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SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”
As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.
Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.
Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.
My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.
My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!
NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.
In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.
So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…
PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)
As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!
At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!
STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.
(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.
AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)
I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:
street hockey, et al.).
cinematography, videography, Photoshop).
———————–
Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net To: clark@speakeasy.org
Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.
Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…
I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Erinn Kauer / eakamouse
P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.
THE 1998 MISC. MIDSUMMER READING LIST: For the second year, we’ve a pile of old and new bound verbiage (in no particular order) to recommend as mental companions while you sit in airports, on ferry docks, in the breakfast nooks of RVs, in rain-pelted tents, and wherever else you’re spending your summer leisure hours.
The Ruins, Trace Farrell. In the ’80s I was involved in “Invisible Seattle,” a group of writers who (among other exercises) fantasized about an alternate-universe Seatown with Old World traditions and grit. This is what local author Farrell’s accomplished in her hilarous parable of working-class discipline vs. New Money hedonism; set in an Old World seaport town but based on a real Seattle supper club and on Seattle’s current caste-and-culture wars.
The Incomparable Atuk, Mordecai Richler. From the Great Canadian Novelist, a 1963 fable still relevant amid today’s Paul Simonized nobel-savage stereotypes. Atuk’s a supposedly innocent native boy from the Northwest Territories who’s brought to Toronto as part of a mining company’s publicity stunt, and who quickly falls right in with the city folk’s hustling and corruption.
Machine Beauty, David Gelernter. One of these skinny essay-books everybody’s putting out today; only this one’s in hardcover. The premise is admirable (advocating simplicity and elegance in the design of industrial products and computer software), but it’d have been better if it were longer, with more examples and illustrations.
Consilience, Edward O. Wilson. Giant essay-book by biologist Wilson, who proposes all human behavior (and indeed all knowledge) can be ultimately traced to biology and physics. He puts up a solid defense, but I still disagree. To me, the world isn’t a tree with a single trunk but a forest of interdependent influences. Life is complexity; deal with it.
The Taste of a Man, Slavenka Drakulic. For “erotic horror” fans, a novel of psychosexual madness by the Croatian author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Not much laughing here; just a heroine who takes the female sex-metaphors of absorption and consumption to their logical extreme.
Self Help, Lonnie Moore. Short stories by the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams, reworking women’s-magazine clichés into a far less “motivational” but more realistic worldview.
Coyote v. Acme, Ian Frazier. Light yet biting li’l funny stories like the old-old New Yorker used to run. The cast includes a cartoon lawyer, a Satanist college president, Bob Hope, Stalin, Mary Tyler Moore, and “the bank with your money on its mind.”
Eastern Standard Time, Jeff Yang, Dina Gan, and Terry Hong. Asia’s economies are on the ropes but Asia’s pop cultures are going strong, as shown in this breezy coffee-table intro to everything from pachinko and sumo to Jackie Chan and Akira Kurosawa.
Sex, Stupidity, and Greed, Ian Grey. For all haters of expensive bad movies, essays and interviews depicting Hollywood as irrepairably corrupt and inane (and offering the porn biz as an example of a slightly more honest alternative).
Behind Closed Doors, Alina Reyes. An ’80s teen-romance series, 2 Sides of Love, told its stories from the girl’s point of view on one side of the book and the boy’s on the other. Reyes (author of The Butcher and Other Erotica) applies this gimmick to more explicit sex-fantasies, putting her two protagonists through separate assorted sexcapades in assorted dreamlike settings with assorted opposite- and same-sex partners before they finally come together at the middle.
Soap Opera, Alecia Swasy. Intrigued by Richard Powers’ corporate-greed novel Gain (based on Procter & Gamble, and named for one of its detergents)? This real, unauthorized P&G history (named for the broadcast genre P&G helped invent) is even stranger.
Underworld, Don DeLillo. Mega-novel spanning four decades and about many things, principally the U.S. power shift from the northeast (symbolized by NYC’s old baseball dominance) toward the inland west (symbolized by chain-owned landfills). But with the Yankees back in dynasty mode, and financiers now overwhelmingly more influential than industry (particularly resource-based western industry), DeLillo’s march-of-history premise seems like reverse nostalgia.
The Frequency of Souls, Mary Kay Zuravleff. The best short comic novel ever written about refrigerator designers with psychic powers.
AND A READER SELECTION of sorts:
Subject: Northwest Lit Sent: 7/26/98 5:29 PM Received: 7/26/98 5:36 PM From: LSchnei781@aol.com To: clark@speakeasy.org
Clark:
Your review of the above subject completely ignored the best of the lot–Ivan Doig. Here in Fort Wayne IN where more books are read per capita than in any other city in America (there just isn’t much else to do), Mr Doig’s books enjoy a wide readership, and he is considered by many of us to be in the first rank of contemporary American writers. Lynn Schneider (LSchnei781@aol.com)
WELCOME TO A MIDSUMMER’S MISC., the pop-culture column that hereby calls for a one-year moratorium on any further motion pictures depicting the violent destruction of computer-generated replicas of New York City.
UPDATE: The Cyclops restaurant, closed last year when its building was demolished in the Belltown redevelopment mania, will be reborn later this summer as a beneficiary of that same mania. It’ll be in a part of the ex-Peneil Mission/ Operation Nightwatch building, whose new landlords wanted more potentially lucrative tenants than the perenially underfunded social-service sector could provide. Since the building’s side sports half a faded old Pepsi sign blending into half a faded Seven-Up sign (the two have long had the same local bottler, which was once based in that building), it’d only be appropriate if a mixture of the two took a place on the beverage menu…. In other real-estate news, the nearby Casbah Cinema’s turned its SIFF-month closure into an indefinite one. The beautiful screening room in an alley location without dedicated parking is still for sale. And the former U District Clothestime juniors’ clothing store is now a National Guard recruiting office (talk about your yin/yang dualities).
OVERREACTION DEPT.: The supposed “gang riot” last Saturday at the Fun Forest was, as far as I’ve been able to determine, really just either an argument or an exhibition of horseplay by a handful of rowdy teens; climaxing either with a few gunshots into the air or (more likely) firecrackers. The ensuing scramble among sweaty, crowded kids set cops scrambling into crisis mode and herding all opposite-race youths off of the grounds. Live TV reporters got all hussied-up about a Sudden Threat to Public Safety, while the kids passing by just giggled or mugged it up to the cameras–this was a big Dionysian revel that had merely gotten a bit out of hand, not the huge angry mob depicted. More telling was the scene the following late afternoon, in which teams of cops with plastic face masks and billy clubs shooed any and all groups of three or more young Af-Ams not just off the Center property but out of the larger vicinity. It’s not just the Sidran gang and the anti-affirmative-action cadre who fear blacks, particularly young blacks. The fear is ingrained in the popular image of a clean, ordered city where everybody’s soft-spoken and unassuming. Lots of real Af-Ams are just like that, of course; but lots of whites still think (consciously or sub-) that Black + Young = Gangsta. (White teens can get rowdy too, but tend not to inspire such wholesale crackdowns.) Elsewhere last weekend…
DAYS-O-FUTURE PASSED: The Mariners’ Turn Ahead the Clock Night promotion, with uniforms and stadium signage supposedly harkening forward to 2027, finally let the Nintendo people put their graphic stamp on the team they co-own, at least for a one-game gimmick. The oversize, maroon-and-black, not-tucked-in jerseys with the huge, tilted logos and the “Xtreme-sports” style lettering, accessorized with metallic-colored batting helmets and racing-stripe pants legs, harkened back to an early-’90s computer-game interpretation of cyberpunk’s retro-modernism. Of course, it was all completely antithetical to the modern-retroism of the new Mariner stadium; so no regular Ms’ uniforms will probably ever look like that. (‘Twas also fun to ponder the fake out-of-town scoreboard listings for Venus and Mercury. If you think the thin air in Denver affects the game…)
DESIGNS FOR LIVING: A bookseller of my acquaintance recently tipped me off to one of the nonsexual passages (yes, there are several) in the Kama Sutra: a list of “the sixty-four arts and sciences to be studied” by a learned man or woman. They include some universals (“singing,” “dancing,” “tattooing”), some obscure-around-these-parts cultural practices (“binding of turbans and chaplets”), and some practical matters of life in ancient India (“storing and accumulating water in aqueducts, cisterns, and reservoirs”). Anyhow, it’s inspired me to compile 64 arts and disciplines (from the practical to the spiritual to the just plain fun) a modern person should know. As always, I’d like your suggestions, to clark@speakeasy.org. Results will appear in this space in three weeks.
(Here’s a link to the original Kama Sutra list)
(Next week: The 1998 Misc. Summer Reading List.)
AFTER YEARS OF SEEING favorite radio stations die from low ratings, what should happen but I get my very own one-week Arbitron diary. For $2 cash, I was to faithfully record every station I heard, whether at home, in car, at work, or blaring out the neighbors’ apt. at 2 a.m.
To carefully choose which stations deserved my temporarily-important endorsement, I kept the dial moving all week. Herewith, selected results:
It’s also an opportunity for those who’ve been yearning for a real progressive community station. There’s several low-rated, probably unprofitable conserva-talk stations in the 1200-1600 AM neighborhood (plus new frequencies now being allocated in the 1600-1700 range). The progs should get together, hit up some friendly moneybags in the music and tech bizzes, and buy one of these.
FROM `THE PESTO OF CITIES’: You’re probably either anxiously awaiting tonight’s final episode of Seinfeld, or you’re bored to tears by all the press the show’s gotten and you’re glad it’ll all be done soon. Both camps might be interested in the Seinfeld create-a-plot guides on the Internet. Fill in the blanks and you’ve got your own wacky li’l Mad Libs-esque story, little more implausible than those the show’s actually used. I’ve used some of the categories on that list, and made up some of my own, to organize my own riff on the show’s familiar formulae:
Discussion/argument about a topic of profound unimportance: If Carly Simon wrote about somebody and wanted to get at him by saying “You probably think this song is about you,” but it really was about him, what’s the deal here?
Slightly unsightly sight gag: Sticking quarters onto your forehead.
Sexual euphemism: A soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend is derided behind his back for spending too much time “mountaineering” and not enough time “spelunking.”
Kiddie snack-food product, still remembered and/or consumed by the lead characters: Fizzies–the tablets that, when dropped in water, are supposed to create instant soda pop but actually create a vaguely cherry-flavored, non-medicinal version of Alka-Seltzer.
Celebrity name-drop: Charlene Tilton.
Humorous situation in which this celebrity appears: Fighting with one of the lead characters over an object of pathetic obsession.
Object of pathetic obsession: A M@xRack movie-ad postcard with Gwyneth Paltrow’s name misspelled, and hence potentially collectible.
Urban-etiquette peeve: People who make too many consecutive transactions at an ATM while others are in line.
Proposed solution to this peeve: Start a petition drive outside bank branches, demanding banks to set a two-transactions-at-a-time limit at ATMs during peak hours, punishable by “eating” the violator’s ATM card.
Ethnic guest character: An Italian-American mother who works at the clothing-catalog company.
Ethnic-slur aspect of that character: Demands accordion music at her daughter’s wedding reception.
Reason to start dating someone: She appreciates really good Dr Pepper, and makes special buying trips to New Mexico where the local bottler makes an especially strong version. She even knows to never spell Dr Pepper with a period, and publicly corrects anyone who tries.
Reason to stop dating someone: Goes into a hissy-fit at any restaurant (or wedding reception) that even deigns to offer Mr. Pibb as a substitute for Dr Pepper, and in fact screams to the whole world that she would rather drink cherry-flavor Fizzies.
`Wacky’ money-making scheme: The last known cache of big-E Levi’s jeans not yet sold to Japan; a cache discovered at the rural New Mexico general store that also has the world’s best Dr Pepper.
Why this money-making scheme’s doomed: Nobody bothers to figure out that, with the Asian recession, the bottom’s fallen out of the Japanese big-E Levi’s mania.
How the characters learn this lesson too late: At the wedding reception, the clothing-catalog owner is overheard casually mentioning this during a discussion about a new unusual garment concept.
Uunusual garment concept: Garanimals for grownup men.
Potential benefit of this new garment concept: You’d never look like an ill-dressed, color-conceptless dork in public.
Potential liability: If you’re a single man and you don’t look like a color-conceptless dork, women will presume you’re either gay or married.
Potential benefit from that potential liability: Attracting a woman who’s specifically after married men, because she’s turned on by the transgressiveness.
Potential liability from that potential asset: You’re now living an elaborate lie in order to keep this woman from leaving you, which she undoubtedly will do if she finds out you’re not really married.
Non-sequitur catch phrase: “Do I even look like your caseworker?”
Now go make up your own answers to these categories, or categories like them; then stick them into a standard four-subplot Seinfeld story arc. The result will probably be funnier than whatever’s gonna be on tonight’s finale. Submit your entries to clark@speakeasy.org. The best entries will be posted online, for all to share in the being and nothingness.
It’s a post-April Fool’s Misc., the popcult column that hopes the popular new local band A/C Autolux will one day appear on the same gig with the even-newer local band MoPar. Let’s just hope no band members forget their parts.
UPDATE: Since writing about the Triangle Broadcasting Co., I’ve learned of another gay radio outlet, sorta: The Music Choice section of the DirecTV satellite-dish service has a nightly package of “Out” music, starting around 11 p.m. It’s commercial-free and even flashes the titles and artists’ names on screen.
CLASS-ACTION RACISM SUIT HITS BOEING: Some of you theoretically might ask, “But aren’t pocket-protector-clad Boeing engineers the virtual epitome of squaresville fair play and quiet devotion to duty?” Maybe, in myth; but any huge organization with an almost all whitebread leadership (even an officially “nice” whitebread leadership) can be prone to insult “jokes,” promotion preferences and other discriminations, even anonymous threats and attacks. It’s happened in the past decade (according to suits and pubilshed accusations) at Nordstrom, City Light, the fire department, the ferry system. And with affirmative action under attack and with every boor and bigot using the all-justifying label of “political incorrectness” as an excuse to actually take pride in their own obnoxious inhumanity, we might see more ugliness ahead. Speaking of untoward behavior at unexpected places…
CATHODE CORNER #1: The (still alive, still free) online zine Salon recently ran allegations of sexual harrassment in the offices of 60 Minutes (following that show’s sympathetic treatment of Clinton accuser Kathleen Willey). Salon‘s article was built around eight-year-old allegations by freelancer Mark Hertsgaard, who’d written a piece for Rolling Stone (which published only a watered-down version). He charged the show’s bigwigs, including exec-producer Don Hewitt and anchor Mike Wallace, with acts of gender-hostility ranging from lewd jokes to groping and bra-snapping. It’s enough to bring new meaning to my old foolproof formula for “Safer sex” (imaginining that the person you’re about to have sex with is really Morley Safer oughta stop anything from happening).
CATHODE CORNER #2: KCPQ’s news, after the expected bumpy first weeks, is turning into a snappy li’l broadcast that, partly out of necessity (fewer camera crews, no helicopter), spends a little less time than the other stations chasing ambulances and a little more time covering issues, including issues deemed important to those youngish X-Files viewers. Any broadcast that gives top billing (on 3/17) to the fight to abolish the Teen Dance Ordinance at least has a set of priorities in concordance with those of some of our readers. Just one little thing: If they’re trying to skew to a younger audience, why do they follow the newscast with a M*A*S*H rerun that probably looked creaky when made (before the station’s target audience was born)?
PINNING IT DOWN: Bowling as a source for hip iconography is way on the rise. Bowling shirts (particularly the Hawwaiian variety) have been in for a couple of years now and may have another resurgence this summer (if the collectors haven’t stowed away all the good ones by now). New bars from the Breakroom to Shorty’s are festooned with balls, pins, and other acoutrements of the sport. It’s a way to be fun ‘n’ retro without the bourgeois trappings of the cigar-bar crowd. But don’t look for any new bowling alleys anywhere around here anytime soon. Banks and landlords think bowling’s a suboptimal use of square footage, compared to other entertainment or retail concepts. When a Green Lake Bowl or Village Lanes or Bellevue Lanes goes away, it doesn’t come back. All we can do is support the remaining kegling bastions (including the occasional “rock ‘n’ bowl” nights at Leilani Lanes in upper Greenwood).
QUESTION OF THE WEEK: If the Olympics come to Seattle in 2012 (and I know some of you are dead set against the idea but if the Schellites have their way it won’t be our decision to make), will you still be willing to be televised as part of a quaint, exotic human-interest piece about those strange local customs? Submit your reply, with your choice of quaint custom, at clark@speakeasy.org. (Remember, no latte jokes.)
HIGH IQ=LOW XXX?: The papers were full of smart-folks-get-less-sex headlines the same week IDG Books brought out Dating for Dummies, the latest extension of a guidebook series initially aimed at people who needed to run computers at work but didn’t like to. Maybe they should’ve put out Dating for Smarties instead. (On the other hand, a programming-manual format’s perhaps an ideal means to show literal-minded people how to survive in such an un-left-brain activity.) (On the third hand, maybe it’s all the wrong way; reinforcing thought patterns completely useless for the realm of hormones and emotions.)
Smart ladies at least have Marilyn Vos Savant and the learned lovelies in Bull Durham and La Lectrice as sexy role models. Who’ve boys got: The antisocial (alleged) Unabomber? The hygiene-challenged Einstein and Edison? OK, there’s the fun-lovin’ late scientist Richard Feynman and certain brooding movie master-criminal types, but they’re the exceptions. But the more common image is the drooling fanboy in a three-sizes-too-small Capt. Kirk shirt, peering through inch-thick spectacles, looking for love in all the wrong places (like AOL chat rooms), fantasizing about Amazonian superwomen but incapable of chatting up a real one, perhaps still traumatized by high-school crushes who slept with jocks and treated him as a brother.
Many hyper-rational people of all genders fear the irrational, and love and sex are about the most irrational behaviors known to humankind. But becoming more desirable isn’t as impossible as it sometimes seems. Practice using a softer, sultrier voice in which to recite post-structuralist literary theory. Memorize love sonnets. Do something to get outside the comfy prison of your own head (yoga, gardening, cycling, pets). Reclaim your place in the physical/ biological/ emotional realm. To quote a love-struck professor in Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire, “Knowing is not enough.”
`WORLD’ CONQUEST: I’ve heard punk-rock activists might try to disrupt location tapings of MTV’s Real World Seattle with pickets or street-theater type hostilities. I say we can be more creative than that. They think they’re an entertainment network; heck, we’ll show ’em some real entertainment. First, start a phone tree in advance, so you can descend on the place in numbers. Then when the crew and cast are sighted somewhere, arrive en masse in Santa suits, or chanting the Ivar’s Acres of Clams folk jingle, or loading the bar’s juke box to repeatedly play “Convoy.” Let’s show those stuck-up industry people we know how to have an old-school good time in this town. Speaking of entertainments…
WORDS & MUSIC: Fizz: A Blah Blah Blah Blah Magazine has put out its last issue and I’ll miss it. Some of publisher Cathy Rundell’s associates are regrouping to start a successor mag, Plus One. One of the things I loved about Fizz (and its LA-based predecessor Fiz) was its insistance on indie-pop as a force for creativity and empowerment, for doing things where you are with what you’ve got.
Compare this to the attitude in Resonance, the three-year-old local dance and pop mag. Where Fizz got personal with musicians, portraying them as just-plain merrymakers like you or me, Resonance keeps its critical distance. Even its interviews too often practice the same old provincialism, treating musical artists as gods and goddesses descending upon us from the media capitals. The irony, of course, is how dance music depends for its real innovations on stubborn trend-breakers, many from outside the NY/LA/SF/London axis. Another dance-club freezine, the LA-based Sweater, exemplifies this in a recent cover story about Derrick May, the Detroit DJ who pioneered late-’80s house music–and who only found a domestic market for his work after U.K. imitators “popularized” the style.
I’ve been criticized for having a rocker-reactionary “disco sucks” attitude toward the dance revolution. Not true. My beef’s with the self-defeating “real-life-is-elsewhere” attitude among too many dance-scene followers, too content to remain followers. Like an introspective genius afraid to date, the scene needs to shake off its inhibitions, to dare to be foolish, to really get down.
(Share your egghead love tips at clark@speakeasy.org .)
MICOSOFT TO BUY CBS?: That’s what a New York Post story said a couple weeks ago. I didn’t believe it, even before the denials from all sides. For one thing, Gates likes to buy companies on their way up, not underperformers in need of restoration. For another, MS’s current alliance with NBC made for at least a few half-decent jokes around the Internet, contrasting nerd stereotypes with the network’s young, hip image (Gates becoming the seventh Friend, et al.). But there’s nobody on CBS one could even imagine as having ever used a computer–except Dave’s World star Harry Anderson, a card-carrying Macintosh endorser.
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “At Bally’s health clubs, you can get the body you’ve always wanted to have.” And you thought that sort of offer could only be advertised in the rural counties of Nevada…
WHITE UNLIKE ME: I’m on my third reading of Jim Goad’s book The Redneck Manifesto. Goad (co-creator of the nearly-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me!) has his points, but you have to sift through an awful lot of theasaurus-bending cuss words and almost poetry-slam-style “attitude” to find it. Around all this filler, Goad interweaves his and his family’s story of financial/ social struggle with observations of his current surroundings in industrial north Portland and with what BBC documentary producers might label “a personal history” of the white (rural and urban) working class in Europe and America, from the bad old days of indentured servitude and debtors’ prisons to the bad new days of welfare-mother bashing, wage stagnation, and job exports. In Goad’s worldview, the great mall-hopping middle class either doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter much to his main concept, the eternal war of “white trash vs. white cash.” Among the aspects of his thesis:
* Poor whites and poor blacks have more in common (and socialize together more readily) than poor whites and rich whites.
* Unattractive traits ascribed to rednecks and trailer trash (laziness, savagery, stupidity, promiscuity, poor hygiene) have always been used by the rich everywhere to disparge the poor everywhere.
* America’s “dirty little secret” isn’t race but class.
* Most rich people are white but most white people aren’t rich–and shouldn’t be collectively blamed for slavery, discrimination, and other rich people’s crimes.
* So-called “angry white male” subcults (militias, talk radio listeners, etc.) aren’t necessarily as racist, sexist, homophobic, or paranoid as the upscale media crack ’em up to be. Their real beefs, Goad claims, are against big business and big government, as they should be.
* The media (including most “alternative” weeklies) are tools of the “white cash” class and don’t give a damn about the downscale, except to sneer at ’em.
* The same’s true of white-upscale leftists, whom Goad claims care more about overseas rainforests than about toxic dumps in our own inner cities. Goad says this is an historic trait, citing Brit society ladies who spoke out against slavery in the American south while treating their own servants and employees like dirt.
* The white hipster agenda has always had less to do with assailing bourgeois privileges than with defending these privileges against the downscale squares.
Many of the class-struggle arguments have been made before, by folks like Michael Moore and Baffler editor Tom Frank. Goad’s main addition to the genre, besides his damn-aren’t-I-politically-incorrect sass, is his insistance that there’s no singular white racial caste, united in privilege and oppressiveness. With this, Goad seemingly contradicts the worldview of Race Traitor zine editors Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey, who claims there is such a universal Caucasian identity and “progressive” whites should personally renounce it.
But their stances aren’t really that different. Both believe in self-empowerment by dropping out from the mainstream-America assimilation thang. Ignatiev and Garvey (instructors at bigtime East Coast universities) do this by pretending to be black. Goad does it by playing up his links to the white unprivileged. Goad’s is probably the healthier approach. Instead of appropriating the romanticized victimhood of some defined “Other,” Goad argues for the right to be his own Porter Wagoner-listenin’, dead-end-job-workin’, hard-livin’, high-lovin’, prematurely-dyin’ kind. One approach seeks true humanity outside oneself; the other finds it within. (More on this latter sub-topic in two weeks.)
I just spent half a week in Corvallis (Latin for “Heart of the Valley”), the Oregon hamlet where I’d spent some of my post-adolescent years. I was there to revisit childhood memories (unlike Seattle, most of the buildings there in the late ’70s are still there) and to meet my aunt and uncle. Uncle Kurt looks just like the late Days of Our Lives star Macdonald Carey; like Carey’s character, he was (before his retirement) the leading physician in an isolated college town, a pillar of kindly authority in a place that valued such things. Unlike Days’ fictional town of Salem, Corvallis has no known international spy rings or demonic-possession cases (there’s more treachery in Oregon’s real Salem, the state capital).
Corvallis is a place you have to want to go to, deep in the fertile Willamette Valley. It’s 10 miles from the freeway and Amtrak (both at Albany), 50 miles from commuter air service (at Salem or Eugene), 100 miles from Portland. It’s a place of unbeatable scenery, especially with the low cloud ceiling and the summertime field burning. It’s a real town, a feat of collective architecture/ planning/ whatever. Narrow streets are lined with big trees and shrubs. The buildings are human-scale, mostly amiacably rundown. Downtown’s still intact and prosprous, despite the loss of a few big chain stores (the Penney’s storefront now holds a Starbucks and a Noah’s Bagels). The outlying cul-de-sac streets are still part of the town, not elite-retreat suburbs.
It’s a company town, and the company’s Oregon State University (née Oregon Agricultural College), home of the fighting Beavers. It’s a damn handsome college, with low-rise ’20s brick classroom buildings built close together. At the campus’s heart is the Memorial Union (“Vnion” in the exterior stone lettering), an elegant, state-capital-like student union building.
It’s a place where small-town kids arrive, learn a trade in concrete, physical-plane-of-existence stuff (food growing and processing, computers, machines, chemicals, earth sciences), and in the process learn about getting along with people. One of the things they learn how is interracial dating’s no big deal–the college imports out-of-state black athletes (like future Sonic Gary Payton), who invariably end up dating white women (Af-Am females being scarce, even with the rise of the women’s basketball program). (One of the few Af-Ams to grow up in Corvallis was ex-Mariner Harold Reynolds. No, I don’t know anything gossipworthy about either Reynolds or Payton.)
State budget cuts have hit OSU hard. While private funding is helping keep the physical plant up (with several big new buildings going up this summer), enrollment is now less than three-quarters of its 1990 peak of 16,000. Fewer students mean local merchants sell fewer kegs of beer, fewer copies of Penthouse, fewer jogging bras. What’s kept the town going are the office-park businesses that like to put down roots near tech schools, such as the Hewlett-Packard plant and the CH2M-Hill engineering firm.
Also, there’s not much nightlife (though they’re finally getting regular punk shows and have an improving college-radio station). There’s a granolahead scene, but it doesn’t rule the town like in Eugene. There is a “Music of Your Life” radio station (the network KIXI used to belong to). The yellow pages list more multimedia production companies than video-rental stores. There’s a feminist small press (Calyx), and a strong gay-lib movement (surrounded by Lon Mabon’s notorious anti-gay crusaders elsewhere in the valley).
Despite these struggles, Corvallis was recently cited in one of those “top places to live” books as one of America’s most progressive towns. I don’t know if the honor’s deserved, but it is a near-perfect example of the kind of strait-laced yet “mellow” place Utne Reader readers might love. Oregon was always Washington’s older, more patrician sibling; Corvallis is a jewel-box setting for this staid “civil society” attitude. It’s the sort of town where almost nobody’s too rich, too poor, or too dark; where everybody (in certain circles) has some post-high-school education, where everybody wears sensible shoes and drives sensible cars; where even the frat houses separate their bottles for recycling; where Lake Wobegon and Reagan’s “Morning in America” prove to be the same fantasy–soothing for some, scary for others.
MY ADORATION OF JACK BENNY notwithstanding, I decided years ago I wouldn’t rue or deny the inevitable entry into the fourties. I wouldn’t be like those pathetic boomers, forever striving to retain ever-fading remnants of youthful bodies and identities. (My recent diet-exercise regimen had nothing to do with staying young; I was as out-of-shape at 17 as I was last year.)
No, I plan to age disgracefully into a crochety old geezer. Having bosses younger than me, at a paper targeted at readers younger than me, has offered plenty of practice. “Back in my day Sonny, we had real music. Einstruzende Neubauten! Skinny Puppy! Throbbing-fuckin’-Gristle! That crap they listen to these days: Why, it’s just noise!”
I also plan to enjoy the collected experience of my years on Earth. A few years ago I wrote something called “Everything I Ever Really, Really Needed to Know I Learned on the Playground.” Since then I’ve learned a few more things, including the following:
HERE AT MISC. we’re bemused in a melancholy way by the new logo for the Landmark (ex-Seven Gables) theaters; imposed by their new owner, John Kluge’s Metromedia empire. It features the words “Landmark Theater Corporation” surrounding a hyperrealistic airbrush image of the Hollywood sign and palm trees. It precisely symbolizes that creepy showbiz “glamour” the Seven Gables indie-film citadels were always supposed to represent an alternative to. Speaking of the supposed Year of Independent Film…
BAD-MOON-RISIN’ DEPT.: Remember that lifetime-achievement Oscar to English Patient producer Saul Zaentz, the Hollywood establishment’s idea of a proper “independent” film guy? Admittedly, he’s generated some of the more interesting celluloid products of recent decades (Amadeus, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest). But amid the peaens to Zaentz on the Oscar show and printed in newspaper tributes, John Fogerty was never mentioned.
Details of the Fogerty/ Zaentz fiasco have been disputed, in courts and elsewhere. The following is pretty much agreed on: Fogerty was underage when his band, Creedence Clearwater Revival, signed with Zaentz’s Fantasy Records, then a small Frisco jazz label. The terms were typically awful for the period (Fogerty & co. got pathetic royalties, the label took all ownership to their songs). Creedence became one of the biggest-selling acts in rock history, enabling Zaentz to expand his record empire (Fantasy now owns over a dozen labels, including the catalogs of R&B legends Chess and Specialty), and from there to enter the movie biz.
Instead of offering the band a better contract, Zaentz convinced them to invest their royalties at a Nassau tax-shelter bank. The bank disappeared in the ’70s, taking the band’s money with it. Fogerty left the business and moved to Oregon, living off the cents-on-the-dollar settlement he got years later from Fantasy’s lawyers. When he returned with a solo LP in ’86, Fantasy sued him, claiming one of his new songs sounded too much like one of his Fantasy-owned old songs. Fogerty’s first new record in a decade will be out in a month or two. Since he won’t perform any Fantasy-owned Creedence songs on tour, this little dispute will probably come up again. We’ll see if Zaentz (no longer active in Fantasy’s day-to-day management) gets mentioned in connection with the hassle. In any event, the story should serve as an object lesson for anyone who believes indie media operators are always more honorable than the majors. Speaking of pop history…
OTHER WORLDS, OTHER SOUNDS: Esquire magazine’s been so pathetic in recent years, it’s amazing its lounge-culture cover story turned out not-half-bad. Pity it didn’t more thoroughly explore one curious quotation from critic Milo Miles, complaining that the retro-cats were championing a worldview the Beats and hippies had desired to destroy. That’s true, but that’s also one of the movement’s positive points.
At its broadest definition, lounge culture is the culture of the first Age of Integration. It’s Sammy Davis refusing to perform at hotels that made him eat in the kitchen. It’s Sinatra demanding to tour with an integrated band. It’s Juan Garcia Esquivel, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Eartha Kitt, Yma Sumac, Perez Prado, Sergio Mendes, Nat “King” Cole, Desi Arnaz, Vikki Carr, Harry Belafonte, and Quincy Jones. (In comparison, can you name more then four stars of color in the past quarter-century of “progressive rock”?) It’s the sounds and sights of other lands, curated and juxtaposed to jostle the audience’s expectations (as opposed to the smiling-peasant complacency undertoning much of today’s “world beat” industry.) It reflects an aesthetic of respect for oneself and others, and also a postwar philosophy that personal and social progress were not only necessary but possible.
Sure, there’s a lot of posing and play-acting among today’s cocktail kids. But within the most “shallow” pose, as gay-camp afficianados know, lies a truth, or at least a desire for a truth. In the lounge revival, it’s a desire for seemingly long-lost ideals of beauty, adventure, community, mutual respect (the only source of true cultural diversity), economic advancement, and fun. Locally, that wish for a brighter tomorrow was and still is best expressed in the legacy of the Seattle World’s Fair. More about that next week.
MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…
SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…
IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.
The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”
‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.â€
AD VERBS 1: Pontiac’s got this new ad with a computer-animated version of the Munch Scream man. A red sports car appears on his bridge. He gets in and immediately morphs into a shades-clad “dood,” happily puttering down the road. By treating chronic depression and/ or realistic world-weariness as just a minor “attitude adjustment” problem, it ridicules the worldview of the young-adult generation it’s trying to sell to. How typical. Speaking of ill-advised selling points…
AD VERBS 2: I know I’m not the only one disturbed by the new Blockbuster Video slogan, “One World, One Word.” It harkens back to a line used in the ’80s by its now sister company MTV, “One World, One Music, One Channel.” Both phrases envision a singular corporate deity commanding the entire Earth’s population with a single brand of formula entertainment. It’s not just monopolistic, it’s monotheistic. And it’s not what either music or video ought to be. Rather, millennial pop culture is (or is becoming) a pantheon of sources, ideas, aesthetics, genres, sounds, and looks; something as vast and chaotic as the world itself. Speaking of dangerous delusions of hegemony…
ANGUISH LANGUISH: The whole Ebonics mania is about teaching the ability to communicate. The furor over it shows just how much miscommunication we have to deal with. From hate radio to the op-ed pages, Beemer conservatives and Volvo liberals alike are decrying something Ebonics isn’t, something that existed only in oversimplified newspaper descriptions. What the Oakland, CA schools want to do isn’t to “promote” the language spoken by Af-Ams in inner cities and the rural south. They want to treat that language in class as a legitimate idiom, with its own rules and norms–and then to use these notions of rules and norms to teach business English as a second language. Think of it as sorta like your Pygmalion/ My Fair Lady shtick, with modern school-bureaucrat propriety substituted for Prof. Henry Higgins’ old-time classism.
The more rabid critics of Ebonics are using it as an excuse to deride Black English as “gibberish,” and those who speak it as “illiterate thugs.” This kind of arrogance is part of the whole point of Oakland’s Ebonics scheme. It’s a scheme to teach kids to speak and write business English without telling ’em they’re idiots for not already knowing it. It’s a scheme combining Calif. new-age “empowerment” hype with legitimate linguistic studies. Indeed, as occasional Stranger contributer Zola Mumford can tell you, Black English is a fascinating mix of words and pronounciation patterns from Africa, the US south, and elsewhere. Everybody from beatniks and mall rappers to jazz and art lovers have benefitted from its traditions and continual innovations. (I wrote a couple years ago that “teen slang in advertising” could be defined as how old white people think young white people think young black people talk.) The catch is that most potential employers speak a different idiom, one which must be learned by potential employees. What might really frustrate both rightists and centrists is where Ebonics departs from the Higgins metaphor. It treats business, or “white,” English as a trade idiom (like the old-Northwest “Chinook Jargon” taught by white pioneers to conduct business with different native peoples who spoke different tongues). The idiom of CEOs (and of talk-show hosts and columnists) is treated as just another English variant, not as the language’s one and only proper form. Speaking of learning…
CRUNCHY NUMBERS: Tucked away in the residential enclave of Maple Leaf (89th & Roosevelt) is an educational-toy store with a wonderful name, Math’n’Stuff (looove that juxtaposition of specifics and generalities!). If you didn’t grow up in the kind of Harper’s-subscribin’, Pendleton-skirt-wearin’ family you see in all the Nordstrom Xmas ads, you can now fantasize about that sort of patrician cocooning with this store’s vast array of geometric puzzle games, algebra flash cards, mind-bender storty-problem books, and K’Nex building sticks. (They’ve even got genuine Rubik’s Cubes!) Much of the store’s merchandise is meant to teach kids to see math as relevant, by relating “real” world observations to the world of numbers. I imagine a different, equally-valuable use–to teach teen and adult computer nerds that the world of senses and physicality is just as exciting as the world of logical constructs.
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED at the announcement that Diahann Carroll would star in the touring version of the Sunset Boulevard musical, coming soon to Vancouver. We’d previously written that “race-blind casting” traditionally means all the starring roles in big commercial theatricals go to white folks. So we’re happy to note an exception (even if it’s an exception that proves the rule).
SINGIN’ THE BREWS: If you remember when Bud Dry was hawked as “The Alternative Beer,” get ready for another contender to that dubious title. New management at Maxwell’s, that longtime rock club inside a former Hoboken, NJ coffee factory (on what that PBS Baseball miniseries claimed was the first site where baseball as we know it was played), has installed a brewpub on the premises, with its own “Alternative Brew” and “Percussion Ale.” If market conditions seem plausible (right now the business press claims there’s an impending microbrew glut), they might get sold at other outlets, perhaps even out here.
LIVING OFF THE LAND: Eat the State!: A Forum for Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research, and Humor is an often-clever li’l four-page lefty newsletter. So far it’s been consistently witty and has had a good mix of local and national topics, though it leans a bit too heavy for my taste on the side of self-righteous ranting, too lightly on organizing and solution-seeking. I also have troubles with the name. At a time when even pork-barrel senators now purport to oppose “Big Government,” that ol’ punk-anarchist concept of “The State” seems almost like nostalgia for yesterday’s problems. The old nation-states are indeed being eaten, but it’s Global Business that’s doing the digesting. (Free weekly at the usual dropoff points; online at speech.csun.edu/ben/news/ets/; or $24/year from P.O. Box 85541, Seattle 98145.) Speaking of social theorizin’…
YOU’RE SO VEIN: I also have problems with the political piece in issue #2 of the regional visual-art journal Aorta, relating the Clinton/Dole rivalry to “The Twilight of The Patriarchy.” For nearly a quarter-century now, the leftist labeling of mainstream American society as “The Patriarchy” has utterly failed to recognize the significant contributions individual women have made in service to reactionary politics and social stagnation. After all, if women are capable of doing anything, they’re certainly capable of doing things you or I might not approve of. A writer living in the state of Craswell and Dixy Lee Ray oughta know this. Still speaking of social theorizin’…
GRIN AND BARE IT: As instigator of the cable-access show Political Playhouse, Philip Craft was a master provocateur, attracting the wrath of bluenoses like Sen. Gorton for his on-camera nudity and protest-comedy skits. Toward the end of his show’s two-year run, Craft had begun to move beyond simple protesting and had started to articulate a vision of his ideal alternative society based on practical anarchism. Unfortunately, his new self-published book The Fool on the Hill doesn’t spell out that vision, beyond calling for political power to be recentered onto the county level (an idea similar to ones expressed by the militia cults). Instead, he offers an autobiographical tale about cheating on his wife, taking lotsa drugs, getting investigated by the Feds for advocating some of those drugs on his show, taking on paranoid delusions, and hiding out in the woods. It’s a long way from Craft’s introductory claim that it’s “a paranoid comedy that will forever change the way you view the world… that conspires to bring down the political, economic, and religious institutions that enslave us today.” Rather, it’s a downbeat story of personal loss and confusion, imbued with a sense of vulnerability and humility unseen in Craft’s TV work. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 17320, Seattle 98107.)
WHAT I’LL MISS ABOUT ERNST HARDWARE: The clashing aromas of freshly-cut flowers and freshly-cut lumber. The annual Show Me How Fair in the old Coliseum. The Sonics “In The Paint” promotion. The slogan, “We’ve got a warehouse too; we just don’t make you shop in it.” And, of course, The Fellow In Yellow.
