6/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OUR TOP STORY TONIGHT:

‘CHEERS’ AND JAKE O’SHAUGHNESSEY’S ARE STILL DEAD!

We’re still childless here at Misc. World HQ, despite Mom’s best efforts to fix us up with a nice Christian girl, so we could only watch from aside the conversations in downtown cafés on Take Our Daughters to Work Day: “Just think, little Allie, someday you’ll get to be a frustrated wage slave just like mommy!”

UPDATES: Last time, we commented on the fad for every business to have a “mission statement.” The cool new Xerox art/literary zine Hel’s Kitchen has one of its own: “Mission Statement: Missions were built in California to obliterate the native customs and spread colonization…. We hate them”…. Owners of the Cyclops Café are threatening to sue the N.W. Ayer ad agency over the AT&T commercial inviting Americans to call their grungy pals back in Seattle. Cyclops claims that Ayer offered $100 to shoot still photos inside the joint for an hour, claiming they’d just be used in a stock-photo collection; instead, they spent three hours and not only included the café’s storefront but made it the ad’s key image.

THE TRAGEDY CONTINUES: Greg Ragan, who wrote and performed with the seminal Seattle punk band The Feelings, died 5/1. Friends say he’d gotten a good job and was getting his life together at the time, after getting over his years-long heroin habit. Alas, it had already weakened his system for good.

LESSER BUMMER #1: The King County Library’s closing its Seattle film desk. Several years ago, the city library donated its film collection to the county, under the condition that they remain accessible to city residents. But now, to borrow a 16mm film (or one of the county library’s wide assortment of videos), you have to phone in an order and pick it up days later at an out-of-town library branch (closest: off of 175th & Aurora). If you think this petty budget-cutting move is wrong, write the King County Library System (300 8th Ave. N., Seattle 98109) and the King County Council (King County Courthouse, Seattle 98104).

LESSER BUMMER #2: The Corner of Bargains, the big old rustic barn full of furniture across from Sears on 1st, is closing. That great stoic claptrap of a building, packed to the walls with garish overstuffed sofas and gargantuan brass lamps, is the vision of American commerce at its finest. At least Sir Plus is still in the neighborhood.

HERE WE ARE NOW: Grunge tourism is back, maybe bigger than last summer. I talked to an advance woman for a BBC crew, about to descend on the city for a youth-travel documentary series. She called the paper to ask: Where are the grunge hangouts? What’s the grunge radio station? How did grunge get started? Are any of the current grunge stars under 30 years of age (except for Nirvana, most of the first-tier noisemakers are near or beyond that mark)?

LOSING IT: If we still don’t have a Grungeland theme park, how ’bout somebody putting out a Grunge Aerobics video? I can imagine it now: a formation of tall guys flailing their long hair about during the opening warmups, using Sheaf Stout bottles instead of hand weights, before hitting the floor for the tummy exercises that give you the ever-popular emaciated junkie physique without having to do the drugs. At the end, the moshers could give nutritional advice (“don’t stage dive 15 minutes after eating”) or even sell their own food products (Mosh Mush, the perfect post-hangover breakfast). The dancers could compare their weight-loss results at the end to determine who’s “the biggest Loser.” Just if you produce such a tape, I want credit….In an item cut from the February issue, I pondered even more future developments in watered-down corporate “grunge” style: (1) stage-diving classes at summer camps and grade schools, (2) nipple-piercing in malls, and (3) Grunge Barbie. The first hasn’t happened to our knowledge, but a Basic/Cramp copycat store has opened in Southcenter, and Mattel’s got a new designer-grunge outfit for Barbie’s pal Skipper.

TRAFFIC TO THE JAM: If you’re going to Lollapalooza at the Gorge at George, don’t try to “gorge” your conscience at the environmental booths up front; 20,000 people in 10,000 cars, 140 mi. each way, ain’t exactly living lightly.

A REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENT: The Weekly‘s fanning the flames of “tax revolt” every chance it gets (as many as three redundant articles per issue), gleefully predicting political genocide if Lowry and Clinton don’t cave in to big business and the rich. As publisher David Brewster’s followed his target audience away from its last vestigial connections to The Sixties, he’s followed a classic behavioral shift among publishers, once described by New York Daily News founder Joseph Patterson: a young Turk vows to be the Voice of the People, but winds up on the golf course with the Chamber of Commerce and slowly sees things their way. In the Reagan-Bush era, Brewster and his readers could ostensibly oppose (while benefiting from) Reaganomics. Now that the yups are asked to pay their fair share, Brewster’s ready to follow (or lead?) them rightward.

STREET STORIES: While the Weekly set upon its campaign to decimate government services, the daily papers launched a campaign for more government aid to their business friends, by trumping up an “instant crisis” about the downtown retail “atmosphere.” The papers, wholly recycling the Downtown Seattle Assn. line, apparently want downtown to be as sterile and monocultural as the malls, hinting that cops should remove the homeless (to where??) so the sidewalks can look nicer. The anticlimax came with a full-pageTimes story full of crime-scare tactics, while reluctantly admitting in a sidebar item that most downtown crime categories are down this year (after peaking in ’85). Downtown retail’s real problems are (1) a continuing national downturn in consumer spending, partly due to the long-term consolidation of personal wealth towards the wealthiest; (2) the decline of the dept. store biz, of which Frederick’s and I. Magnin were the weakest local players; and (3) layoffs at banks and other offices, bringing fewer commuters downtown. Locking up the panhandlers and chasing out the skate teens won’t solve any of that. I’ve lived down here nearly 2 years; sure, I’d like to see fewer suffering people on the sidewalks, but the real way to do that is to try and alleviate their suffering, not to corral ’em into some other neighborhood. We need a war on poverty, not another war against the poor. And skateboarders don’t hurt anyone, they just speed up wear-&-tear on Westlake Park facilities. I say let ’em skate. Rebuild the park platforms and pottery to withstand skate wheels, and turn the kids into a tourist attraction.

UNSOLVED MYSTERIES DEPT.: We can’t figure out why anyone would buy a correspondence course to escape a dead-end career, based on the recommendation of Sally Struthers.

PC PARADE: Tacoma’s News Tribune ran a front-page photo of Sea-Tac Mall guards chasing two teen boys out of the mall for wearing blue bandannas, which immediately branded them in the eyes of mall staff as gang members. In the photo, the guards are black and the supposed gangbangers are clearly white (tho’ their faces are partly obscured by the camera angle, a standard practice in news photos of underage suspects).

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: The current quarterly Bulletin of the Seattle-based National Campaign for Freedom of Expression features a whiff of 1992 nostalgia: mug shots of Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan altered with X-Ray Spex for proper ridicule by us sophisticates. The articles are thankfully more lucid. NY scholar William Strickland calls for a permanent, populist, holistic left coalition. Another article notes that city officials in Auburn and Spokane have been trying to censor nudity in public art works, using laws intended to fight sexual harassment. In both towns, the challenged works are by female artists…. Tacoma’s finally got a more-or-less stable music scene and some newsprint zines to go with it. Pandemonium and its arch-rival Smutch are chock full of relatively un-stupid band interviews, reviews, scene reports from Club Tacoma and the Red Roof Pub, opinions on everything from hate crimes to youth politics, and dance and art profiles; all in a refreshingly attitude-free attitude…. Back here, Hype published its last free-tabloid issue in April, but vows to return as a slick-cover mag around July.

YOU SEND ME: Times art critic Dolores Tarzan Ament (no apparent relation to Pearl Jam’s Jeff Ament) was all mistaken in her piece trashing City Voice, the public art project/opinion survey now in the mail to 10,000 city homes. Ament mustn’t know about the postmodern traditions of mail art (decorous postcards, stamps, and other mailable matter) and appropriation (turning commercial communication forms inside out). City Voice, funded by Seattle City Light and devised by three local artists (Alan Pruzan, Helen Slade, and Galleria Potatohead vet/Weekly cover boy Bill Moore), takes the fun graphics and interactive tear-and-paste aspects of Highlights for Children and Publisher’s Clearing House mailings, to ask citizens to write in about their lives and ideas. What could be a more appropriate public art project than one that not only asks the public’s response, but invites the public to participate in the creative process?

AD OF THE WEEK (bus billboard for Washington Egg Producers): “Fake is OK, for a sorority girl.” The sales reference is to egg substitutes vs. the real stuff, but what’s the joke reference: fake eyelashes? Bustlines? Orgasms? Personalities?

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Nordstrom’s annual meeting featured a slick video presentation of the “shopping system of the future,” interactive video. Scenes shown on the TV news depict a smug yuppie housewife watching TV, ordering windows around on the screen thanks to never-gonna-happen voice-activation commands. More fantastic, the “personal shopper” talking to the housewife in an inset window was none other than ex-Let’s Make a Deal hostess Carol Merrill!

IN STORE: By now, many of you have seen the new Broadway Safeway, a veritable mini-Larry’s Market with big diagonal aisles and interior neon signs. The remodel emphasizes a deli, a pharmacy, a flower stand and other higher-profit items around the walls, but less shelf space for lower-profit packaged foods in the middle of the floor. Once the staid, sea-green monarch of western supermarketing, the chain’s been decimated by leveraged-buyout debt. It’s closed stores (and left some metro areas altogether) and looked for ways to squeeze more profit out of its remaining stores. The fancy signs, over a 10-year lifespan of a remodel, don’t really add much to the price of a pound of cheese; that comes from getting you to buy that cheese on a ready-made pizza.

IN THE OFF-ING: Contrary to the Regrade Dispatch, no-booze strip joints can be relatively harmless neighborhood additions. What goes on inside may disgust some of you; but, unlike bars, they release their clientele onto the streets not only sober but utterly depressed.

SEATTLE COMMUNITY CATALYST, 1990-93: Are local lefties are so disorganized, they can’t even support a little tabloid with a joint monthly calendar? A more practical analysis (and leftists like nothin’ better than analysis!) would say it’s hard to create a united left just by publishing a newspaper; especially here, where it’s hard to get people to care for causes beyond their own neighborhoods, their own hiking trails, their own ideology trips, etc. Maybe the Catalyst‘s ambitions were too small. It was a paper for people who already believed in the things it covered. It wanted people in one leftist clique to pay more attention to the other cliques. Maybe the next attempt at a political paper should try to evangelize people who aren’t in any cliques yet, to promote new ideas at a wider audience.

CATHODE CORNER: KTZZ’s televising KIRO-AM’s morning news from 5 to 7 a.m., turning Seattle’s slickest radio show into its clumsiest TV show. It’s shot on two robot-controlled cameras mounted above the announcers — great views of bald spots. During remotes and taped segments, we see still graphics or the announcers fumbling with papers. During KIRO’s live commercials, KTZZ plays stock music while showing Bill Yeend continuing to talk. Because KTZZ doesn’t have the rights to CBS Radio material, it runs long stretches of public-service ads at least twice an hour. It’s a great antidote to the slick, empty TV morning shows (including KIRO-TV’s own First in the Morning News). It also points out just how little news KIRO-AM news has.

LIVE AIR: The one station that plays the bands outsiders think all Seattle bands sound like is KZOK-AM. The ex-KJET mostly rebroadcasts the Z-Rock network from Dallas, but ex-KCMU “Brain Pain” king Jeff Gilbert goes live afternoons with the hard stuff — especially on Friday’s local-music hours, cranking up new Sweet Water and Grin right after old AC/DC. And remember, it’s the station with the Million Dollar Guarantee: “Pay us a million dollars, and we’ll play any damn song you want.”

CIVIX LESSON: While the City of Seattle keeps trying to prevent all-ages rock concerts, the City of Redmond puts on its own. Nightlife, a program of the Redmond parks dept., regularly sells out its alternate-Saturday-night shows at the Redmond and Bellevue YMCAs with almost no publicity. The bands are mostly Eastside teen groups, plus a few big and semi-big names (the Posies, D.C.’sFugazi). There’s no reason it can’t be done on this side of the lake, except that the Blue Meanies in high places wouldn’t have it.

`TIL NEXT WE MEET, ponder this from the recently-deceased western author Wallace Stegner: “The west does not need to explore its myths much further; it has already relied on them too long. The west is politically reactionary and exploitive: admit it. The west as a whole is guilty of inexplicable crimes against the land: admit that, too. The west is rootless, culturally half-baked. So be it.”

PASSAGE

From “Queen of the Black Coast,” one of the original Conan the Barbarian stories by the suicide-at-30 Robert E. Howard: “Let me live deep while I live: let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, and the mad exultation of battle…I burn with life, I love, I slay, and I am content.”

SPECIAL EVENT!

Our annual Misc. anniversary party’s happening Sunday, June 6 at the Two Bells Tavern, 2321 4th Ave., 8:30 p.m. Readings, multimedia, previews of our book on the history of the Seattle underground scene, audience participation games, and much, much more. Attend, or don’t lie to your grandchildren and say you went.

REPORT

Your loyal reporter is once again without a day job. All ideas, suggestions, and offers (paid positions only) will be considered.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Simsum”

3/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`TEEN SLANG’ IN ADS:

HOW OLD WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG WHITE PEOPLE THINK

YOUNG BLACK PEOPLE TALK

Misc. once again wades into the juxtaposition of the global and the local, the wide weird world of society and media culture in a secondary port city at the close of the millennium; the pancultural, high-bandwidth world we live in — a world the mainstream arts scene is losing sight of. I’m rapidly losing tolerance for the cutesypie, the fetishistically bland, the upscale formula entertainment. I’m glad the New Yorker changed; it still hasn’t changed enough. I keep trying to listen to Morning Edition, thinking it’ll be good for me like an aural wheatgrass juice; I keep turning it off in disgust over the smarmy music and the cloying attitudes. A few months back, a woman complained to me that the local theater companies that made the loudest campaigns against NEA censorship were the ones with the least adventuresome programming; I couldn’t contradict her. The very thought of A River Runs Through It makes me queasy. I keep looking for real ideas, real thinking, and all I seem to find are snooty baby boomers whining about how perfect Their Generation is, or the most simplistic square-bashing, or rites of cultural “sophistication” akin to drug-free trances. I want more.

BOEING BUST III: It’s happened before, in the early ’70s with the cancellation of the federal SST project (the unbuilt plane the SuperSonics were named after) and again in the early ’80s (after the post-Vietnam defense slump, but before Reagan’s return to Vietnam-era defense spending sunk in). In the mid-’80s, Reagan’s airline deregulation and defense boom led to many more planes and war goods being built than anyone had a practical use for. This time, the 18-28,000 laid off workers are paying for that overexpansion. Let’s face it, the country never needed all those missiles and bombers. And while civilian airline overbuilding led to cheap air fares, it’s no bargain if nobody’s making money. Like many industries, aviation’s in an upheaval due to institutional bloat and outmoded concepts. We oughta (but probably won’t) take advantage of this restructuring opportunity to rethink our domestic transportation system. High-speed rail could move people more efficiently and cheaply, especially on routes that don’t cross the vast inland west. At today’s levels of freeway and airport congestion, intercity trips up to 300 miles could even be faster by rail than by car-to-airport-to-airport-to-car. It’d be a great investment opportunity, with just a directing push by the feds needed. We could’ve already had this now, but the feds pushed aerospace (like nuclear power) to bring civilian investment into a Cold War military technology. Even the Interstate Highways were first promoted as a defense investment (because the movement of war goods wouldn’t be threatened by railroad strikes anymore). Our real national security’s to be found in building a secure economy.

WHERE MEN ARE MEN: If Clinton blinked in his first challenge to the sleaze machine on military bigotry, he succeeded in exposing the religious and talk-radio demagogues as naked creeps. As if the U.S. military that brought you the Tailhook scandal, that turned prostitution into the growth industry of several Asian countries, was a model of gentlemanly behavior. As if the ban on gay soldiers was some time-honored tradition, instead of a Reagan-era appeasiment to the bigot constituency. He might have floated that issue during his first week as a test, to see just how he might ideologically disarm the right. He’s used that lesson with his budget speeches, which he delivered like a good ol’ preacher exhorting the faithful to feel not the ecstasy of Baptist togetherness but the righteousness of Calvinist self-denial. With a few deft moves, Clinton reversed the socio-moral compass of the past 20 years. He positioned himself as the beacon of morality and the preacher/radio goons as the decadent materialists. That moral division’s been evolving for a while, ever since the Carter-era rift of the gold-chain epicureans vs. the tie-dye puritans. In the ’80s, you had the radical conservatives vs. the conservative radicals. By the Bush era, snooty Young Republicans “rebelled” by riding Harleys and telling racist jokes. Fewer of us are fooled by people who boast of their righteousness but whose only real values are their own lusts for power (listening, Mr. Knab?).

THE CONCEPT OF GAYS in the military also diffuses a major tenet of the gay bohemian left: that gays and lesbians are a species apart. Gays are a lot more like everybody else than gays or straights want to admit. Granted, the military’s a declining institution of dubious purpose in an age when our real wars are of the “trade” kind. (Eastern Europe and north Africa just don’t know this yet.) Still, soldiers are about the most ordinary people you’ll meet, having been socialized to be parts of a machine. And ordinary people, people with bad haircuts and clumsy dance moves, can be just as homosexual as any drag queen or lesbian folksinger. Even “different” people are different from each other.

WHERE PERSONS ARE PERSONS: The Times revealed that Julia Sweeney, that belovedly androgynous Pat on Sat. Nite Live, is a Spokane native and UW drama grad. Not only that, but she was platonic pals here with Rocket film critic Jim Emerson, who helped her develop the character (after they’d moved separately to LA) and is co-writing a Pat movie. Emerson’s infamous for his annualRocket 10-best-films list, which always includes off-hand remarks about at least one film that (unknown to him) never played Seattle.

JOKE ‘EM IF THEY CAN’T TAKE A FUCK: In January, I was one the local arts writers corralled into performing at a COCA benefit show, Critics Embarrass Themselves. Afterwards, COCA’s Susan Purves wrote the participants a thank-you form letter in the wacko spirit of the show: “We promise never to think of you as fatuous or overblown again without remembering what you did for us.” Two of the critics (I’ve been asked not to say who) angrily called Purves’s boss Katherine Marczuk demanding a retraction. Purves had to send a second form letter: “I am truly sorry if any individual felt I was actually making personal references. I was not….Please accept my sincere apologies as well as my sincere thanks for your original participation.” This sensitive-white-guy syndrome has gone too far. These days, you’ve gotta watch your language more carefully in bohemia than in church. My theory is that PC-ese, which isn’t about being sensitive to the disadvantaged but to other sensitive white people, is all the fault of those snooty Bay Areans who don’t want you to use the perfectly good nickname Frisco.

NOT-SO-MAGNIFICENT SEVEN: We felt such electricity throughout the city in early Feb., waiting impatiently for “News Outside the Box.” For you who nevvvuh watch teh-luh-vision, that’s KIRO’s slogan for a new presentation package, with music by the Seattle Symphony and a million-dollar newsroom set in “authentic Northwest colors” (an immediate tip-off that it was designed by a Californian). Ads in the month before the change promised more attention to content and less to slick presentation; the reverse proved to be true. The show’s full of forced busy-ness, devised to offer a different visual composition in every shot; all the wandering around looks like life in an open-plan office (or an open-plan school that prepares kids for adulthood in an open-plan office). What’s really wrong with TV news isn’t “The Box” (the traditional desk-and-mural set). It’s the industry-wide mix of slick production technique with gross ignorance about the issues being discussed. News ratings are down among all stations (KIRO’s are just down further). As more viewers find TV news irrelevant, stations respond by making it even more irrelevant. Last year at this time, you learned more about why Randy Roth‘s wife died than why Pan Am died. Maybe the new KIRO set is a symbol for real change; we’ll see. (The Times and others noted that KIRO’s “coming out” theme is enhanced by a triangular logo (its first all-new symbol since ’64), remarkably close to the Seattle Gay News logo.)

WHAT WON’T KILL YOU ANYMORE?: Just what we omnivores need: one more excuse for the neopuritans to go I-told-you-so. I spent the first week after the E. coli scandal going consecutively to all my regular burger hangouts (excluding the Big Jack), asserting my oneness with the greasy grey protien slabs in (foolish?) defiance of my well-meaning vegan friends. Just before that scandal, some UW MD’s wrote a serious report for a medical journal on mud wrestling illnesses, due to animal feces mixed into the mud that entered unclad human orifices. Meanwhile, activists claim those scented magazine ads for perfumes can cause horrible allergic reactions. Maybe that’s why all those naked women in the Calvin Klein Obsession ads don’t have nipples. They must’ve mutated and fallen off. (I know it sounds gross, but to many the inserts smell grosser.) I’d comment on the claim that cellular phones can kill you, ‘cept as Kevin Nealon said, “nobody cares if people who own cellular phones die.”

WHAT’SINANAME: A mystery author appeared at Elliot Bay Book Co. on 2/19 with the official legal name of BarbaraNeely. This marks the progression of “InterCaps” typography from cheesy sci-fi/fantasy books (ElfQuest) through computer programs often created by sci-fi/fantasy fans (WordPerfect) and back into pop fiction.

MOSHPIT TOURISM UPDATE: I told you before of a dorky Boston Globe story about the spread of “grunge culture” to that city. The paper’s since run a two-page Sunday travel piece about “the Seattle mindset,” which writer Pamela Reynolds calls “a vague cynicism paired ironically with progressive idealism.” She calls Seattle home to “funky organic restaurants, odorous boulangeries, and inviting juice gardens.” She lauds N. 45th St. as a bastion of “dining, Seattle Style. That is to say, if you have a taste for hamburgers, hot dogs, steaks, or French fries, this is not the place to be” (must not have been to Dick’s). If there is a “Seattle mindset,” it’s one that throws up at sentimental touristy pap like this. Think about it: if we’re now world famous for our angry young men and women, maybe there’s something here that they’re justifiably angry about.

FOR MEN THIS YEAR, LEOPARD SKINS WITHOUT PANTS: Alert locals were slightly amused by a reference to a fancy store called “Nordstone’s” in the latest Flintstones special. But then again, historical revisionism is nothing new in Bedrock. In the original series, which premiered in 1960, Stone Age technology had advanced to the point of reel-to-reel audio tape recorders. In The Flintstone Kids, made 25 years later but set 25 years earlier, young Fred and Barney already had VCRs.

ZINE SCENE: Fasctsheet Five was the beloved “hometown paper” of America’s underground publishing community, until founder Mike Gundelroy burned out and quit after 44 issues. San Francisco writer Seth Friedman bought the name and has now revived it. While it’s nice to see it back, the new F5 is another great thing that moved to Calif. and went soft, just like Johnny Carson, Motown and Film Threat. The classic F5 reviewed non-corporate media of all genres and discussed the assorted issues surrounding them in acres of sprightly prose set in tiny 7-point type. F5 Lite covers print media only, in plain straightforward language, professionally laid out in large, readable type. What a shame. (Gives my ‘zine a nice review, tho.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Safeway’s ripped out the Coke and Pepsi vending machines outside (or just inside) some of its stores. In their place, it’s put up machines selling something called Safeway Select for just a quarter. It’s a new prominence for what used to be a lowly house brand called Cragmont, the chain used to stack the stuff off to one side, unrefrigerated, away from the high-priced pop. The new Select flavors still taste like Cragmont — corrosive-tasting colas, syrupy orange and rootless root beer.

ADVICE TO OUR YOUNGER READERS: I’m occasionally mistaken for a successful writer by folks who want to become successful writers. Here’s the only proven method I’ve seen to become a successful writer in Seattle, in two easy steps: (1) Become a successful writer somewhere else. (2) Move to Seattle.

AD VERBS: Now that Almost Live‘s an apparent hit on the scattered cable systems that get the Comedy Central channel, you may wonder whatever happened to the show’s original host, Ross Shafer. The gladhanding comic, who started AL on KING in ’84 as a straight talk show with Keister as a sketch sidekick, left in ’88 to become the final host of the Fox Late Show, which led to other brief network stints (including a Match Game revival). Now, Shaffer’s descended to the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher. He’s hosting a half-hour commercial for a programmable VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials: where they take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)…In the future, don’t bet on the Bud Bowl. It’s animated, for chrissake! The person you’re betting against might know someone at the postproduction house. (Alert Simpsons fans got a laugh when this year’s Bud Bowl spots were hosted by the MTV VJ known only as Duff, the same name as Homer’s favorite beer.)

DODGE-ING THE ISSUE: Infamous Las Vegas financier Kirk Kerkorian became Chrysler’s biggest shareholder in February, holding nearly 10 percent of the company’s common stock. This is the jerk who dismantled MGM, the greatest motion picture factory in the world, and used the asset-sale proceeds to build a gaudy little airline and a big hotel that burned thanks to shoddy design. Maybe it’s time for all real film lovers to switch to Fords.

DE-CONSTRUCTIVISM: A building permit to replace the Vogue with a 26-story condo is apparently active again, according to theDaily, after being on hold during the construction slump. Yes, I’ll miss the last venue from the punk/wave days still open today. I saw my first music video there (under its predecessor concept, Wrex). Anybody who’s been in or near the local music scene either played there, danced there, got drunk there, picked someone up there, ditched someone there, got plastered there, and/or had bad sex in the restroom. Me-mo-ries…

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/3): “…an erroneous and insulting headline ran above yesterday’s page one article about Microsoft executive Bill Gates’s lecture on campus. The headline should have read, `Microsoft’s Gates foresees conversion to “digital world.”‘” The original headline on 2/2: “Bill Gates admits he’s a homely geek.” Could Bill’s mom Mary, a UW Regent, have influenced the retraction?

BUDGET CUT IDEA #1: The Wash. State Convention Center has its own toilet paper, specially embossed with its logo.

‘TIL WE WELCOME IN SPRING in our next missive, be absolutely sure to see the Portland Advertising Museum’s traveling exhibit at the Museum of History and Industry thru 3/29, and ponder the words of turn-O-the-century philosopher-printer Elbert Hubbard in the June 1911 edition of his self-published tract (the old term for ‘zine) The Philistine: “I like men who have a future and women who have a past.”

PASSAGE

In honor of the 4th Seattle Fringe Theatre Festival, choice words from Samuel Beckett, quoted in 1988 by Lawrence Shainberg: “The confusion is not my invention…It is all around us and our only chance is to let it in. The only chance of renovation is to open our eyes and see the mess.”

REPORT

I’ve been writing this feature, in various formats and forums, for nearly seven years. I’ve got that itch. I need a new name for this. Any ideas? (No slug or coffee jokes, please.)

I’m also thinking of cutting back (again??) on free newsletter copies. I’ll still accept subs, but I have to pay more attention to the 25,000 Stranger readers than to the 450 newsletter readers. Starting next month or the month after, the newsletter will reprint theStranger column, instead of the other way around. That way, the weekly tabloid audience will have fresher material.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Captious”

4/92 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

Why Men Don’t Get Madonna

We at Misc. do listen to consumer needs. Several readers complained about the shorthand used in many of the report’s segments. I don’t always explain the local news events I’m commenting about, out of the presumption that you’re already aware of the underlying issues. But that’s not proving to be the case, and not just with my out-of-town subscribers. Many of you told me that Misc. is your only local news source. Whoa — that’s way too much responsibility for me, man. To paraphrase the Residents, ignorance of your community is not considered cool. If you only read the New York Times or only watch McNeil-Lehrer, you’ll never know what’s really going on. Even on the world/national scene, those two news-for-the-rich institutions either don’t care or don’t know about whole aspects of reality happening outside of NY/DC/LA. Gil-Scott Heron was wrong: the revolution will be televised; it just won’t be made possible by a grant from AT&T. The revamped Weekly wants to be the local news source for people who don’t like local news; maybe they could grow into the job, or somebody else could do it. In the meantime, here’s a brief guide to Misc. terminology: When I say “Portland,” I mean Oregon not Maine. “The Times” means the Seattle Times. “Rice” refers to our mayor, unless it appears in the “Junk Food of the Month” department. And “Bellevue” means a vast low-rise suburb, not the New York psychiatric hospital (and no jeers from the balcony about how do you tell the difference).

Junk Food of the Month: Espresso continues to turn up in the most unlikely spots, like McDonald’s and 7-Eleven, thanks to newfangled pushbutton machines. With steam rising from everywhere and assorted pumping noises, they’re a romantic reminder of what industrial processes ought to look and sound like. Still, the ambience of those places isn’t right. For that you still need to go to a real espresso joint, like the Tiki Hut inside Archie McPhee’s on Stone Way.

Rock the Boat: Britain’s Economist magazine reported on 2/29, “It seems appropriate that Seattle is home to America’s trendiest musical fad: grungerock (a cross between punk and heavy metal); still more appropriate that the leading exponent of the art should be a group called Nirvana. To jaded middle-class Americans, the north-west seems like heaven: a clean, successful world of highly paid manufacturing jobs, coffee shops and micro-breweries.” In the ’60s, the peak of the U.S. auto biz coincided with the peak of Detroit pop (not just Motown but also proto-grungers Iggy Pop and Ted Nugent). Can one only be a successful nihilist when surrounded by relative prosperity? Does the illusion of a golden age make rebels sharpen their messages?

Big Storewide Sale: Don’t scoff right away at the plan to save Frederick’s downtown store by spinning off all other assets. In the ’50s and ’60s, it was thought that a dept. store needed to be in a ring of malls around a metro area, to make TV ads worthwhile. But nowadays shrinking TV stations don’t give you a strong audience anyway; Nordstrom, Neiman-Marcus and other chains successfully run single outlets in cities far from their home areas. Besides, it hurt Frederick’s to try to be everything to customers from Everett to Corvallis; one store with a strong identity could be a better bet.

The Fine Print (Phoenix Arizona Republic correction, 2/15): “An article on Page B1 on Friday implied that 72 percent of the men in a survey had fallen in love at first sight. That percentage applied only to those men who believe in love at first sight.”

Memo to Roger Anderson: Your almost-daily Geraldo jokes in the Times have become as tiresome as Geraldo himself. Besides, tabloid TV and talk radio are getting less funny and more scary, as these shrill exploiters take over the national agenda with calculated hysteria over non-issues (flag burning, shock art, Congressional check-bouncing).

Cathode Corner: My new home is on Summit Cable, which has a few channels that TCI and Viacom don’t. Weekend mornings, for instance, offer a block of shows from Italy’s RAI network, including a four-hour Star Search-like talent show that included 20 Fred and Ginger tribute dancers (just like in Fellini’s movie Ginger and Fred!), a succession of torch singers in black dresses, and a surprise guest spot by Hammer and his full dance squad, grinding out their routines to a recorded music track while in front of the show’s 40-piece orchestra. After their number, they were promptly shooed offstage by the tux-clad host with a quick “Ciao Hammer, Ciao”… Remember when I bashed PBS’s conservative programming? It’s not conservative enough for far-right senators looking for another election-year non-issue; they want to pull the network’s already-inadequate funding unless it sets “safeguards” against anything pro-gay or pro-black. They even want Bill Moyers fired. PBS and many affiliates are running scared, trying to placate the right; it won’t work. They ought to fight the pressure. They ought to have gutsy shows that will build a loyal audience who won’t stand for political interference. They ought to work for a support system free from annual pressure tactics, more like that of their heroes at the BBC.

Exhaust: The candidates are all talking about where all our next cars are going to be made. Few of them consider that maybe wedon’t need more cars. We’ve got too many autos, used too inefficiently. They give us the suburban sprawl that destroys true community along with the landscape. You know the dangers of pollution and of military alliances with emirates. Eastern-hemisphere governments subsidize rail transit, as a reasonable price to reduce those maladies. Only Harkin understood that we’d have a smoother-running, cleaner-burning economy if we redirected some of the money spent making, selling, feeding, and servicing the metal monsters. If we had decent mass transit within and between metro areas, we could have closer-in and more affordable housing. We’d have a renaissance of street-corner retail, the drop-in shops strip malls just can’t match. We’d have more people meeting by chance, interacting and (if we’re lucky) learning to get along.

Speaking of Politix, I still feel Harkin had the most on the bean; he just couldn’t run an effective campaign machine, which many voters take as a sign of whether a guy can run an effective government. Also, he was wrong was when he called himself “the only real Democrat” in the race. They’re all “real” examples of different kinds of Demo: Tsongas’s Magnuson-like vision of business, labor and government acting as one; Kerry’s senatorial quest for popularity by promoting ahead-of-its-time legislation; Clinton’s state-house gladhanding and self-aggrandizement. And Brown shrewdly built a public image that appealed to voter blocs in his home state; his courage and/or folly is trying to sell that image elsewhere.

Is This a Cool World Or What?: Times columnist Don Williamson wrote on 3/1 that modern teen standards of “coolness” promote delinquency; he partly blames the media for not depicting straight-A students and Meals on Wheels volunteers as sexy. This argument goes back to the anti-rock n’ roll crusades of ’50s parents and beyond. While hair and clothing styles change, the perennial definition of cool is to be that which your parents hate. Earlier in our century, kids found rebel styles in jazz and gangster movies. In the ’70s, what we now think of as disco clothes were based on the flamboyant apparel of East Coast pimps. Selling squareness as a role model doesn’t work. You’ll never get kids to stop smoking/snorting/drinking if your only advertised examples of non-smokers/snorters/drinkers are mama’s boys, good little girls, and Jesus-jocks. Besides, it’s hard to proclaim that smart is cool whenBill Gates still can’t get a girlfriend…

Brock the Boat: The first reaction to l’affaire Brock Adams: What do you expect from a guy with a name like a soap opera stud? The second: Yes, it is possible for a senator to be sincerely interested in promoting women’s legislation and to privately act as a predatory jerk. Political maneuvering and office sexual harrassment are both all about gaining power over close colleagues. It doesn’t just happen in governments, as we found out in the recent case against Boeing. As I wrote after Thomas/Hill, it’s not about sex but domination — which has substituted for leadership in many scenes for several centuries now. Working women don’t want just an end to catcalls and gropes, but a new way of doing business based on cooperation instead of coercion.

Notes: The giant inflated Rainier bottles on the roofs of Rockcandy and the Off Ramp to promote “Fat Rockin’ Tuesday” made those “alternative” venues look just like ordinary mainstream commercial rock bars. On the other hand, maybe it’s good that the rock scene might be getting less pretentious, more aligned with the flow of local money and attention. And the event was a healthy alternative to the tired regular Fat Tuesday, now just an excuse for bringing in higher-paid performers of the same loutish fratboy “blues” Pioneer Square’s always got. On the other hand, I can’t wait to see the 20-foot balloon butt traveling record stores to plug Sir Mix-A-Lot‘s Baby Got Back (I Like Big Butts).

Bank Notes: Guess we won’t see any more of those awful Puget Sound Bank ads touting themselves as good-guy locals, now that they’re merging with one of their out-of-state-owned competitors (Key Bank, the one based in Albany, NY that PSB identified in its ads with Manhattan; they’d better learn their NY state geography quick). Washington Mutual and Portland-based U.S. Bank quickly placed slick full-page newspaper ads taunting PSB, ads that looked like they were prepared weeks in advance. Besides, PSB’s community reinvestment record was not significantly better than the out-of-state banks, as monitored by federal agencies. As part of Key Bank, it’ll still have to put a certain percentage of deposits into local investments.

License Plate Holder of the Month (on a Ford Escort in the KOMO lot): “Broadcast Designers Do It on Television.” Yes, it’s unoriginal and not even very funny, but that’s KOMO for you…

The Mailbag: Michael Mikesell writes, “I was baffled to find you actually recommending To the End of the World.” Wm. Hurt’s not my fave actor, and his line about words being good and images being bad is an orthodox-hippie chiché unworthy of image genius Wim Wenders. But the gadgetry was fun, the chase plot was inspired silliness, and the dream scenes were worth the price alone. The thing worked… After March’s remark about baby-boomer journalists who treat Their Generation as the Master Race, Jeffrey Long writes: “Smug and sanctomonious, they have willfully neglected to acknowledge and credit those who gained social and political awareness after the 1960s.” Another reader pointed out 3/10 Weekly cover piece (“Did Drugs Fry Your Brain?”) whose author presumed all her readers to be of Her Generation, and a 3/8 Times column: “Now that many of us are entering our 40s…”

‘Til our return in the merry-merry month-O-May, stock up on collectible U2 Achtung Baby brand condoms, demand that the city preserve Occidental Park as a public space for all (not a sterile strip for retail only), vote against any candidate who voted for censorship or for humiliating the poor, and heed the words of Stephen Bayley in Taste: The Secret Meaning of Things: “Nostalgia is the eighth deadly sin. It shows conempt for the present and betrays the future.”

PASSAGE

Miami crime reporter Edna Buchanan in her new book Never Let Them See You Cry: “People who look for trouble never fail to find it. Other people never look for misfortune, pain, or woe, but it finds them just the same.”

READER SURVEY

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WORD-O-MONTH

“Orthogonal”

Videophobia

Essay for the Seattle Times, 1/28/92

If you visit independent bookstores, you may have seen the National Book Week poster showing one book surrounded by 51 blank TV screens, with the slogan “One week a year is all we ask.”

The poster exploits an almost religious belief held by many book lovers against TV, despite the fact that talk shows are the greatest sales tool the book business has ever known. Despite the fact that the top book publishers and sellers are stronger than ever, while the big TV networks and many local stations are bleeding red ink.

Literary folks love to think that they’re a downtrodden enclave of true believers surrounded by video heathens. To admit to even owning a TV set is to be labeled as one of the unclean hordes.

Allow me to state this with no guilt or shame: I do not hate television.

It’s the most flexible communications medium in the world today. It combines the languages of film, theater, oratory, music, graphics, and every other visual and performing genre, plus a video vocabulary all its own. Its presence is immediate and intimate, not overwhelming like feature films. It can mix genres and formats much more easily than film, which is pretty much stuck with straight narrative. TV news has grown from a simple headline service to a true window on the world.

But still, the videophobes scoff at the entire medium. Every so often, some parents’ group launches a “turn-off week” campaign, accompanied by publicity campaigns designed to get them on the TV news.

Some videophobic comments involve pseudo-scientific rhetoric, based on vague “evidence” or pure speculation. Author Jerry Mander claims that since the video image is an array of colored dots and lines, it’s inferior to a “real” picture. If that’s true, then we should toss out all pointilist paintings, tile mosaics, and Oriental rugs. Mander also charges that TV consumption is inherently passive and unquestioning. Has he never seen baseball fans arguing over a play? Or a family heatedly discussing a news report? He also can’t explain why literacy rates and per-capita college graduation are higher than in the pre-tube ’40s (though still not high enough for our high-tech society).

Many TV-bashers, including Mander, came of age during the 1960s and have failed to appreciate all of society’s changes since then. They talk as if there were still just three or four channels all showing bland shows like “My Three Sons”.

But their prejudices really go back further, to an old intellectual prejudice against oral and visual expression. Before the Protestant Reformation, religious faith had been inspired largely by the spoken liturgy and visual icons. But after Martin Luther and moveable type, many Europeans believed that ideas were somehow purer when expressed in writing. They believed that words informed and enlightened, while pictures seduced and deceived.

Of course, words can deceive very easily indeed. Holocaust-revisionist “scholars” use reasonable-sounding rhetoric and seemingly authoritative documentation to assert that six million Jews weren’t systematically murdered — unless you notice that their only “substantiation” comes from one another’s books.

And reading alone doesn’t make you smarter. Some of the most mindless people I know devour a book every two days, books carefully chosen to provide predictable entertainment and predictable rhetoric.

The top 10 book publishers did more business last year than the major movie studios. Bookstores were the second-fastest-growing retail industry during the past 10 years (after restaurants). Much of their sales consist of gossipy bestsellers, formula romances and thrillers, and self-help homilies. Can you honestly say that Sidney Sheldon’s trash novels are better than his classic series “I Dream of Jeannie”?

Still, the book business has always had room for a healthy highbrow segment, while TV used to have very little intellectual content. The networks originally promised to bring high culture to every corner of the nation. But after a while, culture shows like Alistair Cooke’s “Omnibus” were replaced by westerns and cops. By 1960, you were basically stuck with light family entertainment every night of the week.

But that was the Old TV. The rise of PBS in the early ’70s was the first step in making a New TV. That was soon followed by the domestic satellites that made cable networks feasible. Also at this time, a few “video artists” started experimenting on new, smaller cameras and recorders; they explored subjects and styles that video could handle differently from film.

Home VCRs showed up in 1976 and brought a new relationship between programs and viewers. People tend to be more involved with a program that they’ve physically left the house to get. Tapes let anyone examine a show or movie, to study the techniques that make a production work. With the camcorder, millions could apply this knowledge toward making their own material.

The New TV goes beyond just watching “whatever’s on.” You can (indeed, you have to) plan in advance. Choose from the best of broadcast, cable and home video, and you can have several evenings a month of quality viewing, to complement the other activities of a well-cultured person.

Mainstream TV entertainment is, on the whole, smarter than mainstream movies with all their lurid violence and visceral special effects. If I had kids, I’d rather they like “Beverly Hills 90210” than Steven Seagal.

CNN may be the first American mass news medium to take everyday, non-disaster news from other countries seriously. Even the network newscasts have a better eye on the nation these days. We get to see the human survival stories behind the abstract word “recession.” in the ’60s, we’d only get to hear what various pinstripe-clad analysts had to say about it.

The cost of TV production and the limitations of TV distribution used to mean that only a few people got to make any. But now, adequate-quality camcorders can be rented for $10 a day. To see what a few smart people with camcorders can do, watch the independent documentary series “The ’90s” (which KCTS will only show at 3 a.m. Wednesday nights). There are also scattered spots in the MTV schedule that expose new visions, new ways of seeing and hearing things.

Also, check out the video-art screenings held at 911 Media Arts, the Vancouver Art Gallery, and elsewhere. You’ll see a generation of people making their own TV, questioning the preconceptions of their culture. People who expose themselves to the widest range of influences, who learn new views and new languages — verbal, aural, and visual.

The New TV is an almost limitless tool. It’s not always pretty, but neither is life. Like any medium, it has its strengths and its weaknesses. Its main weaknesses are its informality and its overambitiousness (it seldom has the time or money to do anything perfectly). Its main strength is that it can take the widest spectrum of material and bring it into the home. Now there’s a new TV, and a new generation of people using these tools to make their own audiovisual vocabulary. The enemy of good writing isn’t other media, it’s bad writing (resulting from sloppy thinking). Taking control of your media is a big step in thinking for yourself.

(Clark Humphrey reads plenty of books, some of which he reviews in The Times. He also edits Misc., a monthly newsletter on popular culture.)

6/91 Misc. Newsletter

(fifth anniversary)

THE M’S CONTENDERS? I CAN’T TAKE IT!

MY REALITY SYSTEM IS SHOT TO HELL!

Welcome back my friends to the show that never ends, to the glorious and simply lovely fifth anniversary edition of Misc., the pop culture newsletter that since 1986 has refused to (1) die, (2) drop all local content in the hopes of syndication, (3) cut back to a more leisurely schedule. We’re still here, on the weekend before the first Thursday of every month, telling you what’s hot, what’s cool, and what’s frozen solid.

AS I PERIODICALLY STATE, this report has a few ground rules: No sex gossip. Nothing from supermarket tabloids (especially that one that the hipsters love to laugh at). No references to Seattle by the “E.C.” slogan (and I don’t mean old horror comics). No nature poems. No spoofs, like it sez at left. And we still don’t settle wagers.

EVERY WOMAN’S IDEAL?: A Blockbuster Video spokesperson tells the LA Times that Pretty Woman is a favorite video among 13-year-old girls. Can’t you just hear the pleadings in living rooms throughout America: “Mommy, I wanna be a streetwalker when I grow up. Can I mommy, Please?!? But Mommy…” (More recently, Disney advertised the video as “the perfect Mother’s Day gift”.)

BOOK BLEAT: Disney’s new Hyperion Books division is to issue The Doors: The Complete Illustrated Lyrics, with a Grateful Dead retrospective book to follow. There’s also a “Live from the `60s” stage show at Disneyland this summer, with cover bands performing Beach Boys and CSN&Y songs while dressed in the hippie garb that people were refused admission to Disneyland for wearing back then. Maybe guys with Mohawks will be let in in 2015.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at University Hair Design): “Someday we will live in a world free of shallow people who make judgments based on physical appearance. Until then, make your perm and color appointment today.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?: The Western Washington Native American Education Consortium spoke out recently against high schools using Indian team mascots. One of the high schools I went to had the Tomahawks, whose mascot was an anthromorphic ax with the face of a stereotypical Indian warrior and a feather headdress. As I’ve written before, we were adjacent to a reservation, so even before K. Costner and new age shaman-mania we knew all the YMCA-style “lore” associated with Indian mascots was a hoax. This was the downtown school; the year after I left, it closed and everybody was shipped off to the suburban school that had the Chargers (a team with the same name as a Dodge muscle car was extremely appropriate for working-class exurbia).

TO HAVE & HAVE NOT DEPT.: Seattle-born actress Mariel Hemingway was sued by investors in her string of fancy restaurants. Seems they were financed like Hollywood movies, to make big money off the top for her and her hubby while showing official deficits to those in line for net profits. Now we know what she meant by her most famous film line, “But everybody gets corrupted.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: It’s not being sold here, but Paul and Linda McCartney are launching a line of frozen vegetarian dinners in the UK. Entrees include lasagna, beefless burgers, and ploughman’s (cheese) pie. I don’t know if they’ll be called “Junior’s Farm” or if they’ll be served in the dining car of Ringo’s train.

TOM DAVIE, R.I.P.: KING’s third and last “cartooning weatherman” died of cancer April 13. A hard-working contributor of gag cartoons during the declining years of national magazines in the 1950s and ’60s, he was best known for seven years as a raconteur and drawer of gag cartoons about the day’s weather. Weather cartoonists were a local institution launched in the early days of TV, when local stations like KING had precious little film footage (Davie’s predecessor Bob Hale is still active in ad art; KING’s first weather cartoonist, Bob Hale, passed on several years back). Their nightly visits undoubtedly inspired area kids L. Barry and G. Larson to take up cartooning. Davie’s replacement in the early ’70s by a real (but forgettable) meteorologist marked another step in the concurrent attempts of Seattle and the TV news business to renounce their freewheeling pasts in hopes for respectability.

WORKS ON PAPER: KIRO reported 5/15 that Seattlites are recycling plenty of paper, but that the city and collection firms can’t ship the stuff out of town. Seems there’s been a shortage of available cargo containers since the war-related disruption in shipping patterns; ships and barges are refusing paper in lieu of more lucrative shipments. Old-growth log shipments to the Far East continue unabated.

CATHODE CORNER: Months before the new owners are set to take over, KING’s once proud news reputation can be considered a thing of the past. The 11:00 show is now so chock-full of happy-talk features and plugs for NBC entertainment shows that there’s barely time for maybe six minutes of actual news. They’ve become just like KOMO (except for a slightly larger vocabulary). And Seattle Today finally expired after some 40 years under different names. Compared to the likes of Geraldo, features on how to save money by eating less just didn’t bring ’em in anymore… The Fox News Update is just like the Fox Movietone Newsreels hadn’t ended in ’58. Quick visuals, rousing narration, heavy bias — just like the old days…. Wonder why all the stations covered a single rape case as the top story for three consecutive nights? Could be a combo of ratings “sweeps weeks” and the ghastliness of the particular crime (the victim was eight months’ pregnant); more likely, it seemed more newsworthy because it was in a “nice” white upper-middle-class suburb, a place where TV news producers might live, where such things aren’t supposed to happen (but they do, often unreported)…

GAME OVER: As Nintendo prepares to clear out its stock of old game machines and cartridges in advance of a fancy new video unit that won’t play the old games, another Japanese-owned company is recalling the board game Bacteria Panic, in which players tried to discard cards bearing the names of deadly diseases. Instructions clearly stated, “Never play this game with the real victims of diseases”….About 140 neo-Nazi personal computer games are being circulated clandestinely in Germany and Austria. Beyond the shock newspaper headlines, this development only naturally follows the evolution of the video-game art form. Behind all the fancy graphics and sound effects of today’s games, they remain exercises in achieving adrenaline highs via the hunting and destroying dehumanized enemies.

DEAD AIR: A piece of radio history died last month when the last KVI DJ signed off. KVI had been Seattle’s premier adult music/talk/entertainment station for three decades, until a program director brought up from Frisco gave the whole evening rush-hour time to his girlfriend, a “dream analyst” who didn’t even move here but just phoned in her whole show. The station quickly went deeply into the red, and an inexpensive oldies format was instituted. Now with competition from at least five all-oldies and four mostly-oldies stations, management has sacked the local staff and subscribed to a satellite programming service. The FCC, meanwhile, wants to let big companies buy as many AM stations as they want to; the official excuse is that the mega-chains would somehow keep AM alive and “increase programming diversity,” when we all know just the opposite will occur.

(latter-day note: I should have been grateful for a KVI oldies format, considering the all-demagogue talk format it has now.)

THE NOSE KNOWS: A “brilliant scientist” in Houston, allegedly frustrated by the loss of funding for his research into the preservation of human tissues, was charged with trying to kill a colleague by putting poison into the guy’s nasal spray.

THE GRIND: Apologies to Café Olé, the free espresso magazine, which has indeed written about realities in coffee-producing countries. They also reported the “disillusioning” news that Tacoma’s famous Java Jive restaurant, while built in the shape of a giant coffee pot, has never been an espresso bar. They wouldn’t have had expectations otherwise had they been reading Tacoma (er,Morning) News Tribune columnist Gary Jasinek, who has used “espresso and its derivatives as shorthand, stereotyping emblems for things snooty, arrogant, and Seattle” — until he saw a line forming at the espresso stand during a Tacoma Tigers game in Cheney Stadium. (Our military correspondent notes that a Starbucks stand has opened within Ft. Lewis.)

THE DRUG BUG: Newsweek reports that “Death” brand cigarettes are being test-marketed in LA. The promoter says they’re supposed to drive home a message about the deadliness of all cigarettes, but the black boxes with the skulls on them look too cool in a speed-metal sort of way. The same page of the same issue talked about U.S. Bank‘s “fourth wall” ads using commercial parodies to ask people to use credit wisely; the magazine noted that a bank is hardly interested in getting people to not use credit cards, just as beer companies’ “drink wisely” spots aren’t really about encouraging less drinking.

STIMULATION SIMULATION: In an experimental aversion shock-therapy program, Seattle patients are being given a newly-patented artificial cocaine. Gee, everything’s being made with artificial ingredients these days (sigh)…

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (David Landis in USA Today, 5/20, on the Miss Universe pageant): “As usual, the universal competition included a large contingent — 73 — from Earth, but no contestants from any other planet or solar system.” Runner-up: The Times 5/24 notice about the TV show Rescue 911, mistakenly printed TWICE as “Rescue 711.” That must be the prequel, where a guy stuffs himself on convenience-store fatty foods before getting the heart attack…

MORE WORKS ON PAPER: The P-I suddenly dropped eight comics. I can’t remember what any of them were, except for Agatha Crumm and When I Was Short…In case you’re keeping track, the Times won’t print the rock-band name Butthole Surfers; the P-Iwill.

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH: “Mealy mouthed red wrigglers are the latest attraction at the Kingdome. Not a rock group and not part of the new Astroturf carpet, red worms of the Esina foetiedia variety, which thrive on organic materials, are joining the stadium’s recycling program.” The release explains that the worms are housed in three composting bins, where they “will be munching vegetable and fruit wastes, grains, breads, coffee grounds, egg shells and the like.” Could feeding animals (even worms) from Kingdome food-service products be considered inhumane treatment?

OVER-BYTE?: The real threat to Microsoft’s dominance of the computer industry may not be antitrust action (a tiny matter of collusion with IBM), as the P-I reported so eloquently, but Sun Microsystems and its increasingly affordable UNIX-based “workstation” computers, machines scaled down from bigger computers (unlike today’s IBM PCs, which were scaled up from less productive models). Sun’s machines, which don’t run Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system or any of its applications, are taking more of the corporate market away from computers that run MS’s programs.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Slice, a book collecting Portland Willamette Week columns by Katherine Dunn, collects facts and trivia as only the Geek Love author could collect them, everything from how the coating gets on the M&M’s to the millenea-old question of why men have nipples….Arterial is easily the best looking literary mag this town’s seen in many a year. The written content is still not up to the visual, but that’s been said about a lot of the local scene.

NOTES: Is Sub Pop, the local garage-grunge record company that inadvertently became a “major independent” and defined the “Seattle sound” to the headbanger nation, in trouble? Will its staff have to go back to their old day jobs at the Muzak Co.? Rumors tell of late bill-payments and delayed releases. Two major alternative labels, Enigma and the venerable Rough Trade, have already folded. Surviving indie labels may benefit from a new phone line, Music Access (900-454-3277, 95 cents/minute), with samples of songs by over 600 obscure bands, with complete purchasing info.

`TIL JULY and the launch of Misc. Year 6, be sure to try out Razcal (the raspberry-apple-spice soda with the slogan “Nobody Famous Drinks It”), visit the Horrorbaubles shop (“weird art objects and unusual items”) on NE 45th across from the motel, and keep working for peace despite all the “I (HEART) WAR” parades.

PASSAGE

From Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata (to be produced at SCCC this month), a love poem of a Spartan warrior to his lady: “How shines thy beauty, O my sweetest friend! How fair thy color, how full of life thy frame! Why, thou couldst choke a bull!”

EVENT: `MISC. AT 5′

The fifth anniversary of this odd enterprise will be heralded at the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave., at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 13. Readings from the newsletter and from my fiction, special movies, and a special surprise are in store. The usual no-host bar will be available.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Exsanguinate”

2/91 Misc. Newsletter

THE REAL VIETNAM SYNDROME ISN’T ‘LOSING;’

IT’S KILLING AND DYING WHERE WE SHOULDN’T EVEN BE

Don’t know about you, but here at Misc. we’re proud to live in the state where Wash. St. Univ. is studying the effect of cattle belching on global warming. My vegetarian pals will say this is proof that we shouldn’t have all these food animals. But if we have more methane gas from more cows, at least we’ll have lots of ice cream to beat the heat. (The topic you’re expecting to see is on the reverse page.)

HOMER SPENCE, 1941-1991: The guy I expected to outlive us all. America’s oldest punk rocker (due to his stint in the Telepaths). A UW poli-sci prof who had left under circumstances I never quite understood, who ended up driving cabs and, eventually, spending his last 10 years tending bar at the Virginia Inn. He remained equally passionate about new music, art, politics, world cultures, astronomy, and especially baseball. He was a focal point for Seattle’s alternative cultural “scene”. His relationships with younger women never looked strange; he wasn’t “an older man,” he was “one of us.” I last met him on New Year’s; he boasted about having lived in seven decades before turning 50 (if you mark decades with the “1” years and mark the start of life with conception, neither of which he necessarily did). He did more living in those 49 and a half years than most do in 70. That he should have a heart attack the same week as the start of war is doubly tragic; he’d have been indescribably valuable in the anti-war movement. He knew how to bring disparate people together better than just about anybody.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Theresa Morrow’s Seattle Survival Guide is the best local guidebook since the Seattle People’s Yellow Pages in 1978. It’s almost a miracle that D. Brewster’s Sasquatch Books put out something about the essentials of urban living (and not just for the Demographically Correct)…I fully support the rights of gays and of poets, though I don’t participate in either activity. The Northwest Gay and Lesbian Reader, however, gives me at least a vision of what both these loves might emotionally be like.

COINCIDENCE OR…?: Every time I’ve ridden a Metro bus up Pine past the Bus Tunnel entrance hole, someone on a nearby seat complains openly about the huge neon art.

WHY I STILL DON’T HATE USA TODAY: ‘Twas so refreshing to read, in their In/Out list for ’91, that Seattle is Out! “…Seattle, the wilderness city (was the writer ever here?), which had a great year in 1990, now is spoiled. Everybody who could move there has. It’s time to return to real cities like Milwaukee and Cleveland, where the air is clean thanks to two decades of recession in their manufacturing sectors.” The following week, an interminable NY Times Sunday-magazine essays called Seattle “a Midwestern hub” that had been the hot place to move to, but is now “a victim of its own success.” (This was during the death weeks of The Other Place, Henry’s Off Broadway and Mirabeau restaurants.) What nobody accepts is that this town did not cease to be a utopia, it never was. Take our ferry system, where a captain was charged with harassing an African-American crew member and broadcasting racial insults over the public-address system. It’s just the latest shame in a century of Indian massacres, pogroms against Chinese railroad workers, the internment of Japanese-Americans, and a bomb plot against a gay disco.

THE LIGHTER SIDE OF SELF-DESTRUCTION: The Economist, a weekly news magazine edited in England for a readership mostly in America, had a brief item on Tacoma’s needle-exchange program among drug abusers. The sad subject matter was lightened a little by the anonymous writer’s lead, depicting Tacoma as “a smoky industrial Sparta to the high-tech Athens of Seattle.”

ANOTHER XMAS STORY: The cutest holiday TV this year was TNT’s Silent Night — a whole evening of meticulously restored silent movies. Without spoken dialogue, there’s no way to wander off to the bathroom or kitchen and still keep up. You have to pay full visual attention throughout the feature.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at a Wherehouse video rental desk): “RoboCop 2; Henry V.”

A DIFFERENT BAND OF DWARVES: Sub Pop almost had a distribution deal with Hollywood Records, the newest off-brand division of the Walt Disney Co. Instead, Hollywood’s first act will be the Party, a promoter-assembled teen dance group heavily promoted at Disneyland and on The Disney Channel.

AT LEAST IN THIS COUNTRY SHE CAN SHOW HER FACE: Producers of the movie I Am Woman will reportedly pay female lead Jamie Lee Curtis $800,000, only 40 percent of co-star Dan Aykroyd‘s fee and even less than child actor Macauley Culkin (Home Alone). What did the song of the same name say? Oh yeah, “I’m still an embryo with a long, long way to go…”

LYCRA LOVE: According to the newsletter Japan Access, Tokyo’s top designers say the 1991 trend in swimwear will be the ecology look: earth-green colors, “designs borrowed from nature, including seashell, fish and flower motifs.” The garments themselves are made of non-biodegradable, petroleum-based synthetics…

LANDLESS: We’ve seen ads for nonexistent housing developments and stock sales for nonexistent companies, but the 1/7 Forbes reported perhaps the ultimate con (besides the war). An American promoter calling himself Branch Vinedresser placed Wall St. Journal ads offering to sell corporate charters and passports in a “tax-free sovereignty.” The documents are sold under the name of the “Dominion of Melchizedek,” which Vinedresser claims is a “4,000 year old ecclesiastical sovereignty” on an island off the coast of South America. The island really exists, but is fully controlled by Colombia. Vinedresser has also paid to have fictional currency and securities for his “nation” listed on international exchanges, and has promoted the sale of these securities through a network of companies in different cities, most of which are just mailbox services and phone lines with call forwarding to his California office.

Latter-Day Addendum: On 4-1-98, I received the following email:

Tzemach “Ben” David Netzer Korem, Vice President (DOM)

NOW I UNDERSTAND QUAYLE: The Times says “an outbreak of `nonsense-speak’ is sweeping Hong Kong” among working-class youngsters with little hope of escaping the 1997 Chinese takeover. (The Cantonese name for the fad is “mo lai tau,” or “you have no head.”) The paper gave only one example of nonsense-speak dialogue heard on the streets: “My sister’s going to have a baby.” “Green babies look strange.” “Green socks aren’t blue.” Sounds to me like the foundation for a code jargon, perhaps for an anti-takeover resistance movement…

WHAT ELSE IS WRONG WITH AMERICA: A Lava Lite is being sold at The Sharper Image, a Lava Lite with a base unit of a solid black marble-like substance. The Lava Lite is supposed to be goofy/fun, not corporate/grim. Sheesh!

FINAL VINYL: The death of records has, as predicted here, meant the loss of thousands of non-hit rock, folk, jazz, and even oldies recordings from availability. Many of the indie labels that had been getting LPs pressed in under-5,000 quantities just can’t afford to port them to CDs at such low figures. The Dead Milkmen contractually forced their record company to press a vinyl version of their latest album, but the stipulation said nothing about distributing it. The LPs are reportedly hidden in a warehouse, waiting to be melted down.

TRUE CRIME: The media went expectedly agog over a pair of killers who planted a thrash-rock CD by their victim’s corpse on Queen Anne Hill. But nobody reacted to bomb attacks at two auto parts stores by calling for the banning of spark plugs. Real thrashers never use CDs anyway, except as master copies to make 20 tapes from.

TRUER CRIME: A Spokane man was arrested after a series of residential burglaries in which the only things stolen were women’s shoes, preferably red. Over 100 such shoes, “mostly in pairs” according to the AP, were found in his home.

LIFE IMITATES LYNCH: KCMU’s environmental newscast, Earth on the Air, presented (on 1/11) a woman identified as Angela, who claimed to channel thoughts from trees. The narrator said the show had become acquainted with her “when one of our members met her at a bus stop.” Angela’s message from the deciduous realm: “Mother Earth is a united, intelligent organism” whose very life is threatened by “this parasite called humanity,” and who might one day resort to catastrophic means to save herself even at our expense.

OFF THE NEWSSTAND: The Texas Dept. of Corrections banned the Feb. Texas Monthly from all state prisons, for potentially subversive content: a state highway map, which officials say might help escapees get away.

WHAT YOU’RE EXPECTING A COMMENT ABOUT THIS MONTH: “In a world where victory is the only thing that matters, the only way to win is by risking it all.” — This Paramount ad for the video release of Days of Thunder would have only sounded as stupid as any other commercial had it not premiered during the second week of January. It could be said that a decade of pro-violence culture has led to 1/16, from joy-of-slaughter movies (approved for juvenile consumption by the make-war-not-love attitude of the Ratings Board) to the stuffing of the Pentagon budget and starvation of schools, keeping people hungry and manipulable for recruiting and propaganda purposes. The “lite wars” in Grenada and Panama and the proxy wars in Central America and Angola may have been partly to condition the public to support butt-kissing in the name of butt-kicking. (Those wars, and this one, are also tryouts for all the post-Nam weapons, the goals of the Pentagon-sponsored R&D in microcircuitry that our computers, VCRs, and import cars depend on.) Our ex-friend Saddam was reduced to offering most everything we demanded if he could only get a Mideast conference (which would have been all talk and no solution). But Bush was willing to have thousands die rather than give in on even a trivial detail. The Congressional debates contained stirring moments, but enough members finally took the stance that looked tough but was really chickening out. It was heartening to see the 30,000 or so marching on the night of 1/14 and the thousands in later events (even the ones the media refused to show, under a policy starting around 1/18 of only covering pro-war opinions); there was an indescribable sense of life and hope in even the most earnest moments. I was also heartened to see the footage of other protests from the Everett Federal Bldg. (where my father used to work) to Kent Meridian High School; to see my latest successor as UW Daily editor, Loren Skaggs, denounce the war on the Today show. After a decade of bitching on our collective barstools, opposition politics in this country have been instantly reborn (with 5 months’ hard prep work). Let’s get it right this time. And don’t be discouraged by intentionally misleading polls comparing opposition at the start of this war to that near the end of the Vietnam war. The real war is by our leaders against true democratic values, and disinformation’s only part of it.

‘TIL MARCH, warily note how consumer recycling is offered as the one true way to save the environment by media outlets beholden to industrial polluters, and keep working for peace.

PASSAGE

Bob Guccione Jr. in a 1986 Spin editorial: “Maybe the American Dream is like the Civil War chess set: Once you’ve bought the board you’re committed to buying the rest of the pieces.”

REPORT

Lite Lit 2: The Remake, an evening of readings (old Misc. items, fiction, essays) and vintage short films, will be held Wed., Feb. 13, 7 and 9 p.m., at the Jewl Box Theater within the Rendezvous Restaurant, 2320 2nd Ave. It’s a partial benefit for my novel publication fund, and is co-sponsored by the Belltown Film Festival. It replaces the reading planned for the beautiful snow-blessed night of 12/19, to which the film projectionist and I were the only attendees.

With the new postal rates, Misc. subscriptions rise to $7/year. (Fax subscriptions stay at $9.) Ads are $15 for spaces like the one below; $25 for that same height across the whole page. (To buy space, leave a message at 524-1967.)

WORD-O-MONTH

“Enlizement”

12/90 Misc. Newsletter

MILLI VANILLA FRAUDS?

NEXT THEY’LL CLAIM ARCHIE AND JUGHEAD

DIDN’T SING THEIR SONGS!

Here at Misc., we’re holding a public wake for the 50-year-old Lacey V. Murrow Floating Bridge (known henceforth as Galloping Gertie II), which reached the end of its life “span” with a bang, not a whimper. Before the sinking, it had become a mile-long, 40-foot-wide construction/demolition project, strewn with a few scattered cars and Honey Buckets. It already looked like it was about to sink (something Boris S. Wart threatened but never accomplished on the J.P. Patches show). (Event info on other side.)

OUT WITH THE OLD, PLEASE!: Nostalgia is going to be the death of America. Every previous fad added something to the national heritage, for good or ill. Nostalgia only subtracts. It boils the flavor and texture away from our past, leaving a gooey syrup of vague memories. It’s getting harder and harder to find a restaurant, store, or beauty salon where the sound system plays any recent music. “Square” places play top 40 hits of 1956-69. “Hip” places play hipper music from that same era (Muddy Waters instead of the Beatles). Only in designer-jean stores can you hear songs by groups whose members are all still alive. And many of them take pride in never playing a single riff that isn’t reorganized Led Zeppelin.

ADDITIONALLY, I’m finding it harder and harder to explain to people that I’m neither (1) a nostalgist for the hippie era nor (2) a conservative. I regard hippie-era politics as a well-intentioned failure. The progressive, populist side of American leftist tradition got smothered by what we might as well call a bohemian aesthetic. There will never be a real left in this country until it stops depicting all working-class people as “the unwashed masses,” as hicks and flaming fascists. The world is not the few enlightened “Us” vs. all the ignorant “Them.” It’s all of “Us.”

NORTHERN REVOLT: The Canadian subsidiary of Popsicle Brands is under vocal attack from children from Victoria, BC (Mile 0 of the Trans-Canada Highway) to St. John’s, Newfoundland (the other Mile 0). According to the Vancouver Sun, the company promised free Nintendo cartridges to kids sending in 15,000 points’ worth of Popsicle sticks; instead, 10,000 kids got only letters of apology claiming that the company’s stock of 6,000 cartridges had been depleted and that substitute prizes would be given to everybody else sometime next year. Still, maybe the kiddie Canucks ought to be grateful to get even that; in a famous mid-’80s essay, Ontario’s ownMargaret Atwood wrote of growing up with Popsicle labels offering wonderful prizes but bearing the fine-print disclaimer, “Offer Good Only in U.S.”

NO FREUDIAN COMMENTS, PLEASE: A staffer at King County Juvenile Hall reports that teenage boys inside there are signifying their gang membership by affixing Dole or Chiquita banana stickers onto their belts.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Manna Raisins & Oat Bran Flakes cereal, made in Delta, B.C. and “sprouted for life.” It’s “Certified Organic,” but (oddly, considering the name) isn’t certified kosher.

IS NOBODY INCORRUPT?: The Wall St. Journal (10/29) reports that the Doris Day Animal Fund Inc. spends 90 percent of its income on direct-mail fundraising (billed in official budget statements as “public education”).

AD VERBS: Rainier Light’s “It’s R Light” commercials are much better than the previous ad agency’s work, but they’re still hollow compared to the classic Heckler Associates spots, and for the same reason. While the Heckler ads had real fun in promoting the beer as a beverage for enjoyment, both of its successor agencies fell into the trap of selling a target audience on an image of itself, with the product merely a supporting player in the drama.

NO MORE FUR AT NORDSTROM: This is how an industry dies, when the first PR-conscious retailer proudly capitulates to public furor (and flat market shares). But fur is more than an inefficient source of outerwear; it’s one reason we’re here. The trapping of wild fur animals was the first white industry in the Northwest. The Hudson’s Bay Co. and others subsidized many of the first non-military settlements in Washington Territory. They were supported by sales to the society ladies of Europe, whose essential financial contribution was totally ignored in last year’s books on women in Northwest history.

SAY IT AIN’T SO RUMOR OF THE MONTH: Is the Comet Tavern going to be upscaled?

(latter-day note: It wasn’t.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 11/14): “A story of 4 kids and how they died/`Anybody who has a teen-ager will related to this’ tale of tragedy.” Now that’s headline writing in the classic manner, almost Victorian in its cadence.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: It’s a shame that The Facts has such ugly design and typography, because some truly eloquent African-American voices may be found there. For example, hear the bitter “Life Among the Thorns” edition of F. Justina Nubay’s column “Say It With Flowers”: “I wholeheartedly believe that Thanksgiving should continue to be the only day when public spirited people ply the hungry with turkeys, pies, and other filling foods, enough to last them the entire year. Like the howling hyena, the hungry and the homeless, for the time remaining, should continue to gorge themselves on carrion and roam their jungles in wild anguish.”…At Cause is a Christian paper with a difference: A Reubenesque nude drawing on the front page, an essay titled “Party On!” saying it’s OK for Christians to “have exhilaration, ecstasy, bliss” — including being gay and/or transvestite if they wish to be so. (Editor M.F. Whealen seems to be an ex-Scientologist, from the use of certain catch phrases.)…The Oregon-based Sinsemilla Tipsmagazine folds after 10 years. Publishers blame the War on Drugs, which they claim has made people scared to sell or advertise in the mag.

CATHODE CORNER: Does the rash of inside jokes on The Simpsons (Marge’s surprise at “a Simpson on a T-shirt,” the on-air homage to Bart’s Macy parade balloon, his chalkboard message “I am not a 32-year-old woman”) mean the show has passed its peak?…A producer has paid millions for all rights to The Ed Sullivan Show; plans to release several video compilations, including the censored TV debuts by famous rockers and a tape of 50 different people doing the Twist. But will they ever include the peg-legged tap dancer, or the National Model Race Car Championship? (A licensed version of Sullivan’s most popular feature, the puppet mouse Topo Gigio, now appears in Spanish on cable’s Univision.)

KRIME KORNER: A Seattle man was fatally shot by an unlicensed Safeway security guard for allegedly pocketing a pack of cigarettes. Now will you listen to me about the dangers of smoking?… The Martinsburg, W.Va. city council plans to require panhandlers to buy $25 licenses or face jail terms. But how do you get the money to tell people you don’t have any money?

MALLED DOWN: The National Endowment for the Arts gave a $50,000 grant (with a 2/1 matching requirement) to the Rouse Co. to sponsor non-threatening art programs in shopping centers (including Westlake Center). Now we know the true priorities of new NEA head John Frohnmayer. He’s using “bringing art to the people” and corporate matching-fund requirements as ways of rewarding works acceptable to business/marketing interests.

PRESSED: Our news media, presuming us all to be beer-swilling xenophobes, devoted their attention on 11/22-23 to how nothing had really happened in the Persian Gulf lately, and only cursorily mentioned that the last major European dictator fell from power. The beginning of the end might have been foretold in an item from USA Today (11/12): “Richard Needham, British minister for Northern Ireland, apologized for calling Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher a “cow” during a car-phone call to his wife. A paramilitary group in Northern Ireland picked up the call on a radio monitor and sent a recording of it to a news agency.”…What they didn’t tell you about the female, Socialist, pro-contraception Irish president is that the position is largely ceremonial, a sort of elected king. She will be less able to take political stances than when she was in the Irish senate.

SECTION BEE: The Killer Bees may finally be on our way! (Times, 11/3) It turns out that they’re not really that much more vicious to humans, but they are less tameable and they do drive out domesticated breeds.

XMAS GIFT OF THE YEAR: The Dance Aerobics game cartridge by our Redmond neighbors at Nintendo. You can vicariously experience the self-punishment and body-consciousness of aerobics without having to actually do the exercises. It’s one of only two games I’ve seen with a female lead character…. The Trivial Pursuit ’80s Edition is historically inaccurate. It’s got a question about Saturday Night Live’s Mr. Bill, who was on from ’77 to ’80….Lynnwood’s Pacific Trading Cards is drawing national attention for itsAndy Griffith Show card set….Trump: The Game (“It’s Whether You Win”) was marked down from $39.95 to $19.90….Seattle’sGenerra has a “Men’s Collective” shirt line, for junior execs old enough to remember their student-Maoist pasts (they’re even made in the PRC!).

MORE VEGETARIANS IN LEATHER: The Vancouver rockmag Discorder sez the next big thing’s “straight-edge rock,” punk-like bands (including Seattle’s Undertow) who belong to the Hare Krishna movement. Their premise: Just as punk stripped rock of impurities and distractions, so should we do with our lives.

PHILM PHIRE: Remains from the blaze at Universal Studios (soon to be owned by Panasonic) soon became a major attraction on the Universal Tour; the simulated “burning building” attraction was temporarily closed. The sale of Universal/MCA leaves Time Warner as the last major US-owned record company. It also brings Japanese money into US publishing (MCA owns Putnam, Berkley and Ace).

NOT IN STORE: You won’t get to shop this Xmas at B.N. Genius, that land of expensive electronic playthings that you’d never buy but always loved to play with in the store. Meanwhile, the end of the Northgate Woolworth leaves only the downtown store as an inexpensive source for hats, socks, and hobby supplies, not to mention the long shelf of cheesy crossword magazines. (It’s also one of the last places still selling Clark candy bars.)

PICK A PEC: The 11/24 Newsweek (the same issue with the essay that claimed that “Cynicism is alien to America”) reported that trendy LA men are now getting silicone implants to make their upper bodies look more muscular. Look dudes, this recent interest in “men reclaiming the feminine side of their natures” ought to mean taking up the smart things about womanhood; just as women’s assertiveness training generally excludes lessons in beer-swilling or sexual harassment.

WE’LL TALK AGAIN in the palindromic year of 1991 (that year which picky purists insist is the real start of the decade), when I’ll count exactly how many times you could have seen It’s A Wonderful Life this holiday season. Until then, watch the astounding South Africa Now 12:30 p.m. Saturdays on KCTS, try to avoid calling the NY Times crossword-help 900 line, appreciate the appropriateness of the big Marilyn Monroe mural inside the Broadway Pay ‘n Save (shouldn’t all drugstores bear the images of people who died from prescription overdoses?), read The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, pray for snow, work for peace, and consider the words of Frank Zappa on unauthorized musical sampling: “It’s just so cheese-oid.”

NOTICE

Sign at the Wood Shop, Pioneer Square: “Authentic East German nutcrackers. Last chance. Buy now or you’ll regret it the rest of your life.”

REPORT

It’s been threatened before, but now it’s really gonna happen. I’m holding two live readings this month: Sun., 12/16, at the Two Bells Tavern (10 p.m.) and Wed., 12/19, at the Rendezvous (7 and 9 p.m., with vintage educational films). Each show contains at least some different material; each is a partial benefit for my Perfect Couple novel publication fund. (The novel is still available only on Mac disks, for $6.)

Subscribers may notice a new mailing-label design. My old label program crashed (thank God and Apple I could retrieve the data with the ResEdit program).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Vituperative”

10/89 Misc. Newsletter

(the first self-contained newsletter edition)

Welcome one and all to the never-say-die return of Misc., the only column in town that wonders why “original flavor” toothpaste doesn’t taste like “original flavor” bubble gum.

This is a successor to a column that ran monthly in ArtsFocus magazine for three years. For those who weren’t with us before our summer hiatus, this is a compendium of things that usually aren’t official art events, but are still part of the world in which we and our arts live. Much of this edition happens to consist of corporate mating and decompsing rituals; other months have dealt with politics, books, religion, music, mass behavior, fine food and wine.

WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation (far more important than the 20th anniv. of Woodstock) by meditating on the “herald of impeachment” still displayed at the Comet Tavern and reminiscing about those pre-Reagan days, when fewer people mistook corruption for a virtue. I finished a novel, to be put out somewhere within the next year. Saw the opening of the first segment of the bus tunnel, a slick brown shopping-mall-of-transit designed to make suburban commuters feel at home. Also saw the construction of the Outlet Mall, now open with complete designer stores by Liz Claiborne, Evan Piccone and others, right on the Burlington exit to the north Sound’s Calif.-colony “getaways.” The annual Popllama Records Picnic was censored by anti-rock forces in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Dept., but promoter Conrad Uno may have kept happy by pretending he was the guy all this summer’s headlines from Japan were about. This second greenhouse-effect summer ended on a stunning autumnal equinox day (even to me, not a weather person). The Ave’s venerable Cafe Allegro was closed for the wedding of two longtime employees (the reception there, the alternative ceremony at the U’s Medicinal Herb Garden). Later that night, Broadway’s Gravity Bar stayed open all night for performances and tarot readings.

DENTAL FLOSS TYCOONS: According to a Wall St. Journal piece, two guys in a New York jail spent months quietly trading cigarettes for dental floss, then hand-weaving the nylon thread into a sturdy rope. They used it one night to carefully climb down from their fourth-floor window. They were still seen by a passerby and got caught.

THE EMPEROR’S NUE CLOTHES: Robert Campeau was forced to turn over control of his dept. store empire to bankers. For a clue to his possible mismanagement, note Campeau’s Bon Marché and its slogan, “The Nue Hits for Back to School.” You’d think a Quebeçois would know better than to sell clothes via the French feminine word for “nude.” (Of course, it’d fit if the promotion includedGuess? jeans.)… Nordstrom might buy Marshall Field of Chicago, which owned Frederick & Nelson for over 50 years. If so, then Frederick’s will be paying Nordy’s for the right to make Frangos (Frederick’s invented them, but Field’s kept the copyright when it sold Frederick’s).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 8/12): “Incarceration for man called too short.” Runner-up (P-I, 8/30): “Margo St. James wants to see a prostitute for president” (haven’t most of them been?).

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Frosty Paws are imitation ice cream treats for dogs, made with no harmful lactose. “Not harmful to humans, but made for dogs.” For humans, meanwhile, there are the new Trix Pops, by General Mills subsidiary Vroman Foods, in the three classic Trix colors (including Orange Orange!)…. Ralston Purina’s new Barbie cereal is the same recipe as its Nintendo cereal; only the shapes and boxes are different. If boys and girls can’t be taught to play with the same toys, at least they can eat the same sugar puffs.

DIRTY DANCING ON MY GRAVE: Just a few months after Vestron Pictures flayed itself all over the Seattle International Film Festival, it went under. Still undetermined: the fate of Vestron’s unreleased products like the fake-DePalma ripoff Paint It Black and of Dan Ireland, whose onetime beloved Egyptian Theater was, at time of Vestron’s first layoffs, showing a cultured, sophisticated James Bond shoot-em-up…. Meanwhile, thanks to Sony’s buyouts, Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records are finally owned by the same company; while Disney’s acquisition of the Jim Henson organization was probably inevitable. Henson’s recent shows have gotten mired in the worst Disneyesque cutesy-wootsies.

WHOLE LOTTO BLUES: A Portland man killed himself in early Sept., thinking he’d lost a $3 million lottery ticket. In fact, he never had it, since the lottery computer registered no winner in that drawing. Undaunted by the bad PR, Ore. still plans to start legal football betting.

HOW WE DOIN’ ON TIME?: David Letterman turns out to be a shareholder and board member of one of the companies buying baseball’s own stupid human trick, the Mariners. He’s said how much he loves Seattle during segments with ex-locals George Miller and Lynda Barry, but that alone wouldn’t stop the majority owners from moving the team. We’ll know their intentions the next time they have to choose whether to keep a star player (Argyros got rid of anybody who got good enough to become expensive).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: National Boycott News. Far from the amateur rabble sheet depicted in a recent Lacitis column, it’s a very long, well-researched compendium on who in corporate America is doing what and why we should care. Editor Todd Putnam keeps revising his listings to reflect changes in commercial behavior or new information, leading to fascinating sagas about the evolving notions of “good business.”

END OF THE ’80S ( #1): David Horsey’s Boomer’s Song, proclaimed “the worst comic strip in the papers” by our first Misc. column in ’86, has gone out with a whimper. No big Gary Larson/Berke Breathed sendoff; the P-I buried the strip’s discontinuation in a notice about the return of Andy Capp (formerly in the Times).

END OF THE ’80S (#2): That American institution, the convenience store, is in deep trouble. Circle K tried to make up for disappointing national sales by raising prices, a counterproductive move. Plaid Pantry is in bankruptcy, after trying to strike an alliance with Arco. Even the mighty 7-Eleven is reeling in debt from a buyout, and is raising short-term cash by turning company-owned outlets into franchises.

END OF THE `80S (#3): Cuisinarts Inc. declared bankruptcy. Only major asset: unsalable inventory. Has it been so long since its food processors were so scarce, you could only buy a certificate for one?

NO MORE MEAN GREEN?: The gov’t’s thinking of redesigning our money, officially to make cash transactions more traceable. They’d be the first changes since the exchange-for-silver guarantee was dropped. They could change the colors or even print Universal Product Codes with each serial number! This society sorely needs to de-mystify money; turning it into just another ugly official document might help.

’90S PREDICTION #1: The “drug war” is replacing the cold war as the official excuse to stage military adventures abroad. By strange coincidence, the only countries to be targeted will just happen to be countries where U.S. business interests seek more control over the local governments.

NORTHERN BYTES: If you haven’t been to Vancouver lately, you haven’t seen a city “go big time” and do it right, with some big exceptions. The downtown East End, a collection of residential hotels and pubs that some feared would be eradicated with Expo 86, has been preserved as a neighborhood and as a film site. It’s the unnamed city in 21 Jump Street; the downtown-underground portion of the light-rail system (above-ground elsewhere) was a murder site in the last Friday the 13th film. Expo itself is now a vacant concrete slab winding along the waterfront, except for three buildings: the Science World museum (check out the “Music Machines” room, sounds just like Throbbing Gristle playing Charles Ives); the 86 Street disco (where any slam dancing is punished with a thorough beating by the most fascistic bouncers in the west); and the floating McDonald’s. The BC gov’t sold the the rest to Hong Kong developers, whose predatory developments elsewhere in town have led to unfortunate racial attacks against the established Chinese-Canadian community. But the best sight in today’s Vancouver is a stencil-painted graffito downtown, “Jesus Saves,” modified by the spray-painted addition, “Gretzky scores on the rebound.”

YES, THERE WILL be another of these reports, and it will feature our own ’80s nostalgia review (get your nominations in now for what’s worth remembering and what’s lest-we-forget). `Til then, read the haunting comic book Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, listen to Car Talk on KPLU, and heed these words of the immortal Irving Berlin: “You’re not sick. You’re just in love.”

Published monthly. Subscriptions: $6 per year by check to Clark Humphrey, 1630 Boylston #203, Seattle 98122. Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS. (c) 1989 Fait Divers Enterprises.

2/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

EVEN WITHOUT 3D GLASSES,

THIS COLUMN IS AS SHARP AND CLEAR AS EVER

Here at Misc., we’re still wondering how soon a Mercury Scorpio is going to crash into a Ford Taurus and a Dodge Aries because the driver didn’t read his signs.

Goodtime Charley’s Got the Blues: Royer chose to quit rather than face a re-election referendum on his move from neighborhoods’ champion to developers’ patsy. Instead of dwelling on it, let’s just remember what his sister-in-law Jennifer James might say: that we must “cut the losses” from relationships that have become unworkable, acknowledge the pain of betrayal, and then move on.

No No-Host Bar: Alcoholics Anonymous’ world convention is coming to Seattle next year, but the best news is the appropriate name of AA’s site-selection consultant: Slack, Inc.

21 Luscious Shades of Red Ink: Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman, after buying a string of bankrupt savings and loans, just added Marvel Comics as a “cash cow” to support the S&Ls. Will America’s financial security be ruined if kids don’t buy enough copies ofShe-Hulk one month? Will folks get handsome Ultima II tote bags with every $10,000 deposit?

Holds Up Longer Than You Do: The Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology and Health’s received a major federal grant to study the shelf life of condoms exposed to heat, cold, humidity, light, and air pollution. It could be another case of a package that’s more durable than the contents.

Junk Food of the Month: Seattle’s Hilton Seafoods is trying to develop the world’s first sexless clam, which presumably would be larger and/or better tasting. But would it still be an aphrodisiac?

Local Publications of the Month: For a major writing project, I’ve been researching local New Age papers. Preeminent is Seattle’s New Times, a monthly broadsheet with stories on everything from ethics for the ’90s to meditation helpers that you put on like goggles and that send pulses of light into your brain. The same publisher also does Spiritual Woman’s Times; other local journals include Olympia’s The Light (with the syndicated psychic-comic Swami Beyondananda), Bellevue’s Common Ground (items on a new locally-designed tarot deck and on “Love, Fear and Linear Thinking”), and Federal Way’s Universal Entity (the tabloid chronicle of “Zanzoona the Old Warrior” as channelled through Vancouver, WA’s MariJo Donais, who is also the reincarnated wife of Ulysses S. Grant)…. Elsewhere in the print world, the second Placebo, an occasional journal of downtown writers, has an extensive, fascinating interview with a mercenary-turned-cab-driver.

Cathode Corner: Matt Groening has made his first commercial, a Butterfinger ad with his Tracey Ullman Show characters. Too bad it wasn’t Abkar and Jeff for Doublemint…. Geraldo Rivera and Cheech Marin have gotten together to buy TV stations. I can just see their “Point-Counterpoint” segments on the nation’s drug menace.

Dead Air: KLSY now has a fax request line, so you can use the newest technology to hear the most archaic music of any non-oldies station. I was recently force-fed two hours of the station in a dentist’s chair and can define one version of hell as sitting under bright fluorescent with a stranger of the same sex in your mouth and George Michael on loud. (Even worse, I got gold put in me the same month I called gold “outski” for ’89.)

Boox & Bux: For too long, bibliophiles have overrated the written word as more honest than other media. That myth should be retired now that we have “product placements” in novels (Maserati paid to be mentioned in Power City by Beth Ann Herman). So that’s what all the brand-name-dropping in the Literary Brat Pack has been about. The book’s publisher, Bantam, is one of three US publishing giants now owned by Germany’s Bertlesmann, who also bought RCA/Arista Records (yes, Spike Jones’s classic song “In Der Fuhrer’s Face” is now owned by the Germans).

Graphic Details: The new Pogo is almost as good as the old. It’s even done what Doonesbury never really has: slam the newspaper biz (though its target was USA Today, considered the young hussy of the industry by the genteel journalism establishment)…. TheTimes has deservedly awarded Calvin and Hobbes the highest honor a comic strip can get: the top Sunday space, displacing Peanuts after more than 20 years.

Bend Over, Johnny Depp: A 25-year-old Dallas undercover cop, posing as a high school student, was spanked by an assistant principal for tardiness. (He could have alternately faced detention.)

Shifting Into “D”: The Democratic Party has finally done something smart in getting ready to pick ex-Jesse Jackson aide Ron Brown as its new national chair. Brown’s strategies for Jackson (healing rifts between races and interest groups, attracting previous nonvoters) are just what the party needs. The Demos’ve lost two presidential races with the “Lite Right” policy of shunning the party’s heritage and most faithful followers to aim slick marketing at some mythical conservative “swing voter.” That policy will not work with any future candidate, as some Demo bigwigs are figuring out at last.

Hershey’s Kisser: Barbara Hershey, for reasons explicable only by vanity and Hollywood trendiness, has had silicone implants put in her lips. This is the same person who, when she was married to one of the Carradine boys, was such a Natural Woman that she briefly changed her last name to Seagull.

`Til the March column (which may include a report from the First Annual Singles’ Festival and Trade Show), beware of films about the Black Struggle in which no black actor’s billed higher than fifth, read Dictionary of the Khazars, and ponder this appropriate-for-Valentine’s line from local writer Theodore Roethke: “I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?”

10/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

SOON YOU CAN SEE JAPAN

(LAND OF COMPANY-RUN UNIONS)

VIA CONTINENTAL

(AIRLINE OF NO UNIONS)

Here at Misc., we must apologize for the lateness of the last issue, stuck in a Belltown computer during the blackout. I can assure you I had the gag comparing Quayle to Pat Sajak days before Johnny Carson did.

The blackout is the top Seattle news story so far this year. The daily papers did an awful job of covering it, giving relatively scant coverage and not really discussing the havoc it played on people’s lives until Day 3. It was over a week before they mentioned the construction crew that started it, though the crew had been visible days before the outage. In the tales of survival dept., the Virginia Inn stayed open with beer served from picnic coolers, constantly re-iced (signs pleaded with customers to be nice to the staff). KJET played four hours of blackout-related songs on Day 2: “Electricity,” “Power to the People,” “The Power and the Passion,” and tunes by the Power Station and the Power Mowers (but not the Blackouts). On the night the juice came back, the Ralph’s Grocery readerboard was ready with “I SAID BUD LIGHT.”

Junk Food of the Month: Langendorf Creme-Filled Carrot Cakes. Now you can enjoy the guilt trip of junk food and the martyrdom trip of health food in the same bite.

Local Publication of the Month: Lifeline America!, a slick national mag from local ad legend Jerauld Douglas Miller. Its tabloidesque graphics and stories cover survival with & life without painful addictions (booze, drugs, food binges, boyfriends). Best part: the cover photo of Liz Taylor’s unretouched face, showing just how much she’s gone through. Worst part: endorsing Ed Meese’s Gestapo tactics against small-time drug users, fueling their own victim self-images while diverting funds away from treatment….The Daily Journal of Commerce now has its own “A&E” section, only with them it’s not Arts & Entertainment but Architecture & Engineering (natch).

Invisible Red Ink: The Soviet Union’s admitted it falsified maps for decades. Military installations were whited out, Moscow streets rearranged, and entire towns moved or obliterated. Our own govt. threatened for years to blow the Russkies off the map, only to find they’ve been doing it themselves.

Tourist Trappings: At Seattle Center, Westlake and the waterfront (no, Mr. Royer, I won’t call it “Harborfront,” a euphemism newly deployed to gussie up its image as everything BUT a real harbor), the future of the city is being debated: Will residents’ taxes be used to make Seattle more liveable or more visitable? In each case, City Hall has chosen to subsidize tourism while vital local needs are put aside (or held hostage). Gore Vidal once wrote a story about Disney buying all of England as a huge theme park, with residents expected to live in costume as milkmaids and other “colorful characters.” It could essentially happen here, as it essentially has to parts of California and New Mexico. Let’s build a better town, but a better real town.

Everything Old Is Neo Again: The next big early-’70s comeback, besides solar energy, could be conceptual art. Our sources count three new Manhattan galleries devoted to various hybrids of visuals, video, performance, and such. Interest in early conceptual, performance, and especially video art is rising. It’d be a great time to screen the early video-art tapes donated to the Seattle Public Library a decade ago, except nobody seems to know where they are now.

The Secret Word Is Love: We normally don’t print sex gossip, but couldn’t resist the rumor that ex-Rocket art director Helene Silverman is to wed cartoonist/Pee-Wee’s Playhouse designer Gary Panter. Silverman’s now at NY’s architecture-design magMetropolis; we can only hope she’ll spread the Panter influence to real-life buildings.

Phast Phashion: Fashion magazines are getting thicker than the models pictured within them. Re-use your copies of Vogue and Elle as inexpensive workout weights…. The “Reeboks Let U.B.U.” campaign could pleasantly remind one of Pere Ubu (the play and/or the band)…. Urban “street” imagery is all over this fall’s ads for suburban-only clothing chains, from J.C. Penney to Lamont’s. If they think inner cities are so cool, why won’t they have stores in ’em?

Loco Biz: Fred Meyer may be a little late in its “We Support Northwest Firms” promotion. There are fewer and fewer of them to support, now with the Seahawks and Seven Gables Theaters going to Calif. clutches (as noted by John Marshall in the San Simeon, Calif.-owned P-I).

Philm Phacts: Home-video bucks for new independent films are drying up. Reason: the big studios are pressuring video stores to stock more and more copies of fewer and fewer films…. Will the UK firm that bought Technicolor stick a “u” into its name?

Headlines of the Month: “Japan’s big boost for state” (P-I, 9/10); “Little yen for NW: Japanese investments going elsewhere in U.S.” (Times, 9/11).

Music Notes: Billboard now has a Modern Rock chart every week. The first #1 is Siouxsie and the Banshees, the last original UK punk band in operation to this day…. The NY Daily News’ recent worst-songs-of-all-time poll is much like the one I did in ’81 (latter day note: that was done for the UW Daily), down to the #1 entry: “You’re Having My Baby.”

Bods vs. Beers: The grand old Rainbow Tavern is now a no-booze “showgirls” establishment. It’s nice that some guys are finding drug-free entertainment, but from a hetero-male standpoint it’s disadvantageous that we’re getting more places to look at women, but fewer places to meet them. (Most of the picketers outside it, claiming it demeans women, were men, mainly regulars from the nearby Blue Moon. Imagine Blue Moon people calling someplace else sleazy!)

To close, be sure to see the 911 Homes for Art and the two non-911 Jardin des Refusées homes, hear the new locally-backed remake of Orson Welles’ radio War of the Worlds, read Pete Hamill’s piece in the Sept. Cosmo on the “Awful ’80s,” and fight for all the park space at Westlake we can still get.

3/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

Back to Our Pre-Taped Profiles

After This Pause for a Sports Event

At Misc., we’re glad Metro’s finally getting those tired Earth Shoe colors off their buses (as part of their continuing belief that promotion is more important to a bus line than reliable service). Let’s paint ’em in the colors that Seattle has sold to the world: screeching primary and secondary colors, in goofily overstated patterns with odd typography along the sides. The first Generra designer bus! I can hardly wait.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: A while since we had this section, but so much to report now. First, there’s Simplesse, the genetically engineered “fake fat” from the makers of NutraSweet. Then there was that great Nova show on how food technologists take consumer demands for natural foods and end up making cylindrical wafers with imitation cheese-flavored fillings, chemically bonded to maintain a “creamy” texture and all “co-extruded” from a machine in long rolls. But perhaps the biggest news in the field is that Dannon yogurt, one of the last “pure” snacks left, now comes in plastic cups instead of waxed cardboard. You can’t even go natural anymore without buying non-biodegradable petrochemicals.

CATHODE CORNER: Previews of The Wonder Years, the first show to treat people my age as the target of nostalgia, aren’t encouraging: Horribly cute little boys and the same ’60s soul classics you hear today in bad commercials. The 12-year-old kids I knew at the time thought those songs were OK but preferred the Monkees and the 1910 Fruitgum Co. — music for kids left behind by progressive rock. Just as we were becoming teens, suddenly it wasn’t cool to be a teen anymore. We learned the media only cared about people 10 years older than us and always would…. At least until MTV. In that channel’s most amazing promo yet, five young actors stand on a stage and chant, “How do you do, Mr. Ginsberg. I would like you to know that the best minds of my generation are rich and famous.” Not quite true, of course; the best minds of my generation are really bankrupting themselves in self-publishing, paying off video camcorders, and fighting to get airplay.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Shelby Gilje, Times, 2/12): “Playskool has Dolly Surprise, whose hair grows when you raise her right arm.” I knew the Sisterhood-Is-Powerful look would come back.

MUSICAL MENACE: At a performance of Seattle Opera’s Orpheus and Eurydice, a man stood up from his seat, yelled “This is dogshit,” and left. They’re trying to identify him from his seat position, in hopes of revoking his season ticket. Earlier, a guy jumped to his death from the balcony at NY’s Metropolitan Opera. I tell you, this Satanic opera music is causing demented behavior. Why aren’t officials demanding warning labels on opera records? Why are opera companies allowed to serve wine at intermissions? Why aren’t opera audiences strip-searched? You don’t know what they could be hiding in those long gowns!

CALGARY REPORT (via Dave Bushnell): “Everybody’s very friendly. When a guy I met tried to climb over a fence to get into an event, the cops asked him to come down, checked his ID, and found out he was going to have a birthday in a couple of days. They sent him a birthday card at his hotel. With all the offices built in the last oil boom, the whole city looks like it just sprang into being in the last few years. You can see multi-million-dollar developments right next to these small suburban houses. One man refused to let the Olympics tear down his little house next to the ski jump; he finally agreed to let them use it as a press office. A strip joint was told it couldn’t use the Olympics name, so it instead ran a “Miss O-Word Contest.” I was with Seattle TheaterSports in the Olympic Arts Festival. We competed against teams from the US, Canada, England and Australia, and came this close to the bronze. Really.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Ex-UW prof Molly (only spiritually related to Shere) Hite’s Class Porn suffers from the most overused plot for first novels (English teacher tries to write her first novel), but it does have one nice twist. After the heroine struggles to create a positive erotic fantasy for women, the result reads just like the plot of a Russ Meyer movie. The heroine doesn’t even realize this; Hite might not either…. Memo to Feminist Baseball: Thanx for your last ‘zine, but I really think deliberate amateurism is passé (as is Michael Jackson bashing).

CAUCUS QUIPS: As our state prepares to be ignored by the candidates and press on Sooper Toosday, let’s glimpse the political realm. Like an awakened sleepwalker saying “Did I really do that?”, more citizens are incredulously realizing they’ve let a gang of grafters, demagogues and confidence artists use our government and economy as their playthings. Others, terrified by the risks associated with reality, are frenetically trying to keep the Reagan illusion alive. But as The Nation (2/6) sez, the leading Democrats (and, to a lesser extent, Dole) are selling progressive populism to a degree beyond anything McGovern did (and often beyond their own voting records). When it’s become hard to even imagine a presidency based on real decency, it’s a miracle that so many voters are insisting that there must and can be a better way.

CLOSE: ‘Til the April Showers come our way (presuming we ever have them), be sure to watch the BBC soap EastEnders on KTPS, vote for Ray Charles and Stan Boreson in The Rocket’s Northwest Music Hall of Fame poll, go to the caucuses, and join us next time.

2/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

MAKE LOVE NOT WARHOL

Welcome to Misc., the column that loved seeing all the Martin Luther King Day signs at banks accused of redlining. We’re also not the official column of Family TV Viewing Month, a recent publicity stunt that involved two households going tubeless for a week. I can’t imagine what’d be worse: another Cagney & Lacey rerun or following the advice of state first lady Jean Gardner.

Aural Threat: For five and a half years, on a tiny budget and a tinny frequency, KJET has been one of the few commercial radio stations in town doing anything worthy of criticism (the best in progressive pop played announcers who dare to assume that their listeners have brains). Now that owner SRO has a few bucks to spend, it’s pondering the removal of this proven format. KJET has extremely loyal listeners. It could have more of them with better equipment and more promotion. The station’s outspokenly asking us to plead with them to let the Jet live. Do it. They’re at 200 W. Mercer, 98119.

No reprieve, however, is apparently possible for the beloved Rainier Beer ads. For 12 years, Heckler & Associates’ campaign (always “zany,” sometimes truly witty) has made Rainier #1 in Washington by distinguishing it from the majors and their cloying, zillion-dollar ads. The brewery’s new Australian owner’s hiring an Australian agency to make Rainier’s ads more like Bud’s and Miller’s –certain doom for a regional brand. Before Heckler, Rainier was sinking in the market. It tried a light beer and a draft beer years before Miller, a dark beer years before Michelob, fancy bottles, fictional spokesmen, outdoorsy jingles — nothing worked until it made commercials people wanted to watch. The campaign also helped put the Seattle production community on the map. It proved that local people can top the LA gold-chain crowd (though some local advertisers, like Bell and the Lottery, still send their customers’ money south).

Sunken Treasures?: Another endangered landmark is Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, Seattle’s second oldest retail business (after L&H Engraving on Elliot). The pier on which the venerable souvenir stand is situated is in danger of collapsing, under the strain of drywall construction further up the waterfront. The contractor won’t ease up on the heavy vibrations until April, when the shop’ll move next to Ivar’s. If Sylvester the mummy sinks, he’ll become the eternal martyr to Seattle’s construction mania.

Philm Phacts: Housekeeping is a great film with great characters, set in a believably matriarchal Northwest town. Its only flaw is easily attributed to a Scottish director filming in Canada: The heroines as girls, being driven across Washington, stop at an Esso station. Standard Oil of N.J. never had rights to the name (an acronym of “S.O.”) in the western U.S., and so used Carter and then Enco before switching nationwide to Exxon. More fascinating info on the gas biz is at the General Petroleum Museum, which sells old pumps, signs, and memorabilia to collectors and rents a hall filled with the stuff for banquets and meetings.

Tunnel Woes: Wouldn’t it’ve been nice if Metro’d kept boring through the soft ground? They could do it at night with advance notice, so nobody’d be hurt when the Century Square building drops to a more reasonable height. If some of the Sharper Image merchandise gets damaged in the process, so much for the better.

Truth is Stranger Dept.: A while back, some clever folks published a parody of the Seattle Arts Commission newsletter. In the fictional lead story friends of commission members were being hired as “Art Buddies” to inspire local artists. It was a slap at programs to “support the arts” without giving a dime to artists. Now the real commission wants to hire three “nationally known” (your tax $$ going to NYC) art critics to advise artists with commission grants. Even Regina Hackett (the William Arnold of art writers) questions the idea (“Artists who want advice should ask artists whose work is in sympathy with their own”).

Wet Dreams: The recent Boat Show was a spectacle of American grandiosity at its finest. Best was the seemingly endless series of interconnected tents outside the Dome, just dying to become the site of a movie chase scene. The boats themselves generally got uglier as they got costlier. By $300G you had Joan Collins beds and blue plush carpeting on the walls. Still, there’s a lot to be said for living on a boat, with its split levels and cozy quarters. If you could only get a moorage with cable TV….

Local Publication of the Month: Columbia, the Magazine of Northwest History. Read, in lovely type with by quaint picures, of the early years of our remote corner of the world — but remember that “early history” here is “modern history” most anywhere else.

Headline of the month (Times, 1/25): “Two hospitals weigh liver transplants.” Lessee, at $1.87 a pound….

Cathode Corner: Some of the best TV entertainment is in commercials on obscure cable channels. Financial News Network has five-minute “paid programs” twice an hour. Gruff-voiced brokers insist that their option-futures-ratio-index packages are still sound investments. Sometimes they appear in phony “interviews” with actors hired to say “Sounds very impressive, Mr. Goldman.” Their heads are electronically squeezed into the top three-quarters of the screen, with stock prices swimming on the bottom.

‘Til March, visit the Old Firehouse second-hand mall at 110 Alaskan Way, watch Bombshelter Videos 1 a.m. Thurs. night/Fri. morn on KSTW, and remember the Valentine’s Day greeting on Pine Street: “Do Not Enter Except Metro Busses” (Look it up).

12/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Cheer Our UW in the
Mediocre-Team-From-Big-TV-Market Bowl

INTRO: Welcome to a special condensed version of Misc., the column that hated yuppies long before USA Today said it was in to hate them. Yes, it’s now officially OK to say there must be something more to life than greed, smugness, defiant immaturity, emphatic bad taste, and all those other model behaviors modern society’s been encouraging us to aspire to. More on this as we go along.

FASHION: Don’t let your friends think you foolishly paid $30 for that new shirt or top (especially if you did). A common office paper punch will turn you from a fashion victim to a wise consumer by adding that “cut-out look” seen in the best clearance stores…. Themini-skirt look, spawned by designers determined to rip-off teen street fashion into a product for older (richer) women, shows a generation finally coming of age in terms of attention from the marketing culture, the dreaded Yups finally getting their comeuppance. O how great this spring will be, with all these self-proclaimed “grownup children” embarrassingly walking around trying to look like real kids.

UPDATES: Have heard the PiL song “Seattle” a few more times and like it much more…. I said The Bon would never revert back to “Bon Marche” (meaning “cheap” in modern French) under its new French-Canadian owner. It is. It’s also replacing Seattle’s last bargain basement with a floor of gaudy boutiques as part of a massive remodel, set to be done by the 1990 centennial of its first store at 1st and Cedar — a building slated to be razed for Yup apartments.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Tunnel Times is Metro’s weekly newsletter of tunnel-construction progress, tunnel trivia and advance word of the next street closures. Free at the tunnel info stands outside the Courthouse and Frederick’s. Note that I used no puns about “underground newspapers.”… Emmett Watson’s Lesser Seattle Calendar goes beyond the one-joke concept of Watson’s old anti-tourist columns into a nifty little collection of Seattle history and folklore, ranking alongside the works of Murray Morgan and Paul Dorpat in helping establish a common mythology for this, the world’s youngest real city. Only complaint: he doesn’t go far enough in his barbs against developers, now that some of their most diabolical plots are coming true. (The calendar exists because Watson, as a Times freelance contributor, isn’t prey to the paper’s rule against outside work by its regular staffers.)

ECOLOGY: Puget Sound Bank’s promising to donate part of each bank machine fee toward “cleaning up Puget Sound.” The ads don’t say that the money’s really all going to a documentary film about the Sound — a film in which the bank’s bound to get a big plug.

CRIME: At press time it’s too early to tell who set fire to the Strand Belltown Cafe, but activist Bob Willmott has made a lot of enemies, some in very high places. Alternately, could there be any connection with the officially non-arson fire at the Trade Winds?… Kudos to Bill’s Off Broadway restaurant, set to reopen 7 months after a robbery-fire.

ART is certainly not the object of the anonymous (natch) buyer of the Van Gogh for $53 million — many times more than Van Gogh made in his life, even more than it cost to make Ishtar. It’s the ultimate example of the “big boy’s toy” syndrome that’s turned conspicuous consumption into a mass neurosis. In a saner world, at least a portion of any art sale over $10,000 would go into a trust fund for living artists.

MUSIC: CBS sold Columbia Records, the world’s oldest and largest label (founded on patent licenses granted by Edison himself) to Sony. Michael Jackson will not honor his new bosses by having plastic surgery on his eyebrows…. Bono Vox, caught spray-painting on a Frisco fountain, might have had to do public-service work cleaning city buses. If U2 had played here, where they’re saving water by keeping buses dirty, he’d have gotten off.

CLOSE: While you put down your deposit on a home in Japan’s proposed new underwater city, be sure to use John Stamets’sGravity 1, U.W. 0 for all your Xmas cards, read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (now at the U Book Store remainder tables), and join us again in the year of piano keys and Oldsmobiles for our second annual alternative Ins/Outs list (send your suggestions in early).

9/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

ArtsFocus is back and so’s Misc., Seattle’s only whole-grain rumor mill. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of ArtsFocus Associates, its advertisers, or Brian Bosworth.

Welcome to the summer of our discontent. Some complained this summer about the traffic, the leaky roof at the Bagley Wright, about paying $8 to see the hydros without being able to get drunk n’ crude, about paying $16.50 for Dana “Church Lady” Carvey in the rain at the Mural Amphitheater, about paying $2 more for Madonna than for the Dylan/Dead show in Eugene, about celeb sellouts like Lou Reed for American Express. Me: I’m not complaining that much, though I did wish we could have had a combined Contra hearing/Isuzu ad, so you could always know when they were lying.

FOR THE RECORD, it’s also been the summer when Seattle got its own overpaid sports legend-in-his-own mind, its own MTV VJ, its own near Presidential hit-and-run, and the start of its own Underground.

Hope y’all had an enlightening time during the Harmonic Convergence. Remember: Author Jose Arguelles sez 144,000 of you had to be meditating at local sunrise 8/16. If the world ends 25 years from now, I don’t want to hear you moaning, “Darn it, I knew I should’ve set my alarm early.”

Already some hopeful news has emerged from the heart of New Age country, on people finding the personal energy to influence the world around them. Port Townsend’s local teens are battling one of the most backward, reactionary social forces known to humanity, the Northwest Nature Poets, over the right to eat Big Macs without having to drive to Port Angeles. More karma to them.

Patrick McDonald has endorsed the Young Fresh Fellows as a local band bound to make it big. As McDonald’s pick-to-click has traditionally meant the Kiss of Death (anyone remember the Heats?), the Fellows should immediately renounce it, declaring that they have absolutely no intention of ever getting a national hit record.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Flavored fortune cookies, as introduced at the Bite of Seattle. Seattle’s Rose Brand will soon market the treats in vanilla, mocha, strawberry, mint, raspberry, banana and bubblegum flavors. Every fortune has two happy-face symbols on it (you can also special-order cookies with custom fortunes).

Procter & Gamble’s announced multi-million losses from its Duncan Hines Soft Cookies. P&G expected a big hit due to a chemical emulsifier that made them soft, figuring it wouldn’t matter how poorly they tasted. They’re not giving up, though: Their next product will be diet cookies, made with a new “sucrose polyester” to be called Olestra.

PHILM PHUN: Japan’s Tampopo, easily the best comedy of the year, is also one of the few films anywhere to deal entirely with the preparation and consumption of food. The most that US films have come to discussing with this most pervasive of all human activities are Fatso, a few cannibalism pictures and some good Woody Woodpecker cartoons.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Seattle Design Association Newsletter. Issue 18 has die-cut finger holes in all 12 pages; 11 of those pages have extremely clever illustrations by Carl Smool, Linda Owens, Michael Dougan and other famed local artists, all supervised by (who else?) Art Chantry. A measly $1.50 at Peter Miller Books on 1st Ave.

CATHODE CORNER: The use of retro rock in TV ads gets ridiculous when Time magazine uses the Byrds’ “Turn, Turn, Turn,” a song originally made in part to protest the Vietnam War — a war that Time supported.

T. Boone Pickens, who tried to conquer Boeing, has made a fortune attacking companies; some of them have surrendered to other overtakers rather than face his wrath. Unocal, Phillips 66, Gulf and Citgo got no government help against his assaults, but state and federal pols rushed to the side of our beloved big employer/big defense contractor. One of the govt’s fave companies was threatened, starting the end of unregulated company-poaching, one of the hallmarks of ’80s commerce….

In other big news, the Easterners who bought Seattle Trust claimed at the time to be impressed by the bank’s reputation and good name — so why’d they demolish it all, as soon as the takeover deal was cleared, by slapping on those ugly Key Bank signs?….

Microsoft’s illustrious reputation has finally gained a little tarnish. A major software program was released full of bugs; then the Redmond firm received undeserved criticism when IBM released new computers designed for an operating system that MS won’t have ready for another year.

Get those “Save the Turf” badges back out. A Contemporary Theater has replaced Intiman as the cultural villain in a plot to destroy one of Downtown’s last truly human spaces for yet another totally unneeded office project. Expect no intervention from the city, which has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the developers…. Give thanks that the Paramount Theater/KKFX empire was rescued from possible bankruptcy. With its prime Convention Center location, the grand ol’ Paramount just might have been bought and razed.

As the moths swarm around the Frederick Cadillac floodlights this hot August night, a final reminder to avoid the $.25 foil-pouch wine at the Liquor Stores, take the 911 Homes for Art tour, read the new bio of cartoonist Winsor McCay, watch Cruzin’ Northwest Sat. morns on KSTW, and come back here next month. ‘Til then, peace and flowers for all.