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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
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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.
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.”
10/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome, art lovers, to the fourth profundity-packed installment of Misc., the pop-culture column recommended by women who used to use powders.
So how ’bout that Moore sculpture in front of the old Seafirst building? Nobody knows who bought it, nobody knows who sold it, nobody knows who owns it now, and on the day it was to have disappeared, its creator did instead. It will be very fitting if the business leaders responsible for selling Seattle’s most famous privately-owned artwork get to remove it; for the absence of “Vertebrae” will show just how spineless they are.
In other news of public spaces without public input, Seattle Center director Ewen Dingwall recently tried to get members of the City Council to give the Disney theme-park people $250,000 to study Center re-development, without such pesky details as open bidding or public hearings — and to sign away to Disney first-refusal rights to any building projects its own study might recommend. Just because Florida gave Disney its own political fiefdom, it doesn’t mean they should expect us to.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Neat Stuff. How could a cartoonist living here in Mellow City come up with such searing commentaries on American sleaze as the hopelessly gauche Bradley family and the definitively bad attitude of Girly-Girl? Perhaps Peter Bagge’s mind was affected for life from formerly living in New Jersey; more likely, though, is that it was affected for life from formerly living in Redmond. Available at all better comic book shops.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Imitation crab meat. Take some useless bottomfish, some potato paste, some “natural crab flavor,” flaking-and-shaping machines and good ol’ Northwest entrepreneurial spirit, and you’ve got an artificial delicacy worthy of an artificial king. Good with salads, pizza, burgers, Ritz crackers, or just as finger food.
My own hometown, Marysville, already the bingo capital of western Washington, may soon become its garbage capital too. There are two proposed sites for a garbage-burning plant on Tulalip reservation property — exempt from state environmental laws. By the way, my folks have this house that’s for sale….
Another gambling mecca, that cardroom and punchboard capital Vancouver USA, is now without its most famous industrial site and tourist attraction. The General Brewing Co. plant, home of Lucky and generic beer, has been closed and the equipment shipped to China. Wonder how those bottle-cap rebuses look in Cantonese….
The latest annual Erotic Art Show at Ballard’s Salty Dog Studio was a fine collection of over 50 2- and 3-D works, expressing the glories of human animals through witty, folksy points of view. Let’s just hope there’ll be more shows of its type. We need more of these intelligent, healthy rebuttals to the modern-day Anti-Sex Leagues.
Metro’s continuing, unannounced bus stop closures have spawned the latest excuse by cheatin’ lovers and undedicated employees. “I didn’t want to be late, but when I got to the old stop the bus went right by, and by the time I finally found a stop that was working the next bus had gone.”
FALL TV SEASON: Best new show, by far, is Pee-wee’s Playhouse…. USA Today reported that many of this year’s contestants onThe New Dating Game appeared last year on The New Newlywed Game (“the honeymoons didn’t last long”)…. With Cosmos now in syndication, Carl Sagan’s exquisite warnings against nuclear insanity are co-sponsored by Army recruiting.
HOME VIDEO TIP: Beany & Cecil. Eleven tapes of the late Bob Clampett’s early ’60s TV cartoons are now available, and the miracle is that RCA/Columbia Video didn’t run out of good segments in the early volumes. They’re all stunningly innovative, with great stories, characters, dialogue, animation and music (though the theme song repeats Clampett’s name as gratingly often as you may remember). They look especially great compared to the Hanna-Barbera shorts of the period (now on the USA Network), which Clampett savages on Volume 9 with a gangster character named Stogie Bear.
Spin magazine columnist Andrea ‘Enthal has a list of 1,000 Best/Worst Band Names available for a SASE from Box 4904, Panorama City, CA 91412. Local rock groups that made the list include the New Age Urban Squirrels, Prudence Dredge, Napalm Beach, Body Falling Downstairs, No Cheese Please, Nation of Milk, Alien Nation, and Lapses In Grammar (Afforded to Avoid Sexism). Not included: Danger Bunny, Idiot Culture, the Fartz, Springfield Flute, Color Twigs, Limp Richerds.
Finally, we are still looking for the ultimate Helga lookalike. Send a photo or drawing of a pose reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth’s mystery model to Misc., c/o Lincoln Arts, P.O. Box 31693, Seattle 98103-1693 by Oct. 17. The winning model and artist will receive University Cinema tickets. As with Elvis impersonators, the right attitude and grooming count more than physical resemblance.
