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7/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Time again for Misc., the column that didn’t enter the contest to replace Ann Landers, co-won by a Wall St. Journal writer who entered just to do a story about it. Of course, the Chicago Sun-Times might not appreciate the sort of advice we’d give: “Protect yourselves, but go for it. You’re both only going to be 17 once, you know.”
It’s summer, and Seattle is like a bombed-out ruin as the tunnel goes down and all the towers go up. It’s great! Central downtown has finally become a place of excitement and activity. The Westlake Mall controversy has brought public activism back into city planning (the ’70s live again!). And the best part is Pine St. at the Roosevelt Hotel, reopened just in time to give a great view of the biggest current street hole. For future scholars, the old mid-downtown wasn’t a great place. A few islands of human energy (the 211 Club, the Turf Restaurant) were isolated among block after block of dull 5- to 10-story brick buildings, whose only character came as they were allowed to deteriorate before they were torn down. The cheap new buildings will age much faster. Since they’re so “contemporary” in design, they’ll also look really odd to future generations.
On May 1, Frederick & Nelson ran full-page ads with a special offer to new charge customers: charge $50 or more during May, June, July or August and get a $25 credit. The ad didn’t say the store didn’t mean the real months but its in-house billing cycles. Depending on the first letter of your last name, that could end as soon as the first week. Many customers were surprised to get undiscounted $49 bills in mid-May. Adjustments have been promised but, as of this writing, have not all been delivered.
TROUBLE AT THE MALLS: Southcenter’s new owners promptly, sharply raised rents, a move seen by some as a ploy to drive out the last local, independent stores…. University Village kicked out the troubled, formerly-locally-owned Pay n’ Save chain after getting a better offer from the thriving, still-local Bartell Drug. Mall mgmt. then wouldn’t let Pn’S move into part of sister-chain Lamonts’ space, causing legal disputes that may be resolved when you read this. The new Bartell’s, meanwhile, is several times larger than any of their other stores. From its look, they seem perplexed on now to fill all that space.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The Space Needle chocolate bar on a stick. It’s made by an entrepreneur in Bozeman, Mont., under the name Space Needle Phantasies. His number’s on the wrapper, in case you’d like to share Space Needle obsessions. At Ruby Montana’s, near 1st on Cherry — one of this column’s all-time fave stores.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The 100th Boyfriend, one of the rare “women’s books” that treats men as human beings with complex emotions, not mere plot devices. Its vignettes (all purported as true to compilers Janet Skeels and Bridget Daly) are being excerpted in at least two national magazines.
No “rap riot” occurred at the Run DMC/Beastie Boys concerts, in a major disappointment to cops, KOMO-TV and other reactionary forces. The youth of Seattle have proven themselves unworthy of the disrespect they’ve gotten. The city should apologize for this bad rap by repealing the teen-dance prohibition law NOW…. Meanwhile, what extremely popular Black performer, with no earlier ties to this city, is building a digital recording studio in Seattle?
(latter-day note: I forget who this was supposed to have been about.)
In world news, the guy who flew his private plane into Moscow’s Red Square may get off lighter than the guy who parachuted into New York’s Shea Stadium…. A clue to the Korean crisis may be found in a recent Sharper Image Catalog, boasting of great values to US consumers made possible by Korea’s near-slave wages.
Bantam Books is promoting the paperback release of His Way, Kitty Kelly’s shattering Sinatra bio, with a Sinatra CD giveaway. Hear the songs of love, read the stories of backbiting and sleaze, all in the comfort of your own home.
PHILM PHUN: The Witches of Eastwick contains a major plot flaw: Real witches don’t worship Satan. To believe in the Devil, you have to believe in the Christian God first. Witchcraft is a tradition completely separate from (and older than) Christianity…. Variety sez sex is the hottest marketing ploy in independent films, proving not only that America has respectfully declined the “new Puritanism,” but that highly personal subjects are best handled outside the Hollywood bureaucracy….
NEW CARTOONS to anticipate include a Garbage Pail Kids TV show and The Brave Little Toaster, a feature about kitchen appliances on a quest to find their missing owner.
The Harry and the Hendersons crew discovered the new Pacific Northwest Studio isn’t soundproof. Important takes were ruined by freight trains on the Fremont spur track or even rain on the ex-warehouse’s roof.
Nice to hear Bill Reid back on KJET, but won’t they ever trash or fix that tape system so we actually hear the same songs the DJs introduce?…
Other congrats from this corner to UW grad and ex-colleague Mike Lukovich, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoons.
CATHODE CORNER: Lifetime now has Our Group, a daily, fictional group therapy session with a real shrink and actors as patients. It’s almost as entertaining as the cable channel’s “medical-ed” shows for doctors with slick prescription-drug ads…. As the Telephone Auction Shopping Program deservedly goes under, another firm is staring Love and Shopping, a soap opera/shopping combo with characters shown using products that are then offered to viewers. It’s a change from the traditional soap universe, where characters put away groceries with white tape stuck all over the brand names…. Using John Lennon music to sell sneakers is no worse than Gershwin for Toyota or Sondheim for stuffing mix.
Cabaret chanteuse Julie Cascioppo is back from NYC gigs with the Mark Morris dancers. “Tommy Tune said I was wonderful, and Mikhail Barishnikov asked me to hold court with him; it was great,” says the world-traveling vegetarian from a family of Ballard butchers. Her shows (ranging from romantic standards to “The Woody Woodpecker Song”) continue Wednesdays at the Pink Door in the Pike Place Market.
Finally, Maxwell House wants people to write songs about their hometowns to the tune of their current jingle. Winners from Seattle and other participating cities will compete in LA for big prizes. “It’s the way we burn up restaurants / It’s the way we tear up Pine / It’s the clocks at 4th and Pike / Telling you three different times.” No, don’t think we’ll enter this one either.
‘Til September, be cool, avoid the flu goin’ around, see Greeks at the Pioneer Square Theater, don’t pay $21 to see Madonna at the Dome, and live for love. Toodeloo.
4/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Greetings, pop-culture followers, to the 10th edition of Misc., the column that knows how to solve two of the city’s architectural dilemmas in one bold stroke: Simply move the twisted remains of the Husky Stadium project to Westlake Mall. Instead of yet another unfillable office/retail complex, we’ll have the world’s largest piece of found art at our core. It’ll be a beautiful, shimmering amalgam of bent steel, creating a fascinating pattern of lights and shadows throughout the day. With the proper supports, it can become a popular spot for climbing, eating lunch, watching musicians and performance artists, and (in the more obscure alcoves) developing new romances. Alternatively, the wreckage could go atop the Convention Center, in place of the planned rose garden dropped several budget cuts ago.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Sourdough Chips. Each tiny piece contains a powerful dose of flavors and seasonings, nearly enough to produce a profound centering experience. Habit forming; not for the wheat-sensitive.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Reflex, from the 911 Contemporary Arts Center (now desperately needing a new space). At last: A paper that treats the Seattle visual-art scene as worthy of serious criticism. By resoundingly eschewing the “It’s Not New York So Who Cares” attitude toward Seattle artists, it challenges artists and the art bureaucracy, leaving no excuse for mediocrity. Issue 2 has a long, good piece on the new Seattle Art Museum (the dawn of a new artistic consciousness or the same old snuff bottles in tourist trappings?) and a pack-page collage by one of this column’s favorite illustrators, who signs her work only with a logo of a triangle with a line through it. (She’s not related to the local band whose printed name was two diamonds with wings and whose spoken name was a growling scream.)
You already know I usually hate pro wrestling, but Britain’s The Face has a great section on Japan this month, highlighted by pix of top female wrestlers Dump Matsumoto and Bull Nakano, in punk kneepads and punk/samurai/KISS makeup, engaged in a typical real bodyslam, having finished their pre-match set of pop songs. The audience is mainly teenage girls; this is the refreshing overdue reaction of a generation raised on Hello Kitty kitsch. (In the same issue: an account of the Sankai Juku tragedy in Seattle.)
In other violent mythological spectacles, the end of the annual Ring Cycle could be a great blessing for local performing arts. Now we can put some of that money and effort into something fresher, something with more contemporary relevance than an interminable succession of tired ol’ proto-Fascist imageries. (The Ring was begun here as the centerpiece of a scheme to move the Seattle Opera out to Federal Way, something we can all be glad didn’t happen.)
Anyhow, there’s a second Richard Wagner leaving Seattle. This Wagner, he of the Anglicized pronunciation, opened the CBS NewsSeattle bureau less than two years ago. Now the network’s closing the bureau, as part of massive cutbacks orchestrated as an excuse for union busting, and Wagner has been reassigned overseas. Ex-KING anchor Bob Faw, meanwhile, is more prominent than ever at CBS as a national affairs reporter.
CATHODE CORNER: Could anyone have imagined the Beach Boys special with Brian Wilson, everybody’s favorite obese burnout case, resurfacing as slim, energetic and even cheekboned? It’s as if he totally regenerated, a la Doctor Who….
The “news” segments on the UHF Fundamentalist channel are really just more evangelism, with Reagan portrayed as God and the “liberal media” (even the aforementioned CBS) as Satan. The political agenda of Fundamentalism, to foster fear and mindless loyalty, is nowhere else as nakedly shown.
The local Sanctuary movement might be helped by a Supreme Court ruling making it far easier for candidates for asylum to prove they can’t safely return to their homelands. Ironically, it was a Nicaraguan’s case which may help the refugees of “friendly” genocidal governments.
Five members of the Jazz Section, a Czech underground music society, have been convicted of cultural treason for performing unauthorized types of music. It can’t happen here, though perhaps the politicians fighting Michael Spafford’s state Capitol mural and trying to keep all under-21 Seattlelites with no live entertainment would like it to happen here.
Merger mania, totally manufactured by Federal “regulators,” marches on. Now we must say goodbye to American Motors, the last little guys in the car biz and the inspiration to people in many other fields struggling to stay independent. Maybe if they’d brought back the Nash Metropolitan….
Kudos from here to KCMU, the volunteer-run new music station, on its powerful new 90.3 signal. Now people from Duvall to Bainbridge Island can get Ground Zero Radio — or at least hear it….
Further congrats to the Center on Contemporary Arts. Just as its ’87 season was starting (with the California Natural Foods gazebo on First Ave.), it found a new office space in the building where Trouble in Mind was filmed. May COCA keep troubling area minds for many years to come.
One side effect of the film Platoon’s success is in sportswear. Last year, area designers tooled up for the War-Is-Fun Look, inspired by the success of Rambo and Top Gun. Now that the candy-colored camouflage has arrived from the Asian factories, the attitudes that were supposed to have made it a hit have changed. Look for it all at your local close-out store real soon.
‘Til next month, remember this quote from A.M. Maslow: “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.” Ta ta.
3/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Hi again, pop-culture fans, and welcome to Misc., the only column that ate at the Silver King, drank at the Trade Winds, and lived to tell the tale.
The building that until recently housed the Lesbian Resource Center and Seattle Women’s Gym is about to become a bridal shop. This trivium is offered merely for the sake of irony, and is not in any way to be considered an encouragement of the new homophobia. (Ever notice how many of the mass media only talk about AIDS when straights get it, or how the new soft-focus-scare condom ads never mention the existence of gays?)
In business news, B. Freshman’s in Wallingford, the noble experiment in drawing the hypertasteful Nouveau Riche to mark prices on groceries with great pencils inside a cramped basement, somehow failed. (More closures in our handy sidebar.)
In new business activity, Razz-Ma-Tazz on Denny offers all the essential elements of a topless bar without toplessness or a bar. For a small fee, you can enter a room with flashing lights and blaring Bon Jovi where legally-dressed young women will smile, touch your shoulder and request additional fees for a soft drink, a conversation or a 2-minute “table dance.”… Could that ’80s nostalgia landmark, the Showbox Theater, really be slated for conversion into a movie multiplex?
(latter-day note: Razz-Ma-Tazz went topless and is now all-nude, at least on stage; its table dances are still less explicit than those described in police reports about suburban strip clubs. And the Showbox became a comedy club with an ugly interior remodel.)
CATHODE CORNER: Continuing our theme of antisexploitation, KSTW is following the lead of the USA Network in running cheap sex comedies with the sex scenes all cut out. What’s left makes less sense than the Spanish channel makes if you don’t know Spanish….
Hope you didn’t watch Amerika. Remember: The networks don’t care if you love or hate a show, as long as you keep watching. The only effective protest is to turn it off….
The most fascinating show on the Discovery Channel’s week of Soviet TV was Serious and In Jest. Segments on the value of satire in increasing industrial productivity were intercut with film of degrading police interrogations of vodka scalpers and a melodramatic sketch in which a boy suffers a total breakdown after learning his parents met while dealing in the black market….
The CBC this month is presenting not only the curling championships but also the return of Seeing Things, the offbeat mystery show about a clairvoyant crime reporter. It can descend into corn, but at its best blows the slick US crime shows out of the water.
Now that Bob Barker has successfully used the Miss USA pageant to campaign against furs, maybe he’ll now talk about the way humans are treated in the countries where he MCs Miss USA’s parent show, Miss Universe. I don’t remember him commenting when Imelda Marcos raided the Philippines’ public-housing budget to build an auditorium in Manila, which opened by hosting that year’s Miss Universe show. (By the way, the introduction of computerized scoring to Miss USA may encourage those who criticize pageants for the wrong reasons. A pageant queen is not the idealized lover but the idealized daughter. The spectacle does not objectify the start of the breeding cycle but its final result.)
I keep telling people computers can be our friends. Now it turns out that a White House mainframe, which preserved even “erased” files, may become the best witness to the Iran-Contra scheme and a whole network of other potentially illegal acts organized under the doublespeak moniker “Project Democracy.” As the nation takes what John Chancellor has called a “trip down memory lane,” the Reagan Discs may prove more useful in uncovering abuses of power than the Nixon Tapes.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Amazing Adventures of Mighty Mole, a comic book distributed to elementary schools by Metro. Our tunnel-digging hero exclaims that the downtown bus tunnel is “a totally rad concept,” excavating equipment is “totally awesome,” and that “digging a tunnel is really exciting work.” And I always thought it was boring. (For our slower readers, that was a pun.) (For our early readers, more local publications will be featured at the Underground Press Convention, Feb. 28 here at Lincoln Arts.)
The Globe Radio Theater production of Gogol’s Dead Souls, produced in Seattle by Jean Sherrard and John Siscoe, will soon be available on cassettes for repeated nuance-hunting. KPLU has aired the mini-series right after Bob and Ray Sunday evenings, for a whole hour of consciousness-bending, low-key humor. With great intellectual entertainment like this on public radio, who’ll miss Garrison Keillor (who ran out of ideas three years ago anyway)?
DUMB AD OF THE MONTH (in the P-I): “If it’s true that automatic transmissions are capable of unintended acceleration, then all cars with automatic are suspect. Audi is the only manufacturer to date who has addressed the problem to protect their owners.” A local dealer thus attempted to depict as the leader in responsibility a manufacturer who refused to do anything about the problem until it could not hide from the evidence any more….
Several more respectable cars are on display in a great new book, I’ll Buy That: 50 Big Deals and Small Wonders. It’s published by Consumer Reports as a 50th-anniversary celebration, and covers 50 major contributions to American life, including not just consumer products (the Mustang, the Beetle, the minivan, detergents, frozen foods), but such other innovations as the Salk vaccine, the birth control pill, the credit card and the suburban housing tract.
EARLY WARNING: With spring coming soon, the New City Theater Directors’ Festival is also coming soon, and then the Seattle International Film Festival. Only a few weeks of winter remain in which to stare at your Video Aquarium tape from the How-To-Do-Anything Store. ‘Til then, let’s return to Soviet TV for this closing thought, from its equivalent to CBS’s Morning Program: “If we entertained you, made you smile, and did not make you late for work, then our job here has been a successful one.”
DOWNTOWN BUSINESS WHICH HAVE CLOSED
SINCE THE START OF CURRENT CONSTRUCTION JOBS
Seattle Design
Kentucky Fried Chicken
Florsheim
Weisfield’s
Town Theater
Music Box Theater
Golden Crown
Bernie’s
TJ’s Men’s Wear
The Frankfurter
J.K. Gill
Pipelane Ltd.
ABC Corral Western Wear
Walden Books
Leed’s Shoes
Lindy Shoes
Copper Kitchen
J. Spencer Books
2/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Hi again sports fans, and welcome to the compressed short-month edition of Misc., the regional pop-culture column that had Shirley MacLaine’s baby in a previous life.
The passenger ferry is, as of this writing, in deep trouble. Seems would-be riders never know if the boat’s going to be in the water or in the shop on any given day. Officials say they can’t effectively test the service’s appeal without, you guessed it, a second boat to run when the first one doesn’t have its act together. Maybe we could also get a spare set of ferry officials.
The NY Times sez it’s OK in DC social circles again to call yourself a liberal, even to admit that you liked Carter. Social concern isn’t as gauche as back in the early ’80s, when the Reaganites had everybody thoroughly intimidated. Perhaps, just perhaps mind you, this is another sign of the nation waking up as if from a long dream (or a masochistic love affair). Other ins/outs are in our handy sidebar.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Pocky, the colorful little rice candy sticks from Japan. Eat the chocolate or fruit flavors (both with that distinctive waxy taste), then keep the lovely boxes as collector’s items.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Pacific Northwest’s “40 Local Leaders Under 40” issue. Your columnist is not listed but has about a dozen more tries to go.
UPDATES FROM PAST COLUMNS: The CD menace continues its assault on the American tradition of cheap populist sound recordings, with the Seattle Symphony joining the list of artists refusing to cater to us vinyl proles. Rhino Records, however, is to be commended for its forthcoming 25-record set of 78s, intended for jukebox collectors…. SRO sold its theaters to Cineplex Odeon, the Canadian-based firm that produced The Decline of the American Empire (now showing at someone else’s theater). The bad news: Cineplex is half-owned by MCA, the parent company of Universal Studios which, according to a new book, was once known as the “Octopus That Ate Hollywood” and had close ties to both Reagan and the Mob. The good news: MCA’s lost millions lately on flop movies and overpriced reruns; the whole company may be sold off, as a whole or in pieces.
J Michael Kenyon, the rusty-throated practitioner of homespun cynicism and low-key wit, is back on local radios at last. At this point he’s having a hard time reconciling his style to KING-AM’s withering all-news image, but he may turn out to be KING’s ticket out of the ratings cellar.
If you haven’t seen a TheaterSports performance, you’re missing one of the funniest, liveliest experiences in this or any city. My personal favorite team in the weekly improv wars: The Many Splendored Things.
CATHODE CORNER: The first arthritis ad with a rock song is now on the air. A portent of the decades to come, when my generation will have to pay for the much larger Big Chill generation’s Medicare…. Don’t buy anything on “home shopping” shows. It just encourages them to put on more…. KOMO, home of the most pandering news scripts on local TV, now advertises “News You Experience.” Somehow, I’ve never wanted to be, even vicariously, a preteen Iranian soldier or a hit-and-run victim.
(By the way, our secret support of both Iran and Iraq has helped to lengthen a ghastly war (7-year body count: 300,000+), just to prop up oil prices and achieve the “geopolitical” goals of a White House that calls itself “pro-life.”)
The Little Biscuit deli-grocery on Broadway, one of that neighborhood’s last cheap places to eat, suddenly closed over the new year. If there is a higher consciousness, please don’t let the site become another trendy mini-mall. Pretty please with sugar on top.
The Jackson Street Gallery had a wonderful show in January: K.L. Slusher’s “Images of Construction” (documenting the Convention Center), John L. Harter’s “Construction of Images” (acrylic fantasies of the formation and decay of ideas), and R. Mutt’s “Constructions” (really nice industrial sculptures). Just when I began to think Pioneer Square had irretrievably evolved from a noun into an adjective, something great and provocative like this shows up.
Incredibly Strange Matinees, the independent film club I’m directing, is now renting the plush little Grand Illusion screening site for 12-noon Sunday tributes to the best exploitation films. ‘Til then, contemplate on the inner meanings of the phrase “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” So long.
INS AND OUTS FOR ’87
Unlike the authors of some lists of this type,
I’m not assuming that any trend that’s hot now will simply keep getting hotter.
I’m glad the authors of some lists of this type don’t work for my stockbroker.
Insville
Outski
1/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome again, shopping survivors, to Misc., your pop-culture column and voice of the Post-Sixties Generation.
THE TOP STORY THIS MONTH: Seattle is becoming world corporate headquarters for Muzak. The most famous name in office music recently merged with locally-based Yesco, a purveyor of music tapes for bars and other businesses for which the briefly famous DJ Steve Rabow once worked as national program director. From now on, when you hear a 100-violin rendition of U2’s “Pride (In the Name of Love)” at your local doctor’s office, you can take pride in knowing that the dulcet tones are being carried across North America from right here in your hometown.
The fact that the new Stage Left Cafe is advertised as being right next door to Angry Housewives first and in the Smith Tower second must say something about the relative public awareness of the two longstanding Seattle landmarks.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Blue Suede News. Pick up a free copy at a better record store and read all about cool music that would never have been recorded if CDs and “adult contemporary” radio had been around in its day.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Old-time gum. Beeman’s, Clove and Black Jack are back in a few select stores (some of which are already sold out). If you ever wanted to chew Beeman’s, the official gum of The Right Stuff, now’s your chance.
BEST NEW ALL-AGES LIVE MUSIC VENUE: The Century Square mezzanine. A recent Saturday night found me in the ground floor plaza there, with some professional-sounding (slick but bland) rock emanating from above. At the top of the escalator I found five guy musicians in identical shirts and a young woman singing in exactly the same type of contrived hysterics heard each week on Fame.The answer came in the slick brochures stacked next to the band: They were from the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences, a new private school that appears to be for parents who want their teens to be just like the Fame kids. The band really cooked considering its limitations as a class project, and the acoustics of that huge glass-walled space made it sound even better.
CATHODE CORNER: Cable viewers should check out an awesome Japanese cartoon series (dubbed in Montreal), Astroboy, 9:30 a.m. Saturdays on BCTV. It’s the adventures of a robot boy with superpowers and jet-rocket feet, and his robot sister (without superpowers, which means traditional-sex-role-time in the rescue scenes, the show’s only flaw). It has way-cool music, pleasing characters and very imaginative scripts, many based on the Futuropolis humans’ unfounded prejudices against robots. The best part is the four-minute filler scene at the end of each show, when Astro summarizes the episode’s plot with one obscure error in a name or storyline. You’re supposed to play with your friends after the show and see who spots the mistake — but they never tell you the right answer. A must-see….
With the Michelob Yuppies off the scene, the current Worst Commercial on TV is the one for a maxi-pad using computer graphics to show how it fits in your undies better than any other brand….
Coming to a video store near you: Video Shorts 6, the winners of last month’s national video-art contest run by Seattle’s Parker Lindner. The best video on the tape (and the only winner from Washington) is Crash Your Car, a sprightly music clip using edited gore from old driver-ed films with a peppy synthesizer tune. The real psychotronic thing about it is that the finished video is actually being shown in driver-ed classes!
UPDATE on last month’s item on cable deregulation: Group W’s selling its last local systems to TCI, which burst into town with an instant image problem. They announced that in return for an extravagant rate hike, they’d give viewers many new channels — which turned out to be garbage networks like The Weather Channel and Cable Value Network, which TCI happens to own stock in. To make room, some popular local channels would be dropped out and others moved down to the far end of the black box. Thanx to Reagan’s foxes in the FCC chicken coop, the city could do nothing to stop it –Â except delay approval of the license change until after the new federal tax law, which would cost TCI millions. So it looks like KVOS and KTPS are safe — for a while.
My best wishes to New City Theater, which has had hard times of late. They’ve taken many notable risks this season, trying to expand into a “full service theater company” showing contemporary and challenging works without a camp/nostalgia cash cow production to support them. Hope they’re back in good shape soon.
More kudos to The Weekly for its recent follow-the-money expose of the downtown building boom. Turns out all those glass boxes haven’t been built because anybody needed the office space, but because the old tax law and deregulation of banks and pension funds made real estate speculation a lucrative proposition whether or not the buildings themselves made any money. Therefore, expecting the free market to regulate tower growth without public intervention is useless. This cancerous growth has been going on in most US cities. In Manhattan they call it “gentrification;” in San Francisco they call it “Manhattanization;” in Seattle they call it “becoming more like San Francisco.” In Houston they call the new, unleaseable glass boxes “see-thru buildings.”
Until next month, let me leave you with a line from an obscure Portuguese film about a beautiful woman dying of consumption: “I love you like God loves sinners.”
7/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome back, cult following, to the second installment of Misc., the column that explores popular culture in and out of Seattle. (Unlike that national “arbiter of popular culture” Ian Shoales, I’m not a fictional character created by a comedian. To the best of my knowledge, I really exist.) The opinions herein are not necessarily those of the Lincoln Arts Association or anyone affiliated with it. This column is appointed to be read in churches.
A professional person recently asked me, “How would you define a positive attitude?” A reasonable question, deserving a reasonable answer. Increasingly, the phrase “positive attitude” is used in our society to encourage the worst sorts of behavior. To me, artificial perkiness is not a positive attitude. Conformity is not a positive attitude. Masochism is not a positive attitude. Blind, unquestioning loyalty to your company or your country is not a positive attitude. To be truly positive is to see the things that need changing and to commit to helping change them. It’s easier than it sounds; it just starts with a commitment to be a professional person.
The immediate vicinity of Lincoln Arts now has its own positive-thinking honorary mayor. Ann Nofsinger, actress-writer-Two Bells Tavern waitress, was the narrow victor in a week-long campaign which became far more serious than many people had expected, especially considering that the first Mayor of Belltown was a drag queen named Dominic. This time, the three candidates had official-sounding slogans and platforms on real issues. Suffice it to say not all the debate/balloting audience at the Two Bells was as serious as the candidates.
Interest is now bound to increase in Nofsinger’s acting role in “White Elephants,” a 20-minute video play by Debla Kaminsky and Kurt Geissel. Originally devised to accompany a gallery show of “white paintings,” the play includes over 90 visual and verbal references to the all-reflective color, ranging in obscurity from a sack of flour and a man named Clifford Dover to the patron saint of virginity. It’s all served up within a story of feisty-innocent Nofsinger trading innuendoes with braggart Earl Brooks as they’re painting her apartment all in – you guessed it.
Not to be in Belltown much longer is Display and Costume Supply, the wonderful store where slumming normal people stood outside in line every Oct. 30 to get Halloween office party costumes. The latest victim of the real estate boom is going out with a public auction July 22, when loyal customers can stock up on Conehead wigs, mirror balls, sequins, vampire teeth, party favors, trophies, styrofoam Statue of Liberty torches, lamé fabrics, and plastic hot dogs, croissants, and lobsters. It’ll all still be available, but you’ll have to go north of Northgate to get it.
Also joining the ranks of the disappeared is WorkShop Printers, home of high-quality, low-cost printing for posters, newsletters, flyers, etc. by cultural and political groups. WorkShop products have bee so pervasive in these circles that I always thought they’d been around forever, or at least since the late ’60s, when in fact it has only been in business since 1980.
The new Display and Costume Supply is in the same general area as the Oak Tree Cinemas, the state-of-the-art sixplex everybody’s raving about. I’ll give a full review of the place as soon as it shows something worth seeing or at least something better than Top Gun,that two-hour commercial for the Pentagon budget. The willingness of Rolling Stone to hype that film is the final proof that the magazine no longer cares about anything and probably never did.
AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH: “Silo, Where People Have Fun With Electricity.”
LICENSE PLATE HOLDER OF THE MONTH: Seen on Capitol Hill, this white-on-black custom job with the middle blacked out with masking tape, DAVE ‘N’ 4-EVER.
FOOD FAD OF THE MONTH: Teriyaki fast food. Once the monopoly of the former Toshi’s stands at Queen Anne and Green Lake, they’re now popping up all over town, from Beacon Hill to a resurrected Toshi’s on Aurora. You can eat huge helpings of calrose rice, crisp greens and your choice of beef, pork or a half chicken, usually for under $3. It’s the Pacific Rim-inspired alternative for non-vegetarians who really like to eat.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Wiggansnatch. James Leland Moore has been making this incredibly handsome “Alternative Realities Literary Magazine” for three years now, overseeing its growth into one of the Northwest’s most original, contemporary media of fiction and art. Faced with rising losses, he’s cut back on size and scope with the latest issue, dropping the astute news-briefs column and returning Wiggansnatch to its roots in stories based on pagan and mystic traditions. It’s still great reading for your $2 at Left Bank Books and other select spaces.
The Interstate 90 landscaping in the Rainier Valley has, with the hot weather, bloomed tall grasses along rolling slopes. It’s as if the unfinished freeway has already started making Eastern Washington closer to Seattle.
A Lincoln Arts tenant, the Youth Defense Campaign, has a page in the California-based punk magazine Maximum Rock n’ Roll. YCC’s David Stubbs writes about the group’s efforts to stop the official suppression of independent underage entertainment. The July issue also has the shocking story of LA police arresting and indicting Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, America’s premier political-punk band, on trumped-up charges of “distributing pornographic materials” — an explicit painting by Academy Award-winning graphic designer H.R. Geiger, printed on the fold-out inside cover to an album with a warning sticker on the front. To quote a DKs song. “California Uber Alles” indeed. It’s time to take a true positive attitude and, to quote Biafra’s girlfriend Suzanne Stefanac in the article, “defend your right to deviant behavior.”
That’s it for now. Don’t get overdrawn on your Linda Farris Gallery custom credit card before we meet again.
6/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
(the first Misc. ever)
This “At Large” column will mainly discuss things that don’t fit into the other ArtsFocus departments, but which are still a part of the culture in which we live. All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of the Lincoln Arts Association or its affiliated artists, supporters or advertisers. This column does not settle wagers.
I keep expecting one of the student DJs on KCMU or KNHC to mispronounce the name of the current Bathhouse Theater production as “A Day in the Life of Vic and Shar-day.” Hasn’t happened yet, though.
LOCAL SMALL PRESS PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Manzine, from Tom Grothus’s Function Industries Press. If you’ve ever seen the droll humor of Function’s little cartoon books (Errata, Land of the Cynical Dog-Men), you’ll enjoy this tiny collection of comics and stories. Available at Art In Form in Belltown, 2nd Story in Wallingford and other better book outlets.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Vernell’s Gummy Transformers. Not only can you make them do robot aerobics by twisting them around (they never snap apart), but the very concept of violent Japanese robot toys depicted as colorful, chewy candies made in Bellevue contains almost Zen-like ironies.
Until further notice, the worst comic strip in the newspapers is Boomer’s Song. David Horsey, the P-I editorial cartoonist (now on sabbatical in Britain) and progressive Christian, obviously feels offended by ex-radicals now engaged in airheaded materialism. Unfortunately, Horsey’s contempt for his characters is too heavy-handed, his gags more bludgeoning with an unfunny punchline lettered in boldface italic with an exclamation point. While Horsey’s in Britain, he should get some lessons from Andy Capp cartoonist Reg Smythe in making unsympathetic characters appealing.
On the national scene, National Public Radio had a tribute to the late folk singer Phil Ochs a few Saturdays ago. It finally made this liberal understand what other people have against liberals. The show featured a number of Ochs’s fellow folkies. They all embodied, but didn’t discuss, the dilemma of how to love the Common Man and hate the Great Unwashed at the same time. One of them interrupted his off-key dirge to The People by remarking, “In the old days everyone would be singing along by now.” There was a lot about Us vs. Them, Them consisting of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. You can tell when a liberal has it all wrong when s/he pays too much attention to the paper tiger Falwell and not the real bigwigs in DC.
Elegant posters were up around town last month for “Elan 86, An Expression of Self-Assurance,” a fashion show by design students at Seattle Pacific University. Didn’t make it to the show, but the clothes on the poster were quite sharp. It’s nice to see a sense for good looks among the Free Methodists, operators of SPU and known as one of the most modesty-obsessed religions this side of the Mennonites. (SPU used to send recruiting brochures to high schools with a cover photo of the Phinney Ridge traffic sign pointing in opposite directions for Zoo and Seattle Pacific University. The comparison was intended, not just with big universities, but with other little religious schools.)
You certainly wouldn’t have seen any Free Methodists among the corps of tract-passers seen downtown recently. They held colorful red-and-white flags with a Gothic crest and were dressed like refugees from a Renaissance Faire. Their big two-page tract proclaimed that Halley’s Comet was a sign from the prophet Jacob, signalling the impending punishment of “tyrants and despotisms,” leading to the victory of the true believers. The whole thing is beautiful, with shocking pink headlines and 1940s-style graphic design. It even has small-print sheet music to a non-rhyming hymn: “Co-met comes to destroy / Kingdom of beasts and tyrants / Christ the Lord shall come soon / To build up Cosmic Republic.” I’m not passing judgment on the theology of this Grace of Jesus Christ Crusade, based in Taiwan; I just like their style.
The style of humor on KING-TV’s Almost Live has improved greatly in recent weeks due to a new crop of writer-actors, including former Off the Wall Players Andrea Stein and Joe Guppy. One of their ex-colleagues, Dale Goodson, has recently turned from comedy to music with the Dick Everson Trio; another, Mary Machala, was, at last report, part of the off-season staff at the Grand Canyon National Monument.
In other video events, Frito-Lay has a commercial in which the suave Tostitos man converses, through the miracle of film editing, with Addams Family stars John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Jackie Coogan and Ted Cassidy. The fact that all but Astin are no longer with us just adds to the macabre aura associated with their beloved characters. I’m sure the posthumous endorsements are approved by the actors’ heirs; Frito-Lay once got into big trouble with the W.C. Fields estate over the unauthorized use of a “W.C. Fritos” character.
The 17th University District Street Fair was almost identical to the 7th, the earliest one I saw. The rainbow candles, seascape prints, brown leather sandals and wooden duck toys were just as trite then as now. It’s hard to imagine merchandise like that ever having been fresh. Since the fair has always been tightly controlled by a screening committee employed by a Chamber of Commerce, I suspect it may have been this stale from the beginning, an attempt to tame the hippie spirit into a tourist attraction. It’s sad to see all these aging craftspeople who might have become innovative artists save for the need to please committees.
CLOSING THOUGHTS:
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”– Albert Einstein
“The mediocre mind you encounter may be your own.” — Gilbert Hernandez
