MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…

UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.

UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.

Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.

An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…

FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:

• Real goths don’t collect assault weapons. They might get into fantasies about vampires and post-nuclear zombies, but their real-life personas tend to be far more pacified. (South Park, set in a Littleton-like Colorado town, employed Cure singer Robert Smith for a guest voice as an action hero precisely because the role was so out-of-sync with Smith’s non-action image.)
• As noted in the Weekly, the Euro metal-punk band KMFDM (whose headman Sascha moved to Seattle as the band’s career was winding down) played aggressive music but was always opposed to real-life violence. In its biggest U.S. hit, the band referred to itself as “The Drug Against War.”
• The Trench Coat Mafia boys had their own tribal thang going on. They took bits and pieces from various subcultures and stitched them together to form their own particular monster. Besides industrial and heavy-metal music, they took notions and concepts from neo-Nazis and militia cults. The racist aspect of their ideology is something you just don’t find in more orthodox nerd or goth cliques (which tend to be pasty-face white but to profess solidarity with other outcast groups, including minorities).
• The conservative commentators, as might be expected, went all over themselves to get nearly everything wrong (“Guns don’t kill people, video games and Internet chat rooms and liberal moral relativism and do”).
• The middle-of-the-road commentators (particularly the likes of Dateline NBC) got almost as much wrong. By stereotyping goths, punks, nerds, geeks, smarties, role-playing-game players, video-game players, and just about anyone else who’s not a jock or cheerleader as walking time bombs, the media know-nothings are only encouraging the school officials and the “popular” kids to dehumanize and persecute the unpopular kids even more harshly.
• The liberal and quasi-left commentators liked to compare the Littleton massacre to what they see as America’s “real” culture of violence–the one that presently gives us bombers over Serbia and Iraq. I wouldn’t quite take it that directly. Kids have been cruel to one another in times of relative military peace (like most of the Clinton years), and in times of military conflict (like the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras). Besides, our supposed objective in the Balkans is to stop the kind of ethnic-purity crusade our homegrown neo-Nazis like to dream about.
• Violent media don’t kill people; violent people do. (Note Japan’s relative lack of youth violence and its abundance of youth-oriented-media violence.) Right-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Spawn and Doom. Left-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Schwarzenegger and the World Wrestling Federation. Corporate media defenders might love to blame Littleton on cultural phenomenon outside of corporate control (especially on that bad-ol’ Internet). All these blowhards have done is exploit 15 senseless deaths to promote their own agendas. Some of these agendas are as potentially divisive as that of the Trench Coat Mafia.
• If anything can be learned from the horror, it’s that kids can be, and are, cruel. Especially Caucasian American kids (perhaps a legacy of Britain’s even crueller boarding-school culture). As seen in very mild form in the current crop of teen movies, the typical high school caste system rewards the conceited, the athletic, and the “beautiful,” and disdains anybody with more than half a brain or more than half a conscience.

  Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.

• Perhaps we could use a new kind of PR campaign. One that celebrates the brainy ones, the nonconformists, what that Apple commercial called “the crazy ones.” I wouldn’t go the way of Times columnist Jerry Large, who once called for papers to promote community-volunteer kids as sexy role models. Instead, I’d honor the girls and boys who neither followed role models nor tried to be them. After all, it’s the geeks and the brains these days who (given at least a modicum of adult or peer encouragement) grow up with a chance at creative lives and/or hi-tech careers. It’s the girls who stop worrying about becoming popular who’re more likely to get to 18 childless. It’s the boys who face the taunts and the name-calling who’re more likely to successfully weather the slings and arrows of grownup office politics. It’s the kids who think learning’s too square who end up clerking at Kmart. But it’s the brainy outcasts who are constantly harassed and put down who can end up with the lifelong scars.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”

THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.

As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).

Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.

NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)

During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.

SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.

Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…

BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.

Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…

WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.

This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)

Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”

MISC., your post-print column for (what the Times Personal Tech section calls) the post-television age, was amused by the double standards and double dribbles in that front-page P-I headline on 12/22/98: “Reign star Enis judges basketball, parenthood.” Y’ever see a headline like that about, say, Shawn Kemp?

Alas, that P-I story was one of the last written in the local dailies about the Seattle Reign before the team’s parent American Basketball League announced its sudden, permanent shutdown, leaving fans as bereft of pro women’s b-ball as it is of the men’s game. One could lay the blame for the ABL’s demise on the rival WNBA, with its megabucks backing, its marketable-superstar orientation, and its stranglehold on sponsors and TV outlets. But a less-discussed factor was the league’s management structure. While it claimed to be a grassroots, fan-level outfit, it was really a centralized company which owned all its teams, hired and assigned all its players, and otherwise tightly ran all operations and marketing–just like the Roller Derby, Arena Football, and other assorted marginal team-sports ventures of the past three decades.

The graveyard of new team-sports organizations in North America is full of four decades’ worth of great and less-great visions, from the American Basketball Association to the World Football League and the U.S. Football League, to World Team Tennis and several attempts at indoor soccer. Aside from the American Football League (which got all its teams merged into the NFL in the late ’60s), none were long-term successes. (The only current such ventures with a chance at making it are Major League Soccer and the aforementioned WNBA.) None of those attempts found the formula for nationwide popularity and profits; though some tried to find such a formula thru centralized management. A single-ownership league structure (like that of the ABL) can present a unified public image and prevent a single well-heeled team owner from attaining an uncompetitive dynasty situation (like that which ruined the old North American Soccer League). But it also means local team managers can’t build their own squads, around personalities or playing styles popular in their own towns. And when league HQ runs out of cash and/or ideas, there aren’t local team owners (or buyers) to come up with individual solutions other teams can copy.

But for now, the WNBA (with its emphasis on megabucks and celebrity-driven advertising, and its neglect (or worse) of any lesbian fan base) is the remaining structure for women’s pro hoops, at least until the parent NBA can no longer afford to subsidize it (which, if there’s not even a mini-NBA season, might be more likely and sooner). Wish I had more encouraging news for stranded Reign fans, but a pro league of any sort, especially one with teams scattered across the continent, is an undertaking requiring immense logistics, savvy, and long-term backing. The ABL way didn’t work, and neither has just about any other way.

THE HOLIDAY TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 13th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical Misc. In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions via private email and the public Misc. Talk discussion boards; and apologies to those whose board postings I accidentally erased last week. (I think I’ve gotten the hang of the discussion-board software scripts by now.) As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of ’99; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Tickle Me Elmo dolls to sell you.

UNTIL NEXT WE MEET in the year so great there’s a Washington highway named after it, pace yourself by toasting the New Year once for each North American time zone (starting with Newfoundland at 7:30 p.m. PST), and ponder these thoughts attributed to Lillian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)

HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.

SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?

AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.

MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.

This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!

SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.

The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)

Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.

SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)

Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.

Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”

Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.

Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?

NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.

THE SHOCK OF THE NUDE: As mentioned previously in The Stranger, Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady coffee-table-book photos won’t have their own Seattle Art Museum show (across from the peep-show emporium where Langley took her pix) after all. She’d been invited by one SAM official, then disinvited by highers-up (who’ve offered her a slot in a group exhibition next year instead). The official line: The show would’ve been in a hallway, where kids on group tours might be exposed to the sight of beautiful women’s physiques. (Langley’d already agreed to leave sexually-suggestive shots out of the show.) Yet Langley and her supporters noted (in this paper and elsewhere) that other nudes (M/F) have been on open display at SAM. I saw plenty of under-agers enjoy the drawn nudes at SAM’s Cone Collection exhibit last year, including several young art students copying the drawings into sketchbooks. But art’s gatekeepers have always preferred their nude images to be safely removed from the here-and-now. I believe as late as Monet’s time, painters were expected to set nekkid people only in historic (ancient Greece), foreign (Mideast harems), or mythical (Biblical sinners) settings. But a modern-day gal willfully showin’ off her bod sans shame? Alors! Speaking of sex-fear…

I WAS READING the 1965 intro to The Olympia Reader, wherein editor-publisher Maurice Girodias complained about French censorship in the de Gaulle era, when the radio told me about a Federal Way city council hearing wherein speakers claimed a planned Castle Superstores sex-toy shop would directly lead to wild-eyed rapists rushing the streets after any woman or child in sight (as if anybody in Federal Way walked anywhere!). As I previously wrote, Castle’s just a big-box consolidation of the indie and small-chain stores where nice straights (and nice closeted gays) buy silk undies, condoms, vibes, videos, and other tools for enabling their decent, wholesome sex lives. A criminal will think like a criminal with or without such stimuli. Indeed, a clean, well-lit, mainstream sex shop might help convince someone with borderline-criminal thoughts that sex isn’t necessarily the stuff of oppressive compulsions but is as natural (and potentially as dull) as any aspect of existence. Speaking of sex-role stigmas…

LESS OF A MAN’S WORLD?: The Seattle Times recently reprinted a Washington Post article (originally one of a five-part Post series on gender relations) claiming increased social stigmas against males, especially boys. It claimed boys were more likely to be ostracized for asocial behavior or “learning disabilities,” and more likely to later become perpetrators (and victims) of violence (to themselves or others). Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld wrote, “Boys are the universal scapegoats, the clumsy clods with smelly feet… feeling the tightening noose of limited expectations, societal scorn and inadequate role models” amid a lack of positive sex-role imagery (girls can now become most anything, but boys are still expected to be dumb jocks). Other reports, meanwhile, talk of lowered sperm counts and fewer boy babies in the major western nations, even of chemical-therapy estrogen finding its way (via sewage-sludge fertilizer) into the food supply. Whatever happened to the ’80s radfem cliché of “testosterone poisoning”? Speaking of a gradually more femdom world…

SPLITTING: Bikini Kill’s members have called it quits their way, after seven years of making music their way–avoiding major labelss, package tours, MTV, even movie soundtracks. It’s not that the band’s career was going nowhere. They achieved just about all they could achieve within their self-prescribed boundaries. And now they’re moving on to new creative endeavors, without major-label debts, contractual-obligation albums, or acrimonious “farewell tours.” While I disagreed with the anti-sexist sexism in some of their words, I always admired the strength of their convictions. When they called for “Revolution Girl-Style Now,” they meant more than simply wishing to stick some female bodies onto the same ol’ seats of power, or some military overthrow with subsequent reign of terror. It was about rethinking the whole premises of social engagement, including the way “rebel” music’s produced and distributed.

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that asks the question global economists have as yet refused to address: How will the Korean fiscal crisis affect the continued production of Simpsons and King of the Hill episodes?

WHEN’S ORGANIC NOT?: The health-food business (and don’t be fooled; it really is a business) doesn’t want the Feds deciding what is or isn’t an acceptable nutritional supplement or health remedy. But it does want the Feds to define what is or isn’t an “organic” food. Some within the biz want stricter rules on the “organic” name than the government’s latest proposed guidelines recommend, particularly regarding the use of pesticides on crops. If you wanna learn more, the folks at Central Co-Op will be glad to bend your ear.

WHEELIN’ N’ DEALIN’: Call me retro, call me picky, but I know I’m not the only one to believe there hasn’t been anything really good in U.S. automotive design since the fall of American Motors. From the awkward K-Car, to the once-innovative but now-tiresome Taurus teardrop, to today’s bland minivans and macho-gross sport utilities, mediocrity rules showrooms across the land. The new VW Beetle represents a small forward step, though it doesn’t look enough like the old Beetle and costs too much. Things are a little brighter overseas, especially in Japan. Nissan’s got a number of way-rad cars it sells only in Asia (including a slug-shaped miniwagon called the “S-Cargo”), while continuing to saddle its U.S. division with the same poor-selling Altimas.

Now I have a new object of desire. The Smart car, made by the unlikely joint venture of Mercedes and Swatch, was supposed to hit Euro streets this month (production-startup problems have now held back the launch ’til fall). Think of it as a scooter with a roof. It seats two people snugly inside its eight-foot-long plastic body (surrounding a steel safety cage). It looks like the perfect super-fuel-efficient tool for urban errands, leisurely country drives, or any other transport use that doesn’t involve mucho cargo or wintertime pass-climbing. Naturally, there are no plans to bring the Smart to North America. They don’t think enough people here would want a human-scale vehicle to be worth developing a U.S.-street-legal version and setting up dealers to sell and service it. Sadly, they may be right.

NETTING: Nearly two years ago, I told you to look forward to a new, high-speed Internet connection called ADSL (asymmetrical digital subscriber line). Now at last, US West promises ADSL hookups in Seattle no later than June. It’ll cost $200 to start up such a connection, plus another $300 or so for the special all-digital modem US West will sell you. From there, you’ll pay $60 a month ($40 if you use a separate Internet service provider). For that, you get 256kbps, five times the speed of the best current analog-modem connections. (Even faster rates, up to 7 mbps, will be offered at higher prices.) You might not receive complex web pages all that faster–much of today’s “World Wide Wait” is due to heavy demand on the Internet’s transmission infrastructure, not to the home connection. But it’ll be a boon to Net-based multiplayer games, and it could make streaming video practical at last (opening another potential explosion of many-to-many communication, as mentioned here last week). And you’ll be able to talk on the phone and use the Net at the same time, without an extra line.

A couple caveats: The high speeds only come to, not from, you; it’ll still cost more to become your own Net server. And it’s all promised by a company whose on-time performance record has left more than a little to be desired.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (ad card on the front of a Seattle Times vending machine): “Out of the Box News.” That’s dangerously close to KIRO-TV’s 1993 slogan, “News Outside the Box.” The station’s only starting to recover from that debacle.

MISC. BEGINS THE sorta brave-new post-Rice era of Seattle history with a rhetorical question: Whenever there’s a pesky e.coli outbreak, vegan activists use the tragedy as a reason to call for an end to meat consumption. Whenever somebody working in porn videos or a strip joint turns out to be facing a troubled or abuse-racked private life, rad-fems ‘n’ right-wing censors publicly exploit the situation to advocate further suppression of the sex biz. Yet the highly publicized mistreatment of sweatshop textile workers (domestically and across the Pacific) hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired members of The Naturist Society to issue PR blitzes asserting how there’d be fewer mistreated clothes-maikers if fewer people wore clothes.

WATCH THIS SPACE: Tasty Shows still plans to open a new club in the former Moe building. Sure they’re four months past their originally promised opening date, but these things almost always happen. (Current ETA: Late February.) Contrary to early reports, it’ll have live bands “about 40 percent of the time,” says a Tasty spokesperson, with DJs on the other nights. Among the work still to be done: Finding a name. They’d planned to call it The Mothership, but a hard-rock nostalgia bar in Federal Way just opened with that moniker.

A PRECIOUS GEM: Just as we get used to the Presidents’ untimely breakup, Seattle faces the potential loss of another institution of whimsy, thanks to the Samis Foundation’s ongoing Pioneer Square redevelopment scheme. Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony lost the lease on its space on 2nd Ave. (Montana’s furniture annex across the street, which sold lovely old sofas and dinette sets, has already been evicted.) Ruby’s on 2nd will close in March. After that, everything’s iffy. Montana sez she might open a new store if she can find the right location, maybe with a revised concept (mixing her trademark knick-knacks, toys, and home furnishings with larger furniture items, antique cars, and/or RVs). If that doesn’t work out, she might open a “guest ranch” in the countryside somwehre, to be furnished in her inimitable comfy-campy style. While that’d undoubtedly be a fun getaway destination and retreat center, I’d rather still have Ruby’s to go to for my fix of wacky postcards, Krusty the Klown erasers, Chia-pubis pots, and historic ad art. With all the retail space being built and/or “restored” in the greater downtown, you’d think there’d be someplace for something this vital. Speaking of abundance…

DOUGH BOYS: A few weeks back, Times columnist Jean Godden claimed 59,000 millionaires now reside in western Washington. (She attributed the figure to unidentified speakers at a CityClub luncheon.) Thought #1: Now we know how these chichi restaurants with the menu items marked “Market Price” can stay open. Thought #2: With all that spare cash floating around, howcum we still can’t get decent funding for (insert your choice of non-sports-related causes)? Thought #3 (and a hunch about #2): Seattle’s old, small, reclusive upper class might not have staged a lot of fancy-dress balls or high teas, but by and large they made at least an occasional semblance of acknowledging their role in, and duty to, the larger community. But these days, here and across the country, there’s a new breed of becashed ones, some of whom revel in a “lone wolf” self-image. One of these moguls, Ted Turner, publicly called last year for his tax-bracket brethern (naming Gates as a specific example) to donate more moolah for bettering the world instead of just buying more luxury goods and building bigger “cabins” in the Rockies.

A nice sentiment, but there are problems with the ’80s-’90s wealth concentration trend that charitable alms alone won’t solve. Can America afford to keep turning over larger portions of its material resources to what’s still a small population segment, increasingly made of “self-made” wheeler-dealers who see social-benefit institutions (from environmental rules to progressive tax codes) as personal threats to their right to make and keep all they can? Perhaps the mark of a materially rich community isn’t the number of residents who’ve got more than they know what to do with, but the degree to which its other residents can at least semi-comfortably get by.

INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.

Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.

MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.

Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”

The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”

Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.

Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”

Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)

The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)

The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”

Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.

Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.

There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.

YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.

The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.

IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.

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.)

MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…

SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…

IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.

The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.”

WHAT I DID ON MY WINTER VACATION: Having already given my annual why-I-love-snow-in-Seattle speech in this space, I won’t tell you how thrilled and elated I was by the Boxing Day Blizzard. Instead, I’ll relate some other things I did for fun that day and on the other days surrounding the recent calendar change.

* Pondered that Times headline celebrating the planned Boeing/ McDonnell-Douglas merger for its promise to create a “Goliath of the Sky.” The metaphor just doesn’t sound like something all that airworthy.

* Visited the new Value Village. And a gorgeous palace of pre-owned merchandise it is, indeed. Found nine old LP records I had to get. Unfortunately, three of them contained different records than were advertised on the sleeves. So instead of naughty “party songs” from the early ’60s I instead now own three volumes of ’40s country classics–still great stuff.

* Ordered an evening of Spice Pay-Per-View. Before I did, I believed the only people who ought to suffer through the stifling formulae and monumentally awful production values of hetero hard-porn videos were straight men who needed to see other men’s genitalia in action–and that, therefore, the Spice channel (which shows those videos with all the phallic shots edited out) had no earthly (or earthy) purpose. But after a couple hours of ugly silicone implants, ritualized acrobatics, and laughable “tuff” facial expressions, I caught on to the mood of the thing.

All formula fiction offers “adventure” to its characters and predictability to its audience. Hard-porn is no different. Its strictly-followed rites of banality envelop the viewer in a fantasy universe of cheap surroundings, harsh lighting, crude emotions, unspoken-yet-universally-observed rules of behavior, no thinking, no spirituality, and no love. Sorta like old Cold War-era propaganda stories about life behind the Iron Curtain, but with fancier lingirie. It still turns me off, but I now understand how it could turn on guys who’ve never gotten over adolescent sex-guilt.

* Tried Sanpellegrino Bitter. It’s an import soft drink in an utterly cute 3-oz. bottle. Probably intended as a drink mixer, it tastes remarkably like a liquid version of Red Hots candies. Tasty and startling. (At Louie’s On the Pike, in the Market.)

* Read Downsize This! by Michael Moore. While I’m not always keen on some of his gags, Mr. TV Nation has his heart in the right (or Left) place. More importantly, Moore’s got one Great Idea, which he talked a lot about in his local promo appearances but barely mentions in the book–the idea that left-wing politics oughta be primarily concerned not with Counterculture separatism or theoretical pontification but with improving the lot of the non-upscale. A third of a century after the New Left declared working-class people to be its enemy, it’s refreshing yet sadly shocking to read Moore’s gentle corrective–that if us college-town “progressives” don’t work for civic and economic justice, it doesn’t really matter how well we can deconstruct texts.

* Was amused by the NYC media’s proclamation of “The Evita Look” (apparently just the thing for the millionaire “woman of the people” in your family). Weeks before the film opened, Bloomingdale’s put up an Evita boutique, near its already-established Rent boutique (selling what the NY Times’ Frank Rich calls “fashions inspired by the transvestites, junkies, and AIDS patients of the Broadway hit”).

Movie- and play-inspired fashion trends aren’t new (I’m personally waiting for the Annie Hall look to come back), but seldom before have adult-size, non-Halloween fashions been sold as officially-licensed movie merchandise (T-shirts and Starfleet uniforms excepted). While the Evita costumes are at least inspired by a past golden age of couture, a question lingers: If we’re supposed to now look to a military strongman’s wife as a role model, when will we see the official Imelda Marcosreg. shoe line?

* Intercepted the following note in a tavern men’s room, apparently left by a local music-biz bigwig: “I like TicketMaster when it makes my band money.”

HERE AT MISC. we’ve figured out the easy way to figure out whom to vote for next month: Vote for all the candidates who appear on TV ads in color, and against all the guys who appear in black-and-white.

BELO CO. TO BUY KING, SELL KIRO: This leaves a wonderful opportunity. Let’s buy KIRO-TV. We (myself and you dear readers) will form a private-stock corporation, get some venture capital, and take over Channel 7. First, we’ll bring back J.P. Patches. Then we’ll show America how a station oughta be run. Imagine: A local performance-art variety show, with the Black Cat Orchestra and Pat Graney Dancers. Consumer-watch segments attacking the real corporate crooks, not nickel-and-dime mail-order frauds. The Sanjyit Ray Movie of the Week. Art lessons with Ed Fotheringham. Live curling matches. Late-night rerun marathons of Thunderbirds (the original versions, not the cut-up Fox manglings from two years ago).

FIRST XMAS CAROL spotted on a Seattle restaurant background music system: Sept. 23.

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Sailors Union of the Pacific Hall, home of such nice all-ages shows last year, is now about to house the reincarnation of El Gaucho, formerly one of Seattle’s best-loved steak and bourbon outlets. Its old downtown manifestation, now the Olive Way branch of the Red Balloon Co., was famous as the watering hole of old KVI DJs Bob Hardwick (the official Ninth-Coolest Seattleite Ever) and Jack Morton.

DILLARD’S DULLARDS: During a post-speech Q&A at a Michigan writers’ conference some six months ago, Connecticut essayist/ poet Annie Dillard was asked if she missed living in the Northwest (she was holed up in Bellingham and the San Juans in the late ’70s). She said no, claiming “it’s no place for an intellectual woman” and offering a brusque retort imaging NW females as breast-feeding, fruit-canning, chainsaw-wielding mutes. Dillard’s remark eventually caught the attention of editors at the Seattle Times, who don’t have a particular interest in intellectualism but do have a lot invested in the image of Seattleites as at least a pseudo-sophisticated sort. A Scene section front page was assembled around Dillard’s brief quotation, headlined “Women intellectuals: A Northwest oxymoron?.” To fill the rest of the space, the paper added interview quotes from local citizens and defensive editorial commentary (“OK, Northwest women, dab that drool off your chin, put down your chainsaw and listen up”), treating readers as if they were as dumb as Dillard claimed they were. The Times, which would rather cultivate readers who can grapple with complex wines than ones who can grapple with complex ideas, treated Dillard’s throwaway remark as a call to defend, not the Northwest Mind, but the Northwest Lifestyle. The notion that there could be some bright earth mamas out there, or some well-dressed urbane ditzes, hasn’t seemed to occur to the paper.

Incidentally, here’s a perhaps-fortuitous slice of Dillard’s only novel to date, The Living (set in 1890s B’ham): “…But the times had gotten inside them in some ways as they aged, and made them both ordinary… No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.” (Italics added.) (The Times’ review called The Living “a novel of character that blends history, social change, and individual dreams in a sophisticated, seamless prose.”)

BASES OF OPINION: So “Refuse to Lose II” ended with a whimper (and a wild pitch), not with a Grand Salami. That’s OK. Last year was the grand Drive for Repsect, when the Ms (and, by extension, the region) proved it had contender stuff. This Randy Johnson-less year was more for fun, for accomplishment for its own exhilarating sake, and for the fans to prove to the taxpayers there really was long-term support behind the team (and, by extension, the new stadium scheme).

‘TIL NEXT WE GRAPPLE with the limitations of the written word, recall these words from the legendary Hedy Lamarr: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

UPDATE: Looks like the fabulously unkempt Lake Union Pub has indeed hosted its last punk gigs (as well as its last straight-edge-vs.-skinhead brawls and its last vomit launch on the carpet). The Off Ramp, on the other stamped hand, may reopen any week now. New owners promise “a new tile floor to wipe you off easy” and “bathrooms that won’t make you puke.”

DON’T MEX WITH ME: Ah, for the good ol’ days when a burrito was a burrito, before the invasion of Cal-Mex trendy concepts so darned “Cal” they drop all references to the “Mex.” On lower Queen Anne alone, you can now dine on World Wrapps, Global Wraps(at Macheezmo Mouse), or Todo Wraps (the new name for selected outlets of the Todo Loco chain). A conspiracy theorist (which I’m not) might even ponder whether the new Anglicized appellation constituted some sort of capitulation to election-year hate campaigns against Hispanic immigration.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: The smashing success of Altoids has caused a curiously strong surge of imitation tinned mints, a trend that’s finally reached to Tacoma. There, Brown & Haley (“…Makes ‘Em Daily!”), famous for Almond Roca and Mountain Bars, has brought out its own brand of “Extra Strength Peppermints” in its own reusable tin. They’ve got a far smoother texture than Altoids. And, unlike the originals, they contain no sugar (or beef gelatin). And the tin is just as reuseable as the Altoids tin–good for sewing notions, keys, loose change, snuff, that Visa card you’ve promised to only use in case of emergency, or your first lover’s saved toenail clippings.

CARD ME: A recent Times story says those oh-so-collectible prepaid long-distance cards, which have a face value of $5 or $10 but can rate as much as $10,000 from foolish speculators, can be twice as valuable if they’ve never been used. This is taking the ol’ “mint condition” fetish to the point of ridiculousness. The card is physically unaltered by use; all it does is bear the number of a credit account at a phone company.

FOR (ST.) PETE’S SAKE: While Seattle’s politicians (and the businessmen who own them) keep insisting the next out-of-state chain-store branch will put downtown on the proverbial map, Seattle-mania continues; now spread as far as Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fla. (whose only prior interest in Seattle was trying to take away the Mariners). The Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center recently mounted a play called Nirvanov, described by author David Lee as “Chekov’s Ivanov as seen through the eyes of Kurt Cobain and Frances Farmer.” As a local viewer reports via email, “Kurt angsts while Frances lurks around stage right in a black tail coat and offers advice and commentary. There is a chorus of Seattle Grunge Vampires, a fantastic Courtney imitation, several Nirvana songs recorded by a local band, and a live bat flitting around the theater (I never figured out if it was part of the show or had just wandered in).”

NO, THE CODE: The incredible shrinking 206 area code covered all of western Washington a few years ago. Next April, if US West and GTE get their way from government regulators, only Seattle, a couple of suburbs (Shoreline, White Center) and a handful of islands (Bainbridge, Vashon, Mercer) will be in 206 anymore. Tacoma and south King County will be called with the new 253 code; Everett and the Eastside will turn into 425 country.

The meanings are endless: Eastern Washington anti-sprawl bumper stickers, which now read “Don’t 206 509,” will have to be changed to “Don’t 425 509.” EastsideWeek editor Knute Berger will get a psychological boost to his only-half-exaggerated crusade for an “Independent Republic of the Eastside.” And, of course, both KVI’s hatemongers and our own scenester snobs will delight in the official declaration of Seattle to be its own territory, cut off from the realities of life in the outside world. Me? I’ll just be happy to have further proof that if a business, store, or arena isn’t in Seattle, it isn’t in Seattle. Circuit City? Incredible Universe? Ikea? Microsoft recruiting? Stop running downtown Seattle skyline photos in your ads! You’re not even in the same area code as Seattle!

MISC. CAN ONLY admire the Times for daring to run a front-page banner headline on 6/24 with the quotation “I’m Really Boring.”

THE GRIND: McDonald’s now offers official Babe Happy Meal toys with purchase of a hamburger, cheeseburger, or Chicken McNuggets. No, you can’t substitute a Sausage McMuffin (I tried).

CASH FROM CHAOS DEPT.: Remember when Misc. reprinted a slogan from the Usenet newsgroup alt.society.generation-x, “I Am Not A Target Market”? The June YM had that very phrase–as the tease line for a slick fold-out Nike ad section. Only Nike (and its ad agency, Weiden & Kennedy) would try so desperately to be hip as to try to co-opt youthful rebellion against co-option. Speaking of clever bizpeople…

WHAT’S ON SECOND?: Spurred by the success of Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, a bunch of other eatin’-&-drinkin’ joints wanted to make of Second Ave. in Belltown blossom with a whole string of sidewalk dining spots. It’s been slow in coming, thanks to bureaucrats in the city and at the state Liquor Board holding up the permitting process. The Lava Lounge and the Crocodile got their al fresco OKs, but Goodchow and Tula’s haven’t yet and the Speakeasy’s request was refused. Maybe somebody’s worried about hoped-for hordes of volunteers not being able to navigate narrowed sidewalks to get to the Norm Rice for Governor campaign office, also on Second.

MONEY CHANGES EVERYTHING DEPT.: The Nation had a comparatively flimsy essay a couple months back bashing “profits from poverty”: companies discovering new opportunities from the downsizing of America (dollar stores, check-cashing stands, gambling, “secured” credit cards, telephone-reconnect services, etc.). The article claimed something was wrong in this. I say it’s not something companies persue out of spite, exploitation, or evil thoughts. It’s value-neutral, like most of capitalism. If you wanna argue that value-neutrality is exactly what’s wrong with capitalism, I’m willing to listen. Besides, what’s capitalism good for if it can’t properly service its own victims? Speaking of outfits servicing diverse clienteles (or are supposed to)…

DOWN THE PIKE: The heavy hand of demographic cleansing continues on assorted fronts around Seattle. Seems like just yesterday (really a couple years back) the Pike Place Market fended off a hostile-takeover bid from NYC investors who wanted to turn it into a prettified, market-research-driven mall-oid exclusively for yups and tourists. Now, market activists (including theInternational Examiner newspaper and sometimes-heretic market council member Michael Yeager) charge market management with attempting this process on its own. Their claimed evidence: (1) six recent evictions or lease non-renewals of Asian-American shopkeepers who’d sold non-yup wares; and (2) a statement to the press by market executive director Shelly Yapp, in which she envisioned the market as a place primarily for upscale shoppers in competition with Larry’s Markets and Westlake Center. Twenty-five years ago this summer, the Pike Place Preservation and Development Authority (the city agency employing Yapp) was chartered to preserve the market as a real place for real people, including low-income, elderly, and non-whitebread people. If Yapp and her staff really are ignoring or abrogating this aspect of the market’s mission, then it’s time for a few changes. Pike Place, like the city as a whole, should be for everybody, not just the upscale elite already served by retail institutions that don’t get taxpayer support.

SIGN OF THE WEEK: The following message, each line in descending type size a la an eye chart, is the only thing visible at a boarded-up storefront in Westlake Center: “We waited a long time to get this location and we wanted to keep it a secret and build suspense but the manager of Westlake Center said that according to the lease we were obligated to put something up in the window to let everybody know something exciting is happening in the mall which really surprises us but they probably buried important information like that in the fine print just like we’re doing. Announcing the grand opening of our new store. (Coming soon!)” In the short time it took me to copy the sign’s words into a notebook, three shoppers asked if I knew what the store would be. (I don’t.)

AS YOU OUGHTA know, Misc. adores the raucous lasseiz-faire glory that is Aurora Avenue. From the Twin Tee-Pees restaurant to the Big Star Grocery convenience store (no relation to the same-named Memphis store or the band named after that store), Aurora’s the kind of rugged experience I figured could withstand any attack. I was wrong. PCC just turned the late, great Shop n’ Save supermarket into an aggressively earth-toned monument to upscale soullessness. What’s worse, it’s got only minimal signage facing the avenue. Its main orientation is toward side streets, as if to shun Aurora’s plebian proles and instead identify with the yups who drive to Green Lake, jog, and drive back. Elsewhere on Aurora…

EVERY DAY CAN BE A BAD HAIR DAY: The “G Word” may be considered horribly passé here in town, but it apparently still holds appeal in the ‘burbs. BodyFX, a line of teen-oriented hair products sold at Kmart, stocks “Grunge Gunk” (an “alternative hair styling mud”). You can tell it’s not a leftover item from ’93, ’cause every tube proudly advertises the corporate website, <www.bodyfx.com>. There you can learn all about Grunge Gunk and other “Alternative Attitudes for Your Hair”–Dread Head temporary dreadlocks, Speeder Beeder beading kits, Rags removable hair tape, and Brain Stain hair colors (available in Obviously Orange, Ballistic Blue, Righteous Red, and Global Green).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Pasty is the “Poetry-Free Since 1994” personal zine of one Sarah-Katherine, who works as a retail condom seller and maintains a taste for the humorously distasteful. Issue #5 features her personal account of participating in a UW social-drinking lab study, a friend’s bathroom-humor tale, and a list of ways to “Make Yourself Loathed at a Condom Store.” That’s followed with a few ways to “avoid being despised” but most of those are “don’t” items, keeping with the negative theme (“Do Not–EVER!–tell us to have nice days”). ($2 plus postage from 6201 15th Ave. NW, #P-549, Seattle 98107.)

NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS: Less than a month after Seattleites rejected the demographic-cleansing plan known as the Commons, the forces of Mandatory Mellowness struck again. This time, they silenced the city’s only broadcast outlet for unfiltered progressive news and information. The threatened cancellation of the KCMU News Hour and dismissal of the newscast’s volunteer staff, announced

June 3, may not have been intended as an act of censorship, but it’s still an act of contempt by station management toward its audience. Four years after the World Cafe fiasco, in which KCMU management (under direction from KUOW management down the hall) tried to “mainstream” the station’s music programming, they’ve made another bonehead move officially intended to attract listeners (by offering uninterrupted evening tuneage) but will only end up alienating the station’s remaining loyalists.

Once again, the KUOW-KCMU bigwigs haven’t learned that the established rules of pseudo-“public” radio (crafting safe, mild fare for upscale-boomer audiences and the corporate underwriters who love them) don’t work at something like KCMU, where the most listener donations don’t come from passive, pacified yuppies but from intense fans who crave non-upscale, non-sanitized entertainment and information. Instead of continuing their futile drive to mold KCMU into a normal “public” station, KUOW should butt out and leave KCMU to people who know how to run and program it. Since they won’t, KCMU volunteers and listeners should get together with the UW top brass to spin the station off into a separate nonprofit entity. That’s the only sure way to ensure a source of noncommercial music and cultural programming for non-yups and newscasts addressing non-yup concerns.

Meanwhile, the commercial side of the radio spectrum also gets less and less diverse. The Philly-based Entercom empire’s added KISW to its local holdings, which already include KNDD and KMTT. Entercom now controls every commercial non-oldies rock/ R&B outlet in town except Barry Ackerley’s KUBE. Expect the stations to maintain a market-segment differentiation, a la Buick and Pontiac or the Times and P-I, without really competing.

(I neglected to thank some who worked on the Misc. anniversary earlier this month: Bomo Cho, Kurt Geissel, Steve Loane, Kelly Murphy, Sarel Rowe, Darren Sonnenkinder, and Triangular Dichotomy Productions.)