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HIGH IQ=LOW XXX?: The papers were full of smart-folks-get-less-sex headlines the same week IDG Books brought out Dating for Dummies, the latest extension of a guidebook series initially aimed at people who needed to run computers at work but didn’t like to. Maybe they should’ve put out Dating for Smarties instead. (On the other hand, a programming-manual format’s perhaps an ideal means to show literal-minded people how to survive in such an un-left-brain activity.) (On the third hand, maybe it’s all the wrong way; reinforcing thought patterns completely useless for the realm of hormones and emotions.)
Smart ladies at least have Marilyn Vos Savant and the learned lovelies in Bull Durham and La Lectrice as sexy role models. Who’ve boys got: The antisocial (alleged) Unabomber? The hygiene-challenged Einstein and Edison? OK, there’s the fun-lovin’ late scientist Richard Feynman and certain brooding movie master-criminal types, but they’re the exceptions. But the more common image is the drooling fanboy in a three-sizes-too-small Capt. Kirk shirt, peering through inch-thick spectacles, looking for love in all the wrong places (like AOL chat rooms), fantasizing about Amazonian superwomen but incapable of chatting up a real one, perhaps still traumatized by high-school crushes who slept with jocks and treated him as a brother.
Many hyper-rational people of all genders fear the irrational, and love and sex are about the most irrational behaviors known to humankind. But becoming more desirable isn’t as impossible as it sometimes seems. Practice using a softer, sultrier voice in which to recite post-structuralist literary theory. Memorize love sonnets. Do something to get outside the comfy prison of your own head (yoga, gardening, cycling, pets). Reclaim your place in the physical/ biological/ emotional realm. To quote a love-struck professor in Hal Hartley’s Surviving Desire, “Knowing is not enough.”
`WORLD’ CONQUEST: I’ve heard punk-rock activists might try to disrupt location tapings of MTV’s Real World Seattle with pickets or street-theater type hostilities. I say we can be more creative than that. They think they’re an entertainment network; heck, we’ll show ’em some real entertainment. First, start a phone tree in advance, so you can descend on the place in numbers. Then when the crew and cast are sighted somewhere, arrive en masse in Santa suits, or chanting the Ivar’s Acres of Clams folk jingle, or loading the bar’s juke box to repeatedly play “Convoy.” Let’s show those stuck-up industry people we know how to have an old-school good time in this town. Speaking of entertainments…
WORDS & MUSIC: Fizz: A Blah Blah Blah Blah Magazine has put out its last issue and I’ll miss it. Some of publisher Cathy Rundell’s associates are regrouping to start a successor mag, Plus One. One of the things I loved about Fizz (and its LA-based predecessor Fiz) was its insistance on indie-pop as a force for creativity and empowerment, for doing things where you are with what you’ve got.
Compare this to the attitude in Resonance, the three-year-old local dance and pop mag. Where Fizz got personal with musicians, portraying them as just-plain merrymakers like you or me, Resonance keeps its critical distance. Even its interviews too often practice the same old provincialism, treating musical artists as gods and goddesses descending upon us from the media capitals. The irony, of course, is how dance music depends for its real innovations on stubborn trend-breakers, many from outside the NY/LA/SF/London axis. Another dance-club freezine, the LA-based Sweater, exemplifies this in a recent cover story about Derrick May, the Detroit DJ who pioneered late-’80s house music–and who only found a domestic market for his work after U.K. imitators “popularized” the style.
I’ve been criticized for having a rocker-reactionary “disco sucks” attitude toward the dance revolution. Not true. My beef’s with the self-defeating “real-life-is-elsewhere” attitude among too many dance-scene followers, too content to remain followers. Like an introspective genius afraid to date, the scene needs to shake off its inhibitions, to dare to be foolish, to really get down.
(Share your egghead love tips at clark@speakeasy.org .)
MISC. BEGINS THE sorta brave-new post-Rice era of Seattle history with a rhetorical question: Whenever there’s a pesky e.coli outbreak, vegan activists use the tragedy as a reason to call for an end to meat consumption. Whenever somebody working in porn videos or a strip joint turns out to be facing a troubled or abuse-racked private life, rad-fems ‘n’ right-wing censors publicly exploit the situation to advocate further suppression of the sex biz. Yet the highly publicized mistreatment of sweatshop textile workers (domestically and across the Pacific) hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired members of The Naturist Society to issue PR blitzes asserting how there’d be fewer mistreated clothes-maikers if fewer people wore clothes.
WATCH THIS SPACE: Tasty Shows still plans to open a new club in the former Moe building. Sure they’re four months past their originally promised opening date, but these things almost always happen. (Current ETA: Late February.) Contrary to early reports, it’ll have live bands “about 40 percent of the time,” says a Tasty spokesperson, with DJs on the other nights. Among the work still to be done: Finding a name. They’d planned to call it The Mothership, but a hard-rock nostalgia bar in Federal Way just opened with that moniker.
A PRECIOUS GEM: Just as we get used to the Presidents’ untimely breakup, Seattle faces the potential loss of another institution of whimsy, thanks to the Samis Foundation’s ongoing Pioneer Square redevelopment scheme. Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony lost the lease on its space on 2nd Ave. (Montana’s furniture annex across the street, which sold lovely old sofas and dinette sets, has already been evicted.) Ruby’s on 2nd will close in March. After that, everything’s iffy. Montana sez she might open a new store if she can find the right location, maybe with a revised concept (mixing her trademark knick-knacks, toys, and home furnishings with larger furniture items, antique cars, and/or RVs). If that doesn’t work out, she might open a “guest ranch” in the countryside somwehre, to be furnished in her inimitable comfy-campy style. While that’d undoubtedly be a fun getaway destination and retreat center, I’d rather still have Ruby’s to go to for my fix of wacky postcards, Krusty the Klown erasers, Chia-pubis pots, and historic ad art. With all the retail space being built and/or “restored” in the greater downtown, you’d think there’d be someplace for something this vital. Speaking of abundance…
DOUGH BOYS: A few weeks back, Times columnist Jean Godden claimed 59,000 millionaires now reside in western Washington. (She attributed the figure to unidentified speakers at a CityClub luncheon.) Thought #1: Now we know how these chichi restaurants with the menu items marked “Market Price” can stay open. Thought #2: With all that spare cash floating around, howcum we still can’t get decent funding for (insert your choice of non-sports-related causes)? Thought #3 (and a hunch about #2): Seattle’s old, small, reclusive upper class might not have staged a lot of fancy-dress balls or high teas, but by and large they made at least an occasional semblance of acknowledging their role in, and duty to, the larger community. But these days, here and across the country, there’s a new breed of becashed ones, some of whom revel in a “lone wolf” self-image. One of these moguls, Ted Turner, publicly called last year for his tax-bracket brethern (naming Gates as a specific example) to donate more moolah for bettering the world instead of just buying more luxury goods and building bigger “cabins” in the Rockies.
A nice sentiment, but there are problems with the ’80s-’90s wealth concentration trend that charitable alms alone won’t solve. Can America afford to keep turning over larger portions of its material resources to what’s still a small population segment, increasingly made of “self-made” wheeler-dealers who see social-benefit institutions (from environmental rules to progressive tax codes) as personal threats to their right to make and keep all they can? Perhaps the mark of a materially rich community isn’t the number of residents who’ve got more than they know what to do with, but the degree to which its other residents can at least semi-comfortably get by.
EARLY PROJECTIONS: This paper’s previously chided the Cineplex Odeon Meridian Cinemas, mainly over its lack of union projectionists. But the Pike St. multiplex has one good thing going for it: This past Thanksgiving week, it showed movies as early as 10 in the morning. Morning movies are a tradition in towns with costlier downtown real estate, where theaters have to maximize their assets; they also make “nightlife” not just for the nighttime. Let’s get it and other theaters to open early on a regular basis, at least on weekends. Instead of dinner and a movie, I say why not breakfast and a movie? See a show before heading off on weekend errands or shopping trips. And there’s nothing like a little drama before that dreary job. In other entertainment news…
PASTA PARTICIPLES: One of the fun things about following rock bands is the fun n’ confusion when different outfits take the same names. In my years I’ve heard of two different bands called the Cunninghams, two sets of Feelies, two Screams, two Clubber Langs, three sets of Mutants, and as many as three Nirvanas besides the famous one. Even individuals in the biz can be confused for one another; i.e. the musician/ producer Tim Kerr who has nothing to do with the founder of Tim/Kerr Records. Most recently, Kramden’s Bar and Grill way up on Aurora has advertised an R&B cover band called Eddie Spaghetti and the Meatballs–no apparent relation to the Eddie Spaghetti who’s fronted the cow-punk Supersuckers these past five-plus years. (On a similar note, Minus Five/ Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey sez he’s no relation, as far as he knows, to Iowa’s young fresh McCaughey septuplets, even though both families pronounce it “McCoy.”) In still other entertainment news…
PANTS PARTICIPLES: Loved the notion of an all-female Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (by the new troupe Heads Up Gorgeous at Book-it’s stage). Shakespeare’s plays were originally executed by all-male casts; it’s only appropriate to have reverse-drag of sorts in Tom Stoppard’s sideways take on Hamlet. It also gives a chance for actresses to appear in strong roles that have little or nothing to do with sex or romance, something classic and even modern-classic theater hasn’t enough of. In other gender-related news…
BUYING CHAINS AT A CHAIN STORE: By now you’ve seen the ads for the Castle Superstore, the region’s newest and largest sex-toy shop. Is it worth going the 40 miles to Tacoma for? Probably not, at least not just for the merchandise; mostly the same stuff you can find in Seattle at Show World/ Fantasy Unlimited, Champ Arcade, the Crypt, and/or Toys in Babeland. What sets it apart is its highly female-friendly setting, in a suburban big-box store building (formerly Olympic Sports) right down Tacoma Mall Boulevard from the Discovery Zone and Chuck E. Cheese. Under bright fluorescents, along clean carpeted aisles, you’ve got stacks and stacks of X videos (straight and gay; buy or rent), lace teddies, handcuffs, condoms, body-part-shaped candies, Hustler magazine-brand vibrators, inflatable party dolls, hard- and softcore magazines (all shrink-wrapped), cat-fight paperback novels, oils, creams, perfumes, penis “desensitizing” gels, and more.
The day I was there it had a substantial and very coed clientele, all regular, Sears-clad folks out to make their private lives a bit less drab. There were no nervous giggles, no eyes darting away in shame–just apparently well-adjusted people comfortable with their bodies and with the sight of other people’s bodies. But the arrival of Castle (a Phoenix outfit trying to go national) doesn’t just represent the mainstreaming of the sex biz but the chaining of it. It proves there’s no retail niche too specialized or too outre for the consolidators.
SHOPPING DAYS may be winding down, but you’ve still time to send in your recommendations for the annual Misc. In/Out list. Send yours to clark@speakeasy.org. Remember, we seek people, places, and things that will become hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot now. If you think everything that’s presently big’s just gonna keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Macauley Culkin fan-club merchandise to sell you.
OFFAL-LY STRANGE: Your day-earlier-than-normal pre-Thanksgiving Misc. begins with feast-related news from London. In that town where darn near every non-chain restaurant has a veggie page on the menu, where mad-cow disease is still a recent memory, and where vegan activists used to pass out anti-meat flyers outside McDonald’s outlets until the chain sued them for slander (the vegans won), the latest food fad is a return to a UK tradition, delicacies made from offal–organs and other animal parts not normally consumed by modern Western humans. An AP dispatch claims “more than one-quarter of London’s 600 biggest eateries” now serve such items as pig’s-head salad, bloodcake with fried egg, goose neck (stuffed with gizzards), and veal-kidney risotto with crispy pig’s-ears. Many of these meat-byproduct dishes are illegal to commercially serve in the U.S. (you can’t even get a genuine haggis, the national dish of Scotland, ’round these parts); but hey, there’s another air-fare war going on now. In other food news…
BIG STOREWIDE SALE!: Why, you ask, would Fred Meyer (the regional everything-for-everybody chain) want to buy up QFC (the fancy-pants grocery specialists)? Besides the normal drives for consolidation in today’s chew-’em-up, spit-’em-out corporate world, QFC was threatening to infiltrate Freddy’s Oregon stronghold, and QFC’s role in the Pike & Broadway urban-strip-mall complex (with its food-drug-variety-banking combo) is too close to Freddy’s under-one-roof hypermarket concept for Freddy’s to afford to ignore.
Media coverage, natch, emphasized the merger’s potential impact on the Q’s upscale core clientele. The Q responded to this press-generated nonissue by running full page ads promising the Q will remain the Q. Tellingly, there’ve been no ads promising Freddy’s would remain Freddy’s; just a brief reassuring statement from Meyer management. But with seemingly everything else getting gentrified these days, I know I’d be afraid of such possible consequences as Ralph Lauren goods taking over the Pant Kingdom department, Smith & Hawken on the hardware shelves, Aveda at the cosmetics racks, Bang & Olufson replacing the Panasonic boom boxes in the Photo & Sound section, or even a wine shelf with F. G. Meyer’s Choice Beaujolais Nouveau.
MEANWHILE, Freddy’s won an appeal earlier this month in its plan to build a big store at the former Leary Way steel-mill site. The neighborhood advocacy group SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land), which seeks to stop the plan, sez it’ll continue appealing in higher courts. It’s not against a Freddy’s in their part of town, just against it at that particular location. Its latest flyer reiterates a suggestion made in an old Misc., that Freddy’s instead take over the ex-Ernst block up the street. (SOIL’s hotline: 789-1010, fax 789-7109.) In other retail-space news…
WATCH THIS SPACE: The former Kid Mohair on Pine will reopen (maybe as soon as this week) as the Baltic Room, a piano bar (with just beer & wine). While a lot of remodeling work has been done, the space still looks largely like its elegant former self. Why’d Mohair go the way of 80 percent of U.S. small businesses? Maybe the “cigar bar” fad passed its peak; maybe the gentlemanly surroundings clashed too much with the loud, uptempo DJ music. Why might the Baltic Room fare better? For one thing, it’s phase three of the Linda’s Tavern/ Capitol Club cartel, forming a veritable market-segmented lineup of not-specifically-gay watering holes on Pine. Imagine Linda’s as the Chevy of the chain, the Capitol as the Caddy, and the Baltic as the lush-yet-comfy Buick. In other entertainment news…
WET & WILD: Scientists in Quebec City have announced an “invisible condom” they hope to market after a couple years of further testing. According to Reuters, it’s a “polymer-based liquid that solidifies into a gel at body temperature,” forming a waterproof film that blocks STD transmission. Inventors say “it can be used without telling the partner who doesn’t want to use a latex condom.” I’m sure even before the thing gets gov’t. approval, test users will quickly find additional fun uses for the stuff, some of which might even involve sex.
INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.
Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.
MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.
Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”
The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”
Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.
Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”
Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)
The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)
The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”
Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.
Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.
There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.
YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.
The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.
IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.
MISC. ISN’T REALLY as ironic as some readers seem to believe. Really. That AFLAC commercial using a cover of John Denver’s “Annie’s Song” to sell life insurance, without commentary–now that’s ironic. In another current attempt at irony…
THE GENERATION-GAP GAP: KMTT’s promoting its “grownup rock n’ roll” format with billboards proclaiming a mantra to “Turn On, Tune In, Drop the Kids Off at Soccer.” The unspoken premise behind the slogan is the same premise that’s ruled darn near all local mainstream media outlets for the past 15 years–that everybody (or at least everybody who demographically matters to advertisers) is an ex-Sixties radical now domesticated with preteen kids. The problems with this particular gross oversimplification: (1) Despite the eternal hype, a lot of folks who were around back in that still-overhyped decade weren’t necessarily college radicals (in fact, more than half the people living in America in The Late Sixties weren’t even college students!); and (2) folks with preteen kids today are far more likely to have come of age in the late ’70s and ’80s. That’s why KMTT’s sister station KNDD peppers its 9-to-5 hours with old U2 and Duran Duran tracks, to attract the commercially-desirable ex-waveoids now toiling away in dreary office parks. Of course, it’d be harder to make a flashy billboard slogan for grownup synth-popper parents. At the youngest end, there are now households with kids who only know Jane Curtin from 3rd Rock and parents who previously only knew Curtin from Kate & Allie. Speaking of TV celebs…
NEWS FROM UP NORTH: David (Red Shoe Diaries) Duchovny, who plays an occasionally-dead FBI agent on The X-Files, wants Fox to move the show from Vancouver to L.A. so he can spend more time with his sitcom-star bride Tea Leoni. I say, they maybe oughta merge their respective shows into one production so they can be together all the time. They could play a couple of intrepid tabloid photographers in search of E.T.s, killer vampires, and other assorted grisly phenomena. They could call it The Naked Truth Is Out There. Elsewhere in the world of romance…
TAIL HUNTING: A recent Cal Berkeley study claims sexual activity can alter the brain. According to an LA Times story, the researchers claimed that after four weeks, a group of sexually-active male lab rats showed much smaller (and perhaps more sensitive and responsive) nerve cells than the control group of celibate rats. While it certainly brings new meaning to the phrase “fucking one’s brains out,” more intriguing is the name of the prof behind the study–Marc Breedlove.
But these findings wouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with TV’s famous cartoon lab mice, Pinky and the Brain. In two episodes, the genetically-altered, super-smart Brain (a sort of pint-sized Lawnmower Man with an Orson Welles voice) neglects his usual obsession with taking over the world. Both times, it’s the lure of a female mouse that does it. Elsewhere in the world of science…
REAL VIRTUALITY: The Seattle-made Virtual i-Glasses (goggles with tiny LCD video monitors inside) are no more, but another local company, Microvision, has announced it’s working on a “virtual retinal display” technology that would, if and when perfected for mass production, would use hi-tech glasses or goggles to scan video images (from TVs, PCs, VCRs, etc.) directly onto the viewer’s eye via a low-level, laser-like beam. According to the company’s PR, “the user believes he’s seeing a video image an arm’s length away.” My question is, what would happen if somebody used Microvision to watch a videocassette that’s been copy-protected with Macrovision?
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Your Misc. party-watch team personally witnessed two Xenas, umpteen sword-‘n’-sorcery warriors, lotsa devils, at least three Pippi Longstockings, two Fred Flintstones, a Grinch (with his dog Max and Cindy Lou Who), a bloodied Princess Di (trailed by a photographer sporting a “Le Press Pass” badge), one Bill Gates, several Catwomen (one with a condom on her tail), a pregnant cheerleader, a martini olive, a pair of potted poinsettias, and a Laverne & Shirley pair (I told “Laverne” how much I loved the film Awakenings; she didn’t know what I was talking about).
WELCOME BACK to a return-of-standard-time edition of Misc., the pop-culture column that will miss traded-away Sonics benchwarmer Steve Scheffler. The lovable, lanky Scheffler was an inspiration to everyone who toiled just outside the three-point-arc of fame. He was basketball’s version of St. Bartholemew (the guy in the 12 Apostles who had nothing written about him in the Gospels except his name).
ON THE BUS: Ever feel cramped inside an airplane fuselage? Boeing’s arch rivals at Airbus Industrie have a potential answer, though they’re only promoting it right now as a freight plane. The Airbus Super Transporter, which recently touched town for a promotional event at Boeing Field, is this huge bulbous thing, like a giant Playmobil toy plane; perhaps the most unairworthy-looking thing big engines can push off of the ground. I couldn’t get hold of a picture of it, but it looks almost exactly like the “Thunderbird 2” equipment-transport plane on the classic UK puppet show Thunderbirds. Imagine the kind of interiors you could have built in the thing: Multi-tiered seating, or better yet a multi-level party yacht in the sky, with potential amenities (saunas, beds, live bands) limited only by total weight and power consumption. Just the thing for flying over the International Date Line at the turn of the millennium!
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Alien Pops not only come in great flavors like “Watermelon Slice” and “Strawberry Shake,” they’re shaped like your classic bald, bug-eyed, UFO-abduction-story alien heads. Even better, they come from the saucer-sighting capital, Roswell, N.M. Available at Dan & Ray’s in Belltown or by calling (800) 522-5534.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: XX (Where the Girls Are!), the latest addition to the growing subgenre of local zines proudly billed as “By Women,” is a concise four-tabloid-page monthly newsletter edited by Sandra Faucett and Cresentia Jenkins, focusing on event listings of interest to third-wave (or is it third-and-a-half wave?) feminists of varying sorts. Issue #1focuses on women’s basketball with Seattle Reign game dates and trivia. There’s also a review of ex-local writer Natalie Jacobsen‘s book No Forwarding Address and breast-cancer-info Web links. At the usual drop-off spots, by mail (at P.O. Box 20834, Seattle 98102), or online (www.yin.org). In a somewhat different vision of feminine “empowerment”…
THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE: I’d long wondered when the three not-all-that-compatible branches of Republican ideology (unfettered capitalism; moral prudery; anti-governmental ranting) would stumble apart on an issue. It might be happening in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, directly north of Seattle. There, managers and staff of the Sugar’s strip club are circulating petitions on an initiative that, if it makes the ballot and passes, would change the new town’s set-up to add an additional layer of bureaucracy. Sugar’s management openly says it wants a government less capable of restricting operations at the club (known as among the raunchiest table-dance joints in the state), and believes a more cumbersome municipal organization would be more likely to leave the place alone. In other words, less governance via more government. (But then again, the exotic-dance biz has always known about less equalling more.)
Anyhow, the initiative’s chances of success are questionable. The Sugar’s people (most of whom, along with most of the club’s clientele, live outside Shoreline) have done a good job of publicizing their effort, but have done a poor job of communicating how their proposed governmental change would benefit the suburb’s 5,000 residents. Still, it’s interesting to see the sex industry reaching out for public support, instead of just lobbying politicians and suing in courts to defend its right to exist. Club managers are betting that commercial pseudo-sex has become mainstream enough that Shoreline voters will actively agree to help the club stay in business. After all, it’s not like they’re a sports team demanding a subsidized arena or a department store demanding a pedestrian park be sliced in two.
WORD-O-THE-WEEK: “Abulia.”
(This week’s reader question: Who has more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Respond at clark@speakeasy.org, our new email home. Thanx.)
AFTER LAST OCTOBER’S COLUMN about a trip to Reno, several readers suggested I go to Las Vegas next time for the real gambling/ tourism/ party spectacle. I did. Some pseudo-random thoughts:
It’s hot. A hundred degrees in the afternoon, eighty at night, seven to nine months a year. No wonder so many tourists are willing to stay indoors, inside their all-under-one-roof hotel-resorts. It’s amazing the Strip has as much foot traffic as it does.
It’s large. Much larger than you think. The bigger of the two main tourist zones, the Strip (a highway built parallel to a railroad from L.A.) is four miles long and a mile wide.
It’s modern-day capitalism laid bare. Incessantly gaudy and hyper, devoted to redistributing wealth from the many to the few. If Seattle’s official mindset is mandatory mellowness, Vegas’s is mandatory excitement, unending “fun.” (Fortunately, I stayed at the Horseshoe, known as the most serious of the downtown hotel-casinos.)
On the plus side, it’s what Republicans and capitalists can accomplish when they don’t have to buy votes from Christians. It’s loud yet clean, gaudy but slick, naughty in a thoroughly businesslike manner.
While the famous Nevada brothels are zoned way outta town, Vegas generally treats sex not as a natural aspect of life: i.e., as something to make cash from. Bigtime skin shows operate in some of the same casino theaters as “family” shows (magicians at 8, breasts at 10). Honeymooning brides from Japan line up to get their photos next to the seven-foot nude male statue in front of Caesar’s Palace.
The #1 category in the Vegas yellow pages is 150 pages of “Entertainers–Adult” (hotel-room strippers). I’m told most don’t fuck for money, though some will let you think they might until after you’ve paid them. I didn’t find out for myself.
I didn’t gamble either. Like veggie burgers or sex with men, it just didn’t personally attract me. Instead, I watched other humans of all adult ages, genders, and nationalities feed coin after coin into hungry slots, hoping the machines would come down with a sudden case of coin diahhrea.
On the strip you can visit ersatz versions of nearly every spot on the world: Latin America (Rio, the small Aztec), Europe (the Riviera, plus Paris and Venice resorts to come), Britain (Excalibur), the Caribbean (Treasure Island), the U.S. East (New York New York), the U.S. South (the Orleans, Texas Station), the U.S. midwest (Countryland, soon to come), north Africa (Luxor, the Sahara). But not Australia, Canada, or the Northwest (except for some totem poles outside a downtown ethnic-art store). But the weirdest work of cultural appropriation is the MGM Grand, “honoring” the movie studio that was dismantled and sold in pieces to finance the casino. But Vegas is always engorging on its former selves; witness the just-demolished Sands and Dunes. Next to go: the Aladdin, this Xmas.
Just beyond the Strip is street-level Vegas: bars and liquor stores, industrial buildings, wedding chapels, one or two real churches, motels, trailer courts, malls, strip malls, strip clubs, cul de sac subdivisions, gas stations, panhandlers, industrial businesses servicing the casino trade. More human-scale than the resorts, but little more heartwarming.
The casinos’ “sports book” areas became my idea of a potential full-time life environment. Imagine a cross between Number Two’s office in The Prisoner and a network TV studio on Election Night. Eighty-seven TV monitors, streaming news tickers, huge odds boards. I fantasized about the life of a casino pro: sleeping any hours I chose, eating at the buffets, gathering all available info about the teams and the horse races, living off the only consistantly winnable games in town (sports bets and poker). Watching the Ms’ first two losses on multiple big-screen TVs was a heartbreak experience, and a sign beckoning me home again. I realized I couldn’t live there, even if I could take the heat. So much of my life here doesn’t exist in the city that supposedly’s got everything (or exists only in scattered locations, far from the tourist areas)–things like bookstores, indie coffeehouses, fringe theater and performance art, anything that’s not part of the unending hustle for money.
Online Extras:
To imagine the size of The Strip, think of the I-5 corridor from the Montlake Cut to Northgate Mall. Or for you out-of-Seattle online readers, imagine one-third the length of Manhattan Island, devoted entirely to tourism and specifically to one mega-resort after another, interrupted only by a (very) few side streets, gas stations, fast-food stands, a handful of strip malls, a few surviving indie casinos, and some huge vacant lots where new mega-resorts are about to be built.
The Horseshoe hotel, where I stayed, is in the downtown area, the second and smaller casino district. (There are also individual resorts along other arterial highways and scattered other spots throughout Clark County.) Downtown Vegas was started as a railroad company town in 1906; above-ground casino gambling began there in 1931 as a Depression-era gimmick. But because the city had slightly more stringent licensing rules in the ’40s and ’50s than the state and county governments, most of the Mob and Teamster money that built the initial core of today’s Vegas went to developments on The Strip, just outside the old city limits. In the early ’90s, the city took the step that’s proven fiscally fatal in other towns, and turned its main street into an outdoor mall. Somehow, it worked. The giant canopy over five blocks of Fremont St. helps block the punishing desert sun, and the nighttime light shows on the canopy unite the 11 casinos on it into one entity of closer-to-human-scale thrills. Particularly cool is the block of the mall devoted to the “Neon Museum,” a half-dozen achingly cool old casino, motel, and milk-plant signs now removed from the buildings they once drew people toward. Walk outside the malled area downtown and you’ll find, well, not much. Just governmental buildings, law offices, a Kinko’s Copies, a couple of squatty six-story bank buildings, some of those famous picturesque wedding chapels, a city transit center, and a freeway separating the district from the residential zones to the north. How complete is the economy’s dependence on entertainment travel and gambling? When the local minor-league baseball team sought relatively modest public subsidies for a new stadium (which would also be offered as a spring-training site for major-league teams), authorities rejected the request on the grounds that it wouldn’t bring in enough out-of-towners.
As noted in Peter Rock’s novel This Is the Place, a large part of the Vegas mentality is based on notions of rebellion against a specific type of conservatism, that of the Mormons who populate much of the lightly-populated inland west (and who briefly had a mission at what later became today’s Las Vegas). The bright lights, the larger-than-life ostentatiousness, the endlessly-flowing booze, the intense freneticism, the strip shows, the uniformly “naughty” vision of sexuality, the insistent “bad taste,” and the total immersion in the idea of pleasure thru spending–all directly relate to universal human temptations the Mormons (and the Mormons’ arch-rivals-in-the-same-league, the Fundamentalists) devote their lives toward repressing.
Vegas, however, could use a little more of one positive Mormon trait, their sense of community. Public spending hasn’t kept up with the area’s massive population growth (now nearing 1 million). Not just the public schools but even the police and fire departments have had to resort to special levy elections, which invariably lose. School buildings either run year-round or on double shifts to pack in all the kids of workers at the casinos (and at the supply and construction companies servicing the casinos, and at the secondary and tertiary employers like car dealers and pawn shops). Meanwhile, the more affluent residents and newcomers (mainly from California) hole themselves up in new gated subdivisions patrolled by private rent-a-cops, steadfastly unwilling to consider themselves part of a larger regional tribe.
And forget about finding any of the lounge music associated with historic Las Vegas by latter-day hipsters. There’s still plenty of lounges, but they’re almost all devoted to “high energy” Earth Wind and Fire cover bands.
WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU’RE LAME: Here at Misc., we’re among the many sports fans who aren’t all that sad to say goodbye to Shawn Kemp. He wasn’t the first legend-in-his-own-mind to believe the world would instantly recognize and appreciate his all-around superiority if he only got outta Seattle, where grandstanding demands for idol-worship are often answered not with supplication but with dismissive pleas to get real. Most of the ambitious emigrants I’ve known, who all left town in full certainty of their imminent superstardom, got as far as becoming studio musicians on centerfold videos or bit parts on unaired TV pilots. It takes more than just a hostile attitude toward most everybody around you to make it in one’s chosen profession’s bigtime. It even takes more than the extraordinary talent Kemp’s definitely got. Despite NBA and Nike marketing themes to the contrary, basketball’s still a team game. And, as just about everybody’s middle-school P.E. teacher used to say, there’s no “I” in the word “team.” Speaking of poor sports…
THE FINAL SPORTS BLOOPER REEL: Disgraced sportscasters, like dead celebrities, appear to come in threes. First O. J. Simpson, then Frank Gifford, now Marv Albert. I’m just waiting for the inevitable Albert-meets-Tyson jokes to pop up. The whole tawdry affair almost makes those Fox Sports Northwest promo ads (the ones with images of the lovably square Dave Niehaus intercut with images of a trashed hotel room) seem nearly plausible.
THE MAILBAG: Seattle Scroll writer Jesse Walker writes in to insist he knew all along how the anti-Internet-hoax letter he ran in a recent “net hysteria” essay (reviewed in Misc. two weeks ago) was itself a hoax, and that attentive readers could’ve inferred from his piece that he knew. Unfortunately, he won’t get to clarify this in the Scroll‘s pages. The feisty year-old biweekly’s run out of money and probably won’t come out again.
DRAWING THE LINE: Recent years have seen lotsa grownup in-jokes in cartoons. One Cartoon Network promo spot’s built exclusively around material kids aren’t supposed to know about. It features the Tex Avery dog Droopy and Scooby Doo‘s Shaggy in a convertible, talking about how the Time Warner-owned cable channel’s now seen worldwide, when Shaggy asks, “Do you know what they call Pound Puppies in France?” Explaining how there’s no such thing as “pounds” in the metric system, Shaggy then asks, “What do they call Smurfs in Spain?” His answer: “Los Smurfs.” Only that’s wrong–as anyone who went to the Smurf theme park in France knows, the late Belgian cartoonist Peyo‘s critters have a different cutesy name in each major Euro language (Stroumphs, Schlumphs, et al.). In Spain, they’re “Los Pitufos.”
OFF THE LINE: Hard to believe it just a year ago when virtually every writer, photographer, cartoonist, graphic designer, and programmer in town was either being recruited for or trying to push their way into no-benefits “contract” employment as “content creators” for the Microsoft Network and/or Microsoft-owned websites. But now, the one company that could indefinitely sustain extensive, money-losing online ventures has chosen not to do so, at least not to its first extent. Many of the paid-access MSN sites (including the “alternative culture” site Mint) are being shut down; others are being scaled back. The free-access MSNBC website is also laying off almost half its “temp” workers; while the company’s Sidewalk entertainment-listing sites scattered across the country have faced greater-than-expected staff turnover (apparently several key people were hired as “creative” writers, only to find themselves stuck typing in movie-theater showtimes). While I’ll certainly look forward to seeing some of my acquaintances on this side of the pond a little more often,
ON THE LINE: After two years of development (interrupted by putting an ever-bigger paper out every week), there’s finally a Stranger website at www.thestranger.com. Each week’s current Misc. can be temporarily found on the site. The Misc. World HQ site (www.miscmedia.com) continues as a complete archive of the column and of assorted other things I’ve written over the years.
PASSAGE (from Incredibly Strange Music organist Korla Pandit): “Music may not save your soul, but it will cause your soul to be worth saving.”
UPDATE: On the day last week’s Stranger Misc. column went to the printer, with its call for the P-I to bring back Zippy the Pinhead, the paper announced it would indeed reinstate Bill Griffith’s exquisitely-drawn, smartly off-kilter comic. Nice to see the paper’s editors know what’s good for the publication as a whole, even if it’s not what scores highest in market research. Speaking of publications in tune with their readers…
I AM JOE’S LUMBAGO: The oh-so-venerable Reader’s Digest is having some financial woes. Executives are resigning, the stock price’s going down, circulation’s flat (though still 15 million, comparable to the whole population of English-speaking Canada). It’s easy to see why Wall Street doesn’t like the magazine or the company that makes it. At a time when Deadheads are joining AARP, RD‘s Lawrence Welk image isn’t what many advertisers want. More importantly, the clean-cut, hyper-respectable brand of conservatism RD‘s championed doesn’t fit with today’s go-go, business-above-all mentality.
It hadn’t always been this way, of course. In the ’20s, RD founders DeWitt and Lila Wallace forged a niche product, taking existing articles from other magazines and rewriting them for fast, easy reading by people on the move. (For decades, its only ads were endorsements for itself by corporate hotshots and movie stars). By the ’50s, the Wallaces had turned their little reprint mag into a global brand, aimed squarely (pun intended, natch) at the most straitlaced of mass audiences. By championing cultural as well as political conservatism, it built a loyal subscriber base (a handy market for RD‘s mail-order books and records). But by defining itself and its audience as off to oneside from the social zeitgeist‘s twists-‘n’-turns, it now risks being left behind. Can RD avoid offending its easily-offended reader base while reaching out beyond it? As “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” might say, “Dubitable.” Speaking of shifting zeitgeists…
SPANKING NEW: If you think S/M fetishes around here have gotten as mainstreamed as they could get, you haven’t seen NYC’s new restaurant La Nouvelle Justine (named for the de Sade novel). An AP dispatch claims the three-month-old eatery supplmenents its French-inspired cuisine with “a birthday paddling, boot cleaning, or the chance to eat from a dog bowl at the feet of a whip-wielding mistress,” plus “Masochist” and “Necrophiliac” cocktails. Dimly-lit walls are etched with medieval fetish scenes. There’s a fake prison cell, an oversized high chair, and leather wrist cuffs. Waitresses and waiters are dressed as “dominants,” busboys as slaves. The story claims the place “draws more giggling voyeurs than hard-core afficionados of the master,” quoting one serious fetishist as saying it “could be a spot for bus tourists.” Speaking of fads gone too far…
OFF THE RACK: The Spice Girls, that singing group (Sporty Spice, Sexy Spice, Strong Spice, Scary Spice, Posh Spice) that claims in interviews to not be the shallow studio-manufactured image machine it really is, has proven so popular it’s spawned knockoff quintets throughout Britain. Here’s my idea for my own “Misc. Spice Melange”:
(Speaking of musical fads, we’ve already received plenty of entries in our search for formerly-popular music genres that haven’t been subjected to recent “hip” revival attempts. You’ve still time to send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org. Results here next week.)
A Star and His Bucks
Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey
8/21/97
Pour Your Heart Into It
by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang
Hyperion, $24.95
There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.
Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.
A comparison is due at this point:Â Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.
Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.
On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).
Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.
Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.
Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”
BRIEFS
Thrift Score
Al Hoff
HarperCollins
Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.
Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.
Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.
Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest
Lorna Price, ed.
University of Washington Press
The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?
These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.
EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS
Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.
The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.
If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.
WATCH THIS SPACE #1: A new independent movie house is tentatively set to open sometime next month, joining the Grand Illusion, the Admiral, and the part-time screening spaces around town. The 108-seat Casbah Cinema‘s downstairs in the Sailors’ Union building at 1st and Wall, next to the former Trade Winds/ My Suzie’s restaurant space. Owners Laura and Anton DeJong are self-described “big film fans” who’ve planned for years to set up their own “grand cinema on a small scale.” They promise “classic and foreign films, but nothing really obscure” on Thurs.-Sun. evenings, with early-week dates open for rental to independent screeners and community groups. The DeJongs are also opening a cafe in part of the space, but aren’t applying for a liquor license at this time–a shame, since some of the McMenamin brewpubs in Oregon have quaint little screening spaces attached to ’em.
WATCH THIS SPACE #2: A Barnes & Noble book superstore (or perhaps a B&N-owned B. Dalton regular-size chain bookstore) is rumored to be taking over the Fantasy Unlimited/ Deja Vu corner at 1st & Pike, previously considered for a new public library. Scouts for the chain are said to have been poring over Left Bank Books across the street in the Market, presumably to make sure the new B&N’s fully competitive in the fields of feminist-film-analysis zines and left-activist memoirs. B&N’s regional management claims no definitive plans to add a location downtown, or anywhere else in town, just yet. While anything’s possible, I’d bet against ’em taking that particular site. For one thing, it’s too small as is, and its adjacent buildings are controlled by too many different interests to make assembling an appropriate parcel easy.
STOPPING THE PRESSES: Aorta, the occasional local art tabloid, has published its fifth and last issue under its current all-visual-arts format. Publisher/editor Jim Demetre’s closing editorial gripes predictably about the vagaries of trying to mount a self-sufficient, unsubsidized journal promoting indie and fringe visual artists. But he also complains that “There are many issues which I am very interested in writng and reading about,” but “the local visual art scene… has rarely provided me, or my writers, with a relevant point of departure for discussing them.”
While thanking Demetre for going this far, and acknowledging he has every right to revamp his publicaiton into something he’s more willing to put time and toil into (he plans to resume later this year with a more generalist culture-crit rag), his statement says something about the state of contemporary-art criticism in America. In Aorta, its precursor Reflex, and some of the slick NYC art mags, critics haven’t seemed to want to write about art or artists as much as about the critics’ own philosophical/ political worldviews. Sometimes, articles and reviews in these would take no more than a sideways glance at the nominal art topic, before wandering around about the writer’s beliefs concernig The Dominant Culture and The Other; or about how prejudice is a major contemporary problem and it’s those people who aren’t like us who’re always committing it. We could still use a regional contemporary-art mag that’s really about contemporary art, but it’d take a whole rethinking of the critic’s role. Any takers?
STARTING THE PRESSES: Two Rocket veterans have pop-cult self-help books just out: Start Your Own Band by Marty Jourard and Start Your Own Zine by Veronika Kalmar. Both are packaged by one Jet Lambert (described on the back cover as “a muse to those bitten by the bug of entrepreneurism in the 1990s”) and distributed by Hyperion (the Disney book division that just paid an upteen-thousand-dollar advance for the yet-unwritten memoir of Seattle Schools boss John Stanford). Besides the juicy irony of learning about DIY culture-making from one of Earth’s hugest media giants, there’s something strange about instruction books for activities you’re not supposed to need instruction books for. Still, ex-Motels member Jourard does get some good basic topics covered (such as what chords are and why good used guitars can be better than bad new ones); while Kalmar’s book lightly touches on a lot of topics experienced zinesters (such as myself) already know plenty about.
YOUR HELP NEEDED: Can you think of any formerly-popular American musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? If you know of one, please let me know at clark@speakeasy.org.
The Action Cinema of Andy Sidaris:
Fit to Kill
Video review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 7/14/97
Andy Sidaris just might be the only currently-active, American-born action filmmaker worthy of criticism. His movies really move, like the best Hong Kong actioners and unlike your basic bloated Hollywood shoot-’em-up. It helps that Sidaris (a former ABC Sports staff director who branched out into movies in ’73 and started his own production company in ’85) conceives his low-budget blowouts primarily for the same overseas theaters that play the Hong Kong stuff. (His works are straight-to-video releases in the U.S.) Many are set in Hawaii, the perfect mid-Pacific metaphor for his mix of American action elements (huge guns, huge muscles, huge breasts) and Asian film staples (preposterous stunts, exhaustingly convoluted plots). His stars (chiefly bodybuilders, male models, and Playboycenterfolds) know they can’t act and gleefully don’t care. His story premises might mix blackmail, espionage, and drug smuggling (his newest, Hard Hunted, even fits in Internet cyber-crooks); but they’re just excuses to get the characters’ Uzis out and their blouses off. His frequent softcore sex scenes exist in a universe of complete gender equality–his female roles are just as strong and assertive as his male roles; his guys are just as dumb as his gals. And no matter how steamy the snuggling or how gross the gunfire, the dialogue never gets naughtier than this line in Hard Ticket to Hawaii: “All I know is I want to lick the nail polish right off your toes.”Start with Malibu Express, his least violent film (and his first as producer). If you end up digging its over-the-top strangeness and eager-to-please showmanship, consider moving on to his more recent titles like The Dallas Connection, Picasso Trigger, and the aerobics-themed Fit to Kill.
(LATTER-DAY NOTE: The Sidaris family has asked me to invite readers of this page to their own site, www.andysidaris.com.)
HERE AT MISC., we continue to view with bemusement the twists of fate regarding our allegedly post-print-media era. Blockbuster Music on Lower Queen Anne now has huge window posters announcing “We Now Sell Books!” Amazon.Com Books’ stock sale is a big hit, despite the outfit’s lack of profits to date. Book superstore chains haven’t yet led to increased overall book sales (certainly not compared to all the increased retail square footage now devoted to books), but they’ve shaken up a hidebound industry and just might lead to the end of the bestseller mentality (it’s already happening in the record biz, with the same sales dollars now spread among many more releases).
And by the end of this month, local TV newscasts (not counting Northwest Cable News) will drop from a total of 13 hours per weekday (including two hours of 7 Live) down to 8.5, due to the second realignment of station ownership in two years and the return of CBS shows to KIRO. The decimation of the KSTW news operation (and smaller cutbacks at KIRO) leave some 58 station employees on the unemployment rolls. I can see it now: Blow-dried reporters on the sidewalk, in trenchcoats with white spots where station-logo patches used to be, holding up signs (printed on the backs of old cue cards) reading WILL COVER CAR CRASHES FOR FOOD.
UPDATE #1: Virtual i-O, local makers of the Virtual i-Glasses video headsets discussed here a few months back, has gone under. The headsets were cute and offered an intimate viewer-image experience, but (according to a Puget Sound Biz Journal piece) the company couldn’t get the quality and reliability up and the price down before it ran out of funds. TCI, the company’s leading investor/creditor, now owns the rights to the technology.
UPDATE #2: The coffeehouse cereal fad quietly faded like a soggy bowl of Total. The espresso corner in the U District’s Red Light clothing store’s dropped its cereal selections; the downtown Gee Whiz cafe’s cut its own golden-bowl offerings down to a few top-rated brands.
ON THE RACKS #1: We’re still trying to make sense of People magazine’s “Sexy Moms” cover last month. They’re surprised moms can have sex appeal? The mag’s editors, like many Americans, must not realize that most people who have children have had sex first. And many of them even liked it.
ON THE RACKS #2: It’s been a quasi-frustratin’ year for this lover of obscure magazines, with the demise of the YNOT and ALFI stapled-goodie emporia. At least there’s the U-Village Barnes & Noble, where you can still get British Cosmopolitan, perhaps the sluttiest mainstream commercial women’s magazine published in the English language. Sample articles include “Why Bitches Get All the Best Men” and “The Single Woman’s Guide to the Men of Europe” (the latter complete with jokes about Bratwurst and “Nor-Dicks”). But the articles are just warm-ups for the little ads in the back of the book: phone astrology lines, phone sex lines for women, and more before-and-after implant photographs than you’d ever ever expect in the same mag with workplace-equality and anti-harassment essays in the front.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Want more proof computer geeks are the new idols? Just examine the new Think! brand “Proactive Energy” bar, using the old IBM slogan for its name and a Mac screen window on its label. Makers “Ph.D–Personal Health Development,” list a website (www.thinkproducts.com) but give no FDA-required city-state address (the website lists it as in Ventura, CA). It’s your basic exercise/ diet energy-bar thang, a fudgy-mediciny goo with a thin chocolaty coating. Mixed up in there are ginkgo biloba, choline, “complex peanut protein,” vitamins, herbs, and amino acids. It claims to “enhance the performance of your mind by promoting concentration, calmness, and stamina” if you eat one with water “30 minutes before using your brain.” But you ask, does it work? This column was written on one. Can you tell any difference?
MY ADORATION OF JACK BENNY notwithstanding, I decided years ago I wouldn’t rue or deny the inevitable entry into the fourties. I wouldn’t be like those pathetic boomers, forever striving to retain ever-fading remnants of youthful bodies and identities. (My recent diet-exercise regimen had nothing to do with staying young; I was as out-of-shape at 17 as I was last year.)
No, I plan to age disgracefully into a crochety old geezer. Having bosses younger than me, at a paper targeted at readers younger than me, has offered plenty of practice. “Back in my day Sonny, we had real music. Einstruzende Neubauten! Skinny Puppy! Throbbing-fuckin’-Gristle! That crap they listen to these days: Why, it’s just noise!”
I also plan to enjoy the collected experience of my years on Earth. A few years ago I wrote something called “Everything I Ever Really, Really Needed to Know I Learned on the Playground.” Since then I’ve learned a few more things, including the following:
