LET US RETURN to Misc., the pop-culture column that’s indifferent about the threatened Federal ban on goofy cigarette brand merchandising like Marlboro Gear, Camel Cash, and the near-ubiquitous Your Basic Hat. Wearing or carrying that stuff’s a walking admission of subservience to a chemical god, disguised (as so many human weaknesses are) as bravado. Speaking of personal appearance…

BEAUTY VS. COMMERCE: The Portland paper Willamette Week reports many employers in that town are altering their dress codes to regulate employees with nose and lip rings. An exec with the espresso chain Coffee People was quoted as saying his company allows up to “three earrings per ear and a nose stud,” but forbids nose rings. Starbucks baristas in the Rose City may wear up to two earrings per ear but no face rings, no tattoos, and no “unnatural” hair colors. Dunno ’bout you, but I like to be served by someone who shows she knows there’s more important things than serving me. Speaking of trendy looks…

UPDATE: Got a bottle of Orbitz pop thanks to the guys at Throw Software, who’d smuggled three bottles from NYC. It’s made by a Vancouver company (Clearly Canadian) whose US HQ’s in Kent, but it’s only sold so far in the Northeast. It’s more beautiful than I imagined–a clear, uncarbonated, slightly-more-syrupy-than-usual concoction with caviar-sized red, yellow, or orange gummy globules in perfect suspension, neither floating nor sinking. It uses Clearly Canadian’s regular bottle shape, which is already sufficiently Lava Lamp-esque for the visual effect. As for the taste, reader Jeannine Arlette (who also got hers in NY) sez it’s “less icky tasting than the dessert black-rice-pudding, but just a little… The little neon `flavor bitz’ lodge in the gag part of your throat as you swallow, and, they have no flavor except possibly under some very loose definition where texture is considered a flavor.” Speaking of beverages…

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of an ad offering video-rental “happy hours,” complete with cocktail-nation cartoon imagery): “Rain City Video does not condone the use of alcoholic beverages with some movies.” What? Without a few good highballs or mint-liqueur martinis in your system, what’s the point of watching something like Leaving Las Vegas, Barfly, Under the Volcano, The Lost Weekend, or I’ll Cry Tomorrow? Certainly the Thin Man films nearly demand six martinis. Speaking of film and morals…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Rev. Louis Farrakhan, in his paper The Final Call, recently blasted the producers of Independence Day.He claims they knowingly stole and corrupted a 1965 prophecy by his predecessor, Nation of Islam founder Elijah Muhammed, that a fleet of space ships will one day descend from their “Mother Plane,” secretly built by Africans in 1929 and currently hidden in high orbit, to destroy white America. (This is the source of the “mother ship” imagery George Clinton sanitizes for mainstream consumption.) Farrakhan claims all the world’s political and media leaders know about the Mother Plane but have never admitted it, except to slander it in a movie. (Farrakhan’s also displeased that the UFO-blasting hero in Independence Day is so openly Jewish.)

Many of you first became acquainted with the advanced mysteries of the Nation of Islam at the Million Man March, when Farrakhan preached about conspiracies revealed by magic numbers. A nonbeliever might find it strange, but it’s no stranger than tenets followed by Catholics, Mormons, Evangelicals, and New-Agers.

Besides, the premise of an apocalypse from the skies is as old as War of the Worlds. Several sects have predicted violent or benign spaceship-based takeovers over the years; the Church of the Sub-Genius parodied it in its tracts claiming that “Jehovah is an alien and still threatens this planet.” And compared to real-life crimes against blacks (like the recent report in the mainstream press that CIA-connected crooks jump-started the crack industry, and the resulting gang violence, in order to finance the Nicaraguan Contras), and Farrakhan’s charges seem relatively mild and almost plausible.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder these thoughts of Courtney Love on smells, from a 1993 issue of Mademoiselle: “All boys love Chanel No. 5 because it reminds them of their moms when they got dressed up.”

MISC. HATES TO say it, but the rest of the local media were more than a bit mistaken about the hyped-up overimportance of a certain out-of-state chain restaurant opening up shop in Seattle. Now if White Castle had moved into town, that would’ve meant something.

Besides, we’ve already got a watering hole for Seattlites who love film. It’s called the Alibi Room. Instead of loudly pandering to manufactured celebrity worship (just what has B. Willis actually done to deserve this kind of Messiahdom?), this place quietly honors the art and craft of making film, with published screenplays on a shelf for browsing and many of Seattle’s growing tribe of director and cinematographer wannabes hanging out and networking. They’re even mounting a local screening series, “Films From Here.” Seldom has the divide over competing visions of America’s cultural future been more clearly shown than in the contrast between a corporately-owned shrine to prepackaged Global Entertainment and a local independent gathering place for creators.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: The Vent may be the only alternative literary zine published on that rock of antisociality known as Mercer Island. The current issue’s highlighted by “Rage,” George Fredrickson’s two-paragraph micro-essay on “how crazy it is 2 live on Mercer Isl. and b black at da same time.” Free at Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill or pay-what-you-can from 3839 80th Ave. SE, Mercer Island 98040… July’s Earshot Jazz newsletter has an important piece by new editor Peter Monaghan about DIY indie CDs and some of the pitfalls unsuspecting musicians can face when they try to become their own record producers. (Free around town or from 3429 Fremont Pl. N., #309, Seattle 98103.)

NET-WORKING: the same week I read this month’s Wired cover story on “Kids Cyber Rights,” I also found a story from last September’s Harper’s Bazaar about “Lolitas On-Line.” In the latter article, writer David Bennahum claims there’s a trend of teen females (including “Jill, a precocious 15-year-old from Seattle”) acting out sexual fantasies in online chat rooms and newsgroups. Bennahum proposes, that online sex talk isn’t necessarily a Force of Evil but can, when used responsibly, be a tool of empowerment and self-discovery; letting users explore the confusing fascinations of sexual identity safely and pseudonymously.

In the Wired piece, Jon Katz offered some similar notions. I’m particularly fond of his assertions that children “have the right to be respected,” “should not be viewed as property or as helpless to participate in decisions affecting their lives,” and “should not be branded ignorant or inadequate because their educational, cultural, or social agenda is different from that of previous generations.”

Twenty years of punk rock should have proved kids can make their own culture and don’t like being treated as idiots. Yet the Right still shamelessly uses “The Family” (always in the collective singular, as one monolithic entity) to justify all sorts of social-control mechanisms. Near-right Democrats try to muscle in on the far right’s act, using “Our Kids’ Future” to promote gentrification schemes that make family housing less affordable, while cracking down on any signs of independent youth culture (punks, skaters, cruisers) and going along with dubious “protection” schemes like V-chips and Internet censorship. And too many of yesterday’s Today Generation (like Garry Trudeau) mercilessly sneer at anyone too young to be From The Sixties. (In ’92 a Times subsidiary hired me to write for its tabloid for teens; I was laid off when its baby-boomer bosses found, to their surprise, that actual teens could indeed compose their own sentences.)

Yes, teens and preteens face a lot of problems. They always have; they always will. But they’re far more likely to get abused by daddy than by an e-mail correspondent. They’ll hear more (and more creative) cuss words in the playground than on HBO. Let’s stop stunting kids’ growth by forcing them into subhuman roles they often can’t stand. Instead, let’s treat kids as human beings, who could use a little friendly advice now and then (as could we all) but who ultimately should, and can, take responsibility for their own lives. John Barth once wrote, “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.” I’d add: Innocence excessively enforced becomes fetishization.

HANK-ERING: Misc. received an anonymous letter from somebody complaining about a recent ish of No Depression, the “alternative country” zine co-run by Rocket vet Peter Blackstock. The letter-writer felt outraged at the cover image of the late Hank Williams Sr. posing alongside two white Negro-dialect impersonators. I highly doubt Blackstock intended to endorse the show’s crude ethnic humor. Rather, I’m sure he intended to explore Williams’ work and its historical context–like the Robt. Christgau Village Voice piece last month claiming Williams took his vocal shtick from NY performer Emmett Miller, who sang in blackface from the ’20s thru the ’40s.

CLUB IMPLOSION, CONT’D.: The Weathered Wall, for four years Seattle’s poshest (in a friendly way) live-and-recorded-music club (and the only local club to use a blown-up photocopy of an old Misc. column as a wall poster), shut its doors in mid-June. It’s been used since then as a location for a made-for-TV movie. Various interests are looking into getting it sold and/ or re-opened, but there’s nothing to announce now. Meanwhile, the Pioneer Square Theater has hosted its last all-ages gig. Promoters tried to raise prices after fire marshals halved the building’s legal capacity; but that put the concerts out of range of much of the underage crowd. Reportedly the marshals offered a list of improvements that had to be made before full capacity could be re-granted; but the space’s landlord balked at the expense. (If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d wonder why the marshals didn’t go after the building back when it housed non-punk music and plays.)

And the Lake Union Pub, home to some of Seattle’s punkiest shows (and to some of the Liquor Board’s heaviest enforcement details), just had another 10-day closure, amid rumors the joint would be sold and turned into a sports bar. If it happens, the closure would mean three of the four alt-music clubs on the Commons Committee’s ’94 map of blocks it wanted to condo-ize would be dead (leaving only Re-bar). On the upside, the Pub’s quasi-neighbor, the Store Room Tavern, has been booking bands again; while the Seattle Parks Department (!) has co-promoted Wednesday night touring-punk bands at the Miller Community Center on east Capitol Hill.

THE BIG TURN-OFF: The Sonics’ recent successes reminded me how one of the joys of televised sports has always been the excuse to loiter among a department store’s TV displays, sharing the moments of triumph/ despair with instant friends without having to buy (or drink) anything. But that’s another of those disappearing urban pleasures. The Bon Marche’s new management, having disposed of the Budget Floor, the Cascade Room restaurant, and the downtown pharmacy, is now closing the electronics departments. Besides leaving Radio Shack (and pawn shops) as the only source for home electronics in the central downtown, the loss (effective August) leaves but a few public TV walls in the greater urban core (Sears, Fred Meyer, Video Only). At least we might see no more dorky Bon cell-phone ads (we love ya Keister, but keep your night job).

The changes show how the Bon, once powerful enough to rise above retail’s sea changes (documented in an ’80s P-I headline, “Bon Marches to Different Drum”), now bumps along in the tides like the rest of the industry. Further proof: the parent company’s apparent threat (still officially denied) to consolidate the chain with another of its holdings, Macy’s California, and planned cuts in commission pay which might lead to a clerks’ strike this month. Still, for now, the Bon remains the store “Where All Seattle Shops,” from dowagers hanging out in the women’s rooms to brides seeking just the right bread machine. It’s also the city’s crossroads point, having struck a deal in the ’20s to make its 3rd Ave. side one of the town’s biggest bus stops. While the downtown store’s merchandise mix is now based on strategies devised for mall branches, it’s still the first place to go for lots of stuff, sold in a respectful, relatively unpretentious manner. Would hate to see it deteriorate into just another store.

SHADES OF PALE: Those white authors who’ve unilaterally declared racism to be “over” aren’t living on any planet near mine. Witness David Stennett and Eric Remington, founders of something called the “Euro-American Students Union.” They’re trying to organize at Tacoma’s Univ. of Puget Sound (and are talking about taking their cause to other campuses), under the official guise of cultural awareness and “ethnic pride.” Thus far, Stennett and Remington have met with widespread opposition and controversy. They’ve yet to find a willing faculty advisor, a requirement for officially-recognized student clubs at UPS. The campus paper, the Trail,has run several angry letters denouncing the club as a front for white supremacist organizing. UW Daily writer Kerri DeVault has written a column asking UW students how they’d react if a Euro-pride contingent tried to organize up here.

So far, Stennett and Remington seem to have done nothing to effectively allay these fears. Indeed, they flirt around the edges of the intolerant image they purport to denounce. Stennett told the Trail that the club would attract “mostly white conservative students… since most liberal students don’t believe in cultural heritage stuff and have been brainwashed by the white stereotype.”

The group’s literature and its website are full of barbed-wire imagery and rants against affirmative action, along with euphemistic preachments about a proud, righteous white race persecuted by ashamed-of-their-heritage white liberals and double-standard-bearing minorities. It’s all seemingly designed to appeal to the topsy-turvy ideology of hate radio (where some of academe’s crudest bullies and bigots regularly turn around and whine about being the pitiful victims of the mean ol’ PC thought police).

And Stennett and Remington’s own literature is tame compared to some of the “recommended resources” linked from their website–more extreme writings from guys with Idaho P.O. boxes encouraging folks to support “white preservation” by moving to the “New Plymouth Rock” (the Rocky Mountain states, where they’ve got “the best gun laws”).

How do I count the stupidities in all this? First, “White” is a singular population entity only in terms of a heritage of priviliges and in the delusional theories of demagogues. North American caucasians are a beyond-muttness amalgam of dozens of ethnic, tribal, and national root groups, many of which have fought bitter wars with one another over the past few centuries. (The biggest of those wars were started by jerks like Napoleon and Hitler who foolishly sought to impose a singular nationhood on all Euros.) “White” isn’t an ethnicity; it’s the absence of ethnicity. You can have whole or partial ancestry from England, France, Germany, Spain, Norway, Latvia, Greece, Italy, and/or a hundred other lands or sub-lands, but there’s no Nation of White. What I and other writers have referred to as “whitebread culture” is a complex set of beliefs, styles, fashions, foods, aesthetics, and attitudes rooted in concerted attempts by business and government earlier in this century to forge a common “American” culture from all these diverse ethnic and immigrant groups. That’s not really “white culture”; that’s mainstream American culture, something adhered to in varying degrees by citizens of varying ethnicities.

(Besides, pure breeding is for primping show dogs, not for healthy work dogs and especially not for humans. Interaction and interbreeding makes us stronger, not weaker.)

Of course, some whites are more privileged than others; class and race were never uniformly synonymous. Demagogues here, in Europe, and in Africa have long exploited racial/ national/ color “identity” to get the relatively underprivileged to support programs and wars that mainly benefitted the overprivileged of similar ethnicity or skin hue.

And it doesn’t help that certain demographically-obsessed leftists help the demagogues by ranting against “White Male Society” as if everyone who was white and/or male was equally rich and/or powerful. Most rich people are white, but most white people aren’t rich. I belileve most people regardless of complexion would be better off in a more progressive, more diverse, and more equitable society than in what we’ve presently got. A left wing that really worked would reach out to these people, and not abandon them to the “Euro-Americans” or other such nonsense.

(Coming Sun., June 2: The big Misc. 10th Anniversary blowout at the Metropolis Gallery, across from SAM on University St. Details forthcoming.)

Response to the Above

Subject: ESU?

Date: Sat, 23 Dec 1995 00:44:50 -0800

From: “David J. Stennett” (Dstennett@ups.edu)

Organization: Euro-American Students’ Union

DEAR BIRBONE:

Hey there buddy O’l pal. This is David J. Stennett of the ESU at UPS.

I wanted to help you with some corrections. First… Eric Remington was only the Vice-President of the ESU chapter at UPS–while I am a CO-FOUNDER of the NATIONAL ESU which is now responsible for 34 chapters at University’s throughtout this great country (and growing into Canada and even Europe). Remington was a mere helper at the UPS chapter, along with the final 64 members. Ooo, yeah, we did get an Advisor. He was one Henry Johnson, the BLACK ASST. DEAN OF STUDENTS. In fact, ESU’s are everywhere. I thank you for the FREE PUBLICITY. Please make corrections where nessessary.

Alea Jacta Est!

David J. Stennett

P.S. Have a Great YUL

WELCOME BACK to your Ides-O-March Misc., the pop-culture column that amusedly notes the first wedding of the age of media mergers, in which the widow of the publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review married the retired publisher of the NY Times. Who said you can’t get far in the journalism biz these days?

UPDATE #1: The state legislature’s regular session expired with hundreds of conservative-social-agenda bills allowed to die. Among these was the Senate bill to drive strip clubs out of business via over-regulation, discussed here two weeks back. House members apparently felt the bill wouldn’t survive club operators’ lawsuits. Also gone, for this year at least, are bills to ban gay marriages, require parental consent for high-school HIV education, etc. Most of these proposals (except the anti-stripping bill) were introduced by Religious Right-friendly House Republicans but blocked by Senate Democrats. The Repo men hope to capture both chambers this November. You oughta work to try and stop that.

UPDATE #2: I asked you a few weeks back to suggest Disneyland character mascots for what might become the Anaheim Ex-Seahawks. Choices included Scrooge McDuck (natch), Jafar, and Cruella DeVil. My favorite was from the reader who, commenting on recent Seahawk seasons, recommended Sleepy.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: The guy who played Henry Blake on the M*A*S*H TV show and the guy who played Blake in the movie died within days of one another. Talk about becoming one with your role!

AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK (seen in the Stranger for the Backstage, 3/6): “Maria McKee: A Punk Edith Piaf.” Don’t bait me here, guys. The real Piaf was punker than you, me, or McKee will ever be. Ever heard her version of Lieber & Stoller’s “Black Leather Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”? Didn’t think so.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The P!pe is a tabloid run by ex-International Examiner staffer Soyon Im, who sez he wants “to debunk the myth that anything cool with Asian Americans is happening down in San Francisco or L.A.” It also helps debunk the squaresville reputation of King County’s large Asian American community. Issue #1 packs eight pages with stuff about Indian dance music, Japanese power pop, Korean fashions, “Pan-Asian” restaurants, Chinese-American comix, Vietnamese travelogue photos, Taiwanese interracial relationships, and old Japanese erotic art. There’s even a sex-advice column (where’d they get that concept?) by “Soybean Milkchick,” assuring readers there’s nothing deficient about Asian-American manhood. (In other words, don’t feel bad if you don’t look like the guys in that old Japanese erotic art.) At Pistil Books and elsewhere.

ONE TOO MANY?: Cocktail Nation hype has hit overdrive, less than two years after the first Combustible Edison record (albeit 15 years after Throbbing Gristle did its homage to Martin Denny). A glance at the “Cocktail Mania” display at Borders Music shows how nearly every record label with old middle-of-the-road instrumentals in its vaults is repackaging that material as something hip n’ ironic. And a local indie TV producer’s currently trying to launch a weekly entertainment-talk show called Atomic Lounge. Don’t be surprised if reproduction smoking jackets show up this fall in the Tiger Shop.

PAT-APHYSICS: Buchanan’s proving to be more than just another lifetime DC political/ media insider pretending to be an “outsider.” His (momentary?) campaign success signals the first significant crack in the GOP’s 16-year ruling coalition of fundamentalists and corporations (something I’ve been predicting or at least desiring for some time). About a quarter of the things he says (the parts about the plight of the downsized and the ripoff that is “free” trade) make more sense than what the other Republicans say. It’s just the other three quarters of the things he says are so freakish (the tirades against gays, feminists, immigrants, pro-choice advocates, and other humans guilty only of not belonging to his target demographic). If there’s hope, it’s that Buchanan’s polls rose after he started downplaying the hatefest talk and emphasizing the anti-corporate talk. Why’s the only candidate to challenge the sanctity of big money also the biggest bigot and bully? Why don’t any national-level Democrats speak against the corporate power-grab like Pat does?

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-culture column that still gets slightly disoriented when given a “Welcome to Fred Meyer” bag upon leaving the store.

SITE LINES: Adobe Systems is looking for new area digs for the Seattle software operation formerly known as Aldus, and possibly also for some of its currently Calif.-based divisions. I got just one piece-O-advice to the desktop publishing giant: keep it in town. You’re being tempted by developers to move to some soulless office park on some Eastside flood plain. But part of what made Aldus great was that it was in Pio. Square. The firm attracted people who liked walking to Ivar’s or to Mariner games. I believe this helped grow a corporate culture of creative, energetic people who could listen to others, including the people who used your warez; as opposed to the cult-like groupthink seen within certain office-park outfits.

ON A LONELY SATELLITE: Some of you can get 30 channels of DBX satellite music on your cable TV system. But what I want are the 60 extra channels the DBX company offers retailers and other clients via satellite dish. Instead of just mainstreamed selections like “Top Hits” and “R&B Oldies,” I could choose from polka, mariachi, Hawaiian, Danish, Greek, Brazilian, Indian, “Euro Pop,” “Canto Pop” (that’s Cantonese), “Traditional South African,” and that all-time fave “German Schlagers!”

AD VERBS #1: Denny’s sponsored the Harlem Globetrotters 70th Anniversary tour, which stopped in Seattle during African-American History Month. Let’s see, twelve Globetrotter players plus the sham-opposition team, trainers, and roadies… The restaurant chain instantly doubles its black employment!

AD VERBS #2: You may have been bemused by the Nike commercial with snippets of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as remade by KRS-One) alongside images of street basketball players; defining “the revolution” as mere recreation and fashion. Now the hypocrisy deepens. Nike and its ad agency Weiden & Kennedy have hired Scott-Heron as a consultant for a planned Nike-owned cable channel. The channel has no name or launch date; but you can expect it to rival MTV in associating “rebel” youth culture with the purchase and use of apparel and other consumer products. You can also safely bet it’ll never promote any “revolutionary” thinking which might question companies that export all their manufacturing jobs to pennies-a-day Asian sweatshops and spend all the “saved” expenses on dorky ads.

SPACE CASES: The pitifully thin ranks of Seattle all-ages concert spaces briefly increased by one before shrinking again. The venerable Showbox got special dispensation from the Liquor Board to run all-ages shows under strict conditions. Ever-zealous authorities spotted a relatively minor violation of one of those conditions one night, and promptly decreed the joint 21-and-over for all further events. This was two days before the Throwing Muses gig; promoters had to refund 200 tickets from under-21ers. The onetime punk palace has since changed management (again), so don’t blame that fiasco on the guys there now. Instead, keep questioning why our Powers That Be keep making all-ages music so hard to get put on and so easy to get shut down.

MIKE TAKES A HIKE: It’s a rise-n’-fall tale almost Shakespearean if it weren’t so mundane: A politician who used his out-of-step appearance and social sense to symbolize his devotion to unfashionable policies; who did more things for more people (or tried to) than any Washingtonian since the Scoop-Maggie gravy train; whose downfall came not from opponents but from a trusted aide who’d had enough of his social manners or lack thereof, as expressed thru unwanted “bear hugs.”

We may not have seen the last of Gov. Lowry, but neither may we see anyone like him again soon. And that’s a shame. He lived both in the world of three-martini politicians and that of six-fingered sawmill workers. He used the means of mainstream politics to help those outside the mainstream, at a time when politicians prefer to work chiefly for the overprivileged. (He even dared oppose tax rollbacks for Sacred Business!) And at a time when even many coffeehouse “leftists” ignore class issues or even sneer at working-class people, we need Lowry’s progressive populism more than ever.

MISC. DOESN’T BELIEVE everything’s cyclical, but still finds it cute when something that goes around comes around again. F’rinstance, local mainstream retailers seem again interested in exploiting the popularity of the local music scene. Why just last week, the E. Madison Shop-Rite had its neon sign altered, either deliberately or by accident, to read 1ST HILL FOO CENTER.

INDECISION ’96: Drat. Now I won’t get to recycle old druggie jokes about “a really bad Gramm.”

LEGISLATURE WANTS TO BAN STRIP CLUBS: When lap dancing is outlawed, only outlaws will wear buttfloss. But seriously, our elected guardians of hypocrisy are out to kill, via punitive over-regulation, one of the state’s growth industries, employing as many as 500 performing artists in King County alone, many of whom support other artistic endeavors with their earnings. (Old joke once told to me: “What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice.”)

Yes, these can be sleazy joints, drawing big bucks by preying on human loneliness. Yes, in a more perfect world these clubs’ workforce would have more fulfilling employment and their clientele would have more fulfilling sex lives instead of costly fantasies. Yes, no organized political faction is willing to defend them (‘cept maybe some sanctity-of-the-entrepreneur Liberterians). But if we let the state’s sultans of sanctimony outlaw something just ’cause they think it’s icky, there’s a lot of gay, lesbian, S/M and other stuff they’d love to ban next.

REELING: You’ve heard about the Oscar nominations representing a surprising triumph for “independent” cinema. I’m not so sure. Just as the global entertainment giants have created and/ or bought pseudo-indie record labels, so have they taken charge of “independent” cinema. The Independents magazine given out at 7 Gables theaters lists the following participating sponsor/ distributors: Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Films, Fine Line Features (owned by Turner Broadcasting, along with New Line and Castle Rock; all soon to be folded into Time Warner), Miramax (Disney), and Gramercy (PolyGram).

Seven Gables’ parent firm, the Samuel Goldwyn Co., just became a sister company to Orion, which at its peak was considered a “mini-major” but is indie enough for my purposes here. And there are a few other real indies still out there, including Jodie Foster’s Egg Films. But between buying up the domestic little guys and crowding out foreign producers, the Hollywood majors (half now non-US owned) are on their way to monopolizing everything on big screens everywhere in the world. Speaking of silenced voices…

THE OTHER SIDE: This paper’s reported how ethnic-rights and environmental activists in Nigeria have faced arrest, torture, and execution. The Nigerian govt. defended itself in a slick eight-page ad supplement running only in African-American papers (includingThe Skanner here). In the same quaintly stilted 3rd World PR prose style seen in the USA Today ad section Our World, the supplement extols the west African nation as a land of “Investment Opportunities” and “Investment Incentives,” whose rulers are “Truly Peace Makers and Peace Keepers.” The center spread insists the country’s military junta’s still on “The Road to Democracy” (“Only those detractors who deliberately persist in a negative view of Nigerians and their efforts fail to take account of all that Nigerians have achieved in a short time”).

The junta’s execution of opposition leader Ken Saro-Wiwa is discussed on the back page, in a “Letter to the Editor” by Af-Am conservative Rev. Maurice Dawkins: “The Nigerians are learning the hard way that the majority media and the international liberal left network is a dangerous foe.” Dawkins denounces Saro-Wiwa as “a terrorist determined to overthrow the government” and his anti-junta movement as “a group of bandits;” justifies the crackdown against his movement under “the right of a soverign nation to conduct business and maintain law and order within its borders,” and accuses the junta’s western critics of holding “a racist double standard, depicted by misinformation and disinformation.” In short, the persecutors are re-imaged as the persecuted–a classic Limbaughan doublespeak technique.

PASSAGE (British-Israeli-American social critic Eli Khamarov in Surviving on Planet Reebok): ” People are inherently good. Bad people are created by other bad people; their survival is guaranteed because of their safety in numbers.”

I’m Pseudo-Black and I’m Proud:

Kwanzaa for White B-Boyz

Original online essay, 11/20/95

This goes out to the phat n’ phunky white kids, hangin’ at the malls in their butt-cleavage threads and chuggin’ from 40-ouncers.

You might not know it, but you’re part of an American tradition of caucasian hip-wannabes remaking last year’s Black cultural stances into this year’s lifestyle uniforms.

Thing is, once whites start copying a black style, blacks do something else. When hippies took over electric blues, blacks went to soul. When soul became the property of Brit teen idols, rap emerged. Now that you’re the main gangsta market, Af-Am kids are listening to prosocial R&B harmonizers, as part of the Black Pride thang.

Another part of Black Pride is Kwanzaa. That’s a non-religious holiday created in 1966 by Black Studies prof Dr. Maulana Karenga. The name means “the first fruits of the harvest” in Swahili.

Here’s the short version of how it works: Each day from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, Kwanzaa celebrants hold a simple home ceremony at a table decorated with straw, fruit, ears of corn, a communal cup, and seven candles. They light one candle and speak about one of the holiday’s seven principles: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujama(cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith).

That’s a long ways from the glorified lowlife white kids love about gangsta music. But to be an ahead-of-the-curve hipster is to fake today’s blackness, not yesterday’s white fake blackness. Otherwise you’ll look as dorky as Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues bit looks today.

So put down that malt liquor (you probably don’t like the stuff really). Get one of Karenga’s books, like Kwanzaa: Origin, Concepts, Practice. He writes for descendents of the African Diaspora, but a lot of his message has universal meaning, including the part about how “History is Knowledge, Identity and Power.” Kwanzaa yenu iwe na heri (Happy Kwanzaa).

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)

I COULD SAY I now know what it was like to be a Cubs fan in ’84 or a Red Sox fan any year, but will instead just say: Damn fine ride. All possible kudos to the players, the coaches, and especially to Dave & Rick.

I’VE GOT IT: Here’s the way to make that maybe-finally-funded but yet-undesigned retractable-roof Son-of-Kingdome thang a better investment, and attract the last major-league sport we haven’t yet got: Make it the world’s first combination baseball-hockey arena! Just make the natural-turf baseball surface in a removable-tile format (that’s how they made instant natural-turf fields in some of the stadia for World Cup soccer last year). Then acquire some of those mobile bleachers like they use for Kingdome basketball. Then bring in whatever they use to make that temporary rink inside the Flag Pavilion at Xmas and stick it on top of the whatever floor’s left when the boxes of turf-tiles are trucked away for the winter. Even if we don’t get an NHL team (what with Seattle money investing in Vancouver’s team and Portland’s franchise try), truck-away turf would let the new ballpark be used as an off-season Kingdome annex for car and boat shows.

THE BROTHER ‘HOOD: Watched parts of the Million Man March on C-SPAN and CNN. The former’s unedited coverage was better, but CNN’s mix of speech segments, commercials and “analysis” brought up some of its own issues. The transitions between the sea of solemn Af-Am faces in the crowd and the pale yup models in the commercials was enough to bring home the message about America’s continuing class struggles.

CATHODE CORNER: You can now see Mystery Science Theater 3000 (the show with a guy and some robot puppets heckling bad sci-fi movies) even if you don’t live in a Viacom Cable neighborhood, thanks to KCPQ. The syndicated rerun version’s only an hour, so the movies are heavily truncated and/or split into two episodes. And so far they’re showing only films from the same repertoire of a couple dozen public domain 50’s badfilms that have circulated the cheapo-video circuit forever (probably due to trouble getting syndication rights to still-copyrighted B flicks). But at least there’s now something for Saturday stay-homes to watch at midnight that’s not the reeking undead corpse of SNL.

CONFIDENTIAL TO RYAN B.: Yes, I know Soma magazine’s a pathetic goop of “cliché generational angst” and “anti-marketing marketing.” But it’s no more so than any of those other 20-odd pretentious Frisco mags that claim to cover “The West Coast” but end up only writing about Frisco. At least the title’s appropriate, taken from a cutesy name for a “restored” ex-industrial district there but reminiscent of the mind-control drug in Brave New World. Speaking of printed effluent-for-the-affluent…

I KNOW I PROMISED to cease Weekly-bashing and stick to going after more worthy targets, but I couldn’t resist its sarcastic, classist ad depicting a glass-eyed, square-jawed, power-suited reactionary yuppie as its mythical average reader under the headline “One of the punk rock weirdos you’ll find in the Seattle Weekly/ EastsideWeek personals.”

MISC.’s TOP 6: I Should Coco, Supergrass (Capitol)… VCRs that mark recording/ playback progress in minutes and seconds, not “counter” numbers… The “Opportunities” ads in USA Today offering prepostrously unlikely franchise or multi-level-marketing schemes… Endust for Electronics (Johnson Wax)… The Total Package: The Evolution and Secret Meaning of Boxes, Bottles, Cans, and Tubes, Thomas Hine (Little, Brown & Co.)… The downscale, pulp-paper, ’60s-’70s men’s magazines sold at That’s Atomic on E. Olive (mags that relied less on sex than on faux-Spillane tuff-guy writing and garish graphics)…

MISC.’s BOTTOM 2: Internet service providers that go down for whole weekends, leaving users in acute Web Withdrawal… The slowness of America’s bookstore distribution system…

(Thanks to those who overcame the Sunday-night weather and Mariner Fever to attend my book release party and see four of the rockin’-est sets-O-tunes ever performed. The book itself (Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story) oughta be in more stores this week. As always, info’s on the Misc. World HQ website.)

AGAIN THIS WEEK, my early deadlines prevent me from commenting on the Ms/ Cleveland series. But I can talk about the strangely hostility-free jubilation after the four home victories that led to it. The outside-the-Kingdome postgame celebrations were described by one eyewitness as “loud and happy, not obnoxious or rude. It wasn’t like New York after a championship or Detroit after a championship. It was like Seattle after a championship.” Also of note: Fans who remembered the Sonics’ 1979 championship year found a new reason to hate sportscaster Brent Musburger. He dissed the Sonics then, and this time peppered his ABC anchor duties with East Coast-patronizing swipes at our “no name team” that he thought only got this far ‘cuz California folded. It’s no news to his distant cousin, local utility drummer Mike Musburger, who’s used to apologizing for the actions of a relative he’s never met.

‘ROUND THIS TIME previous years, the Kingdome used to host the annual Manufactured Housing Expo. It’s now held at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma. Last year’s Kingdome closure had something to do with the move, but it’s wiser for what used to be the “mobile home” industry to have its showcase closer to the path of new suburban development. Here in town, only a few small areas are zoned for factory-built housing, and they’re threatened by redevelopment. One of Seattle’s last big mobile home parks on Aurora was razed this past summer for a Home Depot, that shrine to the stick-built house. Still, the Kingdome was a great site for the show. They used to build a mini-neighborhood on the AstroTurf, with walkways lined with plastic landscaping. ‘Twas a fantasy world reminiscent of the domed cities in which, according to the World of Tomorrow exhibit at the ’62 Seattle World’s Fair, we’d all be living by now.

DEAD AIR DEPT.: It’s been about a month since the censorship-by-firing of Jim Hightower by ABC Radio, the people who have no qualms about bringing you avowed white-supremacist Tom Grant. Hightower’s now looking for another syndicator to revive his show. Besides being a hoot-and-a-half to listen to, the Austin sagebrush sage had the only national talk-radio show that dared question Big Money’s stranglehold on public policymaking. He probably wouldn’t have gotten into trouble with the network brass had he limited his barbs to politicians. In the corporate-media world, you can be more or less as “political” as you like, as long as you never challenge the sanctity of business. Speaking of pro-business “political” media…

DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: When I dissed George magazine recently, I neglected to mention the two good parts of its “Inagural Issue.” First was a comprehensive report on Krist Novoselic and the JAMPAC anti-censorship crusade. The other was a short piece by ex-Rocket scribe Karrie Jacobs about a proposed Women Veterans’ Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, drolly undertstating how its architects plan a main rotunda area with a glass ceiling.

HOME BODIES: Remember a few months back when we printed a call for volunteer models for some nude Seattle greeting cards? They’re finally out. Anecdote Productions’ $2 cards feature black-and-white tableaux posed at or outside Moe, the Mecca, the Wildrose, Rosebud Espresso, Cafe Paradiso, Glamorama, the Triangle Tavern, Urban Flowers, the Comet, Dick’s on Broadway, and (natch) the Pike Place Market and the Fremont Troll. They depict a variety of young-adult ladies and gents going about their everyday business, oblivious to the camera and unaware that there’s anything un-everyday about public threadlessness. They’re sexy in a wholesome, clean-cut-American sorta way. But they also invoke a deeper longing for a currently nonexistent way of life, one more “free” and unpretentious yet still totally social and urbane, not hippy-dippy “natural.” Available at M. Coy Books at 2nd and Pine.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, check out the low-key, lounge-y Charles Grodin talk show on CNBC, visit the Candy Barrell store in Pio. Sq. (one of the few places in town where you can still get Clark’s Slo-Poke suckers), and ponder these words of Wm. Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-93: “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”

In Praise of Male Heterosexuality

Original online essay, 1/9/95

I write to defend, yea to praise, the most commercially exploited sexuality in the so-called “mainstream” culture and the most viciously disrespected sexuality in the so-called “alternative” culture.

I assert that male heterosexuality is just as valid a lifestyle as female and/ or gay sexuality, and that male heterosexuals are just as human as women and gays. Not superior, but not inferior either.

The male heterosexuality I praise is neither the crude stereotype presented by the commercial sex industry (which seeks to turn men into mindless stimulus-response machines) nor that presented by the anti-porn movement (which avers that men already are such machines). Nor is it the “mystic warrior” stereotype (often a regression to presexual YMCA/ Boy Scout notions of “playing Indian”), nor the postmodern masochist (all too eager to accept self-pitiful guilt trips over other men’s crimes), nor the crude sexual boasting of “macho” rappers and metalheads (all about playing dumb power games with other guys and nothing about reaching out toward a woman’s heart).

No, I praise the man of passion and soul, of heart and joy, of unpretentious self-confidence and mutual respect, the man who eats and drinks and makes love with a big heart, who gives his lust to a woman while receiving grace from her and vice versa.

It is this passion, this yang zest for living and loving, that is obscenely absent from most manifestations of “sexual liberation” inside the “alternative” culture.

Without going too far into my private affairs, I will admit that I’m still on the path toward discovering my passions and releasing my inhibitions. But at least I know now where I need to be. I need to explore the fullness of my positive male self.

This does not mean by becoming a mere consumer of corporate sex, which is even more life-denying and unfulfilling than corporate food or corporate entertainment.

Nor does it mean the soulless “casual sex” advocated by the Hipster Chamber of Commerce types in NY, LA and especially SF. TheCyborgasm CD, hyped to death in the Frisco “alternative” media, is as loveless a formula product as any XXX video. And S/M can be equally life-denying. Of all the pictures in the recent local “Definitive Erotica” fetish-photo exhibit, only one held any real eroticism. It was also the only picture in which the two models appeared to like one another.

Perhaps love’s opposite isn’t hate or even indifference but power. It’s easy for some of us to see the destructive effects of power madness in the political Right. It can be harder to see it within ourselves. Power madness destroys the heart through the mind, by instilling the false but oh-so-tempting concept of Good People and Bad People (instead of average people who do good and bad things).

The people (of any demographic or political stripe) who claim to be The Good People are the ones who most need to be confronted with their averageness. That’s one of the things sex can teach you, that you’re not one separate loner rebel but a node of the biological continuum.

The devilish temptation of power is not the exclusive property of the Right. You see it in gay bars that use slogans like “Dare to be Different” then post a six-foot-long dress code inside the door. You see it in new-age “men’s movement” zines that promote misogyny in the guise of denouncing misandry. You see it in the stifling codes of thought emanating not only from the Right (denouncing almost all sexualities) but also from the neo-Puritan Left (endorsing almost all sexualities except het-male). And yes, you see it in “radical” ideologies that brand straight men as one mass entity of cruel, idiotic woman-haters.

The true heterosexual male, in my definition, doesn’t hate women. He likes them, having alredy learned to like himself. He takes honest pride in abetting the life and dreams of the woman he loves. The Mahabarata said that “the mark of an efficient society is its respect for women.” In olden days when life was physically tougher and women didn’t get enough iron in their diet, supporting women meant one thing. In this age of coed workplaces and two-career couples, supporting women means helping them achieve their goals in and out of the home.

Feminists and gays should invite the support of sympathetic het-males, not spread oversimplistic stereotypes against them. To engage in gender-bigotry is to tacitly, indirectly accept its use–including its use by those who would use it against you. To demand that more men behave humanely, you must first acknowledge those men who already do. And in the Age of Newt, progressive elements need all the sincere supporters they can get, right?

Besides, without an acknowledgement of a positive role for male yang energy, the Left is bereft of the psychic and emotional means to take charge. It can react (passively or aggressively) against the Right’s actions well enough, but it can’t take proactive steps to promote any agenda of its own.

Sexual love, whatever the genders of its participants, ought to be about breaking down the walls between souls, not building them up. Intimate ecstasy is the abandonment of individualistic power trips. It’s the willful sacrifice of cold individualism for the sake of building something stronger.

Real lovemaking, particularly real hetero lovemaking, its most spiritual level is about discovering and connecting on every level with a life force outside and different from yourself. It’s about the yang becoming enveloped by the yin; what a new-age yoga book described as “the jewel in the lotus.”

This is something far beyond the mechanical sex of the porn industry or the even more mechanical sex of much “alternative” erotica (e.g., the Mondo 2000 dream of one day being able to masturbate with robots–yecch!).

I do not condemn the sex industry or its clientele; a starving person without access to a homecooked feast will find at least some sustenance from an Egg McMuffin. And face it, an Egg McMuffin can seem downright tasty at the right time and context. But those who always settle for the most expedient never learn to train their palates.

My vision of het-male sexuality at its best is of a passion, of the Lust for Life that Van Gogh and Iggy Pop advocated in their own ways (not to mention Henry Miller or Cobain). It’s a vision of blood as the life force, the elixer that feeds the soul; of the heart, the vulnerable organ within us that we don’t see; of braving the risk of looking like a fool or an idiot, the risk of rejection; of intimacy; of the pain no one can see. It values sentimentality, the fulfillment of yearning through remembrance of what the heart truly feels. It values emotional equality instead of loveless sex, friendship instead of name-dropping parties to be seen at but not heard. It affirms life, instead of the surface-level soullessness that the “alternative” culture falls prey to just as badly as other subcultures in today’s America. Indeed, the “hipness” defined by NY/ Calif. is in some ways more life-denying and consumerist than a lot of “mainstream” subcultures.

But that’s not to say we don’t have our own cultural constraints working against active love. Seattle, this land of Mandatory Mellowness, this land of pale Edwardian smugness posing as “progressivism,” especially needs to learn the power of positive passion, to really believe in something, to be really attached to someone, to really live.

A five-Wednesday month means an extra visit from Misc., the pop-culture column that’s just as tired of people wanting to tell it the good news about hemp as it is of people wanting to tell it the good news about Amway.

WHICH MAG D’YA READ?: New Republic cover blurb, earlier this month: “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” Atlantic Monthly cover blurb, same week: “The New Intellectuals… Suddenly They’re Back, and They’re Black.”

THE FINE PRINT (the only subtitled closing credit in the video release of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue): “We wish to thank Alfa Romeo for authorizing the scene of the accident of the Alfa 164, the dynamics of which were purely ficticious.” (The scene involved a brake-fluid leak.)

UPDATE: For those who wanted to reach the Seattle Volunteer News, plugged here a few weeks back, its address is P.O. Box 70402, Seattle 98107, or email SeattleVol@aol.com. Speaking of helpful zines…

`WAVE,’ GOODBYE: Fourth Wave: Disability News and Views is an outspoken and borderline-courageous local quarterly newsprint mag published by the Disabilities Research and Information Coalition with funding from the state’s Developmental Disabilities Council. Or rather, it was. For six years FW communicated directly with 23,000 statewide readers about, as editor Victoria Medgyesi noted in a last-issue editorial, “such issues as love, sex, institutions, oppression, housing, discrimination, abuse, alcohol and drugs, misuse of funds, parents with disabilities, foster care, funding inequities, education, health care reform, `mercy’ killing, and self-advocacy.” It also “questioned the agencies and organizations that deal with disability concerns by asking them the kinds of questions they ask the community-at-large: How many people with disabilities do you have on your paid staff? On your board of directors?”

Eventually, challenging the bureaucracy that fed it caught up with FW. The state canceled the last year of the mag’s funding contract, feeding the money instead to a PR campaign aimed less at fostering self-empowerment for people with physical, mental or developmental disabilities and more at getting resource listings and positive-role-model messages into the mainstream news media. This spring is the first quarter without an issue of FW.

Medgyesi says of the cutoff, “Mostly it’s an impression of keeping disabled people quiet and out of sight of most people. Most of these (media) programs have been developed to make able-bodied people feel better about how they’ve treated people with disabilities. But we looked how the system oppressed and exploited people with disabilities, how it promoted images of pity regarding them in the media. I’ve gone from `why did they cut our funding?’ to `how did we get away with that for six years?’ ” Medgyesi’s willing to correspond with people interested in starting similar ventures, c/o Whole Note Media, 911 Western, #555, Seattle 98104. Speaking of mainstream media…

THIS JUST IN: The network-switcheroo has one positive byproduct: the new KSTW news. It’s fast, info-packed, straight-no-chaser, almost free of happy-talk, little tabloid trash (aside from the requisite O.J. doses), like a local CNN Headline News instead of the drawn-out, filler-filled old KSTW news or the anchorperson-as-celebrity tedium of the other stations.

MISSING THE TRAIN: The transit vote was actually fairly encouraging. The 53 percent no vote was partly influenced by (1) natural suspicion against big public-works projects; (2) suburban rugged-individualists who mistakenly think they’re not part of the larger community; (3) the usual backlash against alternatives to driving; and (4) city-supported opposition in Everett, which got cut out of the light-rail portion of the plan in a last-minute budget cut. When the RTA resubmits the plan, preferably later this year, they should bring Scoopville back in, get out more urban votes, and work better at turning outlying residents onto the possibility of not just commuting but living without having to haul your personal ton of steel everyplace.

‘TIL NEXT WE STRAIN EYES TOGETHER, first- and second-day Stranger readers oughta consider attending the Sheryl Wiser folk gig Thursday night at the OK Hotel bar. Proceeds from Wiser’s tip jar (there’s no cover) will benefit “The Church of Lingirie,” a local ministry providing new underwear to homeless women. Nice music for a good cause, proving the ol’ slogan “Support Can Be Beautiful.

UPDATE: In our In/Out List a few weeks back, we listed “tribute albums” as an Out. More evidence: Duran Duran’s recording a CD tribute to bands that “inspired” them, including a cover of Public Enemy’s “911 Is A Joke.”

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a billboard on a Snohomish County Community Transit commuter bus, selling houses in my ol’ hometown of Marysville by showing a whitebread yuppie nuclear family picnicking in all-white clothes): “Models do not represent any race or family formation preference.”

DAY OF DISCOVERY: I finally realized why I have so much trouble understanding post-adolescent obsessions. It’s because I never really had a post-adolescence. I can love cute childish things, silly adolescent things, and certain mature adult things. But there’s a certain stage of development some people pass through, some people never get over, and I skipped–the stage of the “educated fool” (the dictionary definition of “sophomore”). It’s the moment of a romanticized first awakening to the complications of grownup existence. Not real understanding, but just the initial shock. My late adolescence and early adulthood were times of constant emotional and frequent financial turmoil. I didn’t move from a sheltered suburban upbringing to a swinging college town and suddenly discover how complex life was. To me, life always was complex. So I didn’t get, and still don’t get, a lot of post-adolescent (or post-adolescent-retentive) compulsions, such as (in no particular order): Terrence McKenna, Anais Nin, Naomi Wolf, Charles Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, the yuppie Hendrix cult, the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, neopaganism, “serious” science fiction, raves, pot, acid, semiotic analyses of Madonna, J.D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, &c., &c. It may also be why I still love the ’60s Batman but am bored by the ’80s Batman.

RE-TALES: Chain stores are dropping on Broadway while indie merchants survive: first Burger King turns off its broilers after Xmas, now Crown Books has suddenly shuttered without even a clearance sale. In the District, Cellophane Square’s experiment with an all-vinyl store at its old 42nd St. location failed; now the original Cello2 is gone (ah, the memories…) and everything’s being consolidated at the new site.

Meanwhile, Seattle’s other surviving original-punk-era record shop also shutters this month. Time Travelers was to have been demolished for the new library that failed on last November’s ballot; the current owners decided to close anyway. In recent years it’s been less of a record than a comic-book store, a hard business with nonreturnable merchandise of very unpredictable popularity, with two much larger competitors downtown.

ARS GRATIA ARTIS DEPT.: ArtFBI (Artists For a Better Image) is a Maryland-based group devoted to preserving arts funding by attacking perceived ideas about the arts and artists spread by politicians, the media, and by artists themselves. The group’s Internet site (gopher.tmn.com) includes articles and other materials about the necessity for artists to reclaim their role at the center of the community.

I and other Stranger writers have written in the past that federal arts funding has too largely served to subsidize formula entertainment for the rich. The entities doing most of the real creative endeavors here and across the country still live and work on the fringes, while the biggest cries to stop the NEA’s demise come from institutional theaters and museums that serve the Haves with slick nonthreatening material. While I still believe the upscale should be able to support their own leisure pursuits, I also oppose Newt’s crusade against arts funding–because it’s really a crusade against art, against what art ought to be. The Right is trying to silence all opposition, real or potential, to its societal vision of greed and obedience. To fight this, we’ve gotta do what ArtFBI suggests, and reassert the role of art at the heart of society. Art has to communicate a meaning to people, and not just to liberal-arts grads either. Part of the legacy of modernism is the way the upper classes used newfangled “sophisticated” art forms and genres to define its own difference from the masses. This alliance between modernism and elitism gave Stalin and Hitler their excuses to wage war against expressionistic, surrealistic, nonrepresentational, or oppositional artists, while mandating life-denying kitsch art (cf. The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Newt doesn’t want to kill artists or destroy their works; he’ll settle for isolating them into the margins of discourse by smear campaigns disguised as political funding debates.

WEB FOOTING: I wish I knew who first wrote “I apologize for the length of this message; I did not have the time to make it shorter.” The reason you’ve been seeing fewer, longer items in Misc. lately’s ‘cuz I’ve been busy with (1) my book (now retitled Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story; current ETA: April); (2) my live talk-variety performance event (Fri., 1/20 at 911 Media Arts, 117 Yale Ave. N.); and (3) my current addiction of the month, the World Wide Web.

For once, there’s something worth the Cyberhype. The WWW’s a Swiss-invented software protocol for sending cross-referenced texts, graphics, sounds and other files thru the Internet. Sign up for a local Internet access service, get the appropriate software (my pick: Netscape), and start following the hypertext links to assorted files at assorted sites in assorted places around the world.

The WWW is nothing less than a generalist info-browser’s wet dream. You’re just a click or two or twelve away from scientific and technical info, sampled bits from new bands, scans of new and historic art and photos, classic and PoMo literature, attempts at collaborative art and fiction, episode guides to your favorite sitcoms, online-only music and culture zines, and online editions of your favorite print mags, including that stoic German newsweekly Der Spiegel (the latter has just the articles: no cute ads for Euro-only products like mayo-in-a-tube, no gratuitous nudity like the topless skin diver DS used to illustrate a story about water pollution).

But among my fave WWW places are the personal home pages set up by communicatively-minded individuals with data-storage privileges at their access providers. They’re like personal zines without the Kinko’s bills. There are hundreds of them already, ranging from plain-text first-person narratives to complicated multi-page hypertexts with sound files and original and/or sampled pix. Topics range from travelogues and hobbies (model planes, sci-fi) to essays on the big issues of the day (politics, corporate America, female masturbation techniques). Some pages have BBS-like write-in features, like opinion polls or add-on stories. It’s all chaotic, unregulated, wonderfully DIY (despite the rising number of ad-based sites) and a needed alternative to top-down, elitist commercial media. Speaking of which….

DON’T TAKE IT FOR GRANT-ED: Another of my favorite WWW sites is the online version of Extra!, the journal of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting, a watchdog group documenting how conservative-biased America’s allegedly “liberal media” really are.

The online Extra! currently includes an exposé of Bob Grant, the New York-based talk radio host soon to appear on KVI. Grant isn’t merely another of those tasteless boors who excuse their grossness under the now-sacred rubric of “Political Incorrectness.” He’s an admitted blatant racist. Here are some things he’s said on WABC-AM, New York (as compiled by FAIR and New York magazine): “We have in our city, we have in our state of New York, we have in our nation, not hundreds of thousands but millions of sub-humanoids, savages, who really would, would feel more at home careening, careening along the sands of the Kalahari or the dry deserts of eastern Kenya — people who, for whatever reason, have not become civilized.”…”I can’t take these screaming savages, whether they’re in that African Methodist Church, the AME church, or whether they’re in the streets, burning, robbing, looting. I’ve seen enough of it.” Grant has also advocated the discredited pseudoscience of eugenics (which Hitler used in his “master race” allegations), and has advocated, if only as a pie-in-the-sky-someday hope, that non-whites be legally forbidden from having children. KVI loyalists wrote tons of nasty letters last year when Times columnist Jean Godden called the station “KKKVI.” Adding Grant to the station just shows how far-from-wrong Godden was. It relates to something I wrote a couple of years back, that demographics is the death of democracy. Many of last fall’s victorious Newtzis won by slim margins furnished by talk-radio listeners. Our country is being run on the political ideas that attract the upscale, middle-aged male audiences talk-radio advertisers seek.

Meanwhile, Jim Hightower, Austin populist and one of the few non-demagogues in syndicated talk radio, is now on in Seattle, 10 am-1 pm Saturdays on KIRO-FM (100.7). So far, Hightower’s only attracting bargain-rate, run-of-schedule ads (Ovaltine, Bromo Seltzer).

(Montreal has its Winter Carnival. Seattle has its first annual Midwinter Night’s Misc.-O-Rama, 8 pm Friday at 911 Media Arts, 117 Yale Ave. N. All ages are welcome to an evening of readings, games, weird videos, and general frolic.)