reason for existence — to cover the region specified by its title. Letter writers in the Feb. issue complained about a wine article that included the main wine regions of northern California as part of the Northwest wine biz. The article’s writer, John Doerper, responded with a ludicrous passage claiming that anything from Alaska to San Francisco is Northwest, based on native species of trees, foliage, and grasses. Maybe that excuse would’ve worked when it was a nature mag called Pacific Search, but not for a publication about human societies. He goes on, “No chasm separates us. Northern Californians share our tastes and desires and espouse our unique outlook on life.” No county within the banking or media zone of San Francisco can by any means be called Pacific Northwest. Unless he’s thinking about the generic western-upscale culture of smug attitudes, made-up “traditional” cuisines, and revisionist history shared by Bay Area transplant colonies from Santa Fe to the San Juans.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Somebody has to tell you that Ultra Slim-Fast, the shake mix diet plan endorsed by Chuck Knox and many others, is mainly composed of sugar. It’s like having a vitamin-enriched candy bar for two meals a day, with chemical fillers added to make you feel fuller after consuming it. (Anybody remember what was in its predecessors from other companies, Metracal and Sego?)…The soft drink bottling industry usually comes to Olympia only when there’s a bottle-deposit bill to be defeated (they all have been), but now is lobbying to repeal a one-cent-per-container tax imposed last year to fund anti-drug programs. Instead, the bottlers suggest the tax be taken off pop and put onto candy and bakery products. It’s about time we recognized sugar and carbos as drugs.
LIFE IMITATES COMICS: A reader said, “You’ve got to print this: A certain Seattle woman was suddenly awakened in bed by her new lover’s estranged wife. The woman tried to cordially introduce herself, but that was a very difficult thing to do when one is covered only by a sheet. It was the weirdest experience I’ve ever been through.” My response to her: “But it can’t be that unusual. According to the cartoons in Playboy, it happens all the time.”
NOTES: Tad was forced to recall an album cover that contained a “found photo” (from a yard sale) of a nude middle-aged couple. The real people found out about it and threatened to sue. The Rebellious Jukebox on E. Pine (another store where you can still buy records) displayed posters with the now-forbidden image replaced by pictures of grocery products (a presumed reference to Tad’s famous girth)…. I used to say when asked my favorite music, “12-inch disco remixes of Gregorian chants.” Now, a brit unit called Enigma has actually done one and it made the us charts!
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: Peter Oakley reports that among South African whites, ” `jazz’ is a slang term for going to the bathroom.” To associate what many believe is the highest achievement of black American culture with a toilet says more about South African racial attitudes than all the apologetic white-liberal books from that country put together.
VICTORIA’S SECRET: Not only is the B.C. government clearcutting its old-growth forests faster than they can be replanted as ecologically inferior “tree farms,” but it’s dumping millions of gallons of sewage daily into the Strait of Juan de Fuca; all while it’s running U.S. cable ads selling tourists on the area’s natural beauty….Johnson & Johnson, though, is trying to reduce its use of wood products by test-marketing in Canada a new sanitary napkin made from sphagnum (processed peat moss).
SPROCKETS: While I hinted last time about my misgivings toward Dances w/Wolves, I had to love its Oscar sweep for (1) the screenwriter calling Exene Cervenka (once of the punk band X) as a poet who had greatly inspired him, and (2) Chuck Workman’s clips of celebs talking about their favorite movies with Reagan saying he loved westerns “because they were always good against evil and good always won” during a show that celebrated a western that denounced the values of those films.
END OF THE ’80S ITEM #5: One Larry’s Market has been replaced by something called Price Choppers.
PHASHION PHUN: Mademoiselle sez a group of trendy Chicago club people are calling themselves the Fashion Police, issuing “citations” to people caught in public bearing such fashion violations as “fake Rolexes” or “helmet-head hair.”
‘TIL WE GATHER AGAIN in the merry merry month of May, don’t buy a car at Costco, make bets on whether Yugoslavia will break apart faster than a Yugo car, and don’t forget these words from Yugoslavia’s own Milorad Pavic’s novel Landscape Painted With Tea: “There is no clear borderline between the past, which grows and feeds on the present, and the future, which, it would seem, is neither inexhaustible nor incessant, so that in some places it is reduced or comes in spurts.”
The entire official disclaimer at the start of American Psycho: “This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, incidents, and dialogue, except for incidental references to public figures, products, or services, are imaginary and are not intended to refer to any living persons or to disparage any company’s products or services.”
The fifth anniversary of this here Misc. thing is coming up in June. A big public bash is planned. More details in our next report.
I also write the news section of The Comics Journal, occasional Times book reviews, and a pro-junk food essay in the current Wire.
Please note that, due to postal and other price increases, a one-year Misc. subscription has been $7 since February (cheap at twice the price). Smaller payments will be pro-rated (i.e., 10 months for $6).
“Approbation”
2/91 Misc. Newsletter
THE REAL VIETNAM SYNDROME ISN’T ‘LOSING;’
IT’S KILLING AND DYING WHERE WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE
Don’t know about you, but here at Misc. we’re proud to live in the state where Wash. St. Univ. is studying the effect of cattle belching on global warming. My vegetarian pals will say this is proof that we shouldn’t have all these food animals. But if we have more methane gas from more cows, at least we’ll have lots of ice cream to beat the heat. (The topic you’re expecting to see is on the reverse page.)
HOMER SPENCE, 1941-1991: The guy I expected to outlive us all. America’s oldest punk rocker (due to his stint in the Telepaths). A UW poli-sci prof who had left under circumstances I never quite understood, who ended up driving cabs and, eventually, spending his last 10 years tending bar at the Virginia Inn. He remained equally passionate about new music, art, politics, world cultures, astronomy, and especially baseball. He was a focal point for Seattle’s alternative cultural “scene”. His relationships with younger women never looked strange; he wasn’t “an older man,” he was “one of us.” I last met him on New Year’s; he boasted about having lived in seven decades before turning 50 (if you mark decades with the “1” years and mark the start of life with conception, neither of which he necessarily did). He did more living in those 49 and a half years than most do in 70. That he should have a heart attack the same week as the start of war is doubly tragic; he’d have been indescribably valuable in the anti-war movement. He knew how to bring disparate people together better than just about anybody.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Theresa Morrow’s Seattle Survival Guide is the best local guidebook since the Seattle People’s Yellow Pages in 1978. It’s almost a miracle that D. Brewster’s Sasquatch Books put out something about the essentials of urban living (and not just for the Demographically Correct)…I fully support the rights of gays and of poets, though I don’t participate in either activity. The Northwest Gay and Lesbian Reader, however, gives me at least a vision of what both these loves might emotionally be like.
COINCIDENCE OR…?: Every time I’ve ridden a Metro bus up Pine past the Bus Tunnel entrance hole, someone on a nearby seat complains openly about the huge neon art.
WHY I STILL DON’T HATE USA TODAY: ‘Twas so refreshing to read, in their In/Out list for ’91, that Seattle is Out! “…Seattle, the wilderness city (was the writer ever here?), which had a great year in 1990, now is spoiled. Everybody who could move there has. It’s time to return to real cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, where the air is clean thanks to two decades of recession in their manufacturing sectors.” The following week, an interminable NY Times Sunday-magazine essays called Seattle “a Midwestern hub” that had been the hot place to move to, but is now “a victim of its own success.” (This was during the death weeks of The Other Place, Henry’s Off Broadway and Mirabeau restaurants.) What nobody accepts is that this town did not cease to be a utopia, it never was. Take our ferry system, where a captain was charged with harassing an African-American crew member and broadcasting racial insults over the public-address system. It’s just the latest shame in a century of Indian massacres, pogroms against Chinese railroad workers, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and a bomb plot against a gay disco.
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: The Economist, a weekly news magazine edited in England for a readership mostly in America, had a brief item on Tacoma’s needle-exchange program among drug abusers. The sad subject matter was lightened a little by the anonymous writer’s lead, depicting Tacoma as “a smoky industrial Sparta to the high-tech Athens of Seattle.”
ANOTHER XMAS STORY: The cutest holiday TV this year was TNT’s Silent Night — a whole evening of meticulously restored silent movies. Without spoken dialogue, there’s no way to wander off to the bathroom or kitchen and still keep up. You have to pay full visual attention throughout the feature.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (at a Wherehouse video rental desk): “RoboCop 2; Henry V.”
A DIFFERENT BAND OF DWARVES: Sub Pop almost had a distribution deal with Hollywood Records, the newest off-brand division of the Walt Disney Co. Instead, Hollywood’s first act will be the Party, a promoter-assembled teen dance group heavily promoted at Disneyland and on The Disney Channel.
AT LEAST IN THIS COUNTRY SHE CAN SHOW HER FACE: Producers of the movie I Am Woman will reportedly pay female lead Jamie Lee Curtis $800,000, only 40 percent of co-star Dan Aykroyd‘s fee and even less than child actor Macauley Culkin (Home Alone). What did the song of the same name say? Oh yeah, “I’m still an embryo with a long, long way to go…”
LYCRA LOVE: According to the newsletter Japan Access, Tokyo’s top designers say the 1991 trend in swimwear will be the ecology look: earth-green colors, “designs borrowed from nature, including seashell, fish and flower motifs.” The garments themselves are made of non-biodegradable, petroleum-based synthetics…
LANDLESS: We’ve seen ads for nonexistent housing developments and stock sales for nonexistent companies, but the 1/7 Forbes reported perhaps the ultimate con (besides the war). An American promoter calling himself Branch Vinedresser placed Wall St. Journal ads offering to sell corporate charters and passports in a “tax-free sovereignty.” The documents are sold under the name of the “Dominion of Melchizedek,” which Vinedresser claims is a “4,000 year old ecclesiastical sovereignty” on an island off the coast of South America. The island really exists, but is fully controlled by Colombia. Vinedresser has also paid to have fictional currency and securities for his “nation” listed on international exchanges, and has promoted the sale of these securities through a network of companies in different cities, most of which are just mailbox services and phone lines with call forwarding to his California office.
Latter-Day Addendum: On 4-1-98, I received the following email:
From: tzemach david netzer korem, tzemach@email.msn.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org
Dear Clark:
You might want to rewrite your page about DOM with something closer to the truth, which can be found at:http://www.melchizedek.com.
Best regards,
Tzemach “Ben” David Netzer Korem, Vice President (DOM)
NOW I UNDERSTAND QUAYLE: The Times says “an outbreak of `nonsense-speak’ is sweeping Hong Kong” among working-class youngsters with little hope of escaping the 1997 Chinese takeover. (The Cantonese name for the fad is “mo lai tau,” or “you have no head.”) The paper gave only one example of nonsense-speak dialogue heard on the streets: “My sister’s going to have a baby.” “Green babies look strange.” “Green socks aren’t blue.” Sounds to me like the foundation for a code jargon, perhaps for an anti-takeover resistance movement…
WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH AMERICA: AÂ Lava Lite is being sold at The Sharper Image, a Lava Lite with a base unit of a solid black marble-like substance. The Lava Lite is supposed to be goofy/fun, not corporate/grim. Sheesh!
FINAL VINYL: The death of records has, as predicted here, meant the loss of thousands of non-hit rock, folk, jazz, and even oldies recordings from availability. Many of the indie labels that had been getting LPs pressed in under-5,000 quantities just can’t afford to port them to CDs at such low figures. The Dead Milkmen contractually forced their record company to press a vinyl version of their latest album, but the stipulation said nothing about distributing it. The LPs are reportedly hidden in a warehouse, waiting to be melted down.
TRUE CRIME: The media went expectedly agog over a pair of killers who planted a thrash-rock CD by their victim’s corpse on Queen Anne Hill. But nobody reacted to bomb attacks at two auto parts stores by calling for the banning of spark plugs. Real thrashers never use CDs anyway, except as master copies to make 20 tapes from.
TRUER CRIME: A Spokane man was arrested after a series of residential burglaries in which the only things stolen were women’s shoes, preferably red. Over 100 such shoes, “mostly in pairs” according to the AP, were found in his home.
LIFE IMITATES LYNCH: KCMU’s environmental newscast, Earth on the Air, presented (on 1/11) a woman identified as Angela, who claimed to channel thoughts from trees. The narrator said the show had become acquainted with her “when one of our members met her at a bus stop.” Angela’s message from the deciduous realm: “Mother Earth is a united, intelligent organism” whose very life is threatened by “this parasite called humanity,” and who might one day resort to catastrophic means to save herself even at our expense.
OFF THE NEWSSTAND: The Texas Dept. of Corrections banned the Feb. Texas Monthly from all state prisons, for potentially subversive content: a state highway map, which officials say might help escapees get away.
WHAT YOU’RE EXPECTING A COMMENT ABOUT THIS MONTH: “In a world where victory is the only thing that matters, the only way to win is by risking it all.” — This Paramount ad for the video release of Days of Thunder would have only sounded as stupid as any other commercial had it not premiered during the second week of January. It could be said that a decade of pro-violence culture has led to 1/16, from joy-of-slaughter movies (approved for juvenile consumption by the make-war-not-love attitude of the Ratings Board) to the stuffing of the Pentagon budget and starvation of schools, keeping people hungry and manipulable for recruiting and propaganda purposes. The “lite wars” in Grenada and Panama and the proxy wars in Central America and Angola may have been partly to condition the public to support butt-kissing in the name of butt-kicking. (Those wars, and this one, are also tryouts for all the post-Nam weapons, the goals of the Pentagon-sponsored R&D in microcircuitry that our computers, VCRs, and import cars depend on.) Our ex-friend Saddam was reduced to offering most everything we demanded if he could only get a Mideast conference (which would have been all talk and no solution). But Bush was willing to have thousands die rather than give in on even a trivial detail. The Congressional debates contained stirring moments, but enough members finally took the stance that looked tough but was really chickening out. It was heartening to see the 30,000 or so marching on the night of 1/14 and the thousands in later events (even the ones the media refused to show, under a policy starting around 1/18 of only covering pro-war opinions); there was an indescribable sense of life and hope in even the most earnest moments. I was also heartened to see the footage of other protests from the Everett Federal Bldg. (where my father used to work) to Kent Meridian High School; to see my latest successor as UW Daily editor, Loren Skaggs, denounce the war on the Today show. After a decade of bitching on our collective barstools, opposition politics in this country have been instantly reborn (with 5 months’ hard prep work). Let’s get it right this time. And don’t be discouraged by intentionally misleading polls comparing opposition at the start of this war to that near the end of the Vietnam war. The real war is by our leaders against true democratic values, and disinformation’s only part of it.
‘TIL MARCH, warily note how consumer recycling is offered as the one true way to save the environment by media outlets beholden to industrial polluters, and keep working for peace.
Bob Guccione Jr. in a 1986Â Spin editorial: “Maybe the American Dream is like the Civil War chess set: Once you’ve bought the board you’re committed to buying the rest of the pieces.”
Lite Lit 2: The Remake, an evening of readings (old Misc. items, fiction, essays) and vintage short films, will be held Wed., Feb. 13, 7 and 9 p.m., at the Jewl Box Theater within the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave. It’s a partial benefit for my novel publication fund, and is co-sponsored by the Belltown Film Festival. It replaces the reading planned for the beautiful snow-blessed night of 12/19, to which the film projectionist and I were the only attendees.
With the new postal rates, Misc. subscriptions rise to $7/year. (Fax subscriptions stay at $9.) Ads are $15 for spaces like the one below; $25 for that same height across the whole page. (To buy space, leave a message at 524-1967.)
“Enlizement”
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.
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.”
Still no word on getting my novel out (anybody wanna help support a $2600 self-publishing budget?).
“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.
10/90 Misc. Newsletter
CONNIE CHUNG AND MAURY POVICH:
STOP THEM BEFORE THEY BREED!
It’s time for the big reunification Oktoberfest and time to welcome you back to Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that still wants to know why certain teen and especially pre-teen boys consider male singers with long hair and high voices to be “real men” but dismiss male singers with predominantly female followings as pansies (musical qualities or lack of same being equal). I’m sorry that I had to cut my long Bill Cullen obituary from last month’s issue; the salient point was about finding (at Fillippi’s Old Books) a cheap LP of old show tunes “hosted” by Cullen, shown in a tuxedo on the cover in a dancing pose (from the waist up). A peculiar pose for the game show host who, due to a polio limp, preferred never to be shown walking on stage.
LAME: The long-rumored demise of Longacres at the hands of a land-hungry Boeing, and with it the possible demise of horse racing in Seattle and possibly the Northwest (would the Portland, Spokane and Yakima tracks survive the end of their bigger sibling?), would sadden several subscribing friends of Misc. It’s more than a gambling ritual (albeit one with much better odds than the Lottery). It’s a way of life, for bettors and trainers and riders. (Activists have questioned how great a life it is for the horses, but how well are most non-star athletes treated?)
ALSO IN THE END-O-ERA DEPT.: Twenty years ago, before Tower or Peaches came to town, the prime record store in the U District was Music Street, which became in turn Wide World of Music, Musicland, and finally Discount Records. This store was finally closed in mid-September, following the end of Nordstrom and Jay Jacobs’ Ave outlets. By this time, the top 40 hits that thrived at Music Street had become the nostalgia CDs that Discount Records could not stock or promote as well as other chains could.
DEAD AIR: The recently-publicized payola scandal, in which the Big-6 record labels hired a network of “independent” promoters to pay off radio stations with cash and drugs and hookers, affirms the “radio sucks” attitude of the punk era, the complaints then and now of great songs, even great accessible songs, being buried while hyped-up pablum and soft-rock dinosaurs obtained undeserved hits.
FLAHERTY NEWSPAPERS, R.I.P.: For 30 hellish months, I worked for sub-survival wages with past-death-rate typesetting equipment in Flaherty headquarters, a crumbling shack in the Rainier Valley with weeds rising from cracks in the concrete floor. There, I typed up the alleged “news” sections of seven neighborhood weeklies — smarmy hype stories for advertising merchants, cutesy notices for Catholic schools, a gardening column by an elderly lady who occasionally inserted anti-sex-education sermons, and, always and above all, unquestioned enthusiasm for the Seattle Police. I typed up too many of the squalid police-blotter columns (low-grade tragedy turned into morbid sensationalism), and to this day I lash back at anyone who refers to them as a source of camp humor. The papers were distributed by an ever-changing crew of pre-teens who had to deliver them to every house in a territory and hope some of the recipients would pay the small voluntary fee. Now, the little chain has been bought by an out-of-state takeover artist and will soon be merged with its onetime arch-rival Murray Publishing.
PHILM PHACTS: So far, no major Twin Peaks second-season filming locally. Generally, Seattle continues to be eclipsed in film activity by B.C. and Oregon. Paramount, for instance, has become the second established production company proposing to open a permanent studio in Portland. There can only be one potential logo for such an enterprise: A ring of stars surrounding the remains of Mt. St. Helens.
IS IT THE SHOES?: The Nike boycott by Black activists and the corporate culture of that company (U of O track vets and ex-hippies) are integrally related to the white-bread demographics of that whole-grain-eating city of Portland. That’s where Bill Walton was kept on the TrailBlazers payroll through years of injuries because, some say, laid-back mellow Oregonians would only support a basketball team if it had a white star. The famed progressive politics of Oregon have lately meant stands on environmental, nuclear, and foreign-affairs issues, soft-pedalling the social justice causes that the Left used to be all about. One good sign: The Oregonian has become the only NW daily with a Black editor-in-chief.
STILL MORE FROM SOUTH OF THE BORDER: Iowa artist Bill Witherspoon was charged with scratching a huge geometric pattern in a southeast Oregon desert. The whole thing looked, in news photos, remarkably like those mysterious “field circles” popping up along the English countryside. Maybe some international neo-Druid outfit is making these things and letting people believe they’re the work of spirits or UFOs or such. Maybe he just thought it would look neat…A Portland district judge is trying to keep his job, after he was revealed to have married wife #2 while still wed to #1.
CATHODE CORNER: American Chronicles utilizes artsy highbrow camera work to record the quirky rituals of lowbrow American primitives. In short, it’s a modern Spaghetti western not made by Europeans but perhaps for them. It looks like something really commissioned for Murdoch’s European satellite network……The Pentagon is partly funding Zenith’s research into hi-definition TV, according to a syndicated item in Puget Sound Computer News. Arguably, there might be military applications to more sophisticated video transmission and display systems, perhaps for radar or navigational systems. But essentially we’ve got our government subsidizing private industry, something that happens in every capitalist country but which is often considered a sacrilege to the “American free enterprise system.” What does Zenith think it is, a bank or a basketball team? (In one of his last books, BTW,Buckminster Fuller claimed that “free enterprise” religion was originally a 1776-era reaction to the colonial system of British crown-chartered commerce.)
OUTSIDE PITCHES: It’s hard not to stare incredulously at the Coors commercial with African-American activists working hard to refurbish a storefront community center, then celebrating the job by downing the Beer of Bigots…More songs in commercials: TheHair theme in a shampoo spot; Starship’s “We Built This City” becoming ITT’s “We Built This Company”…From the cable commercial for the compilation CD Those Fabulous ’70s: “Sorry, not available on 8-track”…Advertisers on one page of the Weekly’s 9/26 “adult education” supplement: Cornish College, Griffin College, UW Extension, and The Crypt (“20% Off All Ladies Leather”).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cookie Bowl I (that’s the roman numeral “one”) is a line of cookies in the relief shapes of NFL team helmets (for non-fans, it’s the Cleveland Browns who get royalty checks on the blank helmets). Available in chocolate, vanilla, peanut butter, and shortbread. But beware: They’re intensely male-oriented.
NO FREE RE-FILLINGS: Espresso Dental on Phinney Ridge is almost certainly the first combined coffeehouse and dental clinic in the nation (neck and back massages are also available). Do the lattes come with spit cups?
ON THE STREETS: I survived the biggest assemblage of preteen females in Seattle history, or at least in 25 years: The clean-cut, T-shirt-wearing devotees crowding their way into the Kingdome for the New Kids on the Block concert. That, and the accompanying traffic jam of Bellevue-based station wagons, made the September gallery walk a true navigational challenge. I did not notice the Kidfans directly interacting with the regular art-crawling Pioneer Squares. Had the galleries planned for this confluence of audiences, a little art-ed event might have rescued a few young consumers from a life of plastic culture. Then again, considering some of the works that were hung in those spaces…
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Northwest Network (“Seattle’s Community Newspaper,” though it’s made in Kirkland) is the latest attempt at a serious-progressive local tabloid. The emphasis here is on analysis, re-interpreting the information given by the regular news media. (Seattle Subtext, still publishing after three months, gives you new news on international topics. There’s still nothing here like the Portland Free Press, doing original local investigative reporting.) Still, the presence of another competently written and produced paper, out every two weeks, is a hopeful sign that people are out there wanting to do things.
UNDERGROUND NEWS: The po-mo, engineered-by-committee bus tunnel turns out to be a visual masterpiece, comprising five waiting areas that any corporation would be proud to have as its office-tower lobby. It’s a blast to visit and to ride through. It’s a monument to the pretentions of today’s Seattle, one of those self-conscious boasts of “becoming a world class city.” It’s more successful as a meeting place and art project than as a transportation solution. Amenities sorely lack (subway stations with no newsstands? Unthinkable!). The lack of restrooms was a deliberate decision, by officials who prefer that the homeless relieve themselves in streets and alleys. The whole expensive thing tore up downtown traffic for four years and clearly was meant to appease bus-hating affluent commuters. Most buses running through it (starting next year) will be suburban routes (the reason for the specially built coaches that run on electricity in the tunnel but on diesel on highways and bridges). The layout of the tunnel (just slightly longer than the Monorail) was designed to move buses quickly onto I-5, I-90 and SR 520, not to get them around the city. What we oughta have is a light rail system like our filmmaking cities to the north and south.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (NY Times story on the new Germany, 9/25): “Bitterness Sears the Die-Hard Nationalists.” I knew the NY papers were hard up for advertising, but selling sneak mentions in news headlines?
THE LIGHTER SIDE OF A NATION’S COLLAPSE II: As of 10/3, no longer will the Dresden area, heretofore the only part of E. Germany unable to watch Dallas on W. German TV, be known as the Valley of Those Who Know Little.
YOU CALL THAT A FUTURE?: The Puget Sound Council of Governments, an agency whose own future is in peril, released a fancy public report predicting the look of the region in 2020. There are unspecified “rapid transit” systems between downtown and the burbs, and lotsa reclaimed greenbelts; but nowhere the ring of giant plastic-domed cities predicted in ’62 at the Century 21 Exposition…My cyberpunk contacts were outraged at the 9/3 Time mag’s goofy-human-interest piece about a UW-designed virtual reality machine (a computer-video unit in which you can pretend to fly over Seattle by “steering” with an electronic glove). These guys are adamant about making artificial experience work, even if early experiments like this have bugs to be worked out.
AT B-SHOOT: Rumors of the Big Wave found their so-politically-correct-it’s-painful music on the Miller Mainstage, sponsored by an affiliate of Phillip Morris Companies, best friend of the art-world and civil-rights enemy Jesse Helms. “Boycott Miller/Helms = Death” stickers were, however, plastered throughout the Coliseum. And for next year, remember the big sign at the Bumbershoot 1st aid tent: “Sorry. We cannot give out aspirin.”
‘TIL THE MUCH COOLER MONTH (God, I hope) of November, be sure to visit the peace vigil at Gas Works (NOT a quaint relic of the ’60s but people trying to make sure we have a future), watch the new Graham Kerr Show taped at KING, avoid the recently-named conditions “Nintendo thumb” and “espresso maker’s wrist,” and save the junk-mail foil envelope containing a card drenched inNeutron Industries’ mail-order citrus scent spray. The cards are great playthings for cats.
Lawrence Durrell in the Alexandria Quartet: “Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time, not by our personalities as we would like to think. Thus, every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the position is changed.”
It’s a year since Misc. became a self-contained newsletter; charter subscribers (you ought to know who you are) need to renew. Fax subscriptions to Misc. are now for $9 per year. The space at the bottom of this page is still available for advertising. Leave a message at 323-4081 or 524-1967 for details.
I’m also raising funds to self-publish my seemingly endlessly-announced novel The Perfect Couple. Any and all ideas welcome.
“Esconce”
9/90 Misc. Newsletter
NORTHGATE BACK-TO-SCHOOL SLOGAN:
“DO THE BRIGHT THING”
Welcome to Misc., since 1986 your honest source about the weird, the gross, the fresh, the beautiful and the damned. One reason take pop culture seriously is that the “serious” media don’t. The NY Times did a long profile of actor Paul Benedict, mentioning his roles on Broadway and in such films as The Goodbye Girl, but completely ignoring his 11 years on The Jeffersons. The New Republic, the opinion mag that recently decided it would rather be rich than liberal, did an interminable essay about Madonna as Image, as Marketing Machine, as Sociological Phenomenon — as everything but an entertainer.
IRAQI AND HIS FRIENDS: Saddam Hussein used to be a U.S. ally. We were asked to pity his poor government in its long hard war against Khomeini’s Iran, not quite realizing that each leader was ruthless in his own way. Again, “realpolitik” (unquestioned support for strategically-convenient dictators) has backfired. There are no democracies in that region to support, only monarchies or other dictatorships which treat their women, dissidents, and intellectuals with greater or lesser severity. Even Israel, the lone multi-party state in the area (besides the powerless govt. of Lebanon), is not the example of tolerance and human rights that it still could become. Among the frozen Kuwaiti assets are the oil ministry’s 6,500 gas stations in Europe, bearing the genuinely cute name of Q8.
KOMO SAID IT: “Bush is laying down an iron curtain on Iraq.” Thirty years ago, we condemned the immorality of E. Germany trying to starve West Berlin. Now we do the same. The would-be Oil War fulfills 11 years of accumulating U.S. warlust, incompletely satiated by the conquests and skirmishes in Latin America and the Caribbean; all as the long-lead-time monthlies still displayed think pieces about the possibility of a post-Cold War, post-military nation. Was this conflict escalated so sharply, so swiftly, as a way to keep the Pentagon and its suppliers in business at current levels?… Meanwhile, a Sony-owned theater chain in NYC changed its marquees to promote the temporarily-renamed IRAQNOPHOBIA. There will, of course, be movies about all this. Unlike Vietnam movies, these films could all be made in the close-to-Hollywood Mojave desert; like Vietnam movies, they’ll likely depict conflicts between different American characters, with no Arabian people in sight.
ROSEANNA ARQUETTE IN PLAYBOY: What would her grandfather Charley Weaver have thought?
RUSTLE THEM SOYBEANS: B.C.’s own k.d. lang has based her career around appropriating the music and the images of the cowboy culture, as filtered through kitsch art over the years. Now she speaks out against the industry that all the real cowboys were in – meat — and gets flack from country radio stations afraid of offending today’s cowboys, not to mention fast-food advertisers. It leads one to wonder what country music would have been like with no burgers, no cattle drives, no branding irons, no rodeos. k.d. may be the Angel with a Lariat, but with nothing to lasso.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: MU Press’Â Balance of Power comic book is mostly the same old stuff about corporate assassins and ninjas jumping around, but the futuristic Seattle setting does give us one cool panel: a sign on Broadway, “Dick’s 60th Anniversary: 1954-2014.”
THE LAST LAFF: The Improvisation, a national chain of comedy clubs, is moving into the Showbox. Now, where the leather-jacketed vegetarians used to pogo and fight, where the Police and Psychedelic Furs once played to under 800 people, now generic yups will pay a big cover charge to sip cocktails and hear well-dressed smartasses tell insults about all the rest of us.
GOODWILL GAMES LOSE $44 MILLION: Did the official theme of the “spirit of goodwill,” of international friendship and pulling together, diminish the spirit of ruthless battle TV sports viewers have been used to?
WHAT’S IN STORE: The Bon had this really strange Goodwill sculpture by the main-floor elevators. Three male figures held up a large sphere, while wearing bottom-baring loincloths over what from a side view clearly showed as hemispheric, one-part bulges. The Bon also quietly closed the 62-year-old Budget Store, a refuge not so much for moderate prices as for moderate styles, an island of calm in a sea of fashion victims. Now we’re all expected to go to chains in the far suburbs to get cheaper clothes.
ELEVATOR MUSIC IN ONE-STORY BUILDINGS: A Tillicum 7-Eleven store drives teens away by blasting easy listening music into the parking lot. This music was scientifically engineered, based on 40-year-old principles, to be as inoffensive as possible; but to today’s generation, this is the most offensive thing imaginable (with the possible exception of worldwide environmental disaster or Ed McMahon). But the Muzak company is now trying to reshape its image. It’s getting the rights to make easy-listening versions of contemporary hits by such artists as P. Abdul and even U2. Maybe if 7-Eleven could get a tape of the Muzak “Pride in the Name of Love” and play it over and over, they’d never worry about anybody under 35 showing up within half a mile of the place.
THE FINE PRINT: “At Kellogg Company, we are committed to making the highest quality toaster pastries available. We do not make generic or store-brand toaster pastries. To insure Kellogg quality inside the box, make sure there is a Kellogg’s label outside.”
WASHINGTON MAGAZINE R.I.P.: It tried to do nothing but make money, and failed at that. The next people to try a regional magazine should learn from Washington‘s mistakes and, instead of just running lavish but bland peans to scenery, pay some attention to covering people.
ADS OF THE MONTH: The McDonald’s commercial in which a white guy, shaving, sees a black female singer in his mirror (with shaving cream on her face!), exhorting him to start his day with an Egg McMuffin…A Wild Waves amusement park commercial shows a teenage boy in swim trunks sliding into a tunnel section of a water slide, intercut with shots of bikini-clad females. Honest, this really aired! . . . Frito-Lay‘s youth-bashing ads, which alternate between condescendingly depicted kids and childishly acting alleged adults only prove how smugly out-of-it the yups really are (or at least the role-model yups who may be more populous in advertising than in actual existence).
HOW INFOTAINING: KIRO is actually running those commercials disguised as talk shows, in the former Pat Sajak slot. Those “shows” belong on the chintzier cable channels, if even there (though, I must admit, most of them are funnier than Sajak ever was). . .
HOW COME?: King Broadcasting is about to be sold; bringing an end to its status as the largest women-owned company operating in Washington (with the possible exception of the Sisters of Providence). KING is a Seattle institution, one of the few network-affiliate stations in the country that has its own strong identity. The papers have talked about KING’s documentaries and editorials, about its Seattle magazine of the ’60s (still perhaps the best thing published here). They haven’t talked about its great movie The Plot Against Harry, or about KING’s once-great arts coverage, or about The Great American Game (the first public-affairs game show, where all the contestants had to be volunteers in community organizations) Or about Wunda Wunda, the TV kiddie star who was this sort of harlequin character, and her potted flower Wilting Willie. When she watered it every day and sang the Wilting Willie song, you never knew whether the flower would proudly rise up to become Stand-Up Willie (with appropriate fanfare from the organist) or stay Wilting Willie and lie there drooped over the edge of the flower pot. God, don’t let GE buy the station.
AUTO MOTIVES: Chrysler is offering cash payoffs to any of its 60,000 union employees who retire early. Or, as Joe Garagiola might say, “Quit your job — Get a check!”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Chicago’s Viskase Corp. will supply any company with hot dogs containing an advertising message printed in edible inks. So far, no takers… A Dallas-area company that already makes Miracle Smile teeth bleach, is now entering the soft drink field with Cool Cola, a drink that’s not only caffeine-free and preservative-free but vitamin-enriched.
READERBOARD AT MEAD MOTOR CO. on Roosevelt: WE PAY CASH FOR ARS. If Roosevelt Way were in England and this were the new Ms. magazine, you’d be reading this on the “No Comment” page.
BREMERTON, MOST LIVABLE CITY?: Maybe in the past, when there was a cool, compact downtown with Bremer’s Dept. Store and one of the nation’s last classic 3-story Montgomery Ward units. But not these days. Other Money ratings: Seattle 2, Tacoma 4, Eugene 6, Olympia 8. Michael Moore would love to hear that Flint, Mich. is no longer last on the list of 300 metro areas; it’s not even in bottom 10. Why does Money’s list so often favor the Northwest? Could be that a Portland consulting firm, Fast Forward, does the research and makes the judgements.
YOUR CHEATIN’ MAYOR: In the city that made adultery the stuff of gold records, Nashville, Mayor Bill Boner (no jokes please), 45, has been appearing in public with aspiring country singer Traci Peel (ditto), 34. He’s calling her his fiancée, even though he hasn’t yet divorced his third wife (whose $50,000 salary from a defense contractor had led to a House ethics committee investigation of him, before he left Congress to be mayor). A local newspaper reporter said they’d told him he’d called them “at a bad time,” with Peel adding that they’d gone at it with one another for as long as seven hours.
BUT AREN’T ALL POLITICIANS LIKE THAT?: Illone “Cicciolina” Staller, the ex-porn star in Italy’s parliament, offered to sleep w/Hussein to persuade him to make peace. Perhaps she was inspired by the New Age book, The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take War Out of Them, about ancient “sacred prostitutes” who performed spiritual rituals (of which sex was merely a part) to initiate returning soldiers back into the community.
NAKED TRUTH: If I may overgeneralize, the women at the Silver Image Gallery‘s Nudes show seemed much more comfortable with looking at women’s bodies than the men were with looking at men’s bodies. It’s odd, considering that men pay big money to look at men’s bodies that are dressed in athletic uniforms.
UNTIL OUR BRISK AND COOL October ish, demand the saving of the Boeing Supersonic Transport mockup plane (now in a Fla. church), read Willie Smith’s Oedipus Cadet (an odd little novel about troubled boyhood), and work for peace.
QUOTATION
An El Camino with major dents, parked outside Temple de Hirsch Sinai, bears white press-on lettering on the driver’s door: “Graduate of the Dale Ellis Driving School.”
Still no ads in Misc., still no bigger size, Probably won’t be unless some generous reader’s willing to help out (selling space, distributing copies, etc.).
More of my writing can be seen in The Comics Journal (a magazine available at better comics shops; accept no substitutes) and occasionally in the Times arts section.
“Celerity”
PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH
“Jimmy, the dominant male of the Seattle Aquarium northern fur seal colony, has died of congestive heart failure. Jimmy had been receiving medical care for the bast month from Drs. Joslin and Richardson of the Woodland Park Zoo. Jimmy was collected in the Pribilof Islands in November 1976, at the age of two years. In his 13 years at the Aquarium, Jimmy fathered two pups — Baabs, born in 1988, and Woodstock, born in 1989 — and was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. One of the Aquarium’s females is currently pregnant and, if all goes well, will deliver Jimmy’s third pup this summer. At age 16, Jimmy was indeed an ‘oldster,’ having lived a normal lifespan for males of this species.” (Thanx and a hat tip to Sunny Speidel)
1/90 Misc. Newsletter
Put Your Official Berlin Wall Souvenir on the Bookshelf,
Next To Your Jar of Mt. St. Helens Ash
Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS.
Welcome to the last 10 or 11 years of the millennium and to Misc., your monthly guide to applied sanity in a world where MTV’s decade-in-review show has more journalistic substance than ABC’s and NBC’s put together.
No Bucharest for the Wicked: I was going to open this first Misc. of the ’90s with some clever remark on the order of “Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a new era already?”. Leave it to the Reds to spoil a good sarcasm by actually starting a new era. Not that everyone here cared about all of it; the Times put the outbreak of revolution in Romania on the bottom of its 12/22 front page, beneath the story of one local traffic death. Some emigres interviewed in the U.S. credited Nadia Comaneci with helping inspire the revolt when she risked her life for love (even if that love already had a wife). The revolt might also cheer Romanian refugee Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute, who, according to a Wall St. Journal story published before the upheaval, has lived in a safe house somewhere in France, fearing an attack by Ceausescu’s spies. The slain tyrant was apparently called by many Romanians “Draculescu;” appropriately, it was in Transylvania that the fight to topple him began. Transylvania had been part of Hungary when a socialist revolt was crushed after WWI; one Hungarian leftist was a 39-year-old actor who fled to the U.S., changing his name from Blasko to Lugosi.
The Canal, The Banal: The Panama invasion was a cures worse than the disease. So much for peace on Earth at Xmas. Bush needed an argument for not cutting the Pentagon budget and for not turning over the canal on Jan. 1; thus, the escalation with Noriega to the point of getting him to declare war. Yes, hewas a creep, but was kept in power by the U.S. as a friendly creep. This mess (including perhaps 1,000 Panamanian civilian deaths) is the result of the cynics in our government installing criminals and calling them freedom fighters. Watch for the Nicaragua invasion by March, preceded by full restoration of ties with our friendly creep, Deng.
Plagiarism on Parade?: In this Age of Information, idea-theft suits are the rage. If only the ’80s could have produced Eddie Murphy, only the late ’80s could see a court seriously consider that Murphy would find appropriate comedic scenarios from Art Buchwald. A more plausible but unsuccessful suit was made against Prince by his sister over a song lyric (though the concept of Prince having a sister is mind-reeling enough).
Roll Over, Tugboat Annie: The transformation of Lake Union from working waterfront to preppy playground continues with a Marriott Residence Inn and the pending demolition of the St. Vincent de Paul store for still more restaurants. Most interesting is Jillian’s, a franchised “upscale billiards club” being built in the old Kenney Toyota building on Westlake. The developers’ plans include the original bar from NY’s Algonquin Hotel, bought from the hotel’s new Japanese owners. Imagine: Our own little piece of literary history, the watering stand of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and many other cool people.
The scent of gentrification (not unlike a knock-off perfume sold through multi-level marketing) is detectable in a plan in the city council to restrict adult entertainment to the industrial zone. Even if you don’t mind the prospect of dozens of young women having to commute at night through one of the most desolate, least policed parts of town, you have to recognize that this would make a zoning precedent for the replacement of industry by condo projects (which would also drive out the artists’ studios). Get ready for a boulevard of “luxury loft homes,” some built into the shells of the old warehouse buildings, from the Dome to Spokane Street.
Modulations: An Everett-based successor to KRAB, the late noncommercial radio station for aging Deadheads, may finally emerge this year. KRAB founder Lorenzo Milam has resurfaced as an editor of the Calif.-based Fessenden Review, a “quarterly — we come out two or three times a year” book magazine. Its last cover offers a masked Mexican wrestler and a long list of famous authors, none of whom are published or reviewed inside…. KEZX-AM (the old Country KAYO frequency) has turned over most of its airtime to the Business Radio Network, a satellite feed offering stock-market quotations and advice all day. It’s an advertiser’s dream come true: A station that only reaches people rich enough to have investments. No music, entertainment or general news that could threaten to attract us unworthy middle-class people (or worse).
Junk Food of the Month: The Hurricane Hugo Special at Puerto Rico’s Caribe Hilton. The recipe, from Food Arts magazine: 1 oz. lemon juice, 1 oz. mai tai syrup, 1 oz. Don Q rum 151, 1/2 oz. Grand Marinier, 1/2 oz. Bacardi rum; hand shake with ice, pour into 14 oz. glass, garnish with a cherry…. KIRO-AM and Millstone Coffee are sponsoring a “Coffee Cruiser” van, prowling high-foot-traffic events to distribute free cups-o-Joe promoting the station.
Cathode Corner: The Discovery Channel’s quest for cheap, informative programming makes for some astounding time-wasters. On Xmas morning they offered a years-old Alaska travel video. The late Lorne Greene narrated, calling it (as all regions in travel videos, films and articles are always called) “truly a land of contrasts.” As part of the tourist biz, every town Greene mentioned had a stage show or museum honoring frontier-era prostitution (“but at this saloon, only the beer’s for sale”). Alaska’s tourism division publicizes actresses who dress up as old-time floozies, while its police arrest anyone in the profession for real.
Local Publication of the Month: In Context is a quarterly “journal of sustainable culture” made by the Context Institute on Bainbridge. Its winter issue discusses how new communications media are changing the world. This is one post-hippie rag that doesn’t automatically condemn everything invented since ’70; it encourages its readers to become involved with the new media, that they may form communities around the distribution of ideas.
`Til our fabulous Feb. issue (with an essay on the lessons we can learn from our childhoods), look for Tacoma’s real-life street called Memory Lane, pray for peace and/or snow, read Penn and Teller’s Book of Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (the most successful work of deconstructivist literature ever made in North America), and ponder these words by the great Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1966): “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.”
OFFER
All new subscribers to Misc. this month will receive a original essay, suitable for framing, God As I Understand Him.
Also from Fait Divers:Â The Perfect Couple, an interactive computer novel aout, among other things, two people’s search for romantic excellence ($10 in advance, requires Macintosh computer and HyperCard software).
WORD OF THE MONTH
“Multivalent”
What the `90s Have Given Us
Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution
We’ll Look Back and Laff At
Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated
We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without
Biggest Stories Not Covered in Most End-of-Decade Reviews
Democratic presidential nominations won by raising money from big corporate interests looking for the candidate most likely to lose to the RepublicansSources of Hope
Top Local Stories
9/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Hello again, pop culture fans. Welcome to episode 3 of Misc., the column that asks just how lucky we are to live in an era when we can get gas with “High Tech Techroline.”
This has been a summer of torn streets, noisy construction, disappearing bus stops and other hassles, many of which will be with us for the next four years. The good news is by that time, the only people left downtown will be those of us who demand urban life. Life may soon become a lot less overcrowded for those who refuse to go to Bellevue. Sadly, we’re losing Chapter 2 Books in the University District to that Nowhereland to the east, and are in danger of even losing the Pacific Science Center. This threat to Seattle’s cultural life must be stopped. You wanna have to tell your kids someday that they can’t pitch pennies into the fountains or get their hair raised in the static-electricity exhibit without spending an hour on the bridges? The only arches that belong in Bellevue are golden.
(By the way, the widow and daughter of McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc have started a California peace group, Mothers Embracing Nuclear Disarmament. With nuclear weapons, they must have finally found something to crusade against that’s worse than their food.)
Passionately urban life does seem to be catching on in Seattle as a permanent thing. Broadway this summer has been a wonderland of all different kinds of people making all different kinds of scenes. At Dick’s alone you can find some 200 people being sociable at 1:30 a.m. Whenever anybody in Seattle has this much fun, somebody has tried to outlaw it. Already business interests are demanding something be “done” about this “problem” — which is really the best thing that has happened to Seattle since the saving of the Market. Any real city has spontaneous street scenes — gatherings of ordinary people who may not have a destination in mind when they take to the streets, but have an invigorating time getting there. Not everybody who stands on a sidewalk and talks to friends is a criminal; we should be glad the attempts to make Broadway a district for yuppies and only yuppies has gloriously failed. Now if they can only tear up those nauseatingly-cute footsteps…
THINGS I DID THIS SUMMER: Saw the University Book Store remainder sale and was pleased to find How To Sell What You Write marked down to $1.49. Noticed the resemblance between International News’s brightly colored, slogan laden clothes and those of the 1900s comic strip star, The Yellow Kid. Discovered Seattle’s ultimate food store, other than the Pike Place Market: Marketime Foods in Fremont. Was captivated by Cisterna Magna, an exquisite dance/visual performance at Belltown’s Galleria Potatohead. Concluded that any movie, fashion style, entertainer or politician advertised as “hot” is probably going to be dreadful.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Heritage Music Review. Longtime area piano player/disc jockey Doug Bright uses a Braille word processor to make this knowledgeable guide to old rock, R&B and jazz performers of the region and nation. Available in regular print at Elliot Bay Books and other select sources.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bubble gum cards that didn’t make it. The Sports Stop in the Center House basement has cards for entertainment properties that outstayed their welcome (Michael Jackson, Cyndi Lauper) or never caught on at all (the Dune andSupergirl films). The cards are collector’s items; the gum’s undoubtedly stale, though.
Our last column had a snide remark about an SRO theater. I don’t really hate SRO. About a decade ago, when smart people were briefly being courted as audiences by major motion pictures, SRO was considered the “Establishment” of area theaters. Lately though, SRO has shown itself capable of the finest in theater architecture (though the pink and gray on the Uptown has got to go) and concession food. They continue to subsidize KJET, the closest thing we have to a progressive commercial radio station, and in 1970 tried to save the Seattle Pilots baseball team. Now, this heritage is threatened by a takeover attempt from Paramount Pictures. It might be seen as Paramount’s revenge on Washington state; it was our native son, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who wrote the famous “U.S. vs. Paramount” decision forcing the big five studios to sell the theater chains though which they controlled the entire industry. With today’s federal antitrust regulators (who could more rightly be called protrust), the big distributors are itching for their old monopoly powers back. The remnants of the original Paramount theater chain (not including the Seattle Paramount) are now owned by Coca-Cola, which also owns the Columbia and Embassy studios and half of Tri-Star. Other alliances are underway. If you think the movies this past year have been pitiful, just wait until the big studios control so many theaters they can lock out independent films.
When that time comes, we’ll all have to go to VCRs to see anything interesting. Already you can check out an amazing variety of stuff, including a series of tapes called Video Romance. One store has them in the Adult section even though they’ve no sex, nudity or cussing, and are in fact far tamer than the evening soaps. What they’ve got are impossibly innocent (especially for their glamorous professions) women meeting and taming tall men who have wavy hair and vague accents. All this plus cheap productions (we never see the exotic locales in which the stories are set, only living rooms), syrupy music, bad acting and “Your Host, Louis Jourdan” and you’ve got more real entertainment than in the entire collected works of Michael J. Fox.
Another recently viewed tape:Â Urgh! A Music War, 1981 concert footage of some 35 bands gathered under the awkward, inaccurate label “new wave.” Only one of them was big at the time (the police, who helped finance the film). Others became stars (the Go-Gos, UB40, Devo), had solid cult followings (Magazine, Steel Pulse, XTC), or met deserved obscurity (Athletico Spizz 80, Splodgenessabounds). I found myself viewing the proceedings as nostalgia for my own generation, and seeing how, even while many of the best bands never had a major hit, the attitudes they represented have become quite pervasive in American society — in butchered form, of course. A lot of the worst aspects of punk/new wave (shallow imagery, aggressive hype, destructiveness to self and others as romanticism, bigotry as nostalgia, shamelessness, lousy manners, celebrations of stupidity) have become everyday aspects of modern business, government and lifestyles. Even agriculture has gone punk: It’s dependent on drugs and panhandling, lives fast, dies young and leaves a good-looking corpse.
Home video’s an even bigger happening in the Asian American community. The wonderful variety stores of the International District all have amazing tape boxes promising music, farce, soap opera, horror, kinky sex, and serious drama, as well as the martial arts you’d expect (often more than one genre in the same production). While you might not want to buy a membership for unsubtitled tapes in a language you don’t speak, the stores will usually have a video playing while you buy some of their fine foods, clothes, jewelry, toys and housewares. Treat yourself to a view of another culture’s pop culture.
We close this edition with a call for entries in the first Misc. Helga Lookalike Contest. The Northwest is abundant with the stoic Nordic romantic look now associated with painter Andrew Wyeth’s mystery woman, as seen in both Time and Newsweek. Send a picture of yourself in any appropriate costume to Misc. c/o Lincoln Arts Center, 66 Bell St., Seattle. All ages and races welcome; bonus points will be awarded for the best floral headband.
