EVEN BEFORE the P-I front page discovered it, Misc. was in love with the new Westin Hotel rooftop signs. While the red letters are nearly four feet tall, they’re placed so high up on the hotel’s round towers that they look real tiny from the street. They provide an unexpected spot of cheer against the downtown skyline and bring back memories of the past golden age of hotel neon. They’re also a statement of pride for the locally-based chain, rocked in recent years from a succession of out-of-state parent companies. Elsewhere in greater downtown…

OFF THE MENU: The 5th & Denny restaurant graveyard building maintains its curse on would-be operators–most recently with a would-be southern-esque dining concept called Jambalaya’s. The curse acted faster than normal this time; Jambalaya’s “Coming Soon” signs came down and the “For Lease” signs came up without the joint ever opening. In other money-related fantasies…

GAME THEORY REVISITED: The Seattle Monopoly game, premiered in a big Bon Marche promo event last Friday, is Monopoly owner Hasbro’s belated answer to Stock Block and CityOpoly, two ’80s indie board games based heavily on the Monopoly concept but with different street and business names for each town they were sold in. The thing is, there are enough avid game players and professional game designers in town for somebody to think up a real (not fill-in-the-blanks) Seattle board game. Maybe it could be about trying to start a computer-related company that could make it big, but not so big that Microsoft would crush it by copying its technology. Or it could be about coming up with schemes to improve civic life and trying to get them realized in spite of opposition by the big-money people. For example…

RIDING HIGH?: You can tell it’s election season ’cause the local TV commercial slots and daily-newspaper ad space, normally full of appeals to be a “rebel” by buying officially “rebellious” consumer products, are instead saturated with images of authority figures exhorting citizens to do as they’re told and just say nope to those crackpot initiatives on the ballot. There’s images of cops against (mild) handgun control, and images of nurses against (very mild) health care reform. Another case in point: the Monorail Initiative, denounced by the increasingly rabid-right propagandists at the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce. Instead of opposing the initiative as the work of “crackpots” (i.e., of people outside the government/ business elite), our business leaders should welcome the chance to add more in-city mileage to a light-rail scheme initially intended for suburban commuters, and to add them in the form of a hi-profile, futuristic-looking elevated train system people would want to ride on.

We ought to pass the Monorail Initiative this election. Then we’ll let the city and the Regional Transit Authority (established in last year’s transit referendum) work out how best to incorporate the initiative’s mandate with the in-progress RTA planning and the future RTA operation. RTA was and is about reducing smog, easing freeway congestion, and making life easier for motorists by getting a few other motorists off the road. The Monorail Initiative is about those things, but it’s also about something more. It’s about dreams for the future, and about wresting control of these dreams from the suits, from the consultants and focus-group researchers and the politicians who never met a condo project they didn’t like. Historically, urban transit projects in the U.S. have been proposed from on high by political inner-circle members who would never deign to use public transit themselves, but who love the opportunity to award construction contracts to potential campaign contributors. This is something dreamed up by ordinary citizens, without years of bureaucratic “process.” And it appeals to everyone who’s ever loved the short Seattle Center Monorail and ever wanted to believe it really was the transportation system of the future. As I wrote back in April, much of the dream future presented at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair never happened. Here’s a chance to realize at least a piece of the fair’s promised “World of Tomorrow,” to be finished just a few years into Century 21.

A Star and His Bucks

Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey

8/21/97

Pour Your Heart Into It

by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

Hyperion, $24.95

There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.

Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.

A comparison is due at this point: Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.

Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.

On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).

Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.

Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.

Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”

BRIEFS

Thrift Score

Al Hoff

HarperCollins

Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.

Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.

Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.

Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest

Lorna Price, ed.

University of Washington Press

The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?

These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.

EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.

The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.

If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.

NOT-SO-PACIFIC RIM: What if the Salmon War escalated into a trade war on all fronts between the U.S. and Canada? It could be fun, seeing which side would dare to live without the other’s products the longest. They’d have to stop going to most movies, driving most cars, eating most packaged food products, and shopping sprees to the Burlington, WA outlet mall. We’d have to give up hockey, Crown Royal whiskey, and–oh yeah–cheaper grades of paper, like the newsprint that becomes fine weekly tabloid-size newspapers. Maybe it wouldn’t be so fun after all. Maybe we should figure out a way out of this mess before it gets to that point.

SPICE GIRLS: One of the things I miss most about Moe was its dining room’s large selection of obscure indie hot sauces. There’s more of these out there than ever, thanks to increased demand for exotic foods, bigger supermarkets with more space for different items, and that ol’ pop-cult blessing/ curse, the collector. The trade mag Fancy Food quotes Jennifer Trainer Thompson, author of The Hot Sauce Collector’s Guide, as saying there’s “such a demand today for collectible hot sauces and gifts that makers are releasing the same sauce over and over again and just putting different labels on it.”

One example of creative labeling is the same mag’s ad for Pepper Girl sauces from Calif.-based Peppertown USA. Each product has a label inspired by ’40s-’50s pin-up illustration: Fifi’s Nasty Little Secret (pineapple-jalapeno, with a French maid on the label); Kitten’s Big Banana (banana-mango-habanero, with a bathing beauty); Wrong Number (chipotle-mango-habaerno, with a lingirie model holding a dial telephone); Bad Girls In Heat (papaya-pumpkin-habaerno, with two hitchhikers in slinky dresses); and Sultan’s Main Squeeze (passion fruit-Thai pepper, with a belly dancer). Those female diners who might disapprove of those brands might instead prefer an ad elsewhere in the magazine, for the Atlanta-made Scorned Woman Fiery Barbecue Sauce (slogan: “Don’t Get Mad, Get Even!”).

BRING ON THE WARM JETS: In past years, I used to annually print my arguments in defense of Seafair. I skipped it last year, but with the Blue Angels’ noisy spectacle returning to the lineup this weekend I figure it’s time. With Bumbershoot admission getting pricier every year, the Seafair parade and hydro races comprise two of the city’s three most populist gatherings; the first is the Bite of Seattle. This annual triumverate of events reject both the “quiet good taste” of Seattle’s yuppified official culture and the too-cool-to-have-fun taboo that constricts much of our “alternative” community. Sure these are “family” events, as advertised; but they’re for real families: bratty kids, horny teens, dysfunctional parents, grumpy oldsters. They promise pleasant times out-of-doors with food, drink, and unpretentious entertainment (plus a lot of noise). They deliver humanity in all its gross-out, homely, cantankerous, troublesome, pathetic, amazing, loveable variety (plus a lot of noise).

Nature poets (like the poets who used to hold anti-Seafair reading events every year) love to move to communities connected to The Land and The Water, but have a hard time cohabiting with the castes of people who live off of said resources. Seafair honors the people who work in and on the water (sailors, fishers, shipbuilders, stevedores) and those who feel affinity with them (regular working stiffs)–not the people with million-buck “cabins” on the islands. Similarly, the Bite (particularly the Times-sponsored portion) purports to honor the town’s yupscale restaurant segment, but really celebrates the all-American deadly sin of gluttony as thoroughly as Mardi Gras revels in lust and modern Christmas honors greed. Unlike Folklife’s moderate hammered-dulcimer lovers, the Bite’s a true celebration of the common person. The streets of downtown, increasingly unhospitable to the non-affluent, became on Aug. 1 a temporary invasion site for the forgotten Seattleites. This weekend, the brahmins of Lake Washington are bracing for the onslaught of gauche sex-joke T-shirts, decidedly non-REI rubber rafts, and people at least officially not drinking alcohol in a public park. Plus a lot of noise. Even noisier with the Blue Angels back. I can’t wait.

(Next week: The Misc. midsummer reading list.)

If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.

I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.

One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”

But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”

Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.

There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.

Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.

Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.

Retro-Futurism at 600 Feet:

Dining at the Needle

Eats essay for The Stranger,7/23/96

While the future the Space Needle predicted (it helped inspire the look of The Jetsons) never happened, and the age it came from passed long ago, it remains a beloved symbol of Seattle and an icon of a bygone belief in a late-industrial, pre-computer tomorrow. It’s an almost unbelievable blend of retro kitsch and eternal beauty. Except for the ’80s-vintage 100-foot-level addition (now used only for occasional banquets), its size, scale, and shape are as near as modern American architecture gets to Pythagorean perfection.

Seattleites love the Needle so much they’ll forgive the legendary cost and mediocrity of its restaurant, almost. (You can tell a real local kid: She’ll have 100 Space Needle scale models, ball-point pens, ash trays, whiskey bottles, postcards, and posters, but has never been in the real one.)

I’m looking at a still of Elvis’s scene in the Space Needle restaurant from It Happened at the World’s Fair. The revolving, donut-shaped dining room evokes what was considered wondrous in ’62: Space Patrol uniforms on the servers, fine suits and dresses on the clientele, rich paneling on the walls, rich food on the tables.

In its 35th year, the uniforms and the decor have become more commonplace (the walls are now as grey as the view on an overcast winter day; the ceiling has that speckled-relief effect made infamous by suburban condos). The food, which always was commonplace, has remained so.

The Needle’s a product of what passes for “old money” in this young city. It’s always been a private endeavor, adjacent to but not part of the city-owned Seattle Center. It was built by mega-contractor Howard S. Wright, with backing from developer Ned Skinner and hotel tycoon Eddie Carlson. The late architect-activist Victor Steinbrueck claimed to have played a role in the design, but Wright’s discounted the extent of Steinbrueck’s participation. Both Steinbrueck and Wright claimed to have been inspired by Stuttgart’s TV tower (more explicitly cloned in Toronto’s CN Tower). For many years the restaurant was managed by Carlson’s Western International (now Westin) Hotels; the Needle itself was owned by a five-partner consortium headed by Wright and entitled (our neopagan readers will love this!) the Pentagram Corp. The operation’s now united as the Space Needle Corp.

Tom Robbins called it a phallic symbol, claiming the old Grandma’s Cookies neon sign at north Lake Union as its feminine counterpart. He was only half right. It’s tall and cylindrical, but also curvy and gracious; you rise up to penetrate it, arriving in a cornerless world of padded surfaces and comforting joys.

Upon checking in at the bottom, the efficient staff confirms your reservation and warns you how many elevator loads are ahead of you. Despite a large group from a software company waiting in line ahead of me, it was soon my turn to take the smooth 42-second ride up 600 feet to the “top house.” Quicker than you can adjust your inner ears, you’re in the stark grey topside waiting area. The excessively (but not insuffrably) perky wait staff soon seated me at a non-window table, near two middle-aged couples from Philadelphia freely expressing their giddiness at the whole top-of-the-world sensation. The whole room had the air of low-key (and, at some tables, higher-key) celebrations: Contracts signed, wedding dates set, relatives reunited, jobs and homes temporarily abandoned.

Aside from the diners’ happy talk, the only aural accompaniment to my meal came from the steady, reassuring hum of the turntable motors ever-so-slowly sending me around to view the panorama of city, sound, sky, and (since it was sunny) mountains. I couldn’t see my house (a bigger building was in the way), but everything else was laid out like a miniature movie set for Godzilla to stomp on; the Harbor Island container docks looked like a stack of grey Lego bricks.

The giant turntable has grown jittery over the years. It rumbles and vibrates beneath your feet, and staggers for a second every few minutes. The thing goes all the way around in an hour; with the efficient service and pre-prepared dishes, you can expect to be finished by the time you again spot the buildings that were in front of you when you sat down.

While the restaurant’s menu has evolved, the emphasis remains on fancy-but-not-too-fancy meals for tourists, business travelers, and locals hosting out-of-town relatives. It makes no claims to be on the cutting edge of cuisine. Aside from a fried vegetarian penne ($24.95), the dinner menu is neatly divided into “Entrees” (bigger, costlier versions of what your parents would order in a steak house on their anniversary) and “Signature Entrees” (that seafood stuff the tourists hear you’ve got to get when you’re in Seattle). Everything is soft-textured and mildly seasoned, so everyone from grandma to your finicky preteen niece can enjoy it.

My entree choice, the Chicken Parmesan ($24.95), was a huge slab of chicken, breaded and baked to you-need-no-teeth tenderness, with melted chese and a pizza-esque sauce. Not the worst of its type I’ve ever had, but nothing you couldn’t get better and/ or cheaper on Terra Firma. It came with two scoops of reconstituted mashed potatoes, carrot slices and string beans. The butter-pat foil containers and the sugar pouches carried the telltale logo of Food Services of America–the empire of that Thomas Stewart guy from Vashon, patron of right-wing politicians and subsidizer of John Carlson’s think tank.

If I were to recommend a dish to you, it’d be the prime rib ($27.95 to $31.95). The demise of Jake O’Shaugnessey’s has left a vacancy in the Lower Queen Anne vicinity for this melt-in-your-mouth delicacy. It’s cured, so it’s safely cooked even when it’s all red and fleshy on the inside. Those celebrating on a budget can settle for the smoked-salmon appetizer ($9.95).

Any good kitschy “special occasion” restaurant needs a special drink or dessert. The Needle disappointed in both areas. They were out of the take-home ceramic Needle-shaped glass that’s supposed to come with the Mai Tai-esque Space Needle Blast-Off Punch ($18). They did have the World Famous Lunar Orbiter dessert ($5.50); but once the dry-ice fog from the lower compartment of its special cup has steams away, you’ve just got a lot of ice cream covered with mini M&M’s.

You can get the drinks without the entrees, at the cocktail lounge on the non-revolving Observation Deck just above the restaurant. The view’s just as spectacular as it is from the restaurant, though you have to walk around it yourself (the outer walkway’s all fenced in nowadays, to be jump-proof). And the atmosphere’s far more festive, with cheery tourists and screaming kids running to and fro. The gift-shop merchandise is astounding. You can play with the penny-flattening machine or the coin-op telescope (not powerful enough to peer into hotel rooms). Tucked away in a corner there’s a computer kiosk normally displaying an Internet tourist-guide site, but you can follow links to the Sub Pop Mega Mart site and leave it there. And on summer Friday evenings, the amplified melodies from the Pain in the Grass concerts waft upward beautifully. I like the band Zeke normally, but it never sounded as hot as it did from 600 feet away.

MISC. DOESN’T KNOW how to start this week’s item collection, with a touch-O-bemusement (the Jack Daniel’s Faux Faulkner writing contest limiting entries to 500 words or less? Bill couldn’t write a want ad that short!) or a solemn pledge (Guaranteed: Absolutely nothing about the Baby Boomers turning 50!).

SPACE PROBES: I know this is Anna Woolverton’s department but I gotta mention the gorgeous new Sit & Spin band room. A more perfect homey-glitz look I’ve never seen, and how they made a concrete box sound so good I’ll never know. Seattle band spaces never get bigger (at least not until this year’s planned RKCNDY remodel) but they do get better. Meanwhile, Beatnix (ex-Tugs, ex-Squid Row, ex-Glynn’s Cove) suddenly went the way of 80 percent of new small businesses; it’ll be back with new owners and probably a new name after a remodel. And there was big fun a couple weeks back at the reopened Pioneer Square Theater; whenSuper Deluxe sang their Xmas song about asking Santa for a skateboard and only getting a stupid sweater, the teen punx drenched the band members with sweaters. With occasional all-ages shows continuing at the Velvet Elvis that means there’s real punk now at both former homes of Angry Housewives, the punk parody stage musical that delighted smug yuppie audiences from 1983 to 1989.

TYPO-GRAPHY: I’m developing a theory that certain grammatical errors come in and out of fashion. F’rinstance, people in many stations of life still use “it’s” (the contraction of “it is”) when they mean “its” (the possessive). A year or two back there was a similar fad of spelling “-ies” plurals as “y’s” (i.e., “fantasy’s”), but it didn’t catch on very far. The incorrect phrase “A Women” was seen about a year ago in a Wash. Free Press headline. Then earlier this month the phrase showed up in a Sylvia strip. Even in hand-drawn comics dialogue, people seem to be falling back on the computer-spell-checker excuse (“it’s a real word, just the wrong word”). Either that, or cartoonist Nicole Hollander’s succumbed to the notion of “Women” as a Borglike collective entity.

MATERIAL ISSUE: As a tangental allegation to her $750,000 LA wrongful-termination/ sex-discrimination lawsuit, ex-Maverick Records employee Sonji Shepherd charges the Madonna-owned label and its day-to-day boss Freddy DeMann with running a payola machine, bribing DJs and station managers to play Candlebox and Alanis Morrissette songs with cash, expense-paid trips to lap-dance clubs, and even flown-in visits from Heidi Fleiss’s call girls. Candlebox-haters shouldn’t go around high-fiving and shouting exhortations like “Knew it! They couldn’t have gotten big without extra help!” That’s the same line rock-haters offered during the ’50s payola scandals, when pay-for-airplay charges destroyed pioneer rock DJ Alan Freed. Also, Shepherd’s allegations are aimed at label staff; no band members are charged with committing or knowing about anything unlawful.

NAKED TRUTH DEPT.: Ongoing science exhibits don’t often get reviewed in papers like this, but the best can give as much fun and insight-into-reality as any performance-art piece. My current all-time fave: the naked mole-rats at the Pacific Science Center. These li’l four-inch-long, furless pink rodents from sub-Saharan Africa are the perfect straight-edge punk mascot animals, the ultimate combination of cuteness and ferocity. They live totally underground, in networks of burrows that can be as big as six football fields. They’ve got an organized cooperative, matriarchal social structure (some dig, some walk backwards to shove dirt around, and the biggest ones shove dirt up through surface holes). They don’t drink. They’ve got huge long teeth that can chew through concrete. Their lips close behind their teeth. Science Center PR calls them “saber-toothed sausages.”

At the exhibit they live in a plexiglass-enclosed environment with clear plastic plumbing tubes to scurry around in. It may be impractical to get your own naked mole-rat colony (you’d have to specially import a queen and two or three breeding males, as well as build their elaborate home). But there’s plenty of other fun things you can make and do with science; an invitation elsewhere in this paper should help give you an incentive.

(Next week: A vilification of all those `Apple Computer death spiral’ media stories, and an appeal to Save The Blob.)

HERE AT MISC. we’re disappointed but not surprised to hear the B’vue Square FAO Schwarz store held a name-the-bear-statue contest and couldn’t come up with anything better than “Latte.” Speaking of names…

DREAM OF FIELDS I: Now that the building what replaced the Coliseum is now called KeyArena, what’ll we call the old Seattle Center Arena? The Thunderbirds’ pocket schedule simply calls it “Old Arena.” I’ve heard others call it the “RockArena,” its temporary name for the past few Bumbershoots. Its original, pre-World’s Fair name, the Seattle Ice Arena, is now inappropriate since the T-Birds will play all future games at KeyArena (unless any playoff games conflict with Sonics home dates). Cobain’s last local gig was there, but it might be tacky to rename the place after him. If you’ve any other ideas, lemme know at the Misc. World HQ website, <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>. Speaking of second-string sports sites…

DREAM OF FIELDS II: The Seattle Sounders want their own $25 million, 20,000-capacity, natural-turf soccer stadium. The unofficialSounders website shows a picture of a grand old UK soccer field and waxes on about the dream of a “natural turf soccer pitch in Seattle,” then quietly notes that the team’s only looked so far at potential sites in Bellevue, Kent and SeaTac, where the team and private investors could put up a whole complex of adult and youth soccer facilities. I always say, if it’s not in Seattle it’s not “in Seattle.” Let’s scatter youth and amateur soccer fields throughout the county, but have the stadium in town. It could even replaceHigh School Memorial Stadium (now a shoddy reminder of public-school budget cuts), either at its current site or at the ex-bus barn across the street. If we could get private money to put up a cool neo-classical soccer stadium, then rent it out during high-school football season at a fee no higher than the school district’s cost to maintain and upgrade Memorial Stadium (the WWII memorial parts can be moved or rebuilt), we’d have a clear winner–no penalty kicks required.

FOURTH & LONG: The Seahawks’ attendance woes coincide with the slow decline of the NFL. American football was “The College Game” for the first half of the century. The pro game was a novelty sport, far less popular than baseball, before TV showed how to market it. The networks and NFL Films took what was structurally a game of coaching, of the execution and interruption of pre-planned plays, and turned it into a spectacle of heroes and villains, of noble warriors and ignoble bullies.

But now, the league’s owners have come to believe themselves to be the invicible warriors lionized by NFL Films. Despite sagging attendance and TV ratings here and in other areas, the owners are playing stadium blackmail with cities on such a scale that I’d need to use a Telestrator on a map of North America to explain it. They’re going all-out for subsidized luxury-box arenas now, because they’ve seen the Telestrating on the wall. With the long-term decline of network TV, so will go the first real made-for-TV sport. Why watch a bunch of guys whose faces you can’t see knocking each other down when there’s women’s college basketball on Prime Sports?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jelly is a slick 16-page brochure containing record reviews of “Mostly All-American Blues Funk Jazz Country Soul Rock n’ Roll.” Get past the lame rock-bashing essay on the cover and you’ll find some quite tasty reviews inside, covering everything from Sam Cooke and Charles Mingus to ambient-dub and “Medieval Swedish blues,” whatever that is. The back page features Elvis’s allegedly favorite peanut butter and bacon sandwich recipe. ($1 from P.O. Box 24924, Seattle 98124-0924, or online.)

(More plugs of the shameless variety: I’ve got two (count ’em!) speaking-signing events this week for my book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story; Friday at Pistil Books (1013 E. Pike, and Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 1st Ave. S. and S. Main St. Both are free and start at 7:30 p.m. Be there or be L7.)

HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

A NON-CYNICAL MISC. WELCOME goes to the Rocket’s new owners, the Frisco-based BAM Media. I’ve heard the rumors, how the new Rocket guys wanna go after this paper’s readers and advertisers. But we can be sports about it. F’rinstance, here’s some tips for the newcomers on what not to do to succeed in Seattle:

* Don’t arrive in town in suits, impose a dress code on the office, yet claim to be “one of you” with the staff because you love ’60s classic rock.

* Don’t expect us cowtown hicks to kneel in worship before your superior Cali essences. Don’t act aggressively and pompously among Seattle bands, club owners, and advertisers, boasting how you’re gonna do everything exactly the way it’s done in San Francisco.

* Don’t replace what’s left of the Rocket style with corporate-rock PR and bland shopper-tabloid design.

* Don’t replace familiar Rocket staffers with parent-company transfers who can’t even pronounce the “a” in “Ivar’s” right (it’s theschwa sound).

Avoid these temptations and the Rocket might get fun again. Heck, stronger competition would be good for both papers.

B’SHOOT NOTES: The upgrading of musical acts this year was great, though Sweet Water (perennial also-rans of the Silver Management stable) selling out the Arena surprised me. The cops went after TchKung! for the second straight year, ‘tho the band and its audience managed to keep the officers slightly better-behaved this time. The Stranger had a stage co-sponsorship this year with Biringer Farms, for whom I spent many a boring summer day picking strawberries as a kid. At least this year there was no Lamonts Blues Stage; ’twas bemusing in the past to see bands that considered themselves first-rate, beneath the name of a store popularly known as a perpetual clearance sale.

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE UPSCALE: This column and this paper have talked more about the Commons than the other money issue on next Tuesday’s ballot, the new baseball stadium. The stadium, like similar stadium tax measures across North America, is a simple matter of asking taxpayers to subsidize businesses. That’s a story as old as railroads, agribusiness price supports, and unneeded weapons systems. (In Canada they use slogans like “Partners in Progress” to promote subsidies for worthless oil scams.) But the Commons represents a twist on public pay for private gain, a twist with implications for our future.

Around 1969-70 there was a revolution in City Hall: a slate of progressives ousted a machine of tired, inbred business interests. That new regime has calcified into a replica of the regime it replaced. Politics in Seattle is now essentially the same as in D.C.; i.e., money, power, privilege and to hell with anyone who can’t offer any of them. Seattle’s political machine doesn’t even claim anymore to speak for “The Little Guy.” Seattle, steadily over the past 20 years but now accelerating rapidly, is becoming a city by, of, and for only one class. The Upscale control the politicians, even the “progressive” politicians. The Upscale control the media (cf. KIRO’s hype-laden puff piece on the Nordstrom family, promoted as “The faces behind the brand name everyone loves!”).

The Upscale loathe real cultural diversity; they accept a culture of all races and nationalities who believe and behave exactly alike, like Disneyland’s “It’s A Small World” robots. Anybody who neither belongs to the Upscale nor can be dismissed by it as “quaint local color” is beyond the pale. (Belltown condo dwellers circulated petitions some months back demanding the Vogue’s closure.) Certain non-Upscale subcultures have returned this loathing, though by and large the Upscales don’t know they’re hated. (Corporate “designer grunge” fashion was such a joke because the “Seattle scene” aesthetic was anti-fashion, specifically anti-Nordstrom.)

The Commons is essentially a scheme to create an Upscale haven a la Vancouver’s West End, anchored by a mini-Stanley Park. It’s an Upscale wet dream; it removes blocks of non-Upscale businesses for Upscale condos, stores, and dineries. And it’d remove some of those disgusting punk clubs too! They insist on making Seattle a World Class City, even if it’s ruined as a place for the rest of us to live.

NOW AT THE MISC. WORLD HQ WEBSITE (<<http://www.miscmedia.com>>): Name your favorite Power Ranger.

10/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.

WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.

WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)

WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.

BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.

JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.

RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.

NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.

THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”

CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!

BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.

Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.

I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…

X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.

THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.

EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.

But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.

Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.

So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.

Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.

DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.

Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.

ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.

The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.

FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…

BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.

Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”

Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.

DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”

‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”

PASSAGE

As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:

“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”

REPORT

As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.

Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).

There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Algolagnia”

10/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns and four newsletter-only items)

Here Comes Moshpit Tourism!

OK OK OK, Misc. is now ready to admit that the “Seattle Sound” is dead. The evidence: not Singles, but the 9/13 travel page of the Sunday newspaper insert USA Weekend (stuffed into the Bellevue Journal-American and dozens of other papers around the country), right after the Haband ad for mail order men’s slacks. The headline: “Get Set for the Seattle Sound: Next weekend’s rockin’ movie Singles puts the limelight on this musical metropolis.” As Jim Kelton writes, “Just as Memphis has the blues, Chicago and New Orleans have Jazz, and Nashville owns country, Seattle now has its own hard-driving sound, dubbed ‘grunge rock,’ giving travelers another reason to visit the city…Visitors will find entertaining and fiercely outspoken music in nearly every corner of this sprawling city. But first-timers should note that the best spots to hear its sounds aren’t always upscale. You can take in the sights during the day, then fill the nights with the fresh Seattle sound.” The page gave prospective grunge-tourists listings of five clubs, two costly hotels (including the Meany Tower, inaccurately described as being close to many important grunge venues), the youth hostel, and two eateries: 13 Coins and the Dog House (“the ‘in’ place for musicians and music fans”).

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The article encourages tourists to come here to see live gigs by the very bands that got into making records in the mid-’80s because they couldn’t get live gigs. The music that was rejected by so many clubs for so many years might now become a boon to the state’s hospitality industry. Maybe we should just replace Seattle Center with a Grungeland theme park. Flannel-shirted costume characters could sneeringly blow Export A smoke into the eager eyes of affluent American families, on their way to enjoy hourly indoor and outdoor performances in between stops at a Jimmy the Geek house of thrills, senior citizen moshing lessons, an all-vegan food circus, bumper cars that look like beat-up Datsuns, wandering Iggy impersonators, beer-can crushing competitions, a detox clinic fantasy ride, (for the gents) a contest to become L7‘s chaste bondage slaves, and (for the ladies) an all-scrawny, all-longhair male strip show.

CRIMES AGAINST CULTURE?: The city wanted to collect 3% admissions tax on the “suggested donation at the door” for the Two Bells Tavern’s Chicken Soup Brigade musical benefit. On Sept. 23, city official Dale Tiffany sided with the tavern and withdrew the tax bill, noting in a letter that “you made a quite persuasive case”…. Meanwhile, COCA ran afoul of the police dept.’s crusade to shut down all-ages musical events. Its non-alcoholic rave party was shut down in August over a few creative interpretations of technical ordinances and the infamous “Teen Dance Ordinance,” a law ramrodded through the city council a few years back intended to ban all-ages events under the guise of regulating them.

ON DISPLAY: I saw COCA’s Native American political art exhibit, which uses images of pre-Columbian daily life as symbols of defiance, in the context of what if our entire way of life were similarly suppressed. After thinking some more about it, I couldn’t think of many aspects of mainstream U.S. culture that that weren’t already symbols of our past conquests. What music do we have that isn’t Black- or immigrant-rooted? What fashions have we got that aren’t based on street or folk dress? Through ethnic art (often designed for white consumption) and its equivalents in literature and music, armchair lefties like me get to anoint ourselves with the vicarious righteousness of pretending to be what some white ideologists call “The Other.” It’s a change from most American cultural experiences, which are typically fantasies of conquering something or someone. The only American genres to discuss what being conquered might feel like are science fiction and Red-baiting propaganda, usually as a pretext for heroic action. But imagine: What if our entire way of life was suppressed as North America’s indigenous cultures were? What practices would be kept underground? What pieces of everyday life that you take for granted would turn into symbols of rebellion? What things that you care about would be turned into jokes and stereotypes by the conquerors?

CAN’T I GET LIBERATED TOO?: The (Ero) Writes/Rights panel at Bumbershoot was mostly the usual inconclusive porn-vs.-erotica debate. But one woman made a good point about “censorship of the spirit and the intellect,” something too many of us do to ourselves. The alternative literary scene would attract more people if it weren’t always so grim and staid, if it expressed the whole range of human thoughts and feelings in our big wide world. In many ways, small press literature is the most aesthetically conservative art form this side of barbershop quartet singing (and a hell of a lot less fun). You’re not gonna get young people involved in advanced prose if it offers nothing more than Montana travelogues and ’60s nostalgia. I long for a literature of compassion, of participation. A good place to start is erotica, by its nature a genre that mustn’t be self-centered. Like Jae Carrlson and Kirby Olson in Reflex, I believe the answer to bad porn is better porn, that gleefully celebrates human connection in all its varieties.

OTHER B-SHOOT NOTES: Loved Book-It, the troupe that dramatizes short stories verbatim. Much more literate than most of the “literary” events….

Missed They Might Be Giants, who filled up the Opera House an hour and a half before they went on. In the line, two suburban kids joked about how this show should’ve been in the Coliseum instead of Queen Latifah (this year’s token non-’60s black act), because “nobody’s going to shoot anybody at this show.” I wished to hell I’d had a Walkman so I could’ve made them listen to TMBG’s song “Your Racist Friend.” The Latifah show was, by all accounts, a sedate affair full of perky White Negro wannabes….

The $25 Quick Access Pass was an elitist scam, going against B-Shoot’s one-big-crowd tradition, and should not be repeated….

Michelle Shocked had a great line at the Interview Stage comparing most rock music to “a blackface minstrel show” without the makeup — affluent whites acting out a simplistic persona of blacks as sexy savages….

EXCUSE ME WHILE I KISS THIS GUY: I can’t wait for the Jimi Hendrix museum to open, even if it doesn’t display the uncensored Are You Experienced? cover art or Suzie Plastercaster‘s famous life-cast of his masculinity. Well-heeled local backers are looking at at least two potential sites, including the ex-Seattle Art Museum annex in Seattle Center. The guy deserves a proper public memorial. (KZOK tried a few years ago to get a memorial in a city park, but the Parks Dept. wouldn’t go along; the station settled for a pile of “hot rocks” at the African savannah exhibit of the zoo.) Besides, these days it’d be good to remind people of a guy who joined the Army just to get out of Seattle, his only hope of making it in music.

THE MAILBAG: Charles Kiblinger writes, “Perhaps you might be able to enlighten us as to what exactly is the deal with this baseball cap display on the rear dashboard thing?” Would you please be more specific? What are these items, and what do you wish to learn about them?

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Husky Dawgs, in bright wrappers bearing official UW football logos, are really repackaged Canadian Jumbo Hot Dogs (the expiration date sticker says both “Meilleur Avant” and “Best Before”). As all good Seattle barflies know about Jumbos, they’re hearty if underseasoned tube steaks that can be steamed, boiled, or grilled, and are virtually impervious to decay even after rotating under a heat lamp all day….

As my budget and diet allow, I’m planning to try all of the faux Frangos being offered around town: Nordstrom Best Mints, Ala Bons, Boehm’s Encore, Seattle Chocolate Co.’s Milt Chocolate, etc. The Times sez that Nordstrom uses a higher grade of chocolate, no salt and no tropical oils. The Seattle Chocolate Co. makes the Nordstrom candy (mint flavor only), and also makes its own brand with a slightly different recipe (in three flavors). Ala Bons, the first faux Frango, are smaller and flatter, not as fully whipped. Boehms, in gold foil boxes, only have six ounces for $6.95 (Frangos and most of the imitators have eight ounces)…

MANGO TANG UPDATE: Mark Campos claims to have tried the stuff, obtained from relatives through an Oregon food warehouse outlet. “The mad chemists at the Tang labs were nowhere hear a mango flavor consensus…no matter how much I stirred, a majority of the stuff marched to the bottom of the glass and stayed there. Also, it’s the most unappealingly colored stuff. Like Mountain Dew, it should not be put into clear glasses for consumption.”

1-900-FAILURE: Megaquest, the Queen Anne-based parent company of some 50 phone talk services (many, but not all, sex-related) in a half-dozen countries, is close to bankruptcy, after earning a net income of $14 million in 1990. According to a great story in the Sept. 4 Puget Sound Business Journal, original partners Arthur Joel Eisenberg and Betsy Superfon (apparently her real name) are battling in court over control of the companies, whose revenues have tumbled as government agencies and phone companies crack down against the rights of those unimaginative Americans who can’t even abuse themselves without coaching.

AD OF THE MONTH (newspaper ad for Nationwide Warehouse and Storage Furniture): “The Chastity 4-Piece Bedroom Set, $198.” Runner-up: the Wm. Diericx Co.’s radio ad for office supplies, selling paper shredders endorsed by Fawn Hall.

“DIS” INFORMATION: Still still more proof that hip-hop culture can’t be successfully whitened comes from the Suzuki 4 x 4’s fall ad campaign, “Fear of a Flat Planet” (a notably lame exploitation of Public Enemy‘s Fear of a Black Planet).

A DAY WITHOUT SUNSHINE: The Florida state tourism dept. rushed out some newspaper ads insisting that their state was still open for business. The state had to produce the ads at their own Tallahassee office, because it couldn’t complete a phone call to its Miami ad agency.

CATHODE CORNER: Alert home satellite dish owners know about the supplemental feeds of network football games, with the field pictures and sound but no announcers or commercials. I saw part of a Seahawks game this way; you can tell all the important aspects of the game, and don’t have to hear any dumb anecdotes.

DUDS: One piece of good news in the Generra bankruptcy came in a Times story noting that the company, like many in the sportswear biz, is starting to get clothes made in the U.S., after years of only using overseas sweatshops where workers make as little as $1.03 a day. Seems that it takes too long to ship stuff from over there. By the time a fad item gets here, the fad can be over.

“DON’T WALK” THIS WAY: Bellevue officials are promising to make their town “more pedestrian friendly” — by beefing up citations against people walking against the Don’t Walk lights. If they really wanted to help walkers, they’d change the lights on some intersections that allow walking for only three seconds every three minutes, so you have to jaywalk to get anywhere on time.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Tiny, King of the Roadside Vendors is an affectionate tribute by Sharon Graves Hall to her late brother, Richard “Tiny” Graves, the girthy and jovial operator of Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere (one of Washington’s few authentic “roadside attractions”, with ad signs attracting tourists along U.S. highways throughout the west). For just $12.95, the book’s more fun than a case of Aplets and Cotlets….

Meet Me at the Center is Seattle Center’s authorized history, written by ex-Times guy Don Duncan. It’s chock full of World’s Fair camp images (which I can’t ever get enough of). It’s also essential reading for all of you who don’t know what Seattle was like in the era prior to Starbucks and PCC, when a small remote city was trying desperately to join the “jet set” its machines had made possible….

Journeys of the Muse is a 12-page quarterly newsletter by Pamela Reno of Naches, Yakima County. Topics include “The power of thought to influence the sun: A turning point for humanity?”

FUN WITH WORDS: Husbands and Wives stands a chance of becoming the biggest audience-participation movie since Rocky Horror. Here’s how it works: go with all your feminist friends, and hiss whenever Woody says something that turns out to have been eerily lifelike… Another great new cussing site is the downtown library, specifically at the terminals of the new computer card catalog. On any given afternoon you may find retired schoolmarms, Mormon ancestor-researchers and valedictorian wannabes struggling to cope with the confusing software and the mistake-ridden data, talking back to the VDT’s with words not found in the bowdlerized dictionaries.

INDECISION ’92: A requiem is in order for failed gubernatorial primary candidate “You Must Be” Joe King. He’s actually been a pretty good state House speaker, fighting to keep the Wm. Spafford murals up in the Capitol and to support a lot of good legislation. But for his first statewide campaign, he let image consultants package him as something just this side of a Reagan Democrat; an unlikely recipe for success this year….

Campaign commercials used to feature a big red “NO!” crashing down on the face of the sponsoring candidate’s opponent. This time, at least one candidate used “NOT!” instead.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, pick up some great bargains at Blowout Video on 1st (the video equivalent of a remainder book outlet) and the Evergreen State Store in the Center House (your one-stop tourist trinket shop), watch the Japanese soap The 101st Proposal Sat. mornings on KTZZ, and heed the words of Thomas Hobbes (the philosopher, not the cartoon character): “Fear and I were born twins.”

PASSAGE

John Kricfalusi, the cartoonist-director-actor who made Ren & Stimpy into the cult sensation of the year (and just got fired for his trouble by Viacom bureaucrats), quoted in Film Threat before his dismissal: “Everybody’s ugly in real life. You just have to look close. Look inside anybody’s nose. Look in — who’s the big actress today? Look inside her nose and then think about porkin’ her.”

WORD-O-MONTH

“Funambulist”

STOP THIS WEATHER CHITCHAT ALREADY.

WE’VE GOT ABOUT THE DULLEST WEATHER IN THE WORLD.

5/90 Misc. Newsletter

NEW PACIFIC 1ST FEDERAL TOWER BROKE, FOR SALE.

SERVES ‘EM RIGHT

FOR TEARING DOWN

THE MUSIC BOX THEATER

Welcome back to Misc., the column that is almost certain that the Log Lady did it (though we’re still trying to figure out what foghorns are doing on a small hydroelectric lake).

Clean, Reasonably Priced Accommodations: You may know by now that Twin Peaks’ Great Northern (named after a predecessor to today’s Burlington Northern Railway) is really the Salish Lodge. It was the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge for many years, a family-owned place known for honeymoon suites and a weekend farm breakfast; my parents went there often. Then Puget Power, which owns the building (and the dam behind the falls), decided to “upscale” the place by bringing in a new operator, who yuppified much of the old charm away.

Another Sawmill Soap Opera: The spotted owl is just a symbol of a whole eco-scape in danger. It’s not “environmental elitists” reducing timber-country jobs, it’s companies with their “efficient” automated clearcuts and log exports. If the forest lands now used were used in a more sustainable manner (as opposed to the short-term cash amortization of “high yield forestry”), we wouldn’t need to destroy the last of the old growth.

Behind Closed Doors: The Tacoma News Tribune revealed a Community Development Round Table, a group of business and media leaders started by the Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1933, now including execs of the Times, P-I, KOMO and KIRO as well as bankers and business leaders. Members are bound by the group’s charter never to mention it to outsiders. A Columbia Journalism Review item about the TNT scoop noted that during the Boeing strike the Round Table invited a speaker from Boeing but not from the unions. Before you forment conspiracy theories, note that the press people in the group were execs, not editors, and that the media firms involved have long supported the business community. KIRO, for instance, shared a big booth at Earth Fair 1990 with the Forest Products Council.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Community Catalyst proposes to be the next great local alternative paper. The first issue’s a modest clearinghouse of info from assorted activist groups, plus a substantial background piece by Rich Ray on the making of the aforementioned Earth Fair, in which a commercial festival-organizing company pleaded with everybody to keep all exhibits upbeat and non-offensive to the major sponsors.

As it turned out, the people jamming the roads to Marymoor Park in their single-occupancy vehicles concentrated at the big tent crowded with all the little tables for the real environmental groups, with only a few straying out in the rain to the spacious covered displays for Chevron and Puget Power. Most of them missed the Wash. Natural Gas display, with free samples of a spirulina plankton-based protein drink packaged by its Hawaiian aquaculture affiliate.

Past Futures (from Uncensored magazine, April 1970): “A fascinating new book, The Country of the Young, paints a gloomy picture of what life will be in 1990 — when the generation war is all over and the drop-outs, pot-heads and sandaled freaks have become Old Hippies. The author, John W. Aldridge, says that the failure of the young today to develop their human resources, to cultivate discipline and skills, is going to backfire on them. If the hippies have their way and become catatonics, with all their needs supplied, `They will simply stare at walls for weeks on end, looking fascinated at such things as the copulation of insects. Having been relieved of the struggle of becoming, they would simply exist to be.'”

Phood Phacts: From in-flight magazines to the P-I to CBS This Morning, major attention has been drawn recently to something called the “Northwest cuisine.” WHAT Northwest cuisine? I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian and never heard of any of these fancy dishes involving rhubarb, rack of lamb and alternatively-processed fish, let alone of many of their ingredients. It sounds suspiciously like some of those other western regional cuisines, invented from scratch from ex-LA chefs (Santa Fe, Colorado), allowing itinerant suburbanites the fantasy of “place” while the real communities of these places succumb to mall-ism. I am certain that we will see the “discovery” of Montana cuisine, North Dakota cuisine, and even Utah cuisine. Ya wanna know the true Northwest cuisine (at least among white people)? It’s Dick’s burgers (or Herfy’s burgers, now all but gone, in the outlying towns), barbecued fish with really thin bones, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken, canned vegetables, Krusteaz pancakes with Mapeline-flavored syrup, maple bars, strawberry shortcake with Dream Whip, Fisher scones, Red Rose tea, Mountain bars, and Rainier Ale (the now-discontinued weak version). I don’t know if Lutefisk counts, since it seems to be perennially given as a gift but never eaten.

Your Own Private Idaho 1990: Many of Idaho’s civic leaders were all over the media in ’88-’89, insisting that the presence of a dozen neo-Nazis didn’t make them a fascist state. They were right, in a way. It’s the drive (vetoed by Gov. Andrus) to keep women barefoot and pregnant that makes them a fascist state, at least in potential. There ARE many truly non-fascist Idahoans, like liberals everywhere who complain but don’t vote. Some of these, there and here, are the same folk who eat fantasy regional cuisines. Maybe now that will change, as folks see the consequences of staying home and letting the Right win.

Junk Food of the Month: Again from Idaho, J.R. Simplot Inc. (best known as the nation’s top supplier of fast-food potatoes) brings us MicroMagic Microwave Milkshakes. You buy them frozen solid, then semi-thaw them in the zapper for 45 seconds. Will this be the foundation of the new Idaho cuisine? I doubt it. Some of the fun ingredients: Mono and diglycerides, guar gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan. The taste? Like a shake at a minor fast-food place that might buy its shake mix from the same source as its fries.

The Fine Print (from a Mr. Coffee coffee filter box): “Additional Uses: Use as a cover when microwaving. Line the bottom of your cake pans. Create snowflakes and Christmas decorations.”

Cathode Corner: KING sacked arts critic Greg Palmer after 14 years. I liked him most of the time, but that’s showbiz. What’s more shocking is that the the new KING news director is also vehemently opposed (sez the P-I) to on-camera signing of the 7:25 a.m. news insert, a friendly face and beautiful spectacle that’s helped many hearing people get through rough mornings and worse news. I once met longtime KING signer Cathy Carlstrom, who also signs church services and other events. She and her fellow signers deserve more respect…. So the world athletes in the Goodwill Games commercials are really local actors and models. What’s the fuss? We’ve all seen enough “Up Close and Personal” segments during the Olympics (or Lite Beer ads) to know that athletes are poor actors.

Ad of the Month (from the Weekly): “Sales, retail. MTV, trendy, fun & outrageous clothing. Mature person, exp’d only.”… Meanwhile, the newest batch of Rainier Beer ads soft-pedals the Only Beer Around Here” theme, dropping the slick stereotypes of mountain climbers and basketball players in favor of a partial return to the humor that made the old Rainier ads such favorites. One billboard reads in big black type, “Californians just don’t get it.” As far as I know, they’re made by the same Frisco ad agency that did last year’s unloved campaign.

Philm Phacts: It’s a shame that Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is so gory, because people will love or hate it just for that instead of for its many other qualities. It’s written for the screen, but could easily have been a five-act play. It mostly takes place on one huge 4-room set; the first hour unfolds in “real time.” The Thief, while nominally a gangster-extortionist, incarnates the whole history of English villainy (Henry VIII, Richard III, Dickens’ venture capitalists, on up to the Thatcherian present).

News from Medicine: A White Rock, B.C. man who walked around with a broken back for almost three months without knowing it was awarded $625,000 (Can.) damages. A Surrey, B.C. hospital had failed to notice the fracture when it treated him following an accident.

Who the Hell Are You?: The Kids Fair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall was an ex-substitute teacher’s nightmare. A whole hall full of screaming kids, frenzied parents, and merchant booths grabbing for the parents’ wallets. Everything from Looney Tunes frozen dinners to back yard jungle gyms, professionally installed. The high/lowlight was when they brought out guys in 7-foot Bart and Homer Simpson felt body costumes, hugging adoring little fans who lined up for photos. If a real Bart were there, he’d have pelted the oversize imposter with a pile of Ninja Turtles coloring books.

Arena Football: Barry Ackerly will build a new Sonics home directly south of the Kingdome (thankfully not, as was threatened previously, where Sears is now), but only if the city shrinks the Coliseum’s capacity, making it commercially worthless. In its original life as the World of Tomorrow exhibit in the ’62 World’s Fair, the Coliseum housed a scale model of the Puget Sound region dotted with new domed cities. What’s one of the few present-day structures shown to be still standing in this fantasy future? As the taped narrators said, “Look! There’s Coliseum Century 21!” “Yes, in the future we will retain the best of the past.”

Sell It to Murph: Unocal Corp. (née Union Oil), which once boasted of being the last company to still make gas for older cars, is now going to buy hundreds of hi-smog clunkers in the L.A. area, in order to retire them from the road. As an Earth Day PR stunt it was very effective and probably cheaper than paying for a cleanup of their old Elliott Bay terminal, where the Port of Seattle is having to deal with the residue of 60 years’ worth of minor product leaks and spills.

‘Til the fourth-anniversary Misc. next time, don’t get caught trafficking in counterfeit Nintendo cartridges (lest they sick a lawsuit equivalent of the Hungry Goriya on you),watch the new international-music show Earth to MTV, and ponder these thoughts by my goddess Tracey Ullman on her role in I Love You to Death: “Because the accent is Northwestern, it was tough to stay in character all the time. Southern accents are easy and so are New York accents, but the Northwest accent is the most pure of all the accents. You can’t just put one accent on top of another. You have to lose your accent completely.”

PASSAGE

One of the less-controversial lines in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

“Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell.”

REPORT

If you want Misc. every month (we don’t get to every drop-off every time), subscribe.

My novel The Perfect Couple is available on Macintosh discs for $10.

CALL TO ACTION

ABC will soon decide whether to renew Twin Peaks. Send cards & letters to ABC Entertainment, 77 W. 66th St., NYC 10023.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Syncretize”

3/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

CAT STEVENS JOINS RUSHDIE MURDER CALL,

LEAVES EMPTY SEAT ON PEACE TRAIN

Welcome back to Misc., where we only wish Billy Tipton, the deceased Spokane jazz “man” who wasn’t, had recorded a duet with Wendy Carlos.

The Great ’89 Snow turned everything beautiful and made everyday life a temporary adventure. Monitoring the news coverage, KING gave hourly updates on wind-chill conditions, while KIRO interrupted the very interruptible CBS This Morning for the ritual reading of school closures. KOMO, whose news gets more Murdochian every year, ran promos saying they had the latest forecast but wouldn’t tell it until the regular news time.

Cathode Corner: MTV replaced its Closet Classics Capsule with Deja Video: clips from 1980-85. What a concept! ’80s Nostalgia!…David Lynch is shooting an ABC pilot in area logging towns. Lumberton on your TV every week! We can only hope…. The newGumby show is pleasant and surprisingly funny for a show for the primary-grade crowd. In one episode, Gumby’s “rock band” (more like a clunky jazz fusion) is chased manically by some grandma-age “wild girls.” In another, the jolly green one comes out of a box of fun costumes in an Eddie Murphy mask.

Hearts and Wallets: I saw the “Single’s Festival and Trade Fair.” The Trade Center’s labyrinth of booths was full of merchants. Some insisted that I’d find the love of my dreams if I’d spend hundreds on dating services “for quality, professional people.” I told them I was an amateur person but was trying to break into the pros. Others claimed that my life was really missing the satisfaction that’d come with their “mind control” seminars, or the security that’d come with their network marketing plans.

“It’s,” A Crime: The Times noted the poor grammar in the title “Single’s Festival;” the apostrophe indeed seems to be a lost art. There’s a big supermarket poster that reads, “Fresh Produce: Safeway Is Picky About It’s Quality.” I wish the company was pickier about its punctuation.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Reporter, a biweekly newsletter trying to cover the whole progressive community. In its inclusiveness, it may avoid the fate of the old Northwest Passage tabloid, which kept narrowing its definition of “politically correct” until almost nobody qualified.

(latter-day note: This remark was written at least two years before it became so damn fashionable to boast of being “politically incorrect.”)

Your Little Landmark: Local firm Archimedia makes a lovely Space Needle Paper Model Kit, available at Peter Miller Books. Unfortunately, it comes with the 100′-level restaurant; but at least with no interior, it can’t get a “new look” inside like the real Needle just got. Also, your 40′-tall Needle will never have a plastic crab on it unless you put it there.

Philm Phacts: The monthly Media Inc. (formerly Aperture Northwest ) sez Seattle cops are choosing film projects to cooperate with on the basis of script content. Stallone’s Cobra, which wound up shooting elsewhere, was one victim of this de facto censorship. (Stallone might have been trying to make it up to the Northwest, after filming First Blood in Hope, B.C. and calling it Washington). If the selective OK of police help (needed for most any major production) is true, the citymight be trying to avoid the fate of New York, where they worked to lure films only to get all those films about how awful New York is.

Big Storewide Sale: Mark Sabey’s become a major retail mogul by buying Frederick & Nelson and setting himself up as middleman in a proposed sale of Sears’ store and ex-warehouse (a beautiful building which should be saved) to the Sonics. One big thorn in F&N’s financial recovery has been its site at Aurora Village, the Mall that Time Forgot. Almost a third of the spaces there are boarded up, with few prospects for new tenants. The closest thing we have to that in town is Broadway, where landlords’ve become too greedy for even trendy restaurants to afford.

Bank Shots: Pacific First Federal is going to Toronto’s Royal Trust, as a gateway into the U.S. market. By some accounts, the Canadians don’t even care about doing business here, just as establishing a beachhead for a move into California. Expect home-loan funds to dry up as PFF becomes a cash cow.

Junk Food of the Month: Marilyn Merlot by Monticello Vineyards, with a cleavage portrait of Monroe on the label. It could be the first wine named after somebody who died from a drug addiction…. It’s bye-bye to Carnation Dairies, a locally-founded firm that got rich selling canned milk to the western frontier, expanded, moved its HQ to LA and got bought by Nestlé. To help finance the buyout, Nestlé sold the local dairy division, as announced in the papers by an appropriately-named spokesperson, Dick Curd.

A New Gear: Japanese cars are now on the cutting edge of creative design, but in models sold only at home. Nissan has a shockingly cute little delivery vehicle, the S-Cargo (almost as tall as it’s long). But it’s Mazda that’s taking a hesitant plunge in the US, with a British-inspired sports car that’ll fit two small people snugly. Also coming here, alas, is a Lamborghini 4 x 4: leather & mahogany inside, VW Thing-ish outside, $124G. Wake me if anybody ever drives it off-road.

It’s spring-training time, when Mariner fans briefly dream of glory. I’m just hoping the real M’s can be as entertaining as the fictional M’s game in The Naked Gun — or as dramatically tragic as the Vancouver mega-production of Aida coming to the Kingdome.

(latter-day note: Aida ran out of funds before it could get to Seattle.)

‘Til April, be sure to see Julie Cascioppo mid-week evenings at the Pink Door, watch or tape Sunday Night at midnite on KING, and heed the words of rapper KRS-One: “The new fad is intelligence.”

9/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

ANOTHER CALIF. LAND DEVELOPER

BUYS A SEATTLE TEAM!

FANS PLAN TO SPEND

SUN. AFTERNOONS KNITTING!

Welcome to the September Back-to-Cool edition of Misc., the column that still wonders why they called it the Elliot Bay Jazz Festival when it was held on the shores of Lake Washington. We could also wonder why that group of mostly easy-listening acts was called a “jazz festival,” but we’ve too many new wonders to deal with this month.

Philm Phun: MTV’s been showing a two-minute, censored and colorized version of the Surrealist classic short Un Chien Andalou at unannounced times lately. Yes, what was once shocking is now just another part of the Cash-from-Chaos culture. Meanwhile, our buddy Jean-Luc Godard has recommended that French TV colorize his original Breathless — and show it with commercials, something they’re only starting to do over there, over the dead bodies of the French cultural priesthood…. A National Medal of Arts was just awarded to Gordon Parks, presumably for his photography, not for directing Shaft.

Junk Food of the Month: Oscar Meyer Lunchables, boxed snacks containing eight little slices of luncheon meat, eight little slices of bread, eight crackers, and one napkin, for $1.39 — about the price of a regular-size package of each non-napkin ingredient. Tastes OK, too.

Cathode Corner: KING, publicly disappointed by such syndicated offerings as The New Queen for a Day, will add another hour of local talk in the afternoon. That’ll give the station some 34 local hours a week, to my knowledge a Seattle record (aside from public-access cable)…. KIRO called its telecast of the last hydro race Super Boat Sunday instead of the Budweiser Cup. Bud had paid to sponsor the race itself, but not the telecast. ‘Tho, as about the only racing camp with enough bucks and spare parts to run a complete race, the Miss Budweiser boat kept the beer’s name on Wayne Cody’s lips all day…. Troubled? Can’t relax? Try one of two newly announced videocassettes. One shows a parade of sheep for you to count (with a soothing Brahms soundtrack); the other has a Video Psychiatrist who “listens” to your situation, occasionally nodding his head and asking you to elaborate a little further.

Local Publication of the Month: Sophie Callie’s Suite Venitienne, from Seattle’s Bay Press. The Parisian-based author/photographer trails a near-stranger named Henri B. to and around the streets of Venice, secretly taking pictures of his movements and writing a running essay justifying her actions. Not only is that cool enough, but at no extra charge you also get Jean Baudrillard’s thinkpiece on surveillance in modern life, “Please Follow Me.”

Repo Men: First and foremost, Dan Quayle does not look like Robert Redford. He looks like Pat Sajak (who did serve in Vietnam, tho’ in a noncombat role with Armed Forces Radio). In contrast, Bush looks like all the small-town lawyers on Scooby-Doo after their ghost masks were removed. The difference is that those villains were businessmen disguised as monsters; the reverse is true of George.

Slipped Discs: The compact-disc reign of terror has claimed its first victim. Jem Records, America’s pioneer distributor of import and independent music, filed for bankruptcy protection after a planned merger with Enigma fell through. Without major-label promo bucks, Jem couldn’t keep its roster of cult favorites (Brian Eno, the early X albums) from getting pushed out of stores eager to make way for more oldies CD’s. (The totally unrelated Jem rock-fashion dolls are also doing poorly, and may be discontinued.) Locally, the owners of Standard Records and Hi-Fi on NE 65th have chosen to close Seattle’s greatest non-rock record store. It was the best place to get any classical, jazz or swing record, and the last in town with ’30s-style listening booths…. The record division of Toshiba, a worldwide military-tech supplier, has refused to release a Japanese cover of “Love Me Tender” with new anti-nuke lyrics from distribution. The singer is suing. Now thank your stars GE sold RCA’s record unit.

Star Trysts: Hugh Hefner’s bride had to sign extensive anti-alimony waivers giving her no opportunity to inherit the Playboy empire (still oozing money, mainly from the last non-publishing units). Ol’ Hef wants daughter Christine (12 years older than her new stepmom) to get it all, or whatever’s still there.

Center of Dispute: A recent evening found Patti Smith’s song “The People Have the Power” on the P.A. at the Fun Forest, which the Disney consultants want to replace with an upscale (read: “Tourist”) amusement complex across 5th Ave. N. Other parts of their Seattle Center plan have been modified to have less L.A. kitsch than originally envisioned, but it’s still a potential WPPSS of parks in its scale and boondoggle potential, when all the Center really needs is some structural fix-up and a visual-arts space to replace the SAM Pavillion. Other expenditures can wait while more Seattle-appropriate ideas are developed, preferably by citizens. Or as Smith sez, “The people have the power/To redeem the work of fools.”

‘Til Next Time, avoid 7-Up Gold (the first cinnamon-flavored soda), read the new autobio of Portland’s own Mel Blanc, vote in the primary, don’t get snared into the Olympic medal-counting game, and keep those recycling cartons full.

THE OFFICIAL MISC. READING LIST

Folks often ask, “Where d’ya get all that stuff you write about?”

It’s simple: Everywhere.

Here are some of the sources I try to get around to

at least every now and then.

Read the widest possible range for a healthy intellectual diet.

• Variety
• USA Today
• Wall St. Journal
• Post-Intelligencer
• Seattle Times
• In These Times
• The Nation
• Harper’s
• Reflex
• Journal-American
• News-Tribune
• Herald
• Weekly
• UW Daily
• Pacific Northwest
• Macworld
• Vogue
• Taxi
• Mademoiselle
• Films in Review
• Private Eye
• Spy
• Punch
• Newsweek
• Filmfax
• Time
• The Rocket
• Atlantic Monthly
• Puget Sound Biz Journal
• Christian Science Monitor
• Playboy
• Vancouver Province
• TV Guide
• Esquire
• Four-Five-One
• Utne Reader
• Whole Earth Review
• Village Voice
• Byte
• Seatle Star
• Love and Rockets
• Raw
• Comics Journal
• The New Yorker
• The Oregonian
• Writer’s Digest
• Neat Stuff
• Weirdo

4/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

Despite All Attempts to Preserve the War,

Peace Still Threatens to Break Out

At Misc., the column that says what it means and means what it says, we’re getting awfully bored by America’s glut of lame parody. It’s in movies (Dan Aykroyd’s Dragnet), TV (Moonlighting, public-access cable), music (Buster Poindexter), and now billboards. The car-dealer sign telling us to “Surrender to the Germans” treats WWII as a mere cliché taken from old movies (as did Aykroyd’s 1941). If we’re offended by the sign we’re dismissed as old fogeys, not the cool young dudes of the dealer’s target audience.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts newsletter. With the oversupply of parodic works mentioned above has come a complementary supply of lawsuits. Craig C. Beles’s piece on “Parody as Fair Use; or When Can Minnie and Mickey Be Placed in a Compromising Situation?” drolly covers the cases of Disney v. Air Pirates Comics, Pillsbury v. Screw Magazine, and Dr Pepper v. Sambo’s. For your copy send a small donation to WVLA, 600 1st Ave., #203, Seattle 98104.

FINDING MR. WRIGHT: A major exhibit of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is coming to the Bellevue Art Museum. Talk about going where you’re needed most. Sure, Bellevue could use the inspiration of someone who believed in spaces to enhance human life. But these days, so could Seattle. To call the Disney Co. plan fir Seattle Center “Mickey Mouse” isn’t enough. Our chief public gathering place is not a theme park and should not be controlled by theme-park people. It should not be a sterile, slick monument, but a living world for living people. It should embody the joy and hope of the World’s Fair that created it — just as the waterfront, also targeted for what a citizen-advocate calls “tacky yuppification,” should stay a working dockside, not a Friscoid tourist trap.

CLARIFICATION: You may have been misinformed about the recent flap at UW Women Studies. Activists there aren’t trying to get rid of a guy student because he’s a guy, but because they believe he’s a right-wing troublemaker, out to disrupt the class via heckling. If true, then he’s simply following the Jerry Rubin school of politics, wherein anyone who felt righteous enough was free to act like a jerk, since he was above the behavioral rules of square people. It’s the same method by which egotistical liberals become admired by (or become) egotistical conservatives.

BOOZE NOOZE: The Big Restaurant Protection Committee, a.k.a. the Washington State Liquor Control Board, is lowering the food-to-drink sales ratio that an eatery needs to keep a drink license. Think it’ll lead to saner liquor laws overall? Ha! This unelected body never works for increased competition or live entertainment except grudgingly, years too late.

THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The lights on Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge suddenly started flashing on and off on the night of 3/11. A resident detected that the lights were going off in Morse code, which he translated as “UBC Engineers Do It Again.”

SEZ WHO?: Will someone please tell me where these “reports of a Nicaraguan incursion” that led to the latest Reagan pro-war charade came from? How do we know the CIA didn’t just make it up? None of the interminable analyses on the affair mention this, or if they did I fell asleep before I found it.

SHAME: Masters & Johnson almost seem to want the hetero AIDS epidemic that still hasn’t happened but which they promise any time now. (Masters holds experimental-vaccine patents, and might profit if lower-risk groups thought they were more vulnerable.) If so, they join the soaps and other media trying to exploit it while ignoring anything really controversial like the existence of gay people. It’s worse in Europe, where magazines use AIDS as an excuse to put forlorn, nude straight women on their covers. All this does is heighten fear about the disease without raising sympathy or help for those who do have it.

CATHODE CORNER: Ed Beckley, the self-titled “Millionaire Maker,” is in bankruptcy. Victims of Beckley, who promised viewers they could get rich buying real estate for no money down, are working with other creditors to keep his show on the air. It’s the only way he can pay off everyone demanding refunds from his expensive courses…. Merv Griffin wants to buy Resorts International in Atlantic City. I know I’d pay $20 for a spectacular floor show starring Charo, Prof. Irwin Corey and Helen Gurley Brown.

UPDATES: The Wonder Years is just as awful as I’d feared. The ’68 junior-high clothes are accurate, though…. The plan to re-color Metro buses seems to have been just a stunt, with a phony-looking “groundswell of support” for keeping the blecchy browns.

THE BYTE BIZ: Apple Computer’s suing Redmond’s Microsoft, claiming MS Windows (a key program in the next generation of IBM software) rips off the Macintosh’s “look and feel.” Can Apple, which has always avoided fighting MS, expect to beat what the Wall St. Journal calls “the real controlling firm in computing”?… The hype over an Aldus program being inadvertently “infected” with a hidden world-peace message bears the marks of an orchestrated rabble-rousing by those who’d use “data integrity” to deny public access to major data bases.

HAPPINESS IS A BIGGER SPACE: Peanuts has suddenly switched from four small panels a day to three larger ones. It’s the first major structural change ever to Charles Schulz’s comic. Four square panels every day, six days a week, was a perfect metaphor for the chilling purgatory of characters stuck at the same presexual age for 38 years. (To see Schulz on adolescence, look for his rare ’60s paperback “Teen-Ager” Is Not A Disease. All the kitsch of Peanuts, none of the charm.)

CLOSE: ‘Til May, see the Seattle Filmhouse’s French New Wave series at MOHAI, catch the Weekly piece on local cartoonists, take lotsa pix of the Pine St. hole while you can, and remember the words of Sydney Smith: “I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.”