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Welcome back to Misc., the column that just can’t get into that latest filmed-in-Seattle TV show, Under One Roof. If the James Earl Jones character’s supposed to be a veteran Seattle cop, howcum he never mentions whether or not he ever worked with Frasier’s dad?
GODDESS AND MAMMON DEPT.: You may already know how self-help, “new age” counseling and personal therapy have become big business. They’re so big now, the conglomerates are circling to take it over from the entrepreneurs that started it. The publishing conglomerates have muscled in on the new-age book scene, sometimes buying up titles originally issued by independent publishers. NBC’s got a (surprisingly good) new-age talk show, The Other Side. The major record labels are purportedly looking to start imprints for meditation tapes and light-instrumental CDs. And, according to the Wall St. Journal, none other than the Walt Disney Co. is getting into the seminar/ retreat game. The Disney Institute will open next year on a previously-undeveloped part of Disney World’s 50 or so square miles. It’ll offer speakers, artists-in-residence, cooking schools, sports and recreation programs, all for $700 for a three-day stay. I dunno if they’ll have any Wiccans showing up to promote alternatives to the stereotypes of witches in cartoon features, or if they’ll ever bring in the author of The Peter Pan Syndrome.
BB CUES: Last week I mourned the demise of the Western Coffee Shop. This week I’ve happier news: The Cave Man Kitchen barbecue stand, the single greatest thing about Kent, now has a somewhat more convenient branch in an ex-Taco Bell on Lake City Way.
LIVE AIR: One of this column’s running themes over the years has been the general suckiness of modern radio broadcasting (including much “public” radio) and various attempts to overcome it (activist groups like CURSE and the zine Radio Resistors Bulletin, pirate stations, micro-power stations, the cassette-trading underground). Now I’m happy to report a potential answer to crummy radio (at least at home or work) at last: Real-time Internet audio. The package of software programs to make this possible, called RealAudio, is now in beta testing by Progressive Networks, a Pioneer Square-based startup company started by Microsoft escapee Rob Glaser. The software to record RealAudio files will cost about $100; the playback software will be free. To record or receive RealAudio you’ve gotta have a computer powerful enough to run the software; but such machines can cost less than $1200 new and much less used. (The Western Washington U. station KUGS is already live on the Net, using a software system called CU-See Me that requires a more powerful workstation and a direct Internet hookup (instead of a modem and a phone line) to receive properly.)
Initial press reports tout the RealAudio technology as a way for established broadcasters, record companies, and the like to disseminate their works or promotional materials. The company’s website includes NPR and ABC Radio newscasts, O.J. updates, and some oldtime radio comedy segments. Company PR touts out-of-town sportscasts, music promotion and on-demand traffic reports as possible future applications.
But the company’s name is indicative of the revolutionary opportunities of this invention. It can essentially turn any Internet connection into a virtual radio station, allowing AM-quality reception of radio-refused music and information from almost anywhere to almost anywhere. The firm’s core staff includes Maria Cantwell, one of the Demo Congresspeople defeated in last November’s talk-radio sleaze assault. In addition, the company’s biggest single financial patron is Mitch Kapor, the ex-Lotus Software mogul who started the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the loudest public voices for cyberspace freedom and against government eavesdropping on and censorship of computer communication.
Appropriately, the company’s World Wide Web site (http://www.realaudio.com) will soon include a page called “What’s New in Activism Online,” billed in company PR as an information and volunteer-opportunities exchange “aimed at bringing the power of the Web and the Internet to bear on social and political issues.”
KIRK KERKORIAN WANTS TO BUY CHRYSLER: If the notorious Las Vegas financier does for the automaker what he did for Western Airlines and MGM, expect the Big Three to become the Big Two by the end of the decade.
Here at Misc. we’re anxiously counting down the days (25 on the day this ish comes out) until KSTW starts running CBS shows. Since That Trial will probably still be going on, the big network switch means starting March 13 you won’t see Young & Restless on channel 11 instead of not seeing it on channel 7.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Seattle Volunteer is a handy four-page newsletter run by Andrew Stewart and Laurie Roth, alerting readers to some of the myriad ways they can invest time-n’-sweat to build a better community. It offers free 50-word notices every other month for arts, AIDS, environment, health, education, and political groups that could use your help. The third issue should be out for free next week at some of the same places this paper’s at; or you can subscribe by sending a donation ($25 or more preferred) to P.O. Box 70402, Seattle 98107.
WHICH AD D’YA READ?: Molson Ice beer ad, 1995: “Don’t worry. Your tongue won’t stick.” Rainier Ice ad, 1994: “Warning: Keep tongue off billboard.”
NORTH OF THE BORDER: The fanning out of Hollywood bigshots across the western states continues. I’m told the most recently “discovered” homesite for frequent-flier showbiz commuters is the outer exurbs of Boise. As you’ve seen from the Little Hollywoods in New Mexico, Montana, Colorado and the San Juans, when the L.A. types show up three things tend to happen: 1) real estate prices soar so locals can’t afford to live there anymore; 2) these millionaires who proudly live half a gas tank from the closest supermarket and 100 gallons of jet fuel from their jobs start preaching to the locals about eco-consciousness; and 3) they bring in their favorite L.A. chefs to invent a “traditional regional cuisine” for the area. It’ll be fun to find out what the “traditional regional cuisine” becomes for a state whose very license plates promote “Famous Potatoes,” whose only movie-based association with dining came from Steve Martin’s cameo in The Muppet Movie, as a waiter offering “Sparkling Muscatel by Fine Wines of Idaho.”
NOT IN THE CARDS: Our Pike St. pals at Edge of the Circle Books submitted an ad to KNDD that began as follows: “Magick, Witchcraft, Paganism; words once whispered are now spoken boldly. Though they cut down the sacred groves, burned our religious texts, and tortured and killed people beyond counting for the `crime’ of witchcraft, our numbers have grown so large that they cannot stop us.” The ad that ran for one day before the station banned it after receiving 25 complaining phone calls. The Viacom-owned station (which had run other ads from the store for three years) first asked the store to submit a “less offensive” spot, then agreed to refund its money.
BEAMING: Viacom boss Sumner Redstone has spoken of one of his new acquisitions, Star Trek, as a “global branded identity.” Several analysts over the years have seen the United Federation of Planets as a metaphor for an cold-war-era American self-image, an image of the benevolent colonist bringing order and commerce while allowing at least on-paper autonomy to its “partners.” A case could now be made for the Federation reflecting Hollywood’s self image of a culture empire enveloping the universe, either smothering local arts and customs or using them to its ends. Redstone wants to have everybody on at least this planet viewing, reading and listening to the same things. This is the polar opposite of what many of the acts now on KNDD believe or originally believed.
As further example, note the Week in Rock segment on MTV (another Viacom property) about indie labels–it gave most of its camera time to those “indies” that have alliances with or are part of the Big Six record giants; it talked about the likes of Sub Pop not as patrons of marginal voices but as generators of future major-label stars; and it was peppered with ex-indie singers who unanimously assured viewers that an act could get screwed by an indie just like by a major.
Mind you, there’s plenty that Big Entertainment has given us (I’ve been heard to compare modern American politics to the ST episode with the Evil Kirk vs. the Ineffectual Kirk). But it’s time to put a new concept to work. Instead of global identities, we need to promote and empower the whole motley world at home and abroad. Make it so.
UPDATE: Sir Mix-A-Lot turns out to be the best part of KIRO’s anthology show The Watcher. Without Mix’s narrative interludes (which he probably seriously rewrites), it’s just a package of trite morality tales that’d seem dorky even on the USA Network…. We told you last fall that golf was fast becoming the latest hip sport. Now, an All-Golf Channel will be available to cable systems. And aNude Golf tape will be in video stores this week!
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: First, a little background. Sunny Delight is an orange-flavored punch (made mainly of water and fructose) from Procter & Gamble, with typically clever P&G ads. Instead of marketing it to kids as really hot stuff, P&G’s ads try to convince parents that kids already think it’s really hot stuff. They depict kids praising the taste and texture of what they call “Sunny D” (implying the drink’s so popular it’s inspired its own schoolyard slang) and bad-mouthing other vitamin-fortified beverages (including some mysterious product identified only as “Purple Stuff”). Anyhow, the regular Sunny Delight’s only an average faux-OJ, better than Tang but not up to the standard of Five Alive. The good stuff is the new variety, the imitation kiwi flavor Sunny Delight. It’s green, it’s goopy, and the P&G chemists have amazingly synthesized the nutty-tangy taste of what the California Kiwi Commission advertises as “the fruit that feels fuzzy but tastes fabulous.”
BEAN THERE: They hate Starbucks in Frisco. Every snide Bay Arean zine, columnist and cartoonist I’ve read has ranted against the non-funky, high-rent-paying green coffee stands increasingly dotting the City That Thinks It’s God. You never saw any of these people complaining when Frisco-based BankAmerica absorbed Seattle’s two biggest banks. I say it’s the least they should accept in return for NoCal’s past domination of Northwest arts and its present domination of Northwest finance. Besides, experience here has shown that Starbucks hardly drives independent coffeehouses under, as the Frisco writers warn. It increases interest in specialty coffee, which leads some of its new customers to graduate beyond its own chain-store atmosphere toward independents.
DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: Just as the KCMU Kontroversey settles down, we face a bigger problem. The Newtzis wanna eliminate all Federal support for public radio and TV. Despite what editorial cartoonists allege, this won’t knock Sesame St. or similar established shows off the air. More importantly, it won’t harm conservative-biased shows like The McLaughlin Group, Firing Line, and Tony Brown’s Journal that get corporate money.
No, it’s a naked attempt to silence non-conservative voices. Already, producers of non-con dramas (Tales of the City) and documentaries (The ’90s) have had to close shop because neither governments nor corporations want to fund them. The airwaves need a place for non-corporate points of view. Public broadcasting’s already too dependent on pledge drives (which lead to programs biased toward upscale tastes) and corporate grants (which lead to programs biased toward conservative priorities). The disputes at KCMU centered around a management that wanted to lead the station (which gets no money from the Feds) toward sucking up to affluence. Newt’s plan would drive public radio and TV more firmly down that path. (Extra! notes that NPR, the “liberal” star in the public-broadcasting constellation, already shows the same bias toward conservative sources and interviewees that Nightline andMcNeil-Lehrer have.)
Just as local cable systems have to subsidize public access channels, so should the commercial broadcast industry be taxed to provide a floor of support for public broadcasting. This idea was part of the original early-’70s plan for public TV, but was quashed by that ol’ media-hater Nixon.
WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE DEPT.: In a recent editorial, Weekly publisher David Brewster thinks “liberals” could get back into power by, well, by ceasing to be so darn liberal. He envisions a return to Old Democrat tactics–buying votes by promising construction projects and other goodies in voters’ districts. Everything would work out fine, Brewster apparently believes, if “liberals” and “progressives” got back into big-time ward heeling and stopped worrying about trifles like fighting injustice or helping poor people. This is exactly the attitude that’s causing the Dems’ troubles. By failing to offer (let alone deliver) a competing vision for society, the Dems can only compete with the GOP on the basis of fund-raising and influence-peddling, terms on which the GOP can win every time.
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:Â 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.)
12/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)
MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:
LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS
HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…
MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”
UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…
BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.
The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.
How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).
Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…
FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).
One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.
But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…
140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”
YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.
(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)
AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”
WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.
A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.
WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.
The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.
The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…
EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.
DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.
PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.
THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.
URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”
IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…
Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:
PASSAGE
Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”
REPORT
There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.
Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Procrustean”
11/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:
LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’
IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY
Welcome again to Misc., the pop-culture corner that has one question about the Varsity’s recent documentary Dream Girls: If an all-male Japanese theater is called Noh, is an all-female Japanese theater a Yesh?
AW, SHOOT: We begin with condolences to those who went to the Extrafest fiasco, billed as a free concert but more accurately a way for filmmakers to get crowd shots without paying people. The producers’ inexperience in live events showed throughout the evening. Some bands only got to play as few as three songs. There were long impatient waits during lighting setups. The director’s opening remarks treated the audience as idiots, asking them to be nice kids and not mosh. That only got audience members to mosh at their first opportunity; they were met by harsh security, who grabbed some folks by the neck, dragged them into the hallway, and made them stand for Polaroids for some reason. Three kids tackled a particularly nasty guard. Two-thirds of the audience walked out long before the end.
UPDATE: Looks like Nalley’s Fine Foods won’t be sold to archrival Hormel after all. The farmers’ co-op that holds a big stake in Nalley’s current parent company don’t want to lose the big processor-manufacturer as a captive market for their products.
GIMME A BRAKE: The Times recently reported that UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, since her appointment to the job, had been parking her Beemer in a campus space signed “Handicapped Parking/By Permit Only.” The UW Daily reported it, causing a temporary minor ruckus. The university administration resolved the matter by having the signs at Hedge’s space changed.
SPEAKING OF SPORTS: The Seahawks want to make the beleaguered Kingdome a truly beautiful place at last: Real exterior surfaces, bigger and better concourses, a slick green-glass entrance with shops and banquet rooms, a permanent exhibition pavilion on part of the current parking areas, landscaping around the remaining lots, even more bathrooms. The problem, natch, is the price tag: $120 million. The team doesn’t have that kind of dough and the county surely doesn’t, especially right after spending almost as much to fix the Dome than it originally spent to build it. The Mariners, meanwhile, say they don’t want to sign another long-term Dome lease no matter what’s done to the place–they want their own space, preferably with a mega-costly Toronto Skydome sunroof, for something in the $250 million range.
This has always been a town whose dreams far exceeded its pocket contents. For over 30 years we’ve planned and/ or built an array of “world class” structures on the limited wealth of a regional shipping and resources economy. The result: A handful of refitted older buildings, another handful of decaying newer buildings, and one truly world-class structure (the Space Needle, built with all private money). These days, we’re besieged with blueprints or ideas for one all-new stadium and one revamped one, a square mile of condos and token green space, a new concert hall, a big new library, an addition to the convention center, a new airport nobody except bureaucrats wants, a new city hall and/ or police HQ, and three or four different potential regional transit systems.
Just ‘cuz there’s some Microsoft millionaires out buying Benzos on the Eastside, it doesn’t mean Seattle’s become a town of unlimited fiscal resources. Of course, the politicians (most of whom never met a construction project they didn’t like) will support as many of these schemes as they think they can get away with, rather than bother with comparatively mundane initiatives like health care and low-income housing that don’t lead to campaign contributions from big contractors and construction unions.
However, let it be known that I like the Dome, for all its faults. It’s a great place for monster-truck rallies, boat shows, and the temporary neighborhood built each year for the Manufactured Housing Expo. No matter what happens to the sports teams, the Dome should be maintained at least for these uses.
GOTH-AM CITY: Saw a public-access tape made at the Weathered Wall’s Sun. nite “Sklave” gothic-fetish disco event. It accurately represented the spirit of the event, which I’ve been to and liked. But I took issue with one long segment where some young dancers in pale faces and black clothes whined that “Seattle is just SO behind the times.” This death-dance stuff’s almost as old as punk, and I can assure you it’s had local consumers all that time. But being new or hot isn’t the important thing anymore. What’s important is doing your own thing, which just might be the Bauhaus/ Nick Cave revival thing. Speaking of the beauty of death…
HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN: For a long time I was bummed out by the grownup Halloween. It was one of the three or four nights a year when people who never go out invaded my favorite spots, acting oh-so-precious in their identical trendy role-playing costumes and their stuck-up suburban attitudes. But this year I began to understand a bit about the need for people to let their dark sides out to play. I was reminded of this very indirectly by, of all things, Tower Books’ display of Northwest writers. There were all these guys who’d moved here and apparently couldn’t believe anybody here could have the kind of angst or conflicts needed for good storytelling. These writers seemed to think that just ‘cuz we might have some pretty scenery, nothing untoward could ever happen here. It’s horror writers and filmmakers (especially in recent years) who understand that some of the worst evils are dressed in alluring physical beauty. If a simple-minded drinking holiday can help people understand this principle, so be it.
THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD: A glowing Times story claimed there were approximately 1 million seats sold in each of the past two years to Seattle’s top 12 nonprofit theater companies and the for-profit touring shows at the 5th Ave. Theater. (The story waited till far inside the jump page to say that attendance at some of the biggies, especially the Rep, is actually down a bit.) Even then, more seats are sold each year to the major theater companies than to any local sports enterprise except (in a good year) the Mariners. If you add the smaller, often more creative drama and performance producers, the total might surpass the Mariners’ more popular years. (All the big sports teams together still draw more than all the big theaters together.)
Maybe Seattle really is the cultured community civic boosters sometimes claim it to be. Or maybe we’re a town of passive receivers who like to have stories shown to us, whether in person or on a screen, instead of creating more of our own (our big theaters aren’t big on local playwrights, even as some of them get into the business of developing scripts to be marketed to out-of-town producers).
THE FINE PRINT (inner-groove etchings on Monster Truck Driver’s new EP): “We don’t want to change your oil…”, “…We just want to drink your beer.”
BEAUTIFUL SONS: There’s still no real Cobain memorial in Seattle, but there’s one of sorts in Minneapolis. The paper City Pagessez Twin Cities Nirvana fan Bruce Blake (who’s also organizing Nirvana stuff for Cleveland’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame) has started a Kurt Cobain Memorial Program at the Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center. It’s a fundraising campaign to provide art supplies and toys to hospitalized kids. Donations can be sent to Carol Jordan at the hospital, 2525 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.
BUTTING IN: The New York City government’s proposed laws against smoking in most public places, similar to Washington state’s tough new law. In response, Phillip Morris threatens to move its corporate HQ out of NYC, and also (in a move that would more directly affect politicians’ lifestyles), canceling its support for NYC arts groups. Some of these groups are lobbying the state to give in to PM’s demands. Think of it as a warning to anybody who still thinks artistic expression can stay independent of its Medicis. This might be what conservatives wanted when they slashed govt. arts support, driving producers into the influence of corporate patrons.
The issue of the arts and cancer-stick money is working out far differently in Canada. In that paternalistic land-without-a-First-Amendment, the government banned all cigarette advertising (even in print) five years ago. But they left a loophole: Cig makers could still sponsor arts and sports events, under their corporate names. The feeling at the time was that it might help a few museums and in any event, the Big Two Canuck cancer-stick makers, Imperial Tobacco and RJR MacDonald, didn’t put their corporate names on cig brands. Instead, the companies formed paper subsidiaries with the names of all their main brands (Craven A Ltd., Benson & Hedges Inc.) These false-front companies exist only to sponsor and advertise sports, entertainment and some arts events (the Players Ltd. IndyCar race, the Matinee Ltd. women’s tennis tourney), using the same logos as their parent firms’ no-longer-advertised cigs.
FOREIGN ADVENTURES: The non-invasion of Haiti just might signal a revised definition of “America’s Strategic Interests.” In the past, we warred and invaded over material resources like oil to feed US domestic industry. Now, we’re taking charge of a country whose main asset is cheap labor for multinational corporations. It’s certainly feasible to think of this as the first military occupation of the NAFTA/ GATT era.
TUBEHEADS: Seeing the KCTS “Then and Now” promos with those old kinescoped clips of live, local, studio-bound educational shows, I sure miss those things (I’m just old enough to remember old shows like Builder’s Showcase and Dixy Lee Ray‘s nature lessons). There is something special about live TV that you just can’t get in edited location videotape; the lack of commercials makes the discipline even tougher. Studio TV is the electronic incarnation of Aristotle’s rules of dramatic unity: one place, one time, one linear sequence of events. Now I love shows like Bill Nye, but there’s something to be said for the surviving studio-bound shows likeThe Magic of Oil Painting. And the sheer volume of local programs on KCTS in the pre-Sesame St. years made it the closest thing to community TV before cable access. To see such examples of Pure TV compared negatively to the likes of Ghost Writer is like those talk-show beauty makeovers that turn perfectly fine-looking individuals into selfless style clones.
PVC BVDS: The Times, 10/14, reports a New Hampshire co.’s making thermal underwear (available thru the Land’s End catalog) from recycled plastic items including pop bottles. Just the thing to wear under your vinyl outerwear when it’s too cold to wait in line outside on Fetish Night. Alas, they only come in navy blue or green, not black. (Other non-fetish plasticwear’s available at Patagoniain Belltown.)
MEAT THE PRESS: Green Giant’s moving in on that health-food-store staple, the meatless burger patty. Ordinarily, this would be just another case of a corporation muscling in on a product developed by little guys. What’s different is that Green Giant’s owned by the same Brit conglomerate that owns Burger King, causing a potential conflict-O-interest in its slogans for the veggieburger, promising, a la ice beer, “more of what you want in a burger, less of what you don’t.”
THE CLAPPER: Spielberg, ex-Disney exec Jeff Katzenberg, and Courtney Love’s boss David Geffen want to start their own global movie/ music/ multimedia studio empire. What’s more, Bill Gates is rumored to be investing in it. I thought Gates had more sense. The last guy in his tax bracket with no media experience who tried to buy into the movies, John Kluge, is still pouring cash down the fiscal black hole of Orion Pictures.
KEEP ON YOU-KNOW-WHAT DEPT.: This year, it’s Seattle’s turn to get acknowledged on a nameplate with the Olds Aurora. Next year, according to automotive trade mags, there’ll be a light-duty pickup called the Toyota Tacoma! Besides falling trippingly off the tongue, the name implies a tuff, no-nonsense truck for a tuff, no-nonsense town. My suggested options: Super Big Gulp-size cupholders, Tasmanian Devil mudflaps, half-disconnected mufflers. My suggested color: Rust.
GETTING CRAFTY: Regular Misc. readers know I write lots about the aesthetic of community life, about how architecture, urban planning and the “everyday” arts affect life and health. These things have been thought about for a long time. One proof of this was the NW Arts & Crafts Expo, a collection of sales- and info-display booths earlier this month at the Scottish Rite Temple. This wasn’t street fair art, but work of the early-20th-century Arts & Crafts Movement. At its widest definition, this movement ranged from back-to-simplicity purists like Thoreau and UK philosopher William Morris to unabashed capitalists like author-entrepreneur Elbert Hubbardand furniture manufacturer Gustave Stickley. They believed an aesthetically pleasing environment enhanced life, and such an environment should be available to of all income brackets.
The movement’s influenced peaked between 1900 and 1930–the years of Seattle’s chief residential development. It’s no coincidence that the lo-density “single family neighborhoods” Seattle patricians strive to defend are largely built around the lo-rise bungalow, the A&C people’s favorite housing style. The movement died out with the postwar obsession for the cheap and/ or big–for the world of freeways, malls, office parks, domed stadia, subdivisions and condos. Our allegedly-feminist modern era disdained many traditionally feminine arts, including home design and furnishing. The beats and hippies knew the fabric of daily life had gone dreadfully wrong but couldn’t implement enough wide-ranging solutions. You don’t have to follow all the A&C movement’s specific styles to appreciate its sensibility. We haven’t just been killing the natural environment but also the human-made environment. As shown by the Kingdome and other collapsing new buildings (Seattle’s real-life Einzürzende Neubauten), many of these sprawling brutalities aren’t forever. The next generation of artistic people will have the task of replacing the sprawl with real abodes, real streets, real neighborhoods, and (yes) real ballparks.
ANOTHER YR. OLDER DEPT.: The Stranger, the local arts and whatever tabloid I do some writing for, recently finished its third year. (Misc. didn’t show up in the Stranger ’til Vol. 1 No. 9 in November ’91.)
I was reminded how far the local weekly of choice had come when the public access channel reran a Bongo Corral variety show from early ’92, featuring an interview with the paper’s first editor and future Bald Spokesmodel At Sea Matt Cook, talking of big plans for it to become the best real alternative rag this town’s seen. Big boasts for a paper that then was a raggedy 12-page collection of cartoons, entertainment listings, essays, satire and Savage Love. Now it’s a substantial assemblage of info, fun and ads with over 36,000 copies picked up each week (twice the highest figure of the local ’60s paper Helix, three times the peak of the ’70s Seattle Sun, and as of this month higher than the Weekly if you don’t count its Eastside edition).
The Stranger‘s still a tightly-budgeted operation, with an overworked/ underpaid staff and too few phone lines, but it’s paying its way. It’s become a forum for great cartooning, unabashed arts criticism, investigative reporting, and essays on matters great and small. And while never claiming to be anybody’s “voice,” it’s become a popular reading choice among post-boomers, the people the print-media business long ago wrote off as unworthy of anything but snide condescension.
It’s no big secret how the Stranger did it. It prints things it thinks curious members of the urban community would like to read. It doesn’t treat its readers as idiots or as market-research statistics. It’s been damned w/faint praise as “trendy” and superficial by publications that run cover stories about romantic getaways and Euro bistros. It’s slight on the fancy graphics and doesn’t do many clever white-space layouts. It runs long articles in small type with small headlines and small pictures. In an age of homogenized hype and celebrity fluff, it publishes interesting things about people who say and do interesting things whether they be bestselling authors or crumpet toasters. The closest it gets to consumer-oriented “service publishing” is the Quarterly Film Guide. In keeping with a generation desperate for a sense of historical continuity, its covers comprise a modern revival of the great humor-magazine cover art of the past. In a media universe saturated with shrill self-promotion, it’s a paper of content.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, look up Earl Emerson’s new thriller The Portland Laugher (probably the first novel ever titled after a regular crank caller on the old Larry King radio show), check out the McDonald’s Barbie play set (at last, she’s got a job most kids can expect to get in real life!), and note these words Mike Mailway found in the writings of Wm. Burroughs: “A functioning police state needs no police.”
Computer visionary Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext”) in New Media magazine: “Power corrupts; obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”
You might like to look up some small excerpts of my collaborative fiction in the new book Invisible Rendezvous by Rob Wittig (Wesleyan U. Press), and a small excerpt from my forthcoming Seattle-music book in issue #2 of Mark Campos’s comic Places That Are Gone (Aeon/MU Press).
Copies of Misc. #92 (May) are sold out; as are proof copies of my Seattle music-history book. The trade paperback edition of the book will be out next spring (still looking for pictures and reminiscences).
With subs dwindling, I’m having to consider whether to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on my Stranger writing and my book. Your advice would be most welcome. If I do end the newsletter (which wouldn’t happen until after issue #100), current subscribers will receive alternate collections of my work.
“Oogonium”
10/94 Misc. Newsletter
OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT
Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.
WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.
WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)
WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.
BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.
JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.
RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.
NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.
THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”
CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!
BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).
The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.
Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.
I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…
X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.
THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.
EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.
But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.
Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.
So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.
Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.
DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.
Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.
ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.
The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.
FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…
BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.
Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”
Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.
DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.
SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”
‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”
As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:
“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”
As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.
Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).
There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.
“Algolagnia”
8/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns
and one newsletter-only essay)
…AND THIS CEILING TILE WILL FLLLYYY AWAY!
Here at Misc., your most welcome piece of info since the news that Shannen Doherty will star in a TV movie about the author of Gone With the Wind, we think the just-released Flintstones TV soundtrack album is great and far superior to anything to do with the movie version, but it’d be greater if it had included Ann-Margarock.
UPDATES: Somebody called to report that there’s another salt-and-vinegar potato chip out there, made by the Kettle Chips brand and available at a few scattered outlets….
The family feud between Month magazine and Northwest Monthly, a rival formed by former Month staffers, ended with the Month publishers giving in and folding. The last Month art director has inherited the last Month office space and is using it to start yet another music/art/fashion tabloid, to be called Neo.
OUR “HOWCUM” FILE is puzzled that booze is sold on the car ferries, but prohibited on the passenger-only ferries. Lessee: It’s OK to drink if you’re gonna be driving, but not if you’re not.
THE NEW LITTER: The post-Dog House saga gets curiouser and curiouser. The legendary old roadhouse diner’s “Time to Eat” sign suddenly appeared in a longtime “restaurant graveyard” site at 5th & Denny. A window sign promises the mid-August opening of “The Puppy Club.” Yes, it’s run by the old Dog House people, and will have some of the old staff and some of the old amenities, but with no organ in the bar, some different menu items, and windows. It’ll be open all night weekends but (at least at first) will close at 11 during the week. Let’s hope it’s more of a Dog House revival than the joint now in the old Dog House building (a perfectly adequate restaurant but that’s all).
STAMPING OUT CRIME?: Misc. hasn’t said many nice things about the Seattle Police, but we do think it’s nice that new Chief NormStamper appeared in the Gay Pride parade. Odd name, tho: Down in P-Square, “stamper” is a term for guys wandering around with Joint Cover hand stamps, sometimes getting drunker and more unpleasant at each successive venue.
SERVING THE SERVANTS: An Aberdeen sculptor and ex-monster truck driver, Randi Hubbard, is making a 600-lb. concrete statue of Cobain. She wanted to give it to the City of Aberdeen, but city fathers were uneasy about putting it up in public. Those feelings were supported for other purposes by Novoselic, who wants his bandmate to be remembered according to what he’s called “the punk rock ethic” in which there are no monuments to superstars. Hubbard’s withdrawn her gift of the statue and will offer it to private buyers. Sounds like the futile attempt to make the Seattle Parks Dept. put up a Hendrix memorial, a drive that led only to a “hot rocks” monument in the African savannah exhibit of the zoo. Speaking of creativity and cultural independence…
DANCE FEVER: We now must say goodbye to XLR8R, the local rave-techno-disco-dance tabloid; its publishers are moving their whole operation to Frisco. The move highlights the chief problem with the local dance-music scene: its willingness to merely consume trends created in Calif. instead of growing its own talent and ideas. As XLR8R has reported, most every bigtime rave event in town gives its starring slots to Frisco DJs, with local spinners permanently relegated to opening slots. It’s a longstanding tradition that any creative endeavor in Seattle dies when it becomes just a market for Frisco artists. The original Northwest Rock bands (1958-66) created some all-time great sounds and filled the region’s ballrooms, but once acid rock hit big there was nothing for local bands to do but open for touring bands. To become something more than simple followers, the Northwest (not “West Coast”) dance scene will have to champion its own DJs, its own sounds, its own spectacles, and (yes) its own zines. Speaking of original artistry…
YA KILL ME: Of the current advocates of indie rock as a quasi-religion opposed to the orthodoxy of the major-label industry, few have a more adamant reputation than Kathleen Hanna, co-leader of Olympia’s Bikini Kill. Her band has gained a reputation as defiant tough women, even among mass-media people who’ve never heard its music. One person who has heard the band’s music is punk legend Joan Jett, who produced a 45 for the band. Now Hanna’s co-written three songs for Jett’s next album, Pure and Simple. What’s shocking is that one, “You Got a Problem,” was also co-credited to Desmond Child, corporate-rock producer for the likes of Kiss and singer in ’70s meathead band Desmond Child and Rouge (and a longtime Jett collaborator). Not only that but one of her Kill Rock Stars labelmates, Mary Lou Lord, has signed a publishing contract (but not a recording contract) with BMG Music (née RCA Records). You tell me: Selling out or buying in? Speaking of strong women of song…
A SHORT COOL WOMAN IN A BLACK DRESS: The tribute-album craze continues with a CD of modern stars covering Ms. Romantic Doom-n’-Gloom herself, the legendary Edith Piaf. Her signature tune, “La Vie en Rose,” will be covered by Donna Summer. If you think that’s an inappropriate stand-in for the late Little Sparrow, other non-waify, non-Euro voices on the CD will include country singer K.T. Oslin, Pat Benetar, Juice Newton, Corey Hart, and our own Ann Wilson. (What, no Morrissey?) It may only prove how great Piaf was, that no contemporary female artist can attempt her material without seeming like a bad joke. Even today’s “adult acoustic alternative” women singers are too level-headed to approach Piaf’s delicate combination of power and despair. What woman today would dare present herself as torn apart by romantic anguish, and as finding strength through such turmoil? (Maybe Diamanda Galas.) Speaking of modern women’s images…
DRAWING THE LINE: In a recent Stranger, comix artist/ editor Trina Robbins said a leading deterrent to women in comix (as creators and consumers) is the offputting ambience of comic-book shops. Now, comic-shop chain Dream Factory is opening six “Dream Factory for Her” shops at malls in Connecticut, Illinois and Ohio. A USA Today item quoted exec Lori Raub claiming the stores would have a “feminine look” with rose and purple colors. The article says the stores will sell clothes, art and jewelry in addition to comics, but doesn’t say how they’ll get enough appropriate comix product for their shelves. As Robbins noted, major comic book companies produce few titles with cross-gender appeal (notable exceptions include DC’s Sandman) and fewer specifically aimed at females (and those tend to be for younger readers, like Marvel’s Barbie titles).
Any store looking for comix product to sell to femmes will have to seek independent publishers of woman-made titles (like the locally-drawn Dirty Plotte, Bitchy Bitch, Tomato and Girlhero) and of general-interest titles that emphasize storytelling instead of shoot-’em-up action (like Jim, Deadface, Love & Rockets, and Eightball). A female-friendly store would be friendly toward comix outside the action-violence genre, and would be a great tool for developing the potential of the medium–something fans of any gender can cheer about. Still speaking of modern women’s images…
THE REAL SKINNY: The ultimate charm of the Fox summer serial Models Inc. is that it’s an anachronistic show set in an anachronistic world. One subplot involves a model whose creepy musician boyfriend is trying to raise $25,000 to make a professional demo tape to send to major labels. All he’d need to raise these days would be $2,000 to press an indie CD, get it in stores, and take control of his own career. Similarly, the models themselves are already-arrived faces of pouting perfection. A realistic show about would-be supermodels might have young naive image-obsessed walking skeletons trying to break themselves into a model’s lifestyle, maybe by trying out a new fruit-flavored Syrup of Ipecac. Some would indeed have schemer boyfriends who preyed on their low self-esteem, while others would be giving up on boyfriends who talk sincere enough but just don’t understand the emotional compulsion necessary to become a would-be model, to make the world love your body by relentlessly hating it yourself. (There are women whose figures I liked more than they did; they essentially told me that I was just a tourist while they had to live there.)
RAILING ON: Mass-transit planning is firmly controlled by an insider clique of hard-bitten bureaucrats and number-crunchers who don’t understand the aesthetic and cultural influences that would persuade people to take up non-car transport. That’s why I cheer tour-bus driver Dick Falkenbury and his Initiative 39. If it makes the ballot and passes, it’d create a public agency to build a 35-mile elevated light-rail system, and to find private financing for it if possible. It’d probably look and run like Vancouver’s SkyTrain, but it’d be sold to voters as an update/ extension of the Monorail. The county’s transit planners apparently never thought of this brilliant PR stroke. Nearly everybody loves the Monorail, even if few people have a regular use for its one-mile run. Just think: We won’t be sinking $700 million into some overpriced albatross that few people will use, we’ll be fulfilling one of the Seattle World’s Fair’s dreams for Century 21!
THE MUSIC OF YOUR LIFE DEPT.: ABC’s asking producers of its prime-time shows to not have opening theme songs this fall. The idea is to start out right away with credits flashing beneath actors trading their opening barbs, a la Seinfeld and Murphy Brown, to discourage remote-control zapping. Don’t they know they’re destroying one of the key rituals of the viewing experience? Without theme songs, what’ll nostalgic commercials use in the year 2010?
THE SOUND OF COLIC: Unemployed San Diego aerospace engineer Rick Jurmain and his wife Mary have invented “Baby Think It Over,” an anatomically-correct, battery-powered, squishy-faced baby doll that cries loudly and shrilly at what its makers call “random, but realistic intervals, simulating a baby’s sleeping and waking patterns to its demand for two.” The $200 dolls come in four ethnic varieties plus a special “crack baby” version. The inventors want the dolls to be used in schools to warn teens that having babies isn’t always cute and cuddly. To really do that, they’d need a whole line of dolls, like Baby Stinky Pants, Baby Barf-A-Lot, and Baby Climb-Into-The-Dryer.
THE INCREDIBLE BULK: Had some thoughts while wandering through the massive new Aurora Village Costco warehouse. There are four major national retail institutions from Seattle: Nordstrom, REI, Starbucks and Costco. The latter chain is the closest to the “Seattle scene” aesthetic. At first, punk rock and Costco might not seem to have much in common. Punk is an urban thang; most warehouse stores are located way out there. Punk is built around independent retailers filling highly specialized desires of cult audiences. A warehouse store offers only a few popular items in each department; Costco’s puny CD department doesn’t sell any alterna-rock more obscure than In Utero. But look further: We’re not a scene of debutantes spending Daddy’s money buying designer duds and snorting nose candy in discos. We’re a scene based on thrift, no-nonsense graphics, and the glorious excesses of the common capitalist American. We thrive on low-budget spectacles of glorious lowbrow pleasure. We believe in empowering small business (something Costco claims to also believe in), and in subcultural communal experiences (which Costco shopping certainly is). We like to gather at obscure sites away from the glare of malls. And we much prefer to shop among Laotian immigrant families and self-employed cab drivers than among the Bellevue Squares. And Costco’s got great beer and coffee prices. Speaking of which…
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: One item found in some warehouse stores is Tongue Splashers Bubble Gum, a Canadian-made product that promises to “paint your mouth in a splash of color.” These colors include Bleeding Red, Color Me Blue, Orange Crunch, Slime Green and Slurpin’ Purple. Even cooler is the package: a real paint can, with 240 pieces inside! …
The official Seattle Seahawks chewing gum is a lot like the team. It seems tough for the first couple of seconds, but very quickly proves just how soft and pliable it really is. Speaking of odd consumptible concepts…
HOW DRY I AM DEPT.: Powdered beer has been announced by a Czech brewery, intended at first for export to Russia. “All you need is a pot and a spoon, and you can have your own beer in about 10 days,” brewery spokesperson Jan Oliva told the AP. It contains active yeast cultures that quickly form alcohol once you put the powder in water and let it mature to taste. It costs about 25 cents a quart. “It looks like beer, it tastes like beer, and it has a head too,” Oliva said. “It is beer, and a good one at that.” Maybe it’ll become a fad item over here; heck, anything’d be better than the ice-beer and clear-beer campaigns…
Except, perhaps, for the rumored new product of the St. Ides/Black Star people, an item as yet unnamed but said to be “a malt liquor for white people.” Speaking of beverage products aimed at young markets…
PR LINE OF THE WEEK (postcard to a band’s mailing list): “This is a postcard to promote `Running With Scissors‘ and to tell you things are going to be okie dokie. … The Scissors Manifesto: 1. Attending our shows and buying our CDs are the keys to `okie dokie-ness.’ 2. People who request our songs on the radio are okie dokie. 3. Actually, sex is much better than `okie dokie-ness’ but no one will pay us for sex. 4. It would be really great if young people had a reason to feel better than just okie dokie. 5. Foul tasting, over-hyped beverages do not make you feel okie dokie…. Not affiliated with any patronizing multinational beverage company.” Speaking of which…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The OK Hotel (a great music venue, no relation to any lousy soft drink) almost finally went all 21-and-over last month, a year and a half after its owners first threatened to. The owners were looking for a way to make the ol’ music-n’-art cafe more financially stable, and decided to add a tavern in an unused storefront area of the building. This would’ve made the whole space officially a bar, and hence verboten to minors during entertainment hours; but (for once!) the Liquor Board agreed to an arrangement wherein the music room will still be open to all, but over-21s can access the new bar area. The loss of Seattle’s only full-time all-ages music space would have been an incalculable blow to the development of new bands and new audiences, and would have hindered the continued growth of the local scene. The occasional Velvet Elvis, Penny University and King Theater all-ages shows help a little, but what we really need is a way for a commercial venue to meet its expenses while letting both under- and over-21s in. Let’s hope the new OK layout proves to be one such way. Speaking of kids-n’-culture…
THE YOUNG AND THE CLUELESS: I saw a horrendous CNN interview session at the KNDD studios (don’t blame the station for any of this). Twenty-three people in their mid-20s (a CNN publicist insisted on calling this age group “kids”) took turns in a conference room, where a camera crew taped them in three-quarter profile on the left side of the screen, before a speckled-blue backdrop, while a producer asked them such probing questions as “Is there such a thing as Generation X,” “Is there a generational conflict with baby boomers?”, and “The media generally says Gen X is defined by divorce, AIDS, poor economy and a distrust of politics. What do you feel about each issue?” Not attending was ex-MTV guy Adam Curry, who’ll narrate the finished show, Boom or Bust?–airing (natch) on Woodstock ’94 weekend. Aargh!
COLD AS ICE: Penthouse may soon run stills from home sex videos of Tonya Harding, supplied by ex-hubby Jeff Gillooly. Haven’t seen ’em, but can probably assure you that the pix will reveal that Harding (1) is a woman, and (2) used to have relations with someone to whom she was married. BFD.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (outside Megan Mary Olander Flowers on 1st Ave. S.): “Clues That You’re In the Wrong Age Group: You walk into the party and everyone hides their beer. Your bell bottoms and platform shoes are originals. No one knows who Marlo Thomas is. Rad is not a unit of radiation. They talk Star Trek and you drop the name William Shatner. All your friends are taking Retin A and Alpha Hydrox (isn’t that a cookie?). You were around when martinis and Tony Bennett were cool the first time.”
OTHER VOICES (Fintan O’Toole in a recent issue of The Irish Times): “We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, `I know this is not politically correct, but…’ in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the new sin of political correctness…. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from the fascists to the merely smug.”
CLIPPED: Northwest Rock, one of the only two regularly-scheduled outlets on Seattle TV for regional acts (especially indie and unsigned acts), has been canceled by KTZZ. It can be argued that the station’s sales staff didn’t know how to market the show, and that it was hurt by its 1 a.m. Saturday time slot (when people who liked these bands would be out seeing them). Producer Frank Harlan, a.k.a. Bill Bored, isn’t giving up; he’s got plans for occasional specials, and may try to relaunch the show under some other financial setup, on KTZZ or some other outlet. It might help if you write KTZZ, 945 Dexter Ave. N., 98109, tell ’em you want to keep seeing “Northwest music history in the making” and would watch it in a better time slot.
‘TIL WE BAKE SLIGHTLY LESS in Sept., check out the Thursday night “Rock n’ Bowl” at Imperial Lanes on Rainier (the real-life equivalent to the “Soul Bowl” depicted on a recent Stranger cover), be sure to catch TV Nation, Fox’s great reruns of Thunderbirds Sat. morns and Lifetime’s great reruns of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Sat. nights, and recall the sage advice of the immortal James Thurber: “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.”
Bucky Fuller’s classic definition of a human being: “A self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped…the whole complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, a spectrascope, etc., the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake.”
Still looking for pix (photos, posters, record art) for my book on the real local music history.
If you’ve any comments on what ought to be in the new bigger newsletter (i.e., if you think the fiction’s cool or sucks), lemme know.
“Sedulous”
THE MEDIA SEATTLE
There are many Seattles more or less co-existing in the same real estate, but practically the only one you hear about in the local mainstream media is what we might call the Media Seattle. The Media Seattle is the only Seattle you see on Evening Magazine, in the Weekly, in Pacific Northwest magazine, in commercials, and in Nordy’s ads. It’s the only Seattle you see when Good Morn. America or Tom Snyder’s cable show come here: Pike Place Fish, houseboats, Starbucks, microbrews (but never any drunks), Bill Gates, the Museum of Flight, and maybe Boeing. You see Westlake but not Eastlake, Green Lake but not the Duwamish. The Media Seattle myth tries to condescendingly explain away “the grunge explosion” without acknowledging that the Punk Seattle is diametrically opposed to the obsessive smarminess and blandness of the Media Seattle.The Media Seattle often brags about its “commitment to diversity” or “multiculturalism,” but it’s a sham. The Media Seattle only gives a damn about you if you’re an affluent member of the baby-boom generation (or a pre-teen child of one), and only if you’re either a non-Catholic white or an assimilationist minority trying to be a white boomer. A few Japanese-Americans are allowed in the Media Seattle, but no Koreans or Vietnamese and certainly no Samoans.
Representatives of the traditional news media sometimes try to scare you that the Info Hi-Way will make information accessible only to the affluent, but that’s what those traditional news media themselves have been doing for the past 20 years. When was the last time you saw minority or working-class people depicted as non-buffoons in the local dailies, as non-criminals on local TV news, or at all in the Weekly? When was the last time you saw our “Seattle” mainstream media treat city residents with respect, instead of aiming only at some mythical average family out in the higher-priced subdivisions? There’s this one very narrow class of people that the media want to reach. If you don’t belong to it, you won’t be shown in the media (and that includes “alternative” media that try to be “progressive” but still all-upscale) unless you get arrested for something bad.
When I see images of the Media Seattle, I think what a dull, utterly bourgeois place that would be if it existed. The Commons and the Urban Villages are attempts to make that smarmy fantasy a reality. Thank God we still have some other Seattles in our midst, at least for now.
6/94 Misc. Newsletter
THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR
THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.
INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE
Welcome back to Misc., your friendly roadside diner along the Info Hi-Way, the kind with the big neon sign facing the road that just says EAT. This edition is dedicated to Jim Althoff, one of the last local talk-radio hosts to dare to be smart instead of sleazy. He and wife Andee Beck (formerly the region’s smartest TV critic) are off to do a show in Milwaukee. We’ll miss ’em. (More on Althoff’s ex-station later.)
DEPT. OF CLARIFICATION: I don’t normally write about my personal life, but half the stuff written about me in the 5/11Â Weekly isn’t true. If you need to know which half, send a SASE.
UPDATES: The pirate radio station Free Radio Seattle has had equipment problems and isn’t on the air yet, but now plans a 90-minute inaugural broadcast for midnight June 4, somewhere near 88 FM…. The people who left Month magazine and tried to start a copycat free mag called Monthly have subtly changed their name to Northwest Monthly to avoid confusion with what a Monthly editorial called “a junior high rag.” They’re also putting out Bean: An Idea Cafe, a literary/poetry zine with reviews of only old-hippie-acceptable music (folk, jazz, blues). (One corec: Month and Monthly‘s common ancestor, Face II Face, was originally sold for $2 a copy; it later became a freebie.)
REMINDER TO THE MEDIA: When Bob Hardwick, Seattle’s leading middle-of-the-road radio personality for 30 years, tragically shot himself a year or two back, you didn’t see any dorky commentators claiming the suicide proved that all middle-aged Sinatra fans were pathetic losers.
FADE AWAY NOT: In the first weeks after the Cobain tragedy, I heard several locals privately refer to it as the closing chapter in the “Seattle scene” mania. Does it really mean “the party’s over” locally? Ever since Mudhoney first appeared on the cover of Melody Maker almost six years ago, some people here have expected (and even hoped) that the bigtime music-biz would quickly tire of Seattle and everyone could go back to playing just for one another. It hasn’t happened yet, despite the concerted efforts of the media to shoehorn all Seattle bands into one stereotyped fad, and then to declare that fad over. Face it: The corporate entertainment establishment’s scared of people outside NY/LA making their own culture, refusing to be good passive consumers.
Seattle rock isn’t one singular sound, but it does represent an attitude of DIY production and distribution, of creating things you really like that communicate directly with audiences because they really like it. Just how well this formula worked was proved by the immensity with which Cobain’s death shocked and saddened people. The tragic loss of a singular artist and the end of Seattle’s premier band threw everybody for a big harsh wallop and made everything seem a whole hell of a lot less fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that the NW has two dozen other major-label bands at last count. There are as many as 50 other world-class indie acts in Washington and Oregon, playing a wide variety of sounds, plus hundreds of fascinating/fun/dull/bombastic club acts.
I’ve found that California people used to like Seattle when it was thought of as little more than a good market for Calif.-made culture product (LA films and fashions, SF rock bands and authors), a friendly rival to the LA aerospace-defense industry, and a middle-aged-hippie retirement home with good pot and lotsa magic ‘shrooms ripe for the pickin’. But somewhere along the line, us Nordic hicks started getting uppity; some of us thought we could create some of our own culture for a change. Maybe it was these Seattle rock bands and theater troupes that got the southwesterners to notice our new attitude; maybe it was when the pivot point of the PC biz moved from Palo Alto to Redmond.
In any event, I’ve seen a lot of attempts by Calif. writers and commentators to put us northern yahoos back in our place. The corporate culture industry of LA and the bohemian culture industry of SF both have a vested stake in preventing the movement of DIY empowerment that Seattle represents. All the rock-journalism hype about “Looking for the Next Seattle” was based on trying to promote the image that Seattle had just been a place where a few good bands were ready to be absorbed into the media machine, and that any other town might have similarly-exploitable talent. They’re not willing to admit out loud that Seattle and the other local scenes represent a threat to corporate rock’s very existence, that we want to replace the media machine with what that NY-centrist Patti Smith called “the age when everybody creates.”
PHILM PHACTS: Movies based on TV series have one basic flaw: A TV series isn’t a story. It’s a concept, a set of characters, running shticks and situations; more like a role-playing game manual than a story. A movie script is a sequence of events with a set beginning and end. Once a TV-based movie has established the characters and running gags or dramatic elements of the series, it finds itself with nothing to do and an hour of screen time to fill. The Fugitive avoided this problem by stringing together the initial premise and conclusion of the original series with some Steadicam chase scenes, avoiding the plot elements that made up most of the series episodes. Maverick, The Flintstones, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Beverly Hillbillies, et al. haven’t solved this.
THEIR MONEY: Let’s set the story straight about that ubiquitous right-wing bogeyperson, the infamous “added costs” that prevent businesses from pricing products and services at the cheapest price. Anything beyond the cheapest possible cost of making and shipping a product is “added cost.” Yes, that includes the standard old talk-radio nemeses of taxes and environmental regulations, plus the new talk-radio nemeses of employee health insurance; but it also included mob payoffs, excessive executive salaries and perks, advertising, lawyers, bank fees, lobbying, donations to the symphony, losses on bad real-estate investments, etc. Any Gucci-clad executive who whines that health care for his workers would be an excessive “added cost” oughta be willing to give up half his salary. If the conservatives had their way, we’d all be dying of TB caused by unsafe living conditions so the privileged could have even more privileges.
HARD BARGAINS: The Nordstrom family apparently learned a lot from its former ownership of the Seahawks about wringing forth public subsidies for private business. Nordstrom now allegedly won’t move its downtown store into the old Frederick’s building unless the city gives it big tax breaks, the state builds a bigger convention center, and the feds change rules to encourage cruise ships to dock here. (Store officials don’t call this a list of absolute “demands,” just suggested steps to improve the “business climate.”) If all this doesn’t happen, according to a meeting between corporate and government officials leaked to the P-I, the Nordies hint at threatening to diminish their current downtown store and to move their corporate offices to Oregon or California. Not quite the image of selfless customer service, eh? Speaking of businesses that demand your support…
EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE DEPT.: I’ve already harped about the self-serving hypocrisy of vegetarians who smoke, but this is a life-n’-death issue so I’ll continue with another argument: If you’re such a rebel bohemian, why do you give up your money and your body to the tobacco industry, one of the most reactionary and anti-humanistic forces on the planet today? And don’t think you’re avoiding the campaign coffers of Jesse Helms if you buy that brand that’s falsely billed as Native American-made (it really isn’t; it only advertises to be “true to the Native American tradition,” whatever that means). That’s just a smaller company within the same huge legal drug cartel that’s gotten federal subsidies to keep making products that kill when properly used. Now the US cig industry’s responding to declining domestic sales by seeking new people overseas to enslave, like women in China. Speaking of legal drugs…
THE FINE PRINT: The Rainier Ice bottle prominently displays the product’s bountiful alcohol content twice, but you have to look to find out that you only get 10 oz. of the stuff, instead of the standard 12. Speaking of questionable beverage marketing…
THE EDGE OF WETNESS: In a desperate attempt to rebuild its still scandal-damaged US market, Perrier‘s launching four designer bottles with pseudo-art-deco designs by what its PR calls four “artists of the future” — really professional ad artists. This attempt to start a collectible craze ruins what had been the finest bottle design in its market segment, and doesn’t disguise the fact that what’s inside is still filtered H2O plus CO2, just like the cheaper domestic stuff. Still speaking of questionable beverage marketing…
LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN RECYCLABLE ALUMINUM: The Coca-Cola Co. has made the most brazen attempt yet at reaching the young PoMo sensibility. OK (billed as “A Carbonated ‘Beverage’ “) is an orange-lemon-lime-cola melange with caffeine and a dark-pinkish color, test-marketed here and in eight other towns. It tastes and looks like that stuff you made as a kid by squirting a little from every 7-11 Big Gulp nozzle into the same cup. It’s got a set of package designs by ex-Seattle cartoon legend Charles Burns and another with the monochrome ennui of Eightball cartoonist Dan Clowes, who got $7,000 for the rights to existing panels of his art. According to Time, the brand is the product of two years of research into youthful attitudes, including data from MIT’s “Global Teenager” project, and is meant to sell to skeptical kids here and worldwide (one possible reason for the non-sequitur texts on the packages, which read like Japanese English ad copy.) The whole marketing campaign’s the work of Weiden & Kennedy, the infamous Portland ad agency that gave us Nike, Black Star beer, and the Subaru commercial with the line “It’s like punk rock, only it’s a car.” Speaking of Rose City media products…
PUTTING THE X IN PDX: Several parties have tried to create a heterosex mag for the now generation. But Bikini is too steeped in snowboarding graphics, and Future Sex is too slopped in the anti-human dispassion of cybersex (masturbating with robots being the fantasy of male computer nerds who grew up with too few girls and too many issues of Heavy Metal; if traditional porn is fantasizing for purposes of masturbation, cybersex is fantasizing about masturbation).
It took a low-budget effort from Portland, the double-entendre-titled X Magazine, to come at least close to doing it right. It’s nicely printed on non-slick paper, with type you can actually read. The 42 photos (most in that “arty” black and white) include visual and verbal depictions of young women and men who like one another and themselves–the “alternative” press’s only current sexual taboo, the taboo against inter-gender friendship. The most erotic pic, for me, is on the contents page, with a friendly female face glancing playfully-knowingly toward the staff list. There’s also a spread of a passionate couple stripping out of grunge fashions (you don’t see whether the guy’s hair is his longest feature), some not-too-dumb poetry, an actually-funny spoof of the Tonya Harding media feeding frenzy, and a nice profile of Miss Red Flowers, Portland co-ed rock band that (like Seattle’s Sick and Wrong) has sometimes gone naked on stage. The only downsides: a dumb woman-in-bondage photo (illustrating a man-in-bondage fiction piece) and a puff piece on this moment’s worst corporate “alternative” band, Paw. Available at Bulldog News and Fantasy (Un)ltd. Speaking of sexy printed matter…
NEW MONEY: The feds are talking about redesigning our paper currency, starting with the smugglers’-favorite $100 bill. About time. We’ve got some of the least inviting-looking money in the world. Why should the Canadian buck be worth less but look so much more colorful? Hey, let’s have commemorative bills, just like stamps — money with a thin and fat Elvis, a thin and fat Jim Morrison, or a fat and thin Oprah.
DEAD AIR REVISITED: Irv Pollack is the kind of feisty senior citizen you might hear calling talk radio, unafraid to call the host on a grievously wrong point. When KING-AM was put up for sale, Pollack wanted to buy it, to make it America’s first for-profit community station. He had no experience in broadcast management (tho’ he was a former KCMU news volunteer) and no capital to invest, but he hoped the Bullitt sisters, who were selling the station to endow their environmental foundation, would give him the time to assemble a deal by raising funds from the likes of Robert Redford, Ben & Jerry’s, the Working Assets long-distance service, and author Paul Hawken. But neither time nor money were on the side of Pollack’s quixotic quest. Within weeks, KIRO agreed to pay $2.5 million for the station, which has lost money as long as anyone can remember. This kind of artificial price is only possible because the Feds now let big station groups to own up to four stations in a town. This policy reduces competition, stifles a diversity of voices, and helps nobody but the owners. Speaking of lost opportunities…
SPACES IN THE HEART: Tugs Belmont is now a non-gay bar called Beatnix, with a pool table and jazz and spoken-word shows. Thus ends a tradition that goes back to the original Tugs Belltown (1979-89), a less exclusively-gay disco than Tugs Belmont was. It was also, on weeknights, the first above-ground punk/new wave dance club in town. When Tugs #1 was evicted by its landlord for redevelopment, the Tugs people took over the space that had been Squid Row (1986-90), a gloriously stinky and dank live-music club that hosted a variety of sounds but was best known as one of the chief sites where a few people developed the beer-sodden growls that the outside world still mistakenly thinks all Seattle bands sound like. Both Tugs incarnations had their troubles with a Liquor Board that couldn’t appreciate gay erotic images or queer-positive performance art. Tugs #2 was slapped with a week’s suspension due to a recent underwear party. The owner, who according to inside reports was getting tired of keeping the joint afloat, decided to close it instead….
Also now closed is Belltown’s last lowbrow watering hole: the notorious tavern on 2nd, north of the Crocodile, that hadn’t had an outside sign for several years but was officially known as Hawaii West (I know we’re east of Hawaii; the name referred to a previous Hawaii Tavern in another part of town). As the last place of its type in the area to not get upscaled (besides the Rendezvous), it was a refuge of barflies who’d been 86’d or made unwelcome everywhere else….
And while nobody was looking (or rather, because nobody was showing), the Vogue quietly dropped its last live-music nights in favor of an all-DJ format. Now, nobody’s new band will be able to play the little stage where Nirvana made one of its first Seattle shows, that had hosted Seattle’s best & brightest since 1980 (as WREX). It now seems like a lifetime ago, but before 1990 the Vogue’s Tues. and Wed. night shows were some of the most important showcases a local band could get, back when the only other places to play were the Central and the Ditto (which were only open weekends) and the Rainbow (which had “new music nights” early in the week). Speaking of musical memories…
YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 1: During most of my adult life, “Classic Rock” meant 1956-71 hits only. Then came the ’70s Preservation Society, Rhino Records’ Have A Nice Day CD compilations, the movie Dazed and Confused, ’70s dance parties in some cities, revival bands like the Gin Blossoms, and (most importantly, biz-wise) the aging of ’70s teens into the advertiser-preferred demographic brackets. ’70s-nostalgia radio formats have hit the airwaves in over 20 cities. Barry Ackerly’s turned the old K-Lite into KJR-FM, playing some of the hits heard on KJR-AM during that station’s Emporer Smith/Norm Gergory silver age (which followed its Lan Roberts/Pat O’Day golden age). The emphasis is on whitebread corporate-rockers (Eagles, Springsteen, Jackson Browne), not on the era’s wacky AM hits (as chronicled in Barry Scott‘s new book We Had Joy, We Had Fun), certainly not on late-decade punk, and not even on the decade’s great R&B-pop (much of it recorded by ex-Philly soul producer Thom Bell at what’s now Heart’s Bad Animals studio, then owned by KJR’s parent company). For that you’ll have to catch this season’s two ’70s-soul nostalgia movies or catch Spike Lee’s current Nike ads. The ’70s-nostalgia format just regurgitates the stupidity that the early punks rebelled against. What’s scarier is that it means corporate ’80s nostalgia will eventually appear. I can guess how horrid that’s gonna be: They’ll claim we all really were in love with Reagan and Rambo, just like corporate ’60s nostalgia claims that everybody alive back then was a white liberal-arts student.
YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 2: A quarter-century ago, self-styled “visionaries” among the downtown business elite proposed radical solutions to two “blighted” areas of Seattle. They wanted to turn Pioneer Square into one big parking area, and to replace either all or most of the Pike Place Market with offices and condo towers. The pro-development forces (which included the local dailies and the mayor’s office) dismissed the people who lived or worked in those districts as bums, marginal types and hippie-dippies who were impeding the way of sacred Progress. Fortunately, the hippie-dippies et al. prevailed. Watch for similar arguments to be made against Commons opponents.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (meticulously painted on the facade of Sam’s Super Burger, 26th & Union): “No trespassing. No loitering. I don’t come to your place and sell my burgers, so don’t you come to my place and sell your drugs.”
COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES, RIP: Jack Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor turned hard-headed entrepreneur, who took over a calculator company in the mid-’70s and brought out one of the very first PCs, the Commodore PET. Clever low-cost engineering and lowball pricing helped make the PET’s successors, the Vic-20 and Commodore 64, the first computers of many an early-’80s hacker-dude. In ’85, as the industry was consolidating (and just before Tramiel was ousted from his own company), the firm brought out the Amiga, a mid-level home machine with a proprietary operating system and one unique component — standard NTSC video input/output. The Amiga failed as a home machine but found a niche market among audio and video mavens, especially after the NewTek company brought out the Video Toaster add-on circuit board in 1990, which enabled budding TV-hackers to perform pro-level video editing and effects for less than the price of a big-screen monitor. The Amiga finally had a “killer app,” a third-party application that drove hardware sales. But it wasn’t enough, and now Commodore is being liquidated. No word yet what’ll happen to the Amiga or its loyal users.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Don’t be mistaken, newcomers: Eggheads are not larger versions of Cadbury Creme Eggs. They’re really miniaturized Mountain Bars (have a Northwest native tell you what those are). Just remember for now, “Brown & Haley Makes ‘Em Daily!”… Orville Reddenbacher’s microwave popcorn now comes in “Artificial Movie Theater Butter Flavor.” Actually, it tastes better than the popcorn you get in artificial movie theaters…. Ginseng-flavored chewing gum, a staple of Asian groceries, has been hyped in the new-age press as an alleged aphrodisiac. Something called Gum Tech International has responded with Love Gum (for “the woman with a healthy attitude” and “the man who wants peak performance”), Chiclets-like nuggets with just a touch of ginseng powder. The primary flavor? What else: cherry…. And be sure to attend our junk food film festival and Misc. 8th Anniversary party, 8pm Wednesday 6/8 at the Pike St. Cinema (all ages this time), 1108 Pike St. at Boren Ave., just east of the freeway.
WHERE THEY BE NOW: I finally tracked down ex-local performing artist Tomata du Plenty in Miami, where he makes paintings at a studio in Little Haiti and tends bar in the Design District. He looked back fondly at his wild days in Ze Whiz Kidz (Seattle’s first gay theater troupe, and font of the homespun-camp-cabaret influence in local theater to this day) and the Tupperwares/Screamers (one of Seattle’s first punk bands). He was saddened to hear that fellow ex-Screamer Dave Gulbransen (aka Rio de Janeiro) had closed his family’s business, the Dog House.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, be the first on your block to get FutureTech’s new disposable 3-D still camera, root for the Vancouver Canucksin the NHL hockey finals, and heed these words from Calvin Trillin‘s classic tome Alice, Let’s Eat: “Never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still.”
Some more words-O-wit from that “self published aphorist” (zine publisher) of ’20s Vienna, Karl Kraus: “I hear noises which others don’t hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which other people don’t hear either.”
SPECIAL EVENT!
Celebrate the 8th anniversary of this little literary serial and the launch of my next endeavor (see next item) with the MISC@8 party and Junk Food Film Fest, Wednesday, 6/8, 8 pm, at the cozy Pike St. Cinema (1108 Pike & Boren, just east of I-5 and the Convention Center).
My book on the history of the Seattle punk scene, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, will be published early next year by Feral House, the Portland cult-faves who brought you the anthology Apocalypse Culture and the Ed. Wood Jr. bio Nightmare of Ecstasy. I’m selling off my remaining stock of photocopy rough drafts. Get yours now, or wait for the real book.
“Myxoedema”
5/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating five Stranger columns)
Here at Misc. we can’t wait for the longtime local label K Records to start a joint venture with the new local label Y Records. The connection between the two would undoubtedly go very smoothly.
THE MAILBAG: Thanx to all the Aldus people who E-mailed words of reassurance after the piece here about the software giant last time. One guy said not to worry about Aldus’s future, that the firm’s forthcoming merger with Adobe Systems would be more like a “marriage” than a corporate takeover. (I think we’ve all seen marriages that were like corporate takeovers, but that’s beside the point…)
FOR LOVE OR $$ DEPT.: For shameless audience manipulation, nothing could compare to KCTS‘s weekend marathon of Getting The Love You Want, a home-video marriage counseling series. The facilitator picks a couple from the audience, has them reveal their issues and conflicts, then leads them in working out their differences. He closes the segment by getting the couple to hug and avow their continued empathy. This moment of tenderness and generosity closes, and then we see another pledge break.
THE NEW LITTER: The P-I reports that the much-hyped closure of the legendary Dog House restaurant was just a ploy by its owners to get out from its lease and its union contract. But it backfired; the eatery’s landlord decided not to sign a new lease with the Dog House people, but instead to let the owners of that other legendary 24-hour hash house, Beth’s Cafe, take over the space. The newly-christened Hurricane Cafe doesn’t have a bar, organ player, murals (its walls are newly painted in the same plum color as Linda’s Tavern on E. Pine), or such old-time menu items as liver and onions, but it does have big food at reasonable prices at all hours. The Dog House folks are reportedly looking for a new downtown site to open a non-union cafe, which may or may not have any of the old Dog House iconography.
FOUL TIP: The Mariners opened another season amidst new hype about the team actually maybe winning a division this year (a new mini-Western Division shorn of the powerhouse White Sox). And as usual, a new season brings out the usual media hype of “Whither Baseball?” Here’s what I think’s wrong with the game: 1) a new TV contract worse than hockey’s, with half the national cable games, no network games until July, and regional-only playoff telecasts — a setup that won’t help promote the game to new fans; and 2) its reputation as the sport of writers and other dullards, who blather on about such esoterica as the dimensions of the field (I’ve never seen ponderous essays on how a basketball court’s 96 feet long, a multiple of the sacred numbers 8 and 12). When they’re not doing that, writers use baseball to conjure up images of that Bygone Innocent America, that nice all-white-middle-class wonderland that never was. Face it: a game marketed to exploit grandpa’s selective memories isn’t gonna attract enough kids to maintain a decent supply of players, let alone a decent supply of fans.
PUFF PIECES: The King County Council may vote this month on a plan, drafted by the county health department, to ban smoking in restaurants. If approved, the ban would first take effect in the suburbs, then spread to Seattle in ’95 when the county takes over Seattle’s restaurant regulation. You could still smoke in taverns, lounges, and in restaurants that were willing to serve adults only, at least until they pass a broader ban. I think smoking is a wretched habit; but everybody I meet these days smokes, especially the vegetarians. This is Big Brother-ism at its most persnickity.
INK STAINS: Fourteen months ago, some dudes in Lynnwood started Face II Face, a free monthly newsprint magazine with equal emphasis on fashion, art, music and fiction. The Face II Face team split up un-amicably last November, with several members relocating to Seattle and re-starting under the name Month (though the cover flag said “November,” “December,” etc.). That crew just had another falling out. Jim and Jodi Madigan continued to publish Month, unveiling a slightly revised graphic design in their April issue, while their ex-colleagues Bill Maner, Tom Schmitt and Roger LeBlanc just put out something called Monthly, whose premiere April issue is billed as “Vol. 1 No. 6” and looks just like the first five issues of Month except it’s not stapled. To add to the confusion, neither publication mentions the family feud in its pages. We’ll see if they start up fistfights over press credentials to runway shows.
WANKING ON PARADE: That professional egotist and artistic has-been John Lydon, in town on a book tour, was scheduled to appear on The Spud Goodman Show. Goodman had outlined half an episode to the Lydon interview, the most he’d ever alloted to a single guest. KNDD’s Norman Batley, who’d took on a volunteer producer position on the Goodman show, was in charge of bringing Lydon from his hotel room to the studio. But somebody, either on the local PR team handling the tour stop or one of the print-media reporters keeping him busy, dissuaded him from going, charging “that’s not even a real TV station.” Goodman and his normally scripted cast had to improvise a new show on the spot, shuffling in segments written for other episodes and making introductions for location segments that don’t exist yet, that will have to be shot and edited into the episode before it airs.
THE MARGINAL WAY: There’s been a big media blitz over the county’s plan to revive the beautifully rusty Industrial District between the Kingdome and Tukwila. The stories quoted officials claiming that unless We Act Now, the zone could become a “rust belt” a la the abandoned factories of Michigan and Ohio. The top paragraphs of the stories mentioned all-well-n’-good stuff like fixing roads and cleaning up toxic waste. But if you read further you find out that there really aren’t many vacant sites in the area, that it’s well-occupied by small and medium businesses. Most of the horror stories cited in the articles about companies leaving the ID turn out to be about firms that wanted bigger tracts than they could get.
It doesn’t take much between-line reading to wonder whether the politicians are really seeking an excuse to condemn and consolidate tracts down there, evict some of the little guys, and turn the area over to bigger operations by bigger companies — the sort of companies that employ proportionately fewer people, but make bigger campaign contributions.
MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “race-blind casting” as the courageous risk of daring theatrical directors to award all major roles, no matter what ethnicity the characters may be, to white actors.
THE LAST WORD ON GANGSTA RAP: When hiphop was ruled from NY, it was an explosion of creativity with a social conscience. Then the Hollywood showbiz weasels took charge and, as usual, ruined everything. If I believed power, money, intimidation, sexism and egotism were the answers to everything, I would’ve become a Republican.
LITERAMA: Clever people across the country are discovering a real use for the Apple Newton Messagepad, that overpriced electronic Rolodex that’s supposed to read your handwriting but usually can’t. It may not be able to make an exact digital version of what you write on it, but it can turn it into computer-assisted cut-up poetry! Yes, you can make your own faux-Burroughs without having to shoot anybody or get addicted to anything. In my own experimental-fiction days, I used to be in a group that played the “writing games” devised by the French Oulipo group (Raymond Quaneau, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, et al.). One of them was “n + 7”: take an existing passage and replace each common noun with the noun seven dictionary entries past it. Similar discoveries await when you Newtonize a familiar saying. Here’s some vintage “Abe Newton” as posted on the Net: “Foyer scrota and severe heavers ago our flashovers brought force on thy cosmetician a new notion conceives in lubricate and deducted to the prosecution that all men are crated quail.”
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Thomas Kemper Weizen-Berry might be America’s first raspberry-flavored beer. I wouldn’t say it was particularly good, but it might qualify as an experience in learning just how bizarre foreign-inspired food-and-drink recipes can really be…. Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls is the first basketball-shaped cereal! They’re wheat/corn puffs, sorta like oversize Kix with alternating pink and brown basketball seams dyed onto them and an odd brown-sugar taste. Better still is the hype on the side: “Hey Mom & Dad! Tired of putting on the full-court press to get your kids to eat a wholesome breakfast? Introducing new Dunk-A-Balls, the one-of-a-kind breakfast cereal that will have your kids fast breaking for the breakfast bowl. Dunk-A-Balls is the perfect tip-off to the whole day…. Score a slam dunk with your kids, sky-hook them a bowl of Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls now, before the buzzer sounds on this limited time offering!”
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: My Spokane is Evergreen student Jon Snyder‘s oversize photo-essay book on the sights, sounds and dreams of his beloved Inland Empire hometown (though he does complain in an insert that he couldn’t find an Eastern Washington printer willing to run it, due to a chapter on adolescent sex fantasies). Of special interest to west-side readers is his ode to the Spokane Dick’s Drive-In, a completely separate enterprise from the Seattle Dick’s chain (and servers of superior flesh-n’-grease products, or so he claims). $7.50 at Fallout Records or from 214 S. Coeur D’Alene St., Spokane 99204….
Sell Yourself to Science is, at first glance, just another Loompanics Unlimited tome of quasi-demimonde self-help access; in this case, about how to make small sums of money by participating in medical experiments or by selling your blood, semen or other bodily products. What sets it above the Loompanics norm is the oft-hilarious writing, by local kid Jim Hogshire; especially when he asserts that you should be allowed to sell post-death rights to your organs to the highest bidder. Even better is the collected set of Hogshire’s zine Pills A-Go-Go, which studies pharmaceuticals (legal and otherwise) the way Spin studies music (available at Pistil Books on E. Pike, that handy place to go mag-shopping on a Fri. night while avoiding an opening act at Moe).
THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT?: You don’t have to be in Ulster to get harsh treatment at an Irish cultural event. A couple of bouncers at the Moore were overheard vowing to “get” some kids at the Pogues show a few weeks back. And they did, grabbing people (particularly the small and/or female) from the pit, forcibly removing them. One frustrated attendee tried to leave voluntarily, only to get grabbed and tossed outside herself; she reports still having sore limbs and muscles. The bouncers in question are reportedly no longer at the theater; its new owners were already planning to hire new security.
BOOZE NOOZE: Dewar’s Scotch, whose youth-appeal magazine ads we’ve discussed, isn’t the only distilled liquor trying to capture a younger generation weaned on cheap beer. The trade mag Market Watch: Market Intelligence on the Wine, Spirits and Beer Business just had a special issue about it. The opening note from the publisher, pictured as a plump moustached old guy, declared, “They’re diverse. They’re young. And they have decidedly different attitudes about alcoholic beverages than do baby boomers. Just who are these new consumers, you asked? Generation X, that’s who.” Inside, we learn the market strategies aimed at pushing spirits, extra-sweet chardonnays, ice beer, and mass-produced pseudo-microbrews to under-30s. But the most telling parts of the issue are the ads, boasting to retailers of the youth-market atrategies of Southern Comfort (“One small age group buys enough spirits to empty your store every hour”) and Black & White Scotch (“They’re passive-aggressive vidiots who grew up too fast and have no faith in the system and think holes in jeans are cool and that party is a verb and will never buy anything in your store anyway. Congratulations. They’re your new Scotch customers”)….
Meanwhile, that new desperate-to-be-hip malt beverage Zima has reportedly been casting locally for commercials, seeking out models who are 25 or older but look younger. Encouraging underage drinking, you say? Heavens no! Just looking hip and urbane! Speaking of which…
SNOWED UNDER: I’d hoped that springtime would bring a seasonal end to articles about snowboarding, full of all the requisite MTV Sports-style hyperbole, neon-drenched graphics, “unfocused” typefaces, and Prince-esque spellings (“D Place 4 U 2 B”). But instead there are now at least six year-round snowboard magazines, all more or less drenched in “grafique XS.” The art aside, there’s a bigger issue at work: the case of a countryside athletic activity attracting an urbane-hip mystique. I’m meeting intelligent, club-going, artistically-minded young adults who play the sport, who either don’t mind the hype about it or like it.
To many old-line punkers and wavers like myself, athleticism was the suspect domain of the Evil Jock Mentality, or of anti-intellectual adults (cf. “Get High On Sports Not Drugs” programs in school, which posited that the only alternative to being a mindless junkie was to be a hopeless jock). Artistically-aware people weren’t into sports; they were more likely to be beaten up by the guys who were into sports. But in recent years, some free-thinking youths have begun to accept that the human body might be useful for activities besides dancing, fighting, fucking, and dressing (cf. Vedder‘s surfer-dude acrobatics). Speaking of sports…
FROZEN IN TIME?: The New Times, that monthly new-age broadsheet, offers a specialist perspective on recent events: “Tonya and Nancy: An ECKist’s View.” That’s Eckankar, “The Ancient Science of Soul Travel.” Author Robin Adams McBride claims Harding’s misdeeds and/or lapses in judgment resulted from her personal development over successive reincarnations over the centuries, “as the soul sets up its scenarios for learning and then forgets that it had anything to do with planning her experiences….Tonya Harding can experience the ultimate transformation of an evolved Scorpio personality if she responds to this wake-up call positively. The phoenix arising from the ashes of personal humiliation and defeat can replace the scorpion which stings its enemies to gain advantage.”
THE FINE PRINT (from promo copies of the Sister Psychic CD Surrender, You Freak!): “Advance CD — Instore-airplay promo only. Will explode if sold.”
MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “classic rock” as the work of radio station managers wistfully looking back to a more innocent age, before the radio was controlled by people like them. Speaking of which…
LIVE AIR: Here’s all I know about Free Radio Seattle, the new pirate station advertised on flyers around Capitol Hill this past month. It was scheduled to go on the air at midnight 4/30 for a 90-minute broadcast, transmitting somewhere in the vicinity of 88 on the FM dial. Further broadcasts are tentatively scheduled on a weekly basis. Content will include community news and commentary, club listings, and freeform music (“like what KCMU used to be,” according to an anonymous communique sent to me). Because this whole thing’s somewhat illegal, the broadcasts will be recorded at one undisclosed site and transmitted from another; to avoid (or at least delay) FCC detection, the portable transmitter will be set up at a different place each time. If these guys are putting their butts on the line to do this (and there’s a strong chance they’ll get caught before long), they’d better have a good reason, like having something important to say.
CATHODE CORNER: A recent wire service item placed Married… With Children as one of the top 10 TV shows among African American audiences. (The only white-cast show with more black viewers is Blossom, which until recently shared a time block with the black-starring Fresh Prince of Bel Air.) My theory: Married‘s black co-creator, Michael Moye, clearly set out to devise a family that would affirm the stereotypes some hard-striving black middle-class families have about lazy, privileged white trash. It’s either that, or the utter failure of Bud Bundy’s attempt to play-act as “Street Rapper Grandmaster B.”
BAN, ROLL ON: Yes, the Washington legislature tried again to revive the Erotic Music Bill, a misguided attempt to shore up the morals of Those Kids Today by restricting selected rock records (Gov. Lowry vetoed the “anti-porn” package of proposals that included the music bill). In the short term, control-freak schemes like this can be dangerous to free expression and personal privacy, and must be fought vigorously. But in the long term, the tide is starting to turn against the forces of cultural suppression, because it’s bad for capitalism.
In the pre-industrial age, censorship was a tool of economic as well as social control. When only the upper classes were taught to read, the number of potential rivals for prestige positions was kept within means. The class system was kept in place by restricted information.
In the industrial age, supporting censorship was a convenient way for big business interests to forge convenient political alliances with more populist right-wing elements (note Michael Milkin, Jesse Helmes, et al.). The Republicans of the rural west proved particularly adept at using the religious right to help elect politicians whose real loyalty wasn’t to churches but to big ranchers, miners and real estate developers. Censorship was also a convenient way for the corporate power structure to deny responsibility for some of the social upheavals its own machinations had caused. Corporate America could say: “We’re losing our technological edge to Japan? Don’t blame us; all we did was encourage slashes in education spending so the government could reduce business taxes. Blame the decadent liberals — yeah, that’s the ticket! Sexual permissiveness did it! That, and the devil’s rock music, and those naughty TV shows!” Or: “Urban crime? We didn’t cause it; all we did was move all our jobs to the suburbs! Blame the homosexuals, or the immigrants, or the lack of family values!” Or: “Child abuse? Don’t look at us; we merely promoted a culture where selfish aggression was treated as a virtue. No, just get rid of those magazines with the pictures of bad women in them. That’ll solve everything!”
But in the Information Age (which spread into the realm of politics about 18 to 24 months ago), censorship is a threat to what is becoming big business’s most prized asset — intellectual property. Free expression is the new frontier of post-industrial capitalism. The Viacom-Paramounts and the Time-Warners will begin to fight against the principle of censorship in the same way the timber industry has fought designated wilderness areas, or the way GM has fought pollution controls. A key connection of the old Reagan coalition has been severed, perhaps for keeps. The religious right, having outlived its usefulness to much of the business community, just might find itself sent back into the shadows due to a slow drying up of big-money support, destined to become just another of the many isolated subcultures in today’s fragmented society.
But it won’t go away quietly. There will be more kooky drives like the Erotic Music Bill and that initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination. These campaigns will become blunter, shriller and more divisive, as their instigators strive to hold on to their own core support base.
UNTIL NEXT TIME, root for the Sonics and for single-payer health care, and ponder this sign outside Catholic Community Services on 2nd: “Depression Support Group, 8:30 a.m. Wednesdays.” If you can get up that early, do you really need to go there?
Words of love from the animated, syndicated, underrated 2 Stupid Dogs: “The world is our pancake house, and you’re my flapjack stack with a scoop of butter and maple syrup and a side of hash browns and some toast and a large orange juice.”
A small publisher of cult-appeal books has expressed serious interest in my book, The Real Seattle Music Story. Once I sign a contract, I probably won’t be able to sell any more printout copies of the text. So if you want a Preview Edition, you’d better order it now.
“Phylloxera”
LET YOUR KIDS SEE ANY MOVIE THEY WANT. JUST DON’T LET `EM NEAR THE POPCORN
The word came into local media outlets shortly after 10 a.m. Friday. An electrician had found a dead male body at 8:40 a.m. in Kurt Cobain’s house on Lake Washington Blvd. A shotgun and an apparent suicide note were nearby. Authorities refused to identify the body, but that didn’t stop Nirvana fans (and reporters) from gathering outside the house. Thirty people were there within half an hour of the first announcement; an hour later the street had become too crowded for regular traffic to get through. Shortly after noon, investigators confirmed that it was indeed Cobain who had done himself in.
The AP quoted Cobain’s mother as saying he hadn’t been heard from in six days. That Wednesday, it was announced that Nirvana was bowing out of plans to headline the Lollapallooza ’94 package tour. His wife Courtney Love, who’d saved him when he took the champagne-and-sedatives overdose in Rome in March (officially billed as an accident), was off in LA wrapping up preparations for the release of a new album by her band Hole.
During the Rome coma-watch, The Stranger ran a piece by Eric Fredericksen on how the media would treat a Cobain death, as a cultural icon and a nostalgia industry just like Hendrix and Morrison. I’ll try to avoid that shit here, but I’ll try to give a personal view on the guy’s work. Like most of you, I didn’t know him personally, had never seen him offstage. I knew people who knew him; they inveriably described him as just a soft-spoken regular guy who loved to make music and art and who hated the bullshit of The Industry.
Punk rock had developed in New York as an arty affectation. England took it seriously as a voice of youthful anger. The local new wave scenes across the US took the DIY aesthetic of punk even more seriously, eventually questioning the very need for New York/London tastemakers. Cobain emerged amidst this indie-rock movement, among guys who’d chosen not to listen when the industry said punk was dead. Cobain and Krist Novoselic started playing together when they were 19, and by the time Cobain turned 21 in 1988 Nirvana was becoming a big fish in the still-small pond that was the Seattle club scene. By the next year they had an album and were part of TAD’s European tour; by all accounts it was a miserable experience, with Cobain having a nervous breakdown onstage at the last show.
While tagged by out-of-town media as the Leader of the Grunge Rock Revolution, he hadn’t been a central member of the hard-partying, extroverted schmoozers who had developed the punk-metal crossover sounds in Seattle. He was an inwardly-directed soul who, during Nirvana’s club years, holed up in an Olympia apartment and lived on corn dogs and cough syrup. While he kept his private life private, he put his personal torments into his work with a rare purity and clarity. It was his curse/blessing to be the best songwriter of his generation, and to be ripe for the picking just as “alternative rock” was becoming a big business. But it was his decision to go to Geffen; if Nevermind had come out on Sub Pop, as was first planned, it might have sold a few thousand copies, the label would have continued its slide into bankruptcy, and the Seattle rock hype would have died down leaving Soundgarden as national stars but few others.
We’ll probably never really know what finally led him to quit the world. Perhaps it was the slip back into drugs after the highly-publicized hell he went through to get off heroin. Or perhaps the hype and the pressure finally got to him. To the end, however, he maintained a public image as a survivor.
On March 27 the following statement, credited to Cobain, appeared on the Internet’s Nirvana mailing list:
“So this is the Information Highway our illustrious VP has been jawing to the nation about. Well, my manager told me some kind of fan-thing was going down here and that I should come over and check it out. Well, here I am. I’d be lying if I said I’m not surprised to see the band’s popularity reaching even into the depths of the electronic underworld. Cool.
“Well I won’t keep you people long, but I thought you might be interested in what the band is up to. Last month Chris, me, and Dave came out of London Bridge finishing up a revamped “Pennyroyal Tea” (I didn’t much care for how we did the album version and thought we could’ve done much better with the song). Geffen should have that out shortly, knowing the speed with which their money machine rolls.
“We’re all taking a break from the music and touring for a bit. I’m still a little freaked over the Rome thing and need some time to rest and get over it, you’d think they could make a good milkshake, but no. Hope you people are ready for a calmer moodier album. Yep, Nirvana’s going back into the studio at the end of the summer. I’m already working on the new songs and artwork for the new album. If you’re expecting the same verse-chorus-verse, well, I suppose you have but two choices, don’t buy the new album when it’s released in early ’95 or get used to the fact that the band is changing. Longevity folks.”
(latter-day note: An Internet user in Victoria later claimed to have fabricated the note. My excerpts from it got printed up as authentic in Dave Thompson’s quickie Cobain exploitation book.)
GATHERING OF THE VULTURES: The vehemence with which conservative and old-hippie commentators alike treated Cobain and his fans is unprecedented in my lifetime, unless you count the bio-sleaze books of Albert Goldman (who thankfully died before he could write a Kurt exploitation book) or the Arizona politicians who wanted to prevent a Martin Luther King holiday by red-baiting King 20 years after his death. Rush Limbaugh called Kurt “a piece of human debris” and treated Nirvana listeners with equal disrespect; thus proving for all time the essential cruelty behind his worldview. If Limbaugh deliberately gloated over the demise of an opposition spokesperson, Andy Rooney was merely clueless in his denunciation of Cobain, and by extension anyone who loved him, as a “loser” not worthy of respect, only condescending pity. Locally, that professional pious hypocrite John Carlson echoed the Limbaugh party line in claiming the “sad and pathetic” Cobain should have quit music and found religion (as if Carlson has ever represented sincere Christian charity). P-I cartoonist David Horsey was at least more sympathetic when he suggested that Kurt could’ve found solace if he’d done more hiking in the woods; Kurt grew up near the woods, and from all accounts was more in touch with the terror of timber country than with its majesty.
Then there’s Times columnist Eric Lacitis, whose profound and utter incomprehension of Cobain, his music, his depression and his audience was matched only by his intransigence. First, he wrote a snide “joke” about Cobain’s March coma for a Sunday feature section that was printed before his death but distributed after it. Then, he wrote a “serious” column questioning what somebody with all that money could possibly have to worry about. Then, when many readers rightfully objected, Lacitis wrote a succession of shallow arguments attempting to defend his earlier bluster.
This is more than just the case of some oldsters who don’t get that new music (even though Cobain worked in a nearly 20-year-old genre). It’s the case of people who are paid to communicate, yet who lack a basic understanding of their topic, and in some cases have been defensive and even proud of their own ignorance. If the media business really wants to know why today’s young adults are consuming more books but far fewer newspapers and TV newscasts, it need only look to its own industry-wide “just call me another old white guy who doesn’t get it” attitude. Not “getting it” is not a positive quality, and neither is inhumanity.
4/94 Misc. Newsletter
ATTENTION HAWKEYE: GRAB YOUR STETHOSCOPE.
THE WAR RESUMES IN 0800 HOURS
Dunno ’bout you, but here at Misc. we were excited as heck at the P-I teaser headline, “Seahawks Sign Pro Bowler,” then disappointed when the article said he wasn’t a bowling pro, just a football player who’d been in the Pro Bowl. We’re still excited that a Lynnwood company’s gonna start importing Norton motorcycles, a venerable UK brand that hasn’t been sold over here in 20 years. Some analysts claim the company’s just selling the bikes as a loss leader, and the only real profits will come from merchandising the logo. The P-I says the company’s committed to selling the bikes as well as the T-shirts and caps, and has plans to start building the things here in a few years. It’d be the first US cycle plant besides Harley since the Indian company folded in the ’50s. Imagine — being able to buy a US-built two-wheeler without buying into the Young Republican “rebel” image that now surrounds Harleys (more on that later).
ONE LAST OLYMPIC MOMENT: It’s almost too bad the ’98 winter games won’t happen in Salt Lake City, whose bid was topped by the Japanese. I’d have loved to have seen Charles Kuralt & co. give their patented human-interest feature stories on the quaint customs and folklore of those cute lovable li’l Mormons.
ICE DREAM: If you saw the Good Morning America segment with the woman from the Tonya Harding Fan Club, expressing the group’s continued support for the skater at the enforced end of her amateur career, here’s its address: 4632 SE Oxbow Parkway, Gresham, OR 97080-8967. You can join at several levels (adult $10, senior/fixed income $5, children’s “Tots for Tonya” memberships $1). You’ll get a newsletter, bumper sticker, photo button, and a chance to buy autographed pix, “Team Tonya” T-shirts with the logo of an ice skate with a Portland Rose on it, “No Comment” sweatshirts, “IUPG” (Innocent Until Proven Guilty) buttons, and two cassette singles: “It’s Tonya’s Turn” (described in the club catalog as a “dreamy melodic ballad”) and “Fire On Ice” (“Peppy, upbeat lyrics and melody proclaiming Tonya’s skating abilities”). Hey — ya gotta support a figure skater whose name sounds the same as Patty Hearst‘s alias!
FOR BETTER OR VERSE: The Seattle Small Press Poetry Review has been running a reader poll. Among the questions, “Do you think poetry readings have an effect on the audiences’ writing? Good or bad?” Replies include this from Dan Raphael: “Yes, people are influenced by what they hear. Unfortunately a lot of what they hear is personal, un-crafted and indulgent. Hey, we all need places to unload but I don’t want to burden poetry with my sad songs.”
LIVE AIR: So KING-FM’s gonna be donated to the symphony, the opera and the Corporate Council for the Arts. That may remove one of the main complaints about it — that, as one of the world’s few commercial classical stations, it stuck to orchestral favorites and seldom explored the wider range of highbrow tunes. Now, it’ll be part of the nonprofit arts community’s promotional work, and presumably will be used to expose audiences to a full range of serious stuff — or at least the full range of what the symphony and opera are staging this year. The move will also aid KUOW in its plans to phase out its remaining classical hours, toward a more ratings-oriented talk format. The Bullitt sisters are still pondering what to do with the less financially-successful KING-AM. My $.02 worth: Turn it into a community station. Or if not that one, get a community-radio group together, persuade one of the multi-station groups in town to donate another underutilized 1000-1600 AM frequency, and let it rip with unbridled free speech, ungentrified music, ethnic shows, etc.
ALDUS CORP., R.I.P.: There will still be software under the Aldus name, and its code might be written in Seattle, but it’ll be conceived, guided and controlled by Adobe in California. This is more than the potential loss of a few hundred jobs. Aldus was a rule-breaker in the software biz. It was born in Pioneer Square and stayed there, rejecting developers’ offers to move it off to a sterile suburban fort like all the other software giants. Its flagship product, PageMaker, wasn’t some yuppie number-cruncher but a tool of empowerment that brought professional typography and layout into the hands of any civilian with $5 to $8 for an hour at the copy center.
As PageMaker and its sister products gathered more and more professional features, they became almost as expensive as some of the computers they ran on; but Aldus remembered its DIY roots and acquired the popular-priced program Personal Press. When the history of the street-level media revolution is written, the Aldus name will be up there proudly, in 32-point bold condensed.
CATHODE CORNER: NW colleges have never been sources of Florida migrations, but in recent years we’ve seen what we’ve missed with MTV’s Spring Break Weekend, showcasing that annual rite of thousands of East Coast rich kids getting drunk and stupid together. The “highlight” of each year’s coverage was a coed beauty contest that skipped talent or poise segments and went straight to the skin. But this year, a new (female) producer imposed a new dress code: no more undersized trunks and thong bikinis, just baggy surfer shorts and modest two-pieces. Between this and Beavis and Butt-head, the channel is definitely moving its exploitation recipe toward less sex and more violence (just the formula the Reagan-Bush guys would have approved of).
UNDER THE COVERS: As a fervent lover of bookstores, both big-n’-diverse and small-n’-specific (I don’t mess with Mr. In Between), I anxiously await the opening of Borders Books and Music on 4th Ave. downtown, right near Waldenbooks on 5th and Brentano’s in Westlake Center. Just don’t expect any big neighborhood rivalries among them. All three chains are owned by K mart.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Controlled Divisiveness: The Rise and Fault of the Compact Disc is Alex Kostelnik’s self-published tract commemorating the 11th anniversary of the CD’s introduction, packaged in a CD jewel box. Kostelnik uses the CD as a symbol for everything that’s wrong with the music biz — corporate consolidation, bland overproduced product, repressive tactics like anti-home taping campaigns. (He includes a sticker, amending the anti-taping logo to read “Sony Corporation Is Killing Music — And It’s Legal.” Available for $3 at the New Store…. Splice is a new local movie-review zine run by Tacoma’s Michelle McDaniel and Rich Bowen, operating under a simple slogan: “Movies Suck.” Bowen invokes a line popularly attributed to sci-fi guy Theodore Sturgeonthat “90 percent of everything is crap,” then goes on to differentiate between non-crap (Psycho, Casablanca, 2001), good crap (Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster), and bad crap (Calendar Girl). It offers subscriptions, but since the first issue just came out a few weeks ago and has a crossed-out October cover date, you might not want to trust ’em with cash in advance… The first months of newWeekly editor Knute Berger‘s regime have shown a significant turnaround for a paper that seemed doomed to follow its cherished upscale-boomer generation into the grave (or the suburbs, whichever comes first). It’s doing things it’s never done before — publishing significant stories by nonwhite writers, running more serious cover stories, cutting back on the psychobabble and the advertiser-oriented lifestyle fluff. Last week’s piece on City Attorney Mark Sidrin astutely noted that his various harassment campaigns against nightlife, minorities, and the poor, in lieu of a real anti-crime program, might be less effective at making the city safer than at appeasing the prejudices of the “Emerald City” boomers, whose worldview the old Weekly would have never questioned. Speaking of which…
KARMA CORN: If the new age people are right when they claim that your fate in life is primarily determined by how positive or negative your attitude is, then perhaps the state’s latest welfare reform craze is doomed from the get-go. The current public-assistance system is a network of embarrassment, frustrating procedures and cumbersome eligibility requirements, a surefire way to get people to feel dejected and hopeless about their futures. So of course, some of our legislators want to make the requirements even more picayune, the bureaucracy even harsher, to deliberately turn the system into a kind of psychic punishment for the sin of being poor. By the theory of karma, that’s no way to turn depressed, hounded paupers into confident, assertive citizens.
Of course, the conspiracy theorists among you might claim that that’s just what politicians want — to keep poor people feeling helpless, so they won’t think about rising up to challenge the status quo. The same conspiracy arguers might claim that the current cry for a “War on Crime” throws money into an ever-bigger prison system expressly to turn amateur criminals into professional criminals, thus keeping the crime rate up, thus maintaining the perceived need for a police state that would gnaw away against personal rights. I wouldn’t go that far. I’ve been around long enough to see social systems (legal, bureaucratic, corporate, et al.) get sidetracked by traditional procedures and end up working against their ostensible original goals. It should be clear by now that we need an assistance system that encourages self-respect and initiative, and a justice system that teaches and encourages non-violent behavior. That is, it might be clear if we weren’t living under government-by-talk-radio. The real goal of our welfare system is to let politicians and affluent voters feel like they’re getting tough on those bad ol’ good-for-nothings. In this sense, we’re already spending our tax money to make people feel good about themselves, but we’re doing it in the wrong way for the wrong beneficiaries.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Food and beverage producers have vastly multiplied their assortments of brands in recent years, trying to exploit the subcultural fragmentation of American society (more about that next week maybe). In one clever example, a small brewery deep in the Iowa grain belt proudly offers Pink Triangle Beer, sold exclusively in gay bars and marketed as the gay-friendly brew gays should choose to show their support for their scene. I don’t know if the active yeast cultures used to make it have that special “gay gene” some speculative researchers think might exist; nor do I know if it has what professional beverage critics sometimes call a “fruity quality”…. Tim Zagat, regional stringer for the foodservice trade mag Restaurants & Institutions, claims the Next Big Thing in Northwest restaurants will be Tofu Chateaubriand! I can’t even imagine what that would be. Whatever it is it sounds disgusting, so of course I want to try it. If anybody’s really serving this, please let me know.
DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: The city should support punk culture, instead of continuing to harass it. Seattle’s government and mainstream media still believe in the sentiments uttered by KIRO’s Lou Guzzo back in 1986, supporting the infamous Teen Dance Ordinance. In one of the most reactionary utterances ever made on local airwaves, Guzzo essentially called punks worthless losers; if teenagers were bored, he said they ought to take up hiking or skiing — in other words, consumer leisure pursuits that wouldn’t lead to questioning the established sociopolitical order.
Punks believe in living in big cities. They believe in creativity. They believe in making their own world, in making up their own minds. Punks believe in downtown shopping, public transportation, and public gathering places. Punks seem like nihilists to many outsiders, but really believe in actively working for a better world. In the developing information age, they’re pioneers in info-entrepreneurism. They make their own records, they book their own gigs, they paint their own posters, they publish their own zines — a collection of skills that seem like marginal pursuits to most people over 40, but which will be vital to the key industries of the 21st century. Punks aren’t hopeless dropout ne’er-do-wells. They’ve created one of the Seattle area’s four or five top export industries. They’ve helped make us a world-class arts center, with a reputation as a focal point for aspiring enthusiastic creative types from all over. Speaking of which…
OVER-THE-COUNTERCULTURE: You sometimes hear about old radical groups that got infiltrated by FBI informers. In some accounts, the plants prodded the groups into illegal acts or spurring internal dissentions. But I wonder if they ever got subliminal messages into those old light shows, implanting time-release instructions to the freaks: “By 1971 you will get hooked on pot, move to the country, and care only about yourselves.”
When I was in college in the early ’80s, some of the most personally complacent and artistically reactionary people were the ones who also wouldn’t stop bragging about how open-minded they were in The Sixties. When I was on KCMU I closed my DJ shift with the tagline, “Rock on — never mellow out.” I didn’t want my listeners to turn into self-obsessed fogeys intolerant of anything that didn’t conform to their increasingly narrow worldview.
Now, hardly a week goes by that I don’t meet somebody 10 years younger than me emulating everything that frustrated me about the people 10 years older than me. Here in the Geraldo era I meet young adults who still find something “rebellious” about Hunter Thompson, that professional self-aggrandizer who presaged today’s reporter-as-celebrity hype. I’ve read Terence McKenna essays that criticize “linear Western Civilization” as if it still existed. And it’s not just 40-year-olds anymore who mistake “What a long strange trip it’s been” for a profound statement.
I’m even getting young people treating me with the same stereotypes old people used on me — like the stereotype that anybody who doesn’t adhere to a “leftist lifestyle” must be a political conservative. I’ve heard food co-op purists condemn all supermarket shoppers or all TV viewers as fascist rednecks; the argument reminds me of the Fundamentalists of my hometown who avowed that the Mormons would go to Hell because of their incorrect doctrine.
That’s a perfect attitude for moralistic posturing, but a lousy way to build a progressive political movement. To see why, let’s examine some unexamined presumptions going back to the Beat Generation.
The button-down conformity of the ’50s was not the way society had always been. Some WWII-generation intellectuals saw ’50s culture being created, and rebelled against it. Their central premise, as watered down and reinterpreted over the years, was that all of America could be neatly divided into two groups: Hipsters (enlightened intellectuals and artists, plus those whom the intellectuals and artists chose to romanticize) and Squares (everybody else). Tom Lehrer lampooned these pretensions in his song “The Folk Song Army” (“We’re the Folk Song Army, and every one of us cares. We hate repression, injustice and war — unlike the rest of you squares!”).
The hippies took this premise to its logical extreme, and in doing so tore the American left apart from the working class it once claimed to champion. By stereotyping all non-hippies as fascists and rednecks, they wrote off the potential support base for any real populist uprising. They sometimes claimed to be the voice of The People, but their definition of The People got narrower every year. Spiro Agnew got away with calling leftists “effete snobs” because leftists allowed themselves to be perceived as a self-serving elite.
By the early ’70s, black activists started charging that the counterculture didn’t even care about minorities anymore, only about white middle-class women and white middle-class gays. More recently, minority leaders have questioned the environmental movement’s priorities, asserting that toxic waste sites in ethnic neighborhoods are at least as important as hiking trails.
Today, BMW drivers call themselves “rebels” and beer commercials promise to make you “Different From The Rest.” There is no “mass culture” to rebel against anymore. Society’s been fragmented into demographic and subcultural mini-states, influenced by specialty advertising concepts and demographic target marketing. The “counterculture” is now just another market niche; organic foods in this store, ethnic foods in the next. If you tout yourself as somehow “apart” from Big Bad America on the basis of what you eat or what you wear or what age group you are, you’re still letting the segmented-consumer metaphor define you.
To be truly “political” would be to forge alliances with people beyond your own subculture, to reach out across our fragmented society, to build coalitions and exert influence to help make a better world. We don’t need to tear the fabric of society apart; big business already did it. We need to figure how to sew it back together.
QUESTIONABLE PR TACTIC OF THE MONTH: Marshall at YNOT Magazines wants people to “help” City Councilmember Jane Noland’s drive against street posters: “Go take a flier off your local pole, any one you find visually stimulating is fine. Then fax it to her so she knows the effort you have exerted to her cause. Then do it again. Do it til the cows come home. Do it ’til they leave on spring break and come home again but whatever you do just keep faxing her updates of your efforts. Maybe even make a flier about this and tack ’em up all over. Boy wouldn’t that be swell!” I can’t endorse this; I thought we were trying to prove we can be responsible people who don’t deserve to be treated as non-citizens in the name of that official state religion of Seattle, Mandatory Mellowness.
‘TIL THE NEXT TIME your fingers pick up our ink, and call for your copy of the complete Hanna-Barbera sound effects library, on four CDs from somewhere in Canada (800-387-3030).
Stanford “industrial psychologist” Dr. James Keenan, in a 1967 speech to Muzak executives quoted in Joseph Lanza’s book Elevator Music: “Muzak helps human communities because it is a non-verbal symbolism for the common stuff of everyday living in the global village…. Muzak promotes the sharing of meaning because it massifies symbolism in which not few, but all, can participate.”
Printout copies of the rough draft to my book, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, are still available for a limited time for $10 plus $2 postage. Be among the first to learn what really happened to make Seatown the capital of rock revivalism.
As you can tell, this is the first issue of the new, expanded, larger-than-it-once-was Misc. newsletter thang. It’s a vehicle for some non-Stranger material, for some of my unpublished short fiction and humor pieces, and for some future experiments in form and design. The price also increases with this issue, to $12. Current subscribers will receive two issues for every three they’re still owed at the old price, rounded up in their favor.
Ads are again being accepted for this letter of fun: $25 for a business card-sized spot on the back, $20 for the same-sized spot inside. Show your support for Seattle’s original home of fast-food-for-thought.
“Querulous”
2/94 Misc. Newsletter
REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’
MEANT WARREN G.?
Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.
THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.
CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.
EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.
GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!
SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!
CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.
CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”
DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)
MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.
CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.
REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.
YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it:Â Deluxe.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.
THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”
THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”
DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.
NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.
PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”
DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).
A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.
She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.
Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”
Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”
My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.
“Amphistylar”
1/94 Misc. Newsletter
TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:
THEREÂ ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS
BESIDES CHIHULY
Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.
DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.
CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.
HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?
INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.
LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!
ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.
A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).
MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.
CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.
FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.
GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.
WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.
THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”
SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…
CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example:Â Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.
CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?
LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.
IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.
COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.
From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”
My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:
* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX
* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned
* Stories, wacky anecdotes
Thanx.
“Alembic”
THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST
Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of
Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;
plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.
Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.
If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,
then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.
10/93 Misc. Newsletter
`HAMMERING MAN’ ISN’T ART. THE BALL-AND-CHAINÂ IS.
Return now to Misc., the column that wished the new local fringe-drama outfit Theater Schmeater was related to the former local fringe art-outfit Gallery Schmallery.
WHAT WE DID THIS SUMMER: Couldn’t help but be amused by the preprinted Sizzler kids’-meal coupons in the Sunday funnies the week of the chain’s e. coli crisis. Thought KIRO-TV’s retreat back to the anchor desk should’ve been accompanied by Alice in Chains‘s “I’m the Man in the Box.” Noted that the station that banned two Picket Fences shows clearly showed the slogan on a new pro-Huskies T-shirt, “Puck the Fac-10.”
BOWING DOWN: For years, the Huskies struggled in the LA powerhouses’ shadows, even though the UW was far bigger than any single California campus. But in the ’80s the team grew toward three straight Rose Bowls and one of those “mythical national championships.” We now know these achievements partly came by cheating on the vague regulations that let college ball pretend to be an amateur sport. Husky players had pathetic graduation rates, despite simplified classes and elaborate tutoring. There were allegations of drug dealing in the team dorm. Some players got cushy jobs and cushier cash, arranged by rich boosters.
Now, the Pac-10 Conference saddled the team with recruiting restrictions, a two-year ban from bowl games, and other penalties. Coach Don James (who wasn’t implicated in the charges) quit. The violations had to have been known by authorities.
How could they excuse the overzealousness? I think it’s ‘cuz the UW itself has become a big-money grant factory that relegated teaching to a very low priority. It’s partly the legacy of our late Sens. Jackson and Magnuson, who funneled tons of federal research pork our way. The campus got obsessed with being “a world class research institution,” regardless of how well it serviced the state’s kids.
We’ve discussed the yuppification of KCMU in the context of the UW corporate culture. The administration thought the station could raise more donations with tamer programming; they’d funnel that into enough salaried staff positions to qualify the station for public-broadcasting grants. The men who turned KCMU into the New Coke of radio weren’t malicious; they just behaved like good UW administrators (including manager Chris Knab, who resigned after his pay got cut in half due to sagging donations). They saw no purpose higher than organizational growth.
Similarly, the football program was allowed or encouraged to grow by any means available. While tuitions skyrocketed and academic budgets stagnated, the team generated big cash surpluses. But little football money went up to the main campus.
If rich alums want to pay for football, let ’em, within limits at least as strict as those set by the Pac-10. But funnel part of that income, and a portion of Husky merchandising money, into academic scholarships. And go further with a professed priority of new athletic director Barbara Hedges: getting the players an education. As a kid who used to get beat up by jocks, I’m not intrinsically sympathetic to their plight. But they are risking permanent injury for the slim chance of a brief NFL career. If they can’t get under-the-table cash, they oughta get a degree that might help ’em earn some bucks in the future.
KICKS: The Seahawks used to have a 5,000-name waiting list for tickets. But after last year’s spectacular flop, they’re running commercials pleading for walk-in traffic. Between that and the Huskies’ debacle, Seattle’s football “Wave” may finally crash.
MISC.’S INDEX: Number of local bands profiled/reviewed in the Rocket since June 1992 that are described as “not a typical Seattle band”: All of them.
WHERE FRIENDS MET FRIENDS: It’s time for concerned citizens to again rally behind a preservatory call: Save the Dog House! Not only is it one of the few things in the world that my father and I both like, not only is it one of the last old-time roadhouse diners, it’s a remnant of everything that used to be cool and unpretentious about pre-Yup Seattle. We need a sympathetic investment group to take over the place under two directives. (a) Don’t “restore” it into some plastic imitation of itself. Keep the signs, keep the menu designs, keep organist Dick Dickerson, keep the low drink prices, keep the dogs-playing-poker prints. (b) Revise the food only as much as you have to. Many people love the Dog House’s murals but not its meals; the new owners will have to provide some new things to attract them, and make careful changes to existing items without imposing that gentrified faux-diner cuisine seen in some newer places.
FOR MEAT LOVERS ONLY: One local chow-down institution still going strong, Dick’s Drive-Ins will celebrate its 40th anniversary by publishing a “Memory Book” early next year. They’re asking for people’s stories and photos of life at Seattle’s classic burger emporia (top prize: $100). I know a guy from Vancouver who makes a point when he’s in town to visit all five locations (even the obscure Holman Road outlet, the Dick’s That Time Forgot). In the mid-’80s the Broadway Dick’s was the teen cruising hangout, until the parking lots were closed by the powers that be. It was the setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway,” the first proof that an artist could reach a national audience without pretending not to be from Seattle. One important memory is gone: they stopped selling their orange T-shirts (“Dick’s, where TASTE is the difference!”) to the public, and now outfit their staff in new blue designer jobs (not available to civilians). The new shirts betray Dick’s heritage as a place that didn’t follow trends, but just made the greatest grease and sugar products anywhere.
ELECTORAL COLLAGE: Rice, Sidrin and other politicians sometimes loathed in these and other pages are up for re-election this year but are either unopposed or have only token rivals. For all the boasts people around town give me about how “political” they are, there’s damn too little real organizing going on to provide a truly progressive influence on (or alternative to) Seattle’s Democratic machine politics. To really be “political” doesn’t mean to stand around and proclaim how morally superior you are. It means to form alliances with other people (yes, even with squares, meat eaters and TV viewers) to forge a popular consensus toward rebuilding our frayed social fabric.
BE “R” GUEST: The Stouffer Madison Hotel not only stamps its logo into all the ashtrays every day, it replaces its elevator carpets daily: “Have A Pleasant THURSDAY.” An excessive service perhaps, but it is useful to business travelers who need to be reminded where they momentarily stand in the time-space continuum.
GOO: The UW alum mag Columns reports that researcher Patricia Kuhl’s got some big govt. grant to try and decode baby talk, believing it holds the key to language learning. Why doesn’t she just read some Sugar & Spike comic books or watch Rugrats?
COLOR ME BEMUSED: Why’s any sweatshirt or trinket boutique that screechingly claims to be “Seattle Style” invariably drenched in California-airhead pastels that have nothing to do with how light and color look here? A real “Seattle Style” would start with the misty hues of the Northwest School painters, then add the muted tones of bark brown, pine-needle green, and the steely gray of a lake on an overcast day. No pink, no “sky blue,” no saturated brightness, no neon violet, no harsh contrasts.
CLEANING UP: Sit & Spin, the new cafe/laundromat on 4th, apparently stands on the ex-site of Vic’s, a jazz club run in the early ’30s by local big-band leader Vic Meyers. I’ve told you about Meyers: In ’32 he ran for lieutenant governor as a publicity stunt, won in the FDR landslide, and stayed in office 20 years. S&S promises to open up a back room for performances later. One current local band would be perfect for its opening: Laundry. Past bands that oughta consider re-forming to play there: Red Dress, Skinny Ties, Green Pajamas, and Ironing Pants Definitely. They could cover songs from Nirvana’s album Bleach.
FROM FLY II SHAI: A year ago I predicted that by 2002 there’d be upscale rap festivals in tourist towns, where nouveau riche couples would listen to perky Vassar grads perform a cross between scat singing and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. Since then, new (arrested) developments made that obsolete. We’ve already seen the (PM) dawn of soft hip-hop, and it’s different from my prediction (never trust sci-fi stories that think every present trend will keep going forever). You could see it at last month’s KUBE Summer Jam: two dozen acts (most with recorded backing tracks), who had rap names but sounded like neo-Commodores or neo-Pointer Sisters. These groups celebrate the only recent black music hip white guys haven’t muscled in on: “quiet storm” love songs of the ’70s and early ’80s. The new R&B eschews the white-hipster image of blacks as lust-crazed savages. Mall rats are still appropriating gangsta rap’s romanticized violence, selfishness and sexism (in both directions); while the neo-doo-wop aesthetic finds sexiness galore in solid black-middle-class values: good grooming, hard work, mutual support. Since the black music of today usually becomes the white music of tomorrow, those white hiphop shows of the early 21st century are now more likely to have Boyz II Men cover bands, and today’s preteen daughters of Bellevue lawyers may someday go to their first bars awkwardly crammed into En Vogue dresses.
BUDDY LOVE LOST: The French may still love Jerry Lewis but his ex-wife doesn’t, according to her soon-to-be-published memoir that lists his extramarital escapades over the years. It may be painful for some of you to imagine Lewis having sex, but I can envision him afterwards, looking the lady in the eye, pointing a finger at her face and declaring, “Did you know that this is one of the greatest humanitarians this business has ever known? Give her a big hand!”
DEAD AIR: The ex-KJET went soft again. The Z-Rock network dropped its AM affiliates, so KZOK-AM quit the Hard Rawk to simulcast KZOK-FM’s tired oldies. The sign-off brought the end of the station’s local afternoon shift, facilitated by Jeff Gilbert. For the first time in 35 years, nobody’s playing new rock records on Seattle AM radio.
`IT’S,’ A CRIME (graphic during an ad for HBO on ABC): “Has Saturday Night Lost It’s Magic?” No, but apparently HBO has lost its ability to spell.
MIXED ICONS DEPT.: The Times ran an article comparing home mortgage rates today with those during the 1960s. It was festooned with all the cliché images of hippie nostalgia: a peace sign, a VW bus, et al.; all in tie-dye-ish colors. They should’ve used images appropriate to the kinds of folks who were buying houses back then: plastic-smiled suburbanites in green pantsuits and Sta-Prest slacks holding barbecues with delightful recipes from Sunset magazine.
STAN RIDGWAY REVISITED: The greatest channel on cable these days, without peer, is Univision. Everything on that channel is utterly cool: Variety shows with sensational female performers; outrageous game shows; goofy (and obviously censored) sex-farce movies; dubbed kung fu movies; and best of all the novelas, semi-lavish tearjerker dramas of sin and betrayal that run to 50 or more episodes and then stop. In a way it’s even more fun if you don’t know Spanish; you can just absorb the energetic performers, the great clothes and the cool-camp graphics without worrying whether the dialogue makes any sense. If that’s too much trouble for you, one of the channel’s greatest stars, the utterly remarkable children’s entertainer Xuxa, now has an Anglophone show at 3 pm weekdays on KTZZ. Who else would get cabaret singer/gay activist Michael Feinstein as the first guest on her US show — a show bankrolled by Pat Robertson? No wonder Forbes listed her as the second-wealthiest entertainer based in the non-English-speaking world (after Julio Iglesias).
ACTIVE CULTURES: In a Stranger article a few months ago I called for the death of Hollywood. Now, the decentralization of American culture looks unstoppable. New means of production and distribution are bypassing (or influencing) media monarchies. With Hi-8 camcorders people can make pro video for less than the annual cost of many prescriptions. The music video format has freed a generation of moving-image makers from the tyrannies of linear narrative and feature length. With DTP and quick-printing, the last financial barrier to self-publishing is the cost of binding to bookstore specs. The revolution is here, it is being televised (at least on odd cable channels), and it’s gonna be rough. You’ll see a lot of unlistenable indie records, unwatchable direct-to-video movies, unreadable desktop-published books, and unbearable fringe-theater plays. It’s the natural stumblings of people learning painfully to make their own culture, instead of merely choosing which prepackaged NY/LA/SF/UK worldview to adopt.
GE WANTS TO BUY BOEING, according to a Wall St. Journal rumor: If this column had editorial cartoons, it’d show a pilot’s seat occupied by a six-foot weasel.
SCENE STEALING: As late as 1990, there were only a couple dinky places to hear original rock bands in Seattle. Those times may return. The Times published a map showing the Seattle Commons proponents’ plans for east downtown. You know they want a long park from Denny Way to Lake Union. That’s the sugar-coating for their real scheme: thousands of condos and apts., mostly upper-income. The Times map showed all the blocks the Commons advocates plan to demolish. The Off Ramp, RKCNDY, and Lake Union Pub are all slated for removal. (The neo-folk Eastlake Cafe and the 911 film-video center would be allowed to live; Re-Bar might also be spared.) If I were paranoid, I’d call this another plot in the 15-year official conspiracy to crush local music. But my more understanding nature believes the rich suburbanites behind the plan are disinterested in live music and don’t care whether bands have a place to play. In the ’70s, citizens saved Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from smaller redevelopments; those areas are now tourist traps. The powers that be don’t get that the music scene is Seattle’s new major tourist attraction. This summer, you could hardly walk downtown without spotting Euro and Japanese young adults in the finest flannel, poring over maps and Strangers. (On a recent Fox TV magazine show, Ron Reagan Jr. had to tell Mayor Rice who Mudhoney was!)
‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, go look at Seattle’s first color TV camera (now on display at Olympic Lincoln-Mercury on Aurora), tape theamazing early talkies at 2 a.m. on KTZZ, and worry about your favorite waterfront businesses getting “discovered” and ruined after the Weekly moves there.
Bonnie Morino on the Vicki Lawrence show, telling how excited she was to be hired as a Playboy model: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that doesn’t happen very often in one’s life.”
Still working on my new book. Still nowhere near selling it.
Will the person in Calif. who left a message about participating in one of my publishing projects please call again? The number given me doesn’t seem to work. Thanx.
“Audile”
