WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-cult column that just can’t think of any good jokes about the Eastside having its own area code. When the outer reaches of western Washington became “360,” at least one could joke about “going full circle” or “matters of degrees.” But there’s nothing worth saying about a nothing number like “425.” It’s the Bellevue of three-digit numbers.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (outside Bruegger’s Bagels in Pioneer Square): “Our salmon is smoked. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t compete.”

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WEIRD WEBSITES ARE FROM VENUS: Amid all the media coverage earlier this winter when the Deja Vu strip-club chain bought the Showbox building downtown (but not the nightclub operating therein), nobody mentioned how its retail spaces had been previously porn-related. First Avenue in the ’40s hosted a string of penny arcades, bowling alleys, and other inexpensive entertainments. One of these was the Amusement Center, operating in the Showbox building’s ground floor. By the ’70s, the Amusement Center had become a porn peep-show operation. In 1978, the peep show took on the name “The Venusian Church,” enveloping its attractions within a New Age-esque ideology of sexual freedom. (It got written up in national media as “the churchof the sacred sleaze.”) Besides the coin-op movies and live strippers, it advertised sex-ed classes and workshops, some of which were held at a camp-like compound outside Bothell. Those who paid for the workshops were invited to pay more to join the church, with assorted consensual “encounters” promised as a benefit. But by the early ’80s, one the group’s founders had died; its compound was razed for suburban sprawl; the peep operation was sold (eventually morphing into today’s Lusty Lady across the street); and the Venusian Church faded from public sight. Some members continued to practice group marriage and tantric-yoga sex rituals at a house on the Eastside, but offered no publicly-advertised programs.

But now, like disco, Qiana, and other ’70s relics, the Venusians are back. They’ve got a website which sells $50 “associate memberships” providing access to online porno stills, which (according to the free samples) appear to have be from pre-existing CD-ROMs. For $100, they throw in enrollment in a “divine sexuality” course called Pathway to Paradise, billed as a prerequisite for more advanced levels of involvement. These advanced levels are advertised on the web site as taking place on “The Isle of Eros,” and as including everything from revelations of eternal sacred mysteries to real sex rituals, the latter including “a mystical marriage” with “a divine priest or priestess.” The site’s vague about what the latter entails, but it’s not direct sex-for-money; the “priesthood” is billed as comprising advanced group members rather than hired help.

I knew people who were involved in the old Venusian operation and either loved what they learned from it or got bored and wandered away. Still, the new Venusian pitch rings off alerts in my Skeptic Zone. It combines the promise of relief from spiritual isolation with the promise of relief from sex frustration, two of the most effective come-on lines known to humanity–especially to lonely, isolated Net users of any gender. (The site includes many buzzwords from “sex positive feminism” as well as more traditionally male-directed orgy fantasies.) I’m fully in favor of spiritual exploration, and of finding safe ways to learn about your sexual nature. But I’d try to find out what a group’s really about, in plainer language than the Venusians’ sales hype, before plunking down big bucks. (Those without Web access can write the Venusians at P.O. Box 2607, Seattle 98111.)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, observe but don’t buy the Dennis Rodman fashion doll at FAO Schwarz, and consider these observations from Susan Sontag: “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”

(Mark your calendars now for our grandioser-than-ever Misc.@11 anniversary party; Sunday, June 8 at Ace Studio Gallery, 619 Western Ave.)

HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.

CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.

UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.

SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”

UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”

A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.

EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.

PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

IT’S A THANKSGIVING MISC., the pop-cult column that asks the musical question, “Why doesn’t the columnist like sweet potatoes?” (Answer next week.)

THE MAILBAG: Ex-Almost Live! cast member John Garibaldi writes, “Credit my friend now in New Hampshire, Geordie Wilson. One visit back to Seattle this fall and he instantly renames the new REI store Hiketown.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Matt Asher’s Seattle Scroll has arrived to take the place of the now-suspended Perv as Seattle’s biggest one-piece-of-paper publication (it measures an odd 11″ x 40″). Its first issue was highlighted by associate editor Chris Walker’s essay on the real meaning of Chief Seattle and a haunting photo by George Vernon of Georgetown’s abandoned but still gorgeous Hat n’ Boots gas station. Biweekly at the usual dropoff sites, or from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.

BLOBOSITY: The second Seattle Scroll has a beautiful shot of the lower Queen Anne restaurant building unofficially known as The Blob. While that space still sits empty (but no longer awaiting demolition), its playful spirit lives in the hearts of local developers. The chapel now under construction at Seattle U., designed by Steven Holl, includes a sequence of oddly-shaped roof structures and baffles. As previewed in the local architecture mag Arcade, they represent elements of iconography, light, and mystery in Catholic tradition.

On a less meditative note, initial designs for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center (still popularly known by its former working title, the Hendrix Museum) show a series of connected buildings, in shapes and colors that, looking down from the Space Needle, would vaguely resemble a smashed guitar. It attempts a “fun” rendition of Blobosity, but ultimately succumbs under the heavy thumb of Boomer-nostalgia pretensions. Speaking of spaces made for fun…

MALLED DOWN: By now there’s something pleasantly weather-beaten about Northgate, “The Mall That Started It All” (in 1950 it was the first complex of its kind anywhere), making it an almost human experience compared to newer, more hyperreal retail theaters. That hasn’t stopped mall management from vying to “upgrade” the joint with ever more yuppified chain boutiques.

But when the now-disappearing Ernst chain abandoned its N-gate hardware outlet, the mall took a rare populist turn and lured the first in-Seattle Toys “R” Us. If you’ve never been to one, it’s essentially an overgrown version of a discount-store toy department (it grew out of the long-defunct White Front discount chain). Tall shelves, narrow aisles, bright boxes, and more echoey sounds of screaming kids than in a suburban YMCA pool. The opening-day festivities included costume-character versions of favorite kiddie stars, including a woman dressed up as Barbie. (No, pervs, I didn’t ask her how she goes to the bathroom.) It’s nice to know the store’s there in case of a really good advertised special, but for day-to-day plaything accumulation I still prefer Archie McPhee’s.

IT AIN’T ME: By the time this comes out, we’ll have seen if the local media that got all aghast over Annie Dillard’s throwaway remarks about the Northwest’s intellectuals (or lack of them) will be equally incensed over the more deliberately nasty regional barbs of Nanci Donnellen, KJR-AM’s former Fabulous Sports Babe. In her new blather book, out this week and predictably titled The Babe in Boyland, the now nationally-syndicated radio sports gabber calls her ex-stomping ground “a hopeless zero” and “a fucked-up backwater town… filled with the dumbest people in the world.” Her KJR colleagues? “Small-time nobodies who thought that because they lived in Seattle they were some big deal and that the rest of the world should come kiss their asses.” To further prompt cheap over-reactions, she writes how when she moved here from Tampa she pledged to work to get the Mariners moved there. Her introduction even thanks Jeff Smulyan, the ex-Ms owner who tried to facilitate such a move, whom she calls one of her “true friends.” Yawn.

IT’S NEARLY TIME for our annual In/Out List. Your suggestions are now being accepted at Misc. World HQ. ‘Til then,ponder these improbably risque remarks attributed to Phyllis Schafly: “Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I rarely write about my private life in the column. This is an exception. I went to my first graveside funeral last month, for my grandmother, Nelyphthia (“Nellie”) Clark Humphrey, 92. (“Nelyphthia” came from a fictional ancient-Greek character in a novel grandma’s mother had read.)

The bus to Tacoma is called the “Seattle Express.” It swiftly jaunted down I-5 to the downtown Tacoma transit mall. Inside the Pierce Transit info center, I overheard a clerk advise two foreign visitors to take the Seattle Express (“There’s nothing in Tacoma to see. Everything’s in Seattle”). Back outside, I paid silent respects at the former UPS Law School building–previously the Rhodes Bros. department store, where my grandmother worked for decades in the employees’ cafeteria. Grandma ranted a lot about how the Tacoma Mall had killed downtown. She was feisty and argumentative when she wanted to be, which was often. Sometimes I’d wished she wasn’t, like when she spouted common-for-her-generation tirades against blacks and Mexicans. I know you’re not supposed to talk about people’s bad parts when they’ve just gone, but she wasn’t strict about the social graces so in a way I think she’d understand.

Anyhow, two buses later I was at Captain Nemo’s restaurant on Bridgeport Way, to rendezvous with several relatives including my cousin who looks just like Marie Osmond (she’d probably appreciate the comparison, even though her religion differs from Osmond’s Mormonism). Got the typical “Todd, you’ve gained a few” remark from an aunt pretending to mistake me for my younger brother. The conversation I’d interrupted was about the differences between the moods at evangelical vs. Baptist church services. These relations on my father’s side are real Tacoma people, Caucasian non-military subtype. Theirs is a world defined by church, angel books, QVC products, RVs, movie-star gossip, and all-American food. If you really are what you eat, I come from a long line of apple pie with Cool Whip, cottage cheese, canned string beans, Tater Tots, and margarine.

A short caravan brought us to the New Tacoma Cemetery. Grandma had been declining for several years, so when I served as a pallbearer there wasn’t much to lift. I’d always seen her as old and scrawny; I was surprised to see on display a photo of her young, as full-cheeked as I, without the frown of Edwardian disapproval I’d always seen on her.

Thirty-three people gathered for the brief service, conducted by grandma’s chapter of the Eastern Star, a women’s Masonic order. Five elderly women took turns describing how grandma’s life represented each of the points on Eastern Star’s five-colored logo, each representing the virtues of a different Old Testament woman.

Afterwards, I was taken aside by two who looked far younger than their real ages and who exuded way too much life energy to be related to me. Turns out they were the daughters of my late grandfather’s sister and her husband, whom I’d known as a kid as Uncle Joe. They told me how, as kids, they’d known my parents before they were married and how much in love they seemed to be.

They also talked about their dad. Uncle Joe ran the Shell station at 3rd & Lenora that was razed circa ’72 for Belltown’s first condo tower. We visited his beautiful house in the hills above Carkeek Park every Christmas when I was little. The last time, I still remember entering into a spirited conversation with him about just what was “Platformate,” the mystery gas ingredient Shell was plugging that year. (He knew what it was, or at least gave a convincing lie.) He seemed to enjoy the chat, but afterward my dad scolded me for my untoward behavior. The cousins assured me Joe undoubtedly did enjoy the talk.

In my head, I’d always resisted the heredity-as-destiny theory. But deep down, I’d quietly feared I was fated to end up just like grandma, all bitter and grumbling about one thing or another, with little room for life’s joys. I’d make some curt remark to a waiter and then wonder if it was a sign of impending grouchhood. Then the memory of outgoing, boistrous Uncle Joe entered my life and gave me hope–until I remembered I was only related to him by marriage.

SEATTLE OLYMPICS IN 2008? First, let’s get our transit problems sorted out (and not with space-wasting freeway lanes, pleeze). Otherwise, the politicians proposing this (and the businessmen who own them) have one point: we’ll already have most of the physical plant the Games would need. Depending how the Seahawks situation works out, we’ll have three to five full-sized stadia in the area, plus three big arenas, four smaller arenas, a AAA baseball field, a convention center or two, a rowing facility, the swimming pool from the ’90 Goodwill Games, and UW dorms that could house a few thousand jocks. Of course, that leaves plenty of spaces to be constructed (for tennis, bicycling, horses, skeet shooting, etc.); and since there’s nothing Pro-Business Democrats love more than mega construction projects, expect more hype about the Olympic bid than you heard about the Commons (even though the Olympic bigwigs won’t decide for years).

AW, SHOOT:Ads for the film The Shot shamelessly rip off the happy-face-with-bleeding-forehead image from the ’80s cult-favorite comic book Watchmen. But don’t worry, fanboys: Watchmen will be famous as long as there’s an audience for “alternative” superheroes; The Shot may leave theaters this month, to live on in video obscurity (unless one of its actors gets famous later).

LIP GLOSS: The fashion mag Marie-Claire claims the Beautiful People have a new cosmetic-surgery thang: labia lifts. My first thought: Perhaps only in the age of Hustler would straight women see enough of other women’s crotches to feel jealous of them. Second, they’ve always been the one part of a woman’s exterior sexual anatomy that’s been considered strictly for sensation, not appearance (until the piercing rage went mainstream). Call me old fashioned, but I sorta like it that way. Speaking of old-style ladies…

OLD WORLD SWORDER: Xena, Warrior Princess (plugged by KIRO-TV sports guy Tony Ventrella as “a clean girl in a dirty neighborhood”) made the cover of Ms. Sure, star Lucy Lawless appeared in a lesbian film (on the compilation Women from Down Under, at Video Vertigo and elsewhere). But essentially, this alleged role model for women’s empowerment is just another Conan-in-drag role, a fantasy formula seen everywhere from Red Sonja to the UK comic Axa. The only essential difference is how, as a low-budget syndicated show that has to fill more talk between the battles, it takes time to explore how non-warrior women would fare in such a muscle-bound world. Speaking of the politics of action heroes…

CURLY CUES: I’ve been feeling guilty about watching the Three Stooges. Not about the films themselves, but about watching them on Pat Robertson’s “New Family Channel.” Promos bill it as “a division of International Family Entertainment, a publicly-owned company,” but the NY Times reports most of the stock’s still held by Robertson, his son, and organizations they control. Indeed, next week it’ll “cover” the Republican Convention via GOP-sponsored hours starring GOP-appointed commentators, promising viewers needn’t spend a second outside the closed-loop system of Right propaganda. Even if I’m not in a Nielsen household and don’t buy any product advertised, I’m patronizing an organization started to spread Robertson’s anti-poor, anti-immigrant, anti-queer, anti-choice, pro-censorship, pro-corporate agenda.

Anyhow, my guilt was relieved slightly when I remembered the Stooge films were originally made for Columbia studio boss Harry Cohn, whose politics were just as Neanderthal as Robertson’s (and who required sex from actresses as a condition for employment, something Robertson’s never been accused of). Also, there’s something satisfying about catching the last seconds of Robertson’s sanctimonious 700 Club rants, followed by some of cinema’s greatest anarchists. I’m sure Robertson’s staff bought the Stooge films (which had been off TV for several years during a merchandising-rights dispute) ‘cuz they were thought to represent current right-wing entertainment tastes (lotsa violence, no sex). But they probably didn’t remember how regularly and thoroughly the Stooges demolished the pretensions of authority and conformity systems–pretensions not unlike Robertson’s. Robertson permits no rebuttals to his political stances on his cable channel, but I can imagine no more elequent rebuttal to the cultural assumptions behind his stances than these Depression-era inner-city Jews confronting WASP society.

UPDATE: The Portland paper Willamette Week sez that town’s “Church of Kurt Cobain” was just a fraudulant publicity stunt. As opposed to the real publicity stunt we thought it was.

SONICS POSTMORTEM: No matter what happens to the team in future years, we’ll always have Games Four and Five to savor. For four glorious days, the whole city (save a few droller-than-thou alternative conformists) believed. Imagine–a team of great players could beat a team of spokesmodels! Like the Seattle music scene (to which the Sonics have consistently made closer overtures than any other local sports team), the Sonic victories celebrated talent, diligence, and cooperation instead of celebrity, arrogance, and corporate hype. How appropriate that it happen two weeks before the opening of Planet Hollywood, that chain restaurant expressly devoted to corporate celebrity hype, and which staged a PR stunt with professional hypemeister Cindy Crawford telling us if we were smart we’d root against our own team. Can you say, “Not quite the way to make new friends for your business”? Speaking of athletes striving for respect…

THE DEAD POOL: At its Olympics debut in ’84, synchronized swimming was often derided as a summer-games answer to ice dancing, less a sport than an excuse to show half-dressed women. Since then, the sport’s tried to shake that image and earn respect. In the biggest effort yet, the French national team crafted a routine inspired by the Nazi Holocaust. The choreographed playlet premiered at the European Cup finals in May and was planned for the Atlanta Olympics. To Schindler’s List soundtrack music, swimmers goose-stepped into the pool, then switched identities to impersonate women victims being taken to the ovens. But in early June, the country’s sports ministry ordered the team to drop all Holocaust allusions from the routine. Time quoted a dismayed team official, “The program was created to denounce not only the Holocaust in particular, but all forms of racism and intolerance that we see rising.” I say the routine’s well within postmodern performance art, and should be allowed; especially with the ex-Olympic city of Sarajevo only starting to rebuild from a half-decade of attempted genocide. Speaking of dances with a message…

BYE BYE BRAZIL: We’ve past reported on the ever-reaching tentacles of global corporate entertainment, even while American fans increasingly search for untainted pockets of “world beat” and other ethnic arts to bring home. Now, I must sadly report Mickey Mouse’s planned debut at next February’s Rio Carnaval parade. Samba school Academicos da Rocinha will get to use giant models of the Disney characters to celebrate 25 years of the Disney World theme park–as long as the parade’s 2,000-or-so women dancers all keep their tops on. “That was my first condition and thank goodness they agreed,” a Disney marketing official told Variety. In the same article, troupe president Izamilton Goes dismissed suggestions the cover-up would detract from the spectacle: “Inside all of us there remains something of a child and we all loved Disney.”

It’s not that Carnaval would be “cheapened” by Disneyfication. It’s been kitsch for decades. But it’s been its own indigenous brand of kitsch. It incorporates sex not as seamy exploitation but as joyous celebration. The dancers are often poor women who sew their own sequined costumes and arrange their own choreography, who bare their bodies proudly to an audience of men, children, and other women. They enjoy being admired as carnal beings after a year stuck in the wife-mother-laborer roles the Disney people are more comfortable with. Anyhow, the other 18 or so samba schools aren’t bound by Disney’s dictates. And the TV network that largely subsidizes the parades wanted to ban nudity a few years ago, hoping to increase foreign TV-video sales, but the samba schools said no. Speaking of broadcast empires…

BEHIND THE SCREEN: MSNBC, the forthcoming Microsoft-NBC cable news channel we won’t get to see for some months after its July launch, is now going to build new studios in New Jersey (with state-government aid), scuttling earlier plans to share space with NBC’s existing CNBC. Darn. CNBC could use some news people in its building, or at least somebody who could tell the channel’s talk-show hosts the O.J. Simpson trial is over.

WELCOME AGAIN one and all to Misc., the pop-culture column still anxious to try those Olestra potato chips with the chemically-engineered fake fat. If any out-of-town readers live in the chips’ test markets, could you send some over here? Thanx.

UPDATE: Looks like the brick-and-concrete light-industrial building that housed RKCNDY, that recently-closed rock n’ roll purgatory, may soon house the Matt Talbot Day Center, a Catholic Community Services drop-in ministry attending to drug-addicted or otherwise troubled teens. The lease hasn’t been finalized and could still fall through (like the deal last winter to buy the club and keep it operating). I’ll let you generate your own forces-of-redemption-take-over-din-of-iniquity remarks; you might even consider it the Big Guy’s smirking revenge for Moe taking up business in an ex-Salvation Army rehab center.

AD VERBS: Not too long ago, advertisers loved to claim their products would help you attract a sex partner. Now, masturbation metaphors are the rage. First, there was the shampoo that promised women a veritable scalp orgasm. In a more recent spot, a phone-sex worker emotes gushingly about the Pay Day candy bar’s sensuous qualities. And a still-small but growing trend of advertising for women sneaks in references to that self-satisfaction aid, hardcore porn, like the Revlon lipstick promoted as “SuperseXXXy.” If you believe the conspiracy-theory thinking in zines like Adbusters Quarterly (I don’t), you might theorize how the marketeers want to exploit people’s natural drives by redirecting those drives away from the nature-intended craving for intimacy with another human soul and toward sexual identification with the Product itself. Certainly the ad where a woman fantasizes (apparently during intercourse) about how she’d rather be driving a Mercedes could be so interpreted.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical-labor outfit that earlier this century tried to forge “One Big Union of All the Workers,” still exists. The Real Deal: Labor’s Side of Things is its regional monthly zine, edited by Mark Manning. It offers a little labor history (in the May ish, an essay on the Spokane IWW’s fight to overturn 1909 laws banning public speech in the Lilac City). But most of it’s of the present day, documenting workers’ struggles and conditions here and in other parts of the world. At a time when much self-styled “radical” literature either ignores or sneers at working-class Americans, Manning refreshingly extols not just sympathy for but solidarity and common cause with wage slaves everywhere. One flaw: The back-page article chiding downtown business interests for opposing hygiene centers for the homeless starts picking on one particular businessman without explaining why. (Pay-what-you-can to PO Box 20752, Seattle 98102.)

PRICELESS-ADVICE DEPT.: One side effect of writing for an increasingly popular alterna-paper is mainstream journalists treating you, perhaps foolishly, as an expert on Those Darn Kids. An AP writer called from Portland late last month, preparing a story on theChurch of Kurt Cobain opening down there and wanting my sound-bite-length comments. I said Cobain was clearly uncomfortable with the role of Rock Star, and would undoubtedly reject veneration as some demigod prophet of Gen X. As I interpret his work, he longed for a world without gods or at least without leaders and followers, a world where folks create their own cultures and work out their own ideas. From first glance, these lessons seem to be lost on the church’s founder, Jim Dillon, who told the P-I his 12-member congregation “pays homage to this alienated tribe and to the man who they have called `saint.'” But then again, if Jesus’ words can be interpreted in as many different ways as they are, it’s only natural to expect Cobain’s sometimes expressionistic word imagery to become similarly reread or misread.

‘TIL NEXT WE SHARE INKSTAINS, ponder these words of Indian movie star Madhuri Dixit, quoted by interviewer “Bitchybee” in the magazine Cineblitz: “Work is worship. Play is a waste of time. Night clubs, parties socializing saps your energy and gets you nothing, but unwanted notices from snoopy gossip journalists. Avoid the night spots and dark circles. It’s even helpful in avoiding pimples.”

CATHODE CORNER: After a little under two months on the air, the NorthWest Cable News channel can politely be termed on a “shakedown cruise”. What oughta be a brisk, informative roundup of regional happennings is instead a clumsy repackaging of footage from the four King Broadcasting stations. The same stories are rerun hour after hour, often with only the weather updated. I won’t talk about the evening sports guy, a comedian-wannabe who spends more time on unfunny gags than on the games. Still, it’s intriguing to hear about economic conditions in Spokane (lousy) and last month’s Oregon Senate race (wacky). I remember the semipro beginnings of CNN and ESPN, so I’ll let NWCN grow into its role. Others, like TCI customers who lost CBC for NWCN, might not be as charitable. I do sorta like how they insist on spelling “NorthWest” with software-marketing style “intercaps;” it’s a way of proclaiming your media market as a virtual nation, like when the Chicago Tribune coined the term “Chicagoland.” Speaking of media institutions…

FALLLING FLAT: The most inadvertantly fascinating part of last month’s PBS Fight Over Citizen Kane documentary was Wm. Randolph Hearst’s creaky newsreel sermon against FDR’s increases to upper-bracket income taxes. It reminded me a lot of Steve Forbes’s flat tax nonsense. Both publishers’ tactics use populist rhetoric to promote the self-interests of the wealthy, particularly those with significant inherited wealth such as themselves. The comparisons go beyond there. Forbes and Hearst are/ were party-lovin’ men-about-town known to hobnob with movie stars. Hearst’s papers provided a self-contained information system, in which no voice too far from his own worldview got heard or respected. Forbes’s magazines haven’t gone that far, but the right-media universe of talk radio, televangelists and opinion magazines (whose support the GOP candidates are courting) fulfill Hearst’s formula better than the old man could have imagined.

(If anyone saved a copy of Forbes’s short-lived entertainment-fashion mag Egg, I’d love to borrow it. It could potentially be a hoot.)

THE MATS: Once the media consolidation bill (the one Net censorship was tacked onto) was signed, the Disney/ ABC and Time Warner/ Turner Broadcasting merger plans went “on” again. The latter deal was protested in an NY Times ad: “Attention TBS Stockholders: Does Ted Turner have a personal vendetta against the World Wrestling Federation? Time Warner Beware!” Turner’s properties happen to include a rival faux-sport circuit, World Championship Wrestling. WCW scored a coup a couple years back when it signed Hulk Hogan, formerly WWF’s #1 star. I’m foggy on the details, but I believe there was tangled legal wrangling before Hogan was freed to use his stage name (which WWF had trademarked) on WCW shows. Methinks the WWF guys take their stage bombast too seriously.

ROOM AT THE TOP?: The gentrification of upper Queen Anne has gone into overdrive. On one block alone a hobby shop, a café, a bakery, a state liquor store, and a pharmacy have perished to make room for as many as seven espresso emporia and two bagel stands. And you know a neighborhood’s gone out of our hands when San Franciscans open ridiculously sublime restaurant/ nightclubs there (Paragon). Queen Anne News writer Robin Hamilton’s taking it in stride. Writing about a co-marketing arrangement between Starbucks and its new QA neighbor Noah’s Bagels, Hamilton shows her knowledge of Jewish lore in explaining how “Noah’s will play Ruth to Starbucks’ Naomi.”

PLAYING MONOPOLY: A fight for the hearts and minds of America’s youth ended with Mattel withdrawing its $5.2 billion hostile-takeover bid for Hasbro (which went on its own acquisition spree a few years back and owns Playskool, Romper Room, Selchow & Righter, and Milton Bradley). Re-create the excitement at home with your handy Barbie vs. GI Joe land war playset… Meanwhile, Hasbro’s lawyers keep upping demands for reparations against a Seattle-based adult website for using the name “candyland.com,” claiming it could be confused with the Candy Land game. If I wanted a porno-pun on a board game, it wouldn’t be that. Maybe Chutes & Ladders, or Go to the Head of the Class…

MISC. CAN’T DECIDE what’s more pathetic: The Weekly believing the media “grunge” stereotype really exists, or the P-I believing it used to but doesn’t anymore.

THE BIG WHITE-OUT: The news media love few things more than a huge, region-encompassing Act of God story. In the winter around here, that means either flooding (which tends to actually show up at the predicted times and places) or snow (which doesn’t). All the boomers I know hate snow (“How on earth will we get to that bed-and-breakfast we already made reservations for?”). All the squares I know fear snow (“How the hell do you expect me to commute to and from Woodinville in this goddamned weather?”). I, however, love snow. And I don’t mean but-only-in-the-mountains. Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. It puts everyday life, and everyday reality, on hold for a day or two of diffused light, an eerie yet inviting silence, and the sharp contrast between grumbling grownups and ecstatic kids and kids-at-heart. It’s been a few years since we had a really good snow in town, so when the radio stations crank up their stern warnings of a Big White Peril today-or-maybe-tomorrow I can’t help but get excited. But invariably, like parents who keep promising that trip to the Grand Canyon but who take you to see the cousins in Topeka every summer instead, the snow-threatening announcers usually leave me with little but brief moments of joy and hopes for the next winter. So to me, for a few flurrying moments before and after the big football telecast, it really was Super Sunday.

BUBBLE TROUBLE: The Times sez “the blob,” the distinctive white Lower Queen Anne restaurant most recently known as 14 Roy, is slated for demolition by bankrupt owners. I say save it! It’s one of Seattle’s few works of individualistic PoMo architecture, as historically important as, well, as many other buildings that were also unfortunately torn down. Speaking of things that oughtn’t disappear…

DOES IT COMPUTE?: If all you know is what you read in the papers, you might believe the scare stories about Apple Computer, stories claiming the company’s into a “death spiral” on the basis of one unprofitable quarter (due largely to price wars in Japan). The Mac’s demise has, of course, been predicted almost every year since it came out. This time, the nay-sayers are citing everything from intensified price competition to over- or under-production to the hype machine over Windows 95 (Gates’s version of the old Ritz cracker recipe for “Mock Apple Pie”). Looking beyond Apple’s short-term numbers, however, shows a different story. The Mac’s selling better than ever (albeit at tighter profit margins). Its market share may be small in corporate back-office environs but it’s doing very well in homes, schools, and small businesses–the loci of most of that hot Internet action. More powerful operating software and a more easily cloneable hardware platform are coming this year, so the Mac’s presence should only increase.

Yet some want the Mac to die, and not just Gates loyalists. I think I know why. Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac and MS-DOS worlds were like Catholics and Protestants–the former visual, sensory, and collectivistic; the latter verbal, coldly rational, and individualistic. (Windows, Eco wrote, is like Anglican spectacle atop a base of Calvinistic doctrine.) Others say the Mac’s intuitive approach and seamless hardware/software integration are more attuned to right-brain creative folks; Windows keeps users stuck in left-brain logic mode. Today’s centers of economic and political power, including the Wall St. analysts and the business press who quote them, are as left-brain-centric as any institutions in history. Many in these subcultures see Macs as artsy-fartsy playthings or as annoying symbols of Windham Hill/ NPR propriety, definitely not as accouterments for the Lean-n’-Mean mentality of Global Business. Yes, I’m a Mac loyalist. But more, I’m an advocate of creative thinking and of Stuff That Works. To millions like me, the Mac’s an extension of the mind, not just another overgrown calculator. It could be improved on, but there’s no real substitute in sight.

ONLINE EXTRA (More thots on Apple): Apple lost over $130 million in one quarter of fiscal 1993 and survived. It’s got about a billion in cash on hand, and theoretically could buy some of the companies rumored to be considering buying it. Even after losing 1,300 employees over the course of the next year, it’ll still have more employees than it had in Sept. ’94. The Mac platform’s relatively higher R&D costs should come down with the new Power PC Platform hardware setup and the new Copland operating system, which not only will make Macs cheaper to design and build but whose development costs have bloated Apple’s recent expenses and payrolls.

There are really only two software categories where the Mac lacks certain important products compared to Windows: Specialty business applications (i.e., accounting and inventory programs for specific industries), and Internet multimedia utilities (i.e., streaming video/audio, virtual-reality gaming, the Java programming language). To help solve the first discrepancy, Apple’s hired the distinguished third-party-development vet Heidi Roizen as its head of developer relations. The second discrepancy’s a bit tougher. The Net is a wild, anarchic place where all sorts of media developers are bringing out all sorts of new media and data formats; many of these developers, especially those working on Netscape helper applications and plug-ins, are rushing out Windows products and promising to get around to Mac versions one of these months. One of the reasons was Netscape’s slowness in bringing plug-in support and other features to its own Mac software. Netscape people have apologized for this on newsgroups, claiming they couldn’t find enough experienced programmers to properly staff their Mac development efforts until recently. I’ve corresponded with folks at other outfits who say similar things. Maybe Apple’s layoffs will help the overall Mac universe by sending some of the company’s best and brightest off to make not just Mac ports of all these media formats but to make newer and better Netstuff.

THANKS FOR THE GENEROUS WORDS about my book in the past two Weeklys. In the holiday spirit I’ll forgive Fred Moody, who wrote one of the pieces, for misspelling my name.

E-MISSIVES #1: As you’ve seen, the paper’s staked out email addresses under the domain name “thestranger.com”. That’s ’cause “stranger.com” was already taken by a Calif. software firm. Still, it could be worse; the World Wide Web address <<www.therocket.com>> takes you to a porn site in Rhode Island.

E-MISSIVES #2: Kelly Humphries writes, “I work as a messenger in the Sea-Ev-Tac area and see a lot of odd things. Friday I saw Hal’s Meat-Seafood-Cheese on 140th and Lake City Way, the marquee offering `Dry Ice 95.’ Is this supposed to replace the outdated `Dry Ice 3.x’ product? If we wanted to take advantage of all the features found in `Dry Ice 95,’ would we have to upgrade all the frozen foods in our freezer?”

INFOTAINMENT WITHOUT THE TAINMENT: King Broadcasting’s new NW Cable News channel launches this week, tho’ some cable systems won’t see it right away. I got to tour the studio, on the top floor of KING’s building. It’s a set-up a videomaker would die for. It’s all run on Avid video decks for nonlinear digital editing, connected to a Silicon Graphics server computer storing 24 hours of footage online. With robot cameras and preprogrammed graphics, it takes only three people to handle the studio production. The channel will launch with only eight reporting teams; most of its 100 staffers will rewrite reports from KING and its Portland, Spokane and Boise sister stations into Headline News-type newscasts running all day. For big regional stories, it’ll turn into the All-Flood Channel or the All-Packwood Channel. They promise something I’ve longed for: a local (or at least regional) TV newscast where the info’s more important than celebrity fluff, sleazy murder trials, plugs for the station’s prime-time shows, snappy anchor-banter, or Mr. Food. (Next week: We complain about TCI Cable dropping the CBC for NWCN.)

KHOLERIK KORNER: Bruce Chapman, whom I’d always thought to be one of that increasingly-rare breed of respectable, thoughtful conservatives, wrote in a P-I op-ed column a few weeks back, “Is the conservative revolution running out of steam? No–not to hearJohn Carlson tell it on his KVI talk show. Indeed, the jovial Carlson, who infuriates liberals, is even more gleeful than usual these days.”… “I have enjoyed John’s company ever since he was a delightfully irreverent college student at the University of Washington, assaulting the choleric dogmas of the UW Daily.”

(1) As I’ve said before, if KVI said it was raining outside I’d still want it confirmed by a credible source.

(2) Carlson’s not so much “jovial” as snide, his snickers more like the sneers of a comic-book-movie villain or schoolyard bully.

(3) “Infuriating liberals” is a mark of laziness at the art of offense. It’s almost as easy as offending Christians.

(4) Carlson’s really quite reverent toward the three things in which he’s publicly demonstrated sincere beliefs–power, money, and ego.

(5) I was editor of the Daily when Carlson, then a member of the Board of Student Publications, tried to censure me for editing a “humor” piece by a friend of his about Ted Kennedy, similar to modern OJ “jokes.” If Chapman wants to call me “easily angered; bad tempered” (the Am. Heritage Dictionary definition of “choleric”), I can take it. If somebody called Carlson something like that, the rich pretty boy would probably whine about the Big Bad PC Thought Police trying to stifle his daring voice of rebellion. People who can raise out-of-state capital to start newspapers and think tanks are not helpless silenced voices. And people who suck up to the real centers of power in this society are not rebels, no matter how big their Harleys are.

AS WE DO EVERY TIME the sunset creeps up toward 4:15 p.m., we seek your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List (not to be confused with any other listing which may or may not appear in a newspaper such as this). Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email at the Misc. World HQ website (that URL once again: <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>).

At Misc. we know some things are just too creepy to turn away from. That was the case when some folks working late in a CapHill building looked ou the window and saw a film crew re-creating the Mia Zapata abduction for Unsolved Mysteries. Under banks of lights, an actress in vaguely punkish clothes kept getting into a passing car, take after gruesome take.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Can’t get it here, but Semtex is the hottest new soda pop in Prague. It’s named after one of the old Czechoslovakia’s most notorious exports–a plastic explosive popular with various terror and organized-crime outfits the world over. An NY Times story sez the chemical factory that made the now-banned explosive is suing. The soda people say they adopted the name ’cause it inspires “a feeling of activity and motion.” That’s probably the same reasoning behind Royal Crown Cola’s new fake Mountain Dew, Kick (“Warning: Contains stuff you don’t even want to know about!”).

BRETHREN AND CISTERN: For unknown reasons, the wife of sometime Stranger writer Bryan Clark was put on the mailing list for Your Church magazine (“Helping You with the Business of Ministry”). It’s a Protestant Sharper Image Catalog, by the publishers ofChristianity Today but with no theological content. Just blurbs and ads for nifty products: Office-cubicle walls “repurposed” to house Sunday School groups, vinyl siding, fiberglass baptism pools, choir robes, bulk quantities of communion wafers, candle holders, electronic organs (“the way Sunday should sound”), clear plastic pulpits (“where no visual barriers exist between you and your congregation”), new and used pews, shatterproof fake stained glass windows, kitchen supplies (“Equipping the Saints in a practical way”), computer software to keep track of membership and fundraising, even entire prefab church building sections. Coolest of all are the electronic music boxes, “digital carillons” (by a company called Quasimodo Bells) and “digital hymnals” (“Instantly plays thousands of hymns, choruses, praise music, children’s songs, wedding music, and gospel favorites”). Our lesson: Even the heirs of Calvinist austerity can’t help but be eternally fascinated by that most basic of human desires, the Quest for Cool Stuff.

`R’ GANG: Entertainment Weekly’s piece on the recent box-office failure of several “sex” movies only pointed out how unsexy those anti-erotic, un-thrilling “erotic thrillers” and equally grim exercises like Showgirls really were. Don’t worry: Sex still sells, these movies just weren’t selling it. They were trying to sell fear and/or hatred of sex; but hundreds of direct-to-video Basic Instinct ripoffs wore out the concept.

TELE-KINETICS: When the new-age talk show The Other Side was suddenly, quietly canceled last month, NBC was left with only three hours of daytime programming. Ratings for the show, which took an almost-rational look at “psychic phenomena, ESP, ghosts, alternative healing, and more,” were never great. Replacing original host Dr. Will Miller (the preacher/ psychologist/ comedian from old Nick at Nite promos) with a perky Entertainment Tonight droid only made things worse. You can make your own joke here about the show’s fans still being able to contact it psychically. Speaking of daytime TV personalities…

THE NEVERENDING STORY: I’ve avoided O.J. Simpson in this column, but now note that the recently retired daytime personality’s looking to start a new life in the face of ostracism by former L.A. acquaintances and hangouts. The Philadelphia Weekly reports his representatives are looking into potential homes for him in Philly’s ritzy Main Line suburbs. Imagine–the figure who nearly put the soaps out of business, moving to the real-life Pine Valley.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perv, a new local monthly gay paper, is a lot like what the Misc. newsletter would have become if I’d kept it going. It’s one big sheet of paper in Stranger’s old paper size but sideways, crammed with gossip, jokes and comix. Of course, I’ve never written about the gay-male bar scene and Perv writes about little else. Still, you don’t have to be gay yourself to realize the way-serious Seattle Gay News can’t be the only possible gay viewpoint in town. And I do like Perv’s comment on how “if every fashion show in town is fetish, then fetish isn’t much of an alternative anymore, is it?”

I’m Pseudo-Black and I’m Proud:

Kwanzaa for White B-Boyz

Original online essay, 11/20/95

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pike St. Cinema Says Adieu:

The Last Rewind

Essay for the Stranger, 8/9/95

Adventurous filmgoers have another month or so to visit the Pike Street Cinema, Seattle’s smallest and most curious film space. In mid-September Pike Street proprietor Dennis Nyback will take his projectors, his old-time movie posters and memorabilia, and his 2,000-reel collection of film oddities to New York, where he’s certain he’ll be better appreciated. The closure marks the end of three and a half years of what Nyback boasts of as “unfunded, unadvertised, and unrepentant” exhibition.

The origins of the Pike Street actually go back to mid-1988, when Nick Vroman and Geof Spencer began the Belltown Film Festival in the Jewel Box Theater of the Rendezvous Restaurant. Vroman and Spencer rented the grand old space on Second Avenue, originally a screening room used by major film distributors, to show the kinds of movies they liked and couldn’t see anywhere else — things like obscure foreign dramas, prewar German dada shorts, and ’80s New York underground films. Despite the special-event implications of the “Festival” name, they had the space one night a week on an ongoing basis. When they began to run short of available, affordable films in their favorite genres, they opened up the Belltown Film Festival to local filmmakers, show-and-tell nights, and other concepts.

To fill other schedule holes, and to help prop up the operations side of their venture, they turned to Nyback, who’d run the Rose Bud Movie Palace in Pioneer Square from 1979 to 1981. Nyback had developed a part-time business as a mail-order dealer in old movie reels and mystery novels, supplemented by various day jobs (including at least one stint as a porno-theater projectionist). Nyback not only owned his own collection of rare prints, he corresponded with similar collectors around the country who had their own peculiarities. He also owned his own 16mm and 35mm projectors, and knew enough amateur carpentry to rebuild the Rendezvous projection room into a workable facility.

In 1989-90, Nyback gradually took more responsibility over the Belltown Film Festival. By early 1991 he was running it by himself. The festival’s programming evolved away from French and Japanese features toward programming built around Nyback’s collection — prewar jazz shorts, cartoons, and comedies; ’50s and ’60s TV commercials and movie trailers; educational and industrial shorts; ’60s music shorts originally made for Scopitone film jukeboxes; and pre-1970 stag films.

Nyback, who admits to preferring total control over his ventures instead of partnerships, broke with the Rendezvous’s owners in September 1991. He held screenings at a couple of other Belltown spaces that fall. Then at the start of 1992 he leased a storefront on the ground floor of a somewhat notorious transients’ apartment building at Pike and Boren, an area of Capitol Hill only now starting to get “upscaled.” He put his book operation, Spade and Archer (named for the Maltese Falcon detective agency) in the front room, separated by a sliding bookcase from the 50-seat screening room in back. For $600 and donated materials he created a funky yet elegant space, complete with old-time theater seats and curtains.

In retropsect, it might not have been the best possible site. People often got lost confusing address, 1108 Pike, with 1108 East Pike; either that or they confused the name “Pike Street Cinema” with the former Pike Place Cinema in the Pike Place Market. And in his first few months at the space, he didn’t even have a sign above his tiny storefront big enough to be seen by drivers heading up from downtown — just a small sandwich board outside and some posters in the window.

Additionally, Nyback had trouble drawing suburban baby boomers, many of whom told him they thought were afraid to venture into Seattle after dark: “People used to say, ‘Go to the Pike Street Cinema and get mugged.'” Nyback admits to the presence of lowlife types in the apartments above the theater and in the tavern next door, but insists none of his audience members were ever hassled by them.

But the space was cheap enough that Nyback broke even for three and a half years on an average attendance of 125 people per week.

Some of the Pike Street’s better attended programs have included a Charles Bukowski bioflick, a show of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, the underground farces of San Francisco director George Kuchar, a package of ’70s Mormon Church instructional films, a festival of old softcore sex films curated by Something Weird Video, the Seattle-made 1970 porno feature The Last Bath, Craig Baldwin’s recent Negativland profile Sonic Outlaws, and Bad Bugs Bunny (a collection of Warner Bros. cartoons no longer shown on TV due to racial caricatures).

Still, Nyback wasn’t earning a living wage from the theater. It didn’t help that “I didn’t charge enough to the people who rented out the space on off nights” for other film programs and cabaret parties. He also couldn’t afford paid advertising and didn’t want it if he could afford it, preferring low-key promotion through flyers and posters.

Yet Nyback isn’t worried about his chances in the New York entertainment scene, a scene even more reliant on high-profile promotion than Seattle’s. “New York just seems like more of a real city, where there’s word-of-mouth, where people my age (he’s in his early 40s) still go out at night.” He’s got friends back east scouting for potential sites, and hopes to be back in business before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Seattle experimental filmmaker Jon Behrens hopes to open a new screening room elsewhere in town with a similar schedule. In the past, Behrens has screened his films at the Pike Street and at 911 Media Arts (including a program held on July 29). But he says he wants to break away from what he perceives as an increasingly institutionalized atmosphere at 911, and to keep the anything-goes indie spirit of the Pike Street Cinema alive in Seattle.

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.