Polyamory: One plus one plus…

Feature article for the Stranger, 1/27/95

The concept of nonmonogomous, consensual, structured relationships is an old idea. From King David’s harem and the Mahabharata’s princess with five husbands to the early Mormons to turn-of-the-century free-love communities, people have looked for workable alternatives to monogamy and cheating.

People exploring nonmonogamy these days use a lot of different terms to describe their lifestyles, including “polyfidelity” and “polyamory”. The two words are more-or-less interchangeable, though the former is more likely to be used by people who consider their current multi-partner setups more or less stable and who aren’t taking or looking for other mates.

I had a long, boistrous chat with 14 “polys” I met through a computer bulletin board. They came from a variety of backgrounds, although the plurality were middle-aged hippies who hadn’t stopped questioning society’s norms. There were heteros, lesbians, gays, and a few bi males. (One man said he got into the poly world because he’d fallen in love with a woman but didn’t want to give up men.) They were currently and/or formerly in a variety of nontraditional partnerships–triads, quads, “Vs” (one person who sleeps with two other people who don’t sleep with each other). Some were in closed relationships; some had “primary” partners plus other lovers.

They met me after their regular Polyfidelity Potluck, where they’d dined with fellow polys (and people interested in becoming polys) and discussed issues relating to their lifestyle. Some of them also meet regularly for group massage and hot-tub parties. Some were raising children, conceived with present or previous partners.

(Everybody here is identified by a fake name unless otherwise noted. Some of them say that in their particular workplaces or social situations, it’s easier to come out as gay or bisexual than as having multiple lovers.)

How they got into it

Several said they’d found their way into the poly life after unsatisfying experiences with impersonal promiscuity, either on their own or in the swinger underground. That lifestyle delivered sexual variety but left the spirit very unfulfilled. George, one of the over-40s in the group, said, “What I found in this community was a way to fall in love again. I spent 15 years after my divorce fucking my brains out, keeping loving relationships at arms length.”

George, 50, has had “lovers who were significantly younger than I. It wasn’t like we were bonded in some perverse monogamous way. They weren’t going to be caring for me when I was 80 or anything.”

Carol had been in a longterm relationship with Mark, when she began to have affairs in secret. “He found out. We went to a polyfidelity workshop. I was amazed by the integrity, the quality of the people I’ve found. It seemed like a workable model. It’s forced us to be honest in a way I’d never dreamed we could be.”

Mark, Carol’s lover, said he found people in the poly subculture seemed to be “much more vulnerable and open. That’s helped me relax a lot.”

Kathy and her lover had been involved in the swinger subculture. “There was a lot of free sex, but a taboo on being lovers.” She longed to share hearts with more than one person, not just orgasms. She said she’s found this in the poly subculture. “I never felt much jealousy, any reason any relationship should do away with any other relationship.”

Gina originally was “with a partner, sort of by chance monogomous. He was getting restless, concerned about being stuck in a relationship. He broached the subject of being with other people. I said, `It sounds like fun. Sure. Now what do we do?’ Nothing happened for a while. We answered ads in Fantasies (a swinger magazine). They were swinger or cruiser types, just in it for sex. It didn’t work out. But from one step after another, we found a community. This community, this family, is very important to me.”

The community

Scott came to the meeting with his female lover; both have spouses. “This is a community of people who understand open sexuality, the possibilities of nonmonogamy. They can pull together in understanding, better than a monogamous group can. My wife wanted to leave me 10 years ago. Our lovers came to us; they offered consolation and love in a non-judgemental way. They gave us the support to stay together.

“I haven’t been in a committed relationship, because I didn’t want the baggage of coupledom. The group gave me a new vision of coupledom: of giving each relationship its full potential, the full open range of what each particular relationship has.”

Melanie, Scott’s lover, was one of the founders of the potlucks. She said she was initally surprised at the degree of bisexual affection she found when she joined the polyfi community, even among the men. “Sexuality among the same sex is always there. You won’t do it with someone of the same sex necessarily, but when you remove the artificial barriers to it, it all opens up.”

George believes some people are destined to be in love with more than one person at a time. “Most cupids have a few bows and arrows; some have submachine guns.” George also differentiates between the poly subculture, with its emphasis on safe sex and mutual support, and unthinking promiscuity. “What we’re doing has some basic tenets; honesty and consensuality especially. Adultery is a part of monogamy. What we’re doing is different from that. People in this group are interested in sexuality and expanding it. We push the boundaries of sex, the whole gradation between shaking hands and fucking one’s brains out.”

How they work it out

Gene, one of the younger potluck members at age 29, came to the group interview with his lover and her three children. His wife was out of town that week. “We agreed to this when we got married over 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s unreasonable to assume that one person would be your be-all and end-all for the rest of your life.”

Still, he noted that “you trade one set of problems for another when you’re willing to let your partner look at other people naked and want to touch them.”

Janet agreed that with a consensual poly life you get rid of the dishonesty that comes with cheating, as well as the frustrations that come with unrequited desires, but you still have to deal with the natural jealousy. “You shouldn’t expect the jealousy to ever go away, but you learn to live with it.”

Scott has “a primary partner who has a wife; but her wife doesn’t do boys.” He said every nonmonogamous relationship sets up its own boundaries: “Just about everyone’s negotiated their comfort level with their partners.”

Another problem, and the main reason everyone in the interview wanted fake names, was outside intolerance. “We get targeted by the religious right just like any other sexual minority,” Scott added. “We sometimes call it `dysphilia,’ the inability to love or the fear of love.”

Outside intolerance is especially tough when partners in an open or multiple relationship are raising children; neighbors, school officials, and government agencies have been known to interfere in nontraditional households with kids. Marianne, 42, has been in one nonmonogamous relationship or another her whole adult life. She believes children can get more care and attention in non-nuclear families. “Groups are a wonderful way to raise children. Children really benefit when there are more adults around.”

One woman’s story

After two “triads,” Marianne fell in love with a UW researcher four years ago. “He hadn’t done multiple relationships before. He said `Let’s be open to it in the future.’ Then in grad school, he began studying with a woman. We all became friends.

“Then we got a national newsletter about multiples. He was reading it, came to bed, and said he’d like a `secondary’ relationship with this woman. We finally figured out the thing that would be most comfortable for me is that they’d see each other every Wednesday. It wasn’t strict, but it was a framework. We tried a threesome once, but she was uncomfortable with it. That relationship went on for over a year. She went on to other things. It just faded. We’re still open to other intimate relationships in our life. He again has a woman he sees once a week. I don’t think they’re sexual and I don’t care.”

Differences of interest

Professional counselor Kathy Severson (her real name) recently advertised in the Stranger Bulletin Board for a nonmonogamy discussion group she wanted to start. She got 26 responses from men and only one from a woman. She placed a similar ad in the Lesbian Resource Center’s paper and got no responses. Severson, herself a participant in a lesbian poly relationship, believes women (gay or straight) are more hesitant than men (gay or straight) about expressing a desire for multiple partnerships–even though women can be about as likely as men to cheat on their lovers. “My perception is that gay men have an easier time accepting nonmonogamy; while lesbians resist the idea. It’s more how we’re socialized as men and as women.”

Severson says she’s sometimes “astounded” by some people’s lack of curiosity about alternate relationships. “It threatens what they’re doing. You talk about it and they give you this stony-faced look. Lifelong monogamy is an ideal some people don’t want to give up, even people who’ve come out as lesbians and gays….The nuclear family model has been so destructive. It isolates people. The ownership issue in monogamy still needs to be questioned, the notion that `I own your body.’ We want to control, to define everything, including our most intimate relationships. There’s all that angst going on, with all the divorces and unhappy couples out there, but when you suggest alternatives you get such resistance….We have knowledge of how to live without fear, scarcity or ownership. But here we are, bound in structures and contracts that bind us. To heal that dichotomy is the challenge.”

In her work, Severson has found two main ways people come into non-couples. “There are some people who discover nonmonogamy consciously, on their own or with a partner, try to consciously come to a new way to relate. The other group are those like me who almost accidentally find our way into questioning the dominant relationship structures. I fell in love two years ago with a woman who had another lover. Since then, nonmonogamy has been my group and counseling focus for about two years.”

One of her favorite aspects of nonmonogamy is its opportunity for what counselors like to call `personal growth.’ “Each relationship calls forth different aspects of your being. If we are secure enough to say `I know I’m special to you,’ why set up road blocks to people’s energies?”

Still, Severson is the first to admit a nonmonogamous life creates as many challenges as opportunities. “It’s about being completely present to whoever I’m with. There are questions of time, space, and energy when you’re trying to be a real intimate partner with even one person, let alone two. If you bring a level of consciousness to a relationship, it’ll do well.”

Resources

The Polyfidelity Potluck is held every other month on Capitol Hill. Some of the people who go to the potlucks also go to a bimonthly workshop studying about ZEEG, an “intentional community” in Germany where open relationships are regularly practiced.

For more info on either group call the BiNet voice mail line, 728-4533. They also recommend the newsletter Loving More or the bookPolyamory: The New Love Without Limits by Deborah Annapol. And there’s an Internet newsgroup, alt.polyamory, where issues such as these are discussed in sometimes-excrutiating detail. Severson can be reached for group or individual counseling at 233-8538.

As has been our practice since 1988, this year’s list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not necessarily what’s big now. If you believe everything already big will just keep getting bigger forever, we’ve got some Northern Exposure and Barney merchandise to sell you.

1/95 Misc. Newsletter

(the last newsletter edition)

(incorporating expanded versions of three Stranger columns

and one Stranger zine review)

ALL LIFE TO THE LIVING! (FRANKLIN ROSEMONT)

As it must to all zines, death comes to the newsletter version of Misc. Do not feel forlorn; I’m simply gonna concentrate on the Misc. column in the Stranger and on my book projects, including the Seattle music history coming out this spring.

Misc. started in June 1986 as a monthly column in the Lincoln Arts Association rag ArtsFocus; the current numbering system dates from that first monthly column. When that paper slowly died, I started the newsletter version (in August 1989) to keep the pop-cult chroniclin’ job going. Since November 1991, Misc. has concurrently run as a monthly newsletter and a weekly column in theStranger. Newsletter subscriptions have fallen drastically in the past year as the Stranger’s free circulation grew. It’s time to concentrate my work on the 80,000 Stranger readers instead of the 50 remaining newsletter subscribers. For now, let’s start one more big roundup of the weird and wonderful:

I DUNNO BAYOU: Winter draws nigh, and with it the seasonal yearning for warmer climes. This year, the preferred destination of many Seattlites isn’t Hawaii or Mexico but New Orleans, and not merely as a visitation site. At least two people I know, who don’t know one another, are moving there; two other friends of mine are thinking about it. As southern-tier towns go, it’s got a lot to offer. It’s perceived as a place of classic architecture, raucous partying, cool cemeteries, hot food, traditional music and weird spirituality; especially when compared to the New South stereotype of sterile suburban sprawl, sleazy developers and sleazier politics. But be prepared. I know people who’ve gone there and come back. They describe a French Quarter full of yuppies in the houses and fratboys on the streets, a political system as sleazy as any in the Sunbelt, a city totally dependent on tourism and plagued by tourist-targeting thieves. There’s a lot to be said for any town that could give us Tennessee Williams, Fats Domino and Anne Rice; just be ready to see fewer welcome mats than you might expect and more “Show Your Tits” placards.

AFTER THE SMOKE CLEARS: It’s not the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that failed this past November, it’s the conservative wing. The wimpy, submissive Lite Right tactics, the tactics of Dems from Scoop Jackson thru Jimmy Carter and beyond, utterly collapsed. Now that there’s no further purpose in preserving the careers of “moderate” Democratic officials, liberals should take over the party machinery and offer up a strong, no-compromise, no-apologies alternative to the right.

To do that, the Dems’ll have to stop playing by the Republicans’ rules. This isn’t a matter of simply infiltrating precienct committees and party organizations to force McGovernite policies onto party platform announcements. I’m talking the whole works, the big boring job.They’ve gotta rethink everything from constituency groups to organizing to fundraising to advertising. We’ve gotta flush away the stinking turd of the idea that liberalism can’t become really popular.

(This ties in with what I’ve been saying about the making of a populist left; one that will expunge the English Department elitism, and instead bring in the funky inclusiveness of the motley loveable mutt of a nation that is America.)

The Right’s ideology has divided society between the Bads who don’t support a big-money agenda (media, government, intellectuals, gays, the “counterculture”) and the Goods who do (big business, big military, big religion, developers, seniors, yuppies). The conservative Democrats divided America between the Bigs who deserved to run things (big business, big government, big construction, big labor) and the Littles who didn’t (pesky Left activists, loony Right demagogues). The post-hippie Left has, for far too long, been trapped with the narrowest goodie/baddie division of them all, between philosopher-king wannabes and those heathens who never studied for a liberal arts degree. All three of these ideologies imply the inevitability of a centralized, hierarchical system of power; they disagree over which sectors of society should have that power.

There’s another way out there, a way that favors small business over big, close communities over sprawling suburbs, new decentralized media over old centralized ones, thinking over obedience, passion over zombiedom. This is the way that could build a coalition among punks, intellectuals, immigrants, minorities, feminists, the downwardly-mobile working class, people who like a healthy environment, people who prefer real economic progress instead of pork-fed defense industries. It won’t be easy; it’ll be hard to keep all these disparate elements together. But it’s the only real way toward a post-conservative future.

FREAKS R US: Don’t have my annual Snohomish County suburbanization rant ‘cuz I stayed home this Xmas. Went back for Thanksgiving, tho, and decided then that there’s one thing you can say about going home for the holidays. It reveals that all of us are connected by fewer than six degrees of separation to at least one potential Montel Williams or Jenny Jones guest. Indeed, tabloid TV serves a vital purpose in remaking our social myths. In the past, people were intimidated into thinking they, or the people they were close to, were just about the only people around with nasty secrets That may have been especially true in places like the Northwest, where a fetishized vision of bland “normality” (the so-called “Northwest Lifestyle”) is virtually a state religion. Weirdness isn’t something that happens only to strangely-dressed people who live in “abnormal” parts of town. And no matter what people do to escape weirdness (like building ever-blander suburbs ever-further-out), it’ll always be there with ’em. “Normal” is simply a wishful fantasy. Understanding this could become one step towards the left-wing populism I’ve advocted. We Outré Artsy Types aren’t the only people who ever transgress against whitebread-Christian behavior. Everybody (almost) is doing or has done it. Need more proof? Just go to any 12-step meeting in a middlebrow neighborhood. The confessions there are enough to make the people on talk shows seem positively blasé. Artsy folks like us aren’t really rebelling against square people, only against their delusions. We’re only exhorting folks to stop hiding their weirdness and start celebrating it. As Boojie Boy said nearly two decades ago, “We’re All Devo.”

COPY WRONGS: Actually found myself agreeing with something Newt the Coot said, when he championed the Internet and other “new media” for “many-to-many” communication rather than “few-to-many” corporate entertainment. Newt saw the rise of right-wing media (talk radio, religious TV, “upscale” magazines, et al.) become a counterforce to the “objective” corporate media, and thinks the new telecommunications could further strengthen his favorite voices. (Let’s not tell him his favorite media’s just the same few-to-many syndrome without the old-school bureaucratic propriety Newt mistakenly calls “liberal.” Real many-to-many communication would encourage real empowerment, not submission to the rich and the PACs.)

Anyhow, another reason Newt wants to keep the new media (the Internet, umpteen-channel cable, video dialtone, et al.) out of the claws of the established media industry’s ‘cuz the latter has been in bed with the Clinton/ Gore crowd. Of course, the media biz also loved Reagan, and any politician who supports its expansionist agenda.

One example: the way Reagan, Bush and Clinton-era FCC officials kept rewriting the broadcast rules to favor ever bigger radio-TV station ownership groups, to the point where broadcast properties are increasingly held by out-of-town financiers bent less toward serving the stations’ communities than toward speculation and empire-building.

Another example: the Clinton administration’s proposed copyright law rewrite. Clinton’s National Information Infrastructure Task Force has drafted legislation to drastically limit what folks can do with information. Among other nasty provisions, it’d trash the “First Sale Right” that lets an info buyer do whatever she wishes with the copy she bought — the right that allows the video-rental industry to exist. In addition, the “fair use” provision (allowing authors to use brief relevant quotes from copyrighted works) would be greatly restricted; devices that could undermine electronic anti-copying systems would be outlawed; and “browsing” a copyrighted work, in a store or online, would be technically illegal.

As the online service GNN NetNews quotes Univ. of Pittsburgh Prof. Pamela Samuelson, “Not since the King of England in the 16th century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books…has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest.” NetNews also quotes Wayne State Prof. Jessica Litman as saying the proposals would “give the copyright owner the exclusive right to control reading, viewing or listening to any work.”

The punk/DIY decentralization aesthetic isn’t just a cute idea. It’s vital if the “info age” isn’t going to be a globally-centralized thought empire. Newt, despite his rhetoric of “empowerment,” wants a thought empire controlled by the Limbaughs and Robertsons; Clinton wants one controlled by the Viacoms and Time Warners. It’s up to us to demand None Of The Above.

SCHOOL DAZE #1: Ya gotta hand it to UW Prez Wm. Gerberding. He may be retiring soon, but he’s still got a keen eye for PR. He tried to raise public sympathy against state-mandated university budget cuts by threatening to shutter the Environmental Studies department, but to no avail. But then he made another presentation in which he threatened to close the journalism school, and by golly it made just about every front page in the state. As a grad of the School of Communications, I can attest that it was (and probably is) a graveyard for a lot of outmoded ideas about what makes good media, and its only official purpose (to provide entry-level staff to local media companies) might seem moot in an age when every opening for a local proofreading job gets 100 resumés from ex-NYC managing editors, but I’d still hate to see it go.

SCHOOL DAZE #2: The Garfield High School Messenger student paper published a student poll last month on the question, “What Makes A Person A Ho?” Responses from female students included “It’s the way you carry yourself, the number of people doesn’t matter;” “A girl that sleeps with more than five people a week is a ho;” “Most girls that guys call hoes aren’t;” and “If a person is having sex with two different people during the same time period of two weeks, for example, she is a ho.” Male responses included “It depends on how easy it is to get it and how quickly they can get it;” “If a girl has sex with another girl’s boyfriend she is a ho;” and “If you don’t demand your respect and you allow yourself to be treated any kind of way, then you sleep with them anyway, you’re a ho.” When asked “Can a guy be a ho?” one male student said no, “but it is a blatant and unfair double standard.”

PINE CLEANERS: The holidays are when merchants put on their friendliest seasonal spirit. Not so for Jim “Ebenezer” Nordstrom. With all the civic-blackmail skills his family learned as ex-NFL team owners, he’s promising (after months of hedging) to move his store into the old Frederick’s building as part of Mayor Rice’s pet development scheme, but only if the city re-bisects the tiny Westlake Park and lets commuters careen down 5th & Pine again. Granted, the street isn’t used much, except as a parking strip for cop cars and a walkway between the park’s two little plazas (themselves poorly planned and expensively built).

The city’s done so many things to aid private developers downtown, and so few have worked. Westlake at least partly works, so a lot of people are understandably upset at its threatened desecration. It doesn’t take an urban-planning degree to see what really works in downtowns: Lively streets and sidewalks with something intriguing every step of the way. Vancouver’s got lively street retail along Robson (which has car traffic) and Granville (which doesn’t). What will save downtown Seattle are (1) more stores for all tastes and income levels, not just the upscale, and (2) an adventurous day-and-night street life.

Instead of making threatening demands on the city, the Nordies oughta make grand promises to help build something better than some windswept empty one-block street: a new downtown that’s a life-affirming gathering place, with all the joyous chaos that makes urban life great. Offer shoppers and pedestrians something worth giving up that block of Pine for.

XMAS XTRAVAGANZA: Again this year, the gift industry’s outdone itself. Among the wackiest ideas is LifeClock Corp.’s Timisis, a digital clock embedded in a fake-granite desktop pyramid paperweight. Besides offering the current time and “Motivational Messages Every Minute,” the top readout line lets you “watch the hours, minutes and seconds counting down until your next vacation, until you must meet your sales quota, until your retirement, OR… The rest of your statistical lifetime!”

Also for the grownups are the Marilyn Monroe Collector’s Dolls, with six costumes but no tiny bottles of sleeping pills, and theScarlett Barbie-Rhett Ken series. Kid stuff’s hit a creative lull this year, as violence-genre video games and Power Rangers character products grab most of the cash and glory. One glorious exception: Zolo, a plastic doll-building set sort of like Mr. Potato Head, only with cool modern-art shapes and colors so you can build anything from a Dr. Seuss-like creature to a Calder-like mobile. Also worth noting are the pocket computer notebooks for kids, including the all-pink girls’ model My Diary (at last, something to draw young girls into computing!).

Haven’t get gotten around to trying the CNN board game, in which you take the role of your favorite TV correspondent trotting the globe in search of breaking news (I can imagine all the drag-queen-theater people playing it and all of them wanting to be Elsa Klensch).

SPINNIN’ THE BLACK CIRCLE: For every image of the corporate takeover of “independent” music (including Time Warner taking 49 percent ownership Sub Pop for a rumored $20 million), there are also signs of hope for the real thing. The NY Times reported that indie record labels (including pseudo-indies like Caroline and Seed) have gained a few points of market share in the past two years, to between 16 and 20 percent of the overall record market. That figure includes genres like country and classical where the majors completely dominate. (The indies’ share is undoubtedly higher in rock, rap, dance, and ethnic music.) And Pearl Jam‘s vinyl first-edition release of Vitalogy became a boon to the specialty stores that still stock the black flat things. Speaking of sonic artifacts…

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Skeleteens beverages from L.A. capture the PoMo generation spirit in ways the OK Soda people couldn’t even dream about. There are five varieties — Love Potion No. 69 (lemon-berry), The Drink (lemon-cola), DOA (vaguely Mountain Dew-ish), Brain Wash (a tart carbonated herbal tea), and Black Lemonade. All are sold in bottles only, in bars and cafes only for now, at hefty microbeer prices. All have cute-skeleton graphics and cute slogans on the labels (Love Potion “Helps to Keep Your Heart On;” Brain Wash “Relieves the Garbage They’ve Been Dumping In Your Mind”). All have plenty of caffeine, ginger and ginseng for a kick stronger than Jolt Cola or many espresso drinks (don’t drink more than one at a sitting if you’ve got a heart condition). Other ingredients in one or more of the flavors include jalapeno, ginko leaf, skull cap, ma hung, mad dog weed, jasmine, dill weed, and capsicum. Brain Drain has a tourquoise color that sticks to your lips and tongue (and other digestive organs and their byproducts). They’re so system-altering in their undiluted state, I’m scared to imagine them as mixers…

Some of you may recall Wrigley’s 1981 bubble-gum novelty in the shape of a tiny LP, packaged in tiny reproductions of Boston and Journey cover art. Now there’s CD’s Digital Gum, from Zeeb’s Enterprises in Ft. Worth, a five-inch slab of gum in a CD jewel box, complete with fake cover art. The six flavors include “ZZ Pop” and “Saltin’ Pep-O-Mint.” If you chew it backwards, do you get secret Satanic messages?

KNOW THE CODE: With the new year will come the new 360 area code, comprising two non-contiguous areas of western Washington: from Marysville north (including the San Juans) and from Olympia south (including the Olympic Peninsula). It could be interpreted as a symbol of growing isolation between the Seattle area and the rest of the state, as exploited in Republican political campaigns. It also means the Oly music-scene people finally get symbolic confirmation of their self-image as the capital of their own little world.

STARRY EYES (UW astrophysicist Dr. Bruce H. Margon in the 11/29 NY Times): “It’s a fairly embarrassing situation to admit that we can’t find 90 percent of the universe.” Maybe it’s under the sofa, or tucked away forgotten in a mini-storage unit. Maybe it’s in another dimension, the place missing socks go. I hope we don’t find a way into that dimension if it’s there, ‘cuz ya know the first thing that happens is that unlucky dimension will get zoned for all Earth’s prisons, waste-treatment plants and landfills.

AFTER DARK, MY SWEET: Caffé Minnies, that just-slightly-overpriced all-night diner on 1st & Denny, has just opened a second 24-hrs. outlet on Broadway, in the space where Cafe Ceilo had replaced one of the dopiest restaurant concepts in Seattle history, the fern bar Boondocks Sundeckers and Greenthumbs (home of the silly-pretentious “Established 1973” sign). ‘Bout time the Hill had an all-night spot (besides IHOP and the Taco Bell walk-up). In other grubbery news, the Hurricane Cafe has indeed become a “scene” place, though not necessarily a scene I’d wanna get very far into. The Puppy Club, the other son-of-the-Dog House, is shaking out into an experience as solid but plain as its food. Worse, it closes at 10 (Sundays at 6!).

HOW CHEESY: There was this recent newspaper ad with the headline “No Cheese Please” and the logo of a wedge of cheddar inside a slash circle. Local oldsters might remember those as the name and logo of a 1981-82 Seattle power-pop band, The ad had nothing to do with the band, but instead offered a mysterious, undefined “personal care kit” called The Ark, packaged by Survivor Industries Inc. and sold at warehouse stores and gun shops. The ad didn’t explain what a “personal care kit” was but hyped it as a gift-giver’s alternative to cheeseballs and fruitcakes.

It turns out to be a box of survival gear (up to three days’ worth of preserved food and water plus a blanket). This could arguably be useful for those who spend time out in (or driving thru) the mountains or other places where the power supply’s subject to the whim of seasonal windstorms. While the ads don’t mention that or any other suggested use, they subtlely identify with the apocalypse/ mountain man ideology. Not exactly a peace-on-Earth-good-will-n’-brotherhood kinda feeling.

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET IN THE PAGES OF THE STRANGER, look for word of our big Misc.-O-Rama live event Fri., Jan. 20 at 911 Media Arts, and check out these words found on a bumper sticker on a Honda: “Preserve Farmland. Live In Town.”

PASSAGE

A lovely parting gift from paintmeister David Hockney: “Always live in the ugliest house on the street. Then you don’t have to look at it.”

REPORT

Every current subscriber with at least three issues remaining will get a free copy of my book, now retitled Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, when it comes out (current ETA: April).

Those who still want to get the column in the mail can subscribe to the Stranger: $19.95 for 12 months or $11.95 for six months within Washington state, $49.95 for 12 months or $29.95 for six months out of state. Don’t write to me but to Stranger Subscriptions, 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 1225, Seattle 98122-3934. Yes, it’s a lot more than the final Misc. sub rate of $12/year, but you get tons more stuff, including my own slightly troubled crossword puzzle, music reviews by me and others, disturbing cartoons, political commentary, and other people’s columns that I don’t always agree with.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Altricial”

ZINES I NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVIEWING

I used to cover zines regularly in Misc.,

but I’ve gotten so verbose at other topics that the zine reviews got sidetracked.

For now, here’s a roundup of self-made publications I’ve seen.

Mad Love: The Courtney Papers (no longer available): Billed on the cover as “posts from America Online left by, presumably, Courtney Love.” At least some of the entries are really hers; some might be hoaxes. On one level, these 17 electronic missives could be seen as the creatively-spelled, quasi-venomous rantings of a person with a past reputation for egotism and flakiness (like many music-scene types), someone who’s burned her share of bridges, particularly with her estranged father and with much of the Olympia rock community. But on another level, they’re the public soul-stripping of a survivor, facing the twin shocks of sudden widowhood and public scorn and slowly getting her shit back together with the tools available to her, chiefly the gift of sarcastic wit.

22 Fires (Chris Becker, 4200 Pasadena Pl. NE #2, Seattle 98105): A 12-page half-legal-size zine, with listings/ reviews of 49 Washington-based zines, plus a cassette sampler of local bands (including one of my faves, Laundry). Issue #2 should be out soon; if it’s as good as #1, it’ll be an invaluable resource for regional self-publishers. Highly recommended.

Radio Resistor’s Bulletin ($1 from P.O. Box 3038, Bellingham 98227-3038): An outgrowth of the battle to keep community-access programming on Western Washington U. station KUGS, this newsletter covers efforts to promote and defend true noncommercial and community broadcasting across the country. Learn how battles against NPR/ Corp. for Public Broadcasting bureaucratic types are popping up all over, not just at KCMU. Issue #6 reviews the book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, Rocket co-founder Bob McChesney’s revisionist history of the so-called “Golden Age of Radio” detailing how a potentially powerful tool for public education and enlightenment was quickly monopolized by the purveyors of Amos n’ Andy.

10 Things Jesus Wants You To Know ($1.58 from Dann Halligan, 1407 NE 45th St. #17, Seattle 98105): It comes out regularly, it’s big, and it’s chock full of indie-rawk bands from here and elsewhere (#8 had Chaos UK, Unsane, and NOFX). Halligan’s editorials provide concise arguments for the indie-purist party line. Christine Sieversen, who sometimes writes for the Stranger, also sometimes writes for these folks.

Feminist Baseball ($3 from Jeff Smith, P.O. Box 9609, Seattle 98109): Smith was Mark Arm’s partner in the fondly recalled teen-punk band Mr. Epp and the Calculations. Now he’s involved in a couple of small labels, Box Dog and Cher Doll, and puts out this tightly-packed collection of articles and over 250 record reviews. Issue #13 features an interview with Richard Lee, the guy who goes on public access Wednesday nights to claim Cobain and Kirsten Pfaff were murdered (accusations based on seemingly minor discrepancies in the coroner’s and media’s accounts of the deaths).

Thorozine ($2 from Mark M., P.O. Box 4134, Seattle 98104-0134): Well-scanned photos (a zine rarity) accompany profiles of punk & noise bands (#6 includes Portrait of Poverty, Fitz of Depression, and North American Bison). No relation to out-of-town zine Thor-A-Zine.

Farm Pulp ($2 from Gregory Hischak, 217 N. 70th St., Seattle 98117-4845): Twenty issues old; still the slickest zine in town. Beautiful manipulated Xerox and collage art; fascinating surrealist fiction.

Point No Point: A Blue Moon Reader (free from Blue Moon Tavern, 712 NE 45th St., Seattle 98105): Maybe the only “alternative” literary zine to ever have a (real, paid) full-page PR ad from Boeing (editor Patrick McRoberts has a day job at a PR agency). A mostly-male, mostly-old-hippie crew contributes solid if sometimes bland fiction, poetry and essays. Highlight: Charles Mudede’s story “Crepuscule With Clarity,” fast-paced and action-packed.

12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”

Sexfilm:

The next last frontier of B filmmaking

Essay for the Stranger, 10/24/94

Sci-fi, horror and fantasy used to be the place to learn the craft of the simple direct narrative film, as a potential creator or simply a more informed viewer. These genres once offered bright delicious eye-and-ear candy, films that cut through the boundaries of slick production and linear narrative to speak directly to their audiences with imagery, energy and audacity.

But the days of low-budget screamfests like Basket Case, The Stuff and The Corpse Grinders now seem long gone in this age of morphing effects, video-game plots and $70 million vehicles for mass-murdering “heroes.”

Meanwhile, the “experimental” or “underground” film has been permanently corrupted by the theft of almost all its repertoire of techniques by music videos, fashion videos and even snowboarding videos.

Likewise, the formerly reviled “shockumentary” has become big business as tabloid TV.

At the other end of the sellout spectrum, the suspense thriller has turned into the USA World Premiere Movie and a host of direct-to-video films by directors imitating 0899506186 De Palma’s imitations of Hitchcock. The only suspense in most of these lame exercises is figuring out which beginning-screenwriting course the writers just came from.

Only one American commercial exploitation genre retains its power to keep re-creating its audiovisual vocabulary, to use simple easy-to-understand tools in creating unreal domains of character and behavior–tools young filmmakers can easily comprehend and copy to their own ends.

I speak, of course, of the sex film.

By stretching its range from the dingiest amateur hardcore tapes to the slickest theatrical “erotic romances,” the sex film has become an item of mass appeal (or rather of a hundred overlapping cult audiences). And not just for the lonely-guy crowd either: the trade mag Adult Video News claims the market for adult-video rentals (hardcore and softcore combined) is 47 percent female. That’s a better gender ratio than you’ll find in many more allegedly “progressive” media like alternative comix and computer online services. It’s still not big in American multiplex theaters, it’s not on American broadcast TV, and many of its subgenres can’t be found at conservative video chain stores. That means it’s still an item people have to go out of their way to get. That means it’s still made to be something people will actually want, rather than some overproduced bland effects-fest.

And because the sex film is centered in the human body and the human spirit, it can’t stray too far from human-scale storytelling. Add money to an action scene and you get noise, smoke, computer-generated effects, and a thousand dead foreigners. Add money to a bedroom scene and you simply get a better-furnished, better-lit bedroom–and maybe some better actors.

Consider the critically-snickered-at producer-director Zalman King, purveyor of “class” adequate-budget softcore (Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction, the made-for-Showtime Red Shoe Diaries series) for viewers who may still be a little timid about the genre. The typical King plot involves a shy heroine who becomes inexorably drawn toward carnal temptation. King and his colleagues (like Roger Corman, King now hires underlings to direct most of the films he produces) spend lots of screen time luring their heroines (and their viewers) from something approaching suburban consensus reality toward a semi-surrealistic universe of blue lighting, dreamlike nonlinear images, and hokey slow jazz-fusion music. In some King features there’s as much as a half hour before the first major nude scene. It’s an eon compared to King’s literary equivalent, the “steamy romance” novel, in which the heroine typically gets to have some action well before page 30. Yet this long first act cleverly lets King and his directors act as patient seducers, bringing viewers and characters alike into the scary freedoms of sensation and irrationality.

And because body doubles are so frequently and obviously used in King’s productions, you’re really seeing four people in every coupling–even kinkier if you think about it. This usually isn’t because the stars don’t have fine bodies, but because King likes to hire specialists in figure posing for the extreme close-ups, just like TV commercials hire separate hand models to pour the beer.

Just as there are innumerable ways to have sex, there are innumerable ways to represent it on the screen. Here are a few examples of how the combined allure and absurdity of on-screen sex, explicit or not, makes for entertaining and even breathtakingly weird film:

Rinse Dream (Nightdreams, Party Doll a Go Go) and Andrew Blake (House of Dreams, Secrets) are among the few would-beauteurs in the mostly boring world of hardcore video. Dream uses staccato video editing, Daliesque stage sets and just a dash of PoMo cynicism to enliven the standardized rite of the ritual fuck video. Blake, who started with “tasteful women’s erorica” for Playboy Video before moving into the hardcore side of the business, maintains a sense of ambitious visual pseudosophistication in his works, with wordless narratives that put teased-hair models through Helmut Newton-esque tableaux on their way toward the sex scenes. Blake is one of the few filmmakers who’s attempted to make explicit fuck scenes visually attractive; a Quixotic task at which I believe he fails.

The Playboy video centerfolds go further than Blake in exploring the inherent absurdity of out-of-context screen nudity. Each tape consists of a half-dozen vignettes, some more linear than others. Some show nude women doing things real-life people often do in the nude (stripping, dressing, bathing, sleeping, swimming, laying in the sun). Others show them doing things few people ever do nude (washing cars, riding jet skis, painting self-portraits, lying in empty storm drains, aerobicizing, doing modern-dance moves, holding up big globes or flags, playing pool, breaking into other people’s houses, making ice sculptures).

On the other end of the linear/ nonlinear spectrum are some videos marketed at female viewers. Each vignette in the Love Scenesseries begins with a conservatively-dressed young woman meeting a man who just happens to work as a male stripper; 15 minutes later, he’s privately showing her his hot dance moves (and his penile implants). Candida Royale, meanwhile, makes “feminine” hardcore tapes with lots of character development, lots of dialogue, almost halfway-decent acting, as few as two slow-paced sex scenes per hour, and the visible use of condoms (“except,” say the closing credits, “when the talent involved are lovers in real life”).

Royale’s work can be contrasted with generic hardcore, something that was never very good when it was in theaters (In the ’70s you could make the sleaziest crap this side of an Elks Lodge stag reel and the Frisco hype machine would call it bold and daring!). It’s gotten even duller on video.

A glut of producers has caused budgets to collapse. The average (and most are very average) video has five to eight fuck scenes strung together with the least possible dialogue, all quickly shot on local-news-quality camcorders and dubbed with cheesy synth music (it’s cheaper to hire a one-person band than to license stock music).

Yet this dismissal of all artistic pretension gives the assembly-line hardcore video a peculiarly honest quality. It doesn’t pretend to tell a real story or make any social statements (beyond crusading for its own legal right to exist). It is what it is, and claims to be nothing more.

With “pro” hardcore budgets so slight, it’s only a slight leap of lessened watchability into amateur hardcore videos. What they lack in picture quality they gain in energy. These are couples from across America, of all races and body types, who actually like one another and want to show you how much. If that’s not punk-rock moviemaking I don’t know what is.

There are many more sexfilm subgenres worth a cursory glance:

* sex-ed videos: many are more sex than ed, but the point is the illusion of education

* highbrow liberal sexfilm (Sirens, The Lover)

* The gloriously cheesy sex comedies USA shows late at night with all the sex cut out, like a chocolate chip cookie without the chips

* sex documentaries and shockumentaries

* short-form Playboy Channel stuff, most of which gets onto video before or after its cable run

* Euro sex sitcom films

* British sex farces (neither really sexy nor really funny, but a fantastic insight into the non-Masterpiece Theater side of English life)

* ’70s Euro erotic drama

* recent Euro erotic drama, from The Double Life of Veronique to the B melodramas released on video here by Private Screenings

* classic girlie film: strippers, nudists, David Friedman, and especially the king of over-the-top sex farce, Russ Meyer.

But we can’t leave without mentioning the best-distributed and worst of current sex genres, the made-for-video “erotic thriller.” At their best, they’re like mediocre USA World Premiere Movies with breasts added. At their worst, they’re the only current sex films that fulfill the radical-feminist stereotype of sex films as encouraging viewers to get off on violence against women. It’s a sick joke that Blockbuster will carry dozens of these but not a single tame centerfold video. (This may change now that Blockbuster’s part of the Viacom-Paramount-MTV-Showtime-Spelling empire.)

10/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

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

REPORT

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

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Algolagnia”

MY DAY: Yesterday afternoon I visited the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn, N.Y., and enjoyed seeing the various apartments and having the opportunity to talk with some of the people living there. Of course, the ultimate object of any housing project is to have satisfied tenants.

Our first visit was to an apartment with two bedrooms, kitchen, sitting room and bath. The young couple had two children and the wife’s mother with them. The man is a longshoreman with only intermittent days of work. The girl seemed proud and happy and she had acquired many possessions which she showed me with pride. Her mother brought out a plate of little cakes and some little glasses and poured out some homemade wine which she offered to us all. We drank to their health and happiness and we wished for them the steady job on which so much depends. Little enough to ask of life and yet often impossible to attain.

Our next family was in a larger three bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath apartment. They had four children and the man was on WPA.

Our last apartment was one of the very small one bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath type. The young couple who lived there had had the sad experience of losing their first baby, but the young woman’s mother, who was visiting her, told me what a change this new apartment made in her life.

These apartments seemed to me very well planned. All of them have eliminated unnecessary doors. The kitchen, for instance, has no door, neither has the living room. The bedroom, bathroom and one closet have doors. The other closets are recessed with curtains. The landscaping around the houses is attractive, and scattered around the project are eight small playgrounds for children. I hope that some day everyone can live in quarters which are as pleasant as this, if for no other reason than that it will cost the taxpayers less and that the next generation will be healthier.

On Friday we went to Boston to see my new grandchild. He is a sweet baby with a nicely shaped head and ears that lie flat against his head. His hair is so fair that it hardly shows. He refused to open his eyes for me, so I don’t know their color, but I surmise it’s blue. I was only allowed to see him through a glass window, so I am looking forward to seeing him next in his own home and knowing more about him. I am sure he is going to be a real person very soon.

On the whole, our family works and plays hard, but there is one member who takes his job so seriously that not even the advent of a baby curtails his working hours. Don’t think John lost one hour. I am glad of this, for there is a real obligation on every one of us these days to do our job, whatever it may be, a little better than we have done it before.

If the need comes for any of us to do a different kind of work from what we are doing at present, the call will be unmistakable. But the fact that we do our daily jobs well will make it easier for anyone who has to take our place and will make us more efficient in anything else we have to take up. Besides going on with the daily routine, keeps our feet on the ground and that is sorely needed in times like these.

Two extremes have come to me in the last few days. One was a young man who announced to me that all talk of a “fifth column” was ridiculous and that there was no such thing in the United States. This, just because he and his friends and those with whom he talked, did not happen to touch any “fifth column” activities.

On the other hand, a woman suggested that we all go out and learn to shoot and sleep with a gun beside our beds in preparation for parachute troops or riots in our neighborhoods.

Both of these attitudes are obviously silly. We want to take proper precautions but, in other ways, we want to go on with our daily life and our daily job in calm security.

RADICALS AND THE ARTS: Miss Dorothy Day, a former rough and tumble radical who became a Catholic, has written a book calledFrom Union Square to Rome, in which she asks herself if the old desire to be with the poor and mean and abandoned was not mixed with a desire to be with the dissipated.

The question has arisen in other lands, prompted by the conduct and language and the studied physical and moral frowsiness of individuals who have identified themselves with radical movements.

The arts also have served as an excuse for a dirty way of life, and some artists of this type, being incompetent painters and writers, easily persuade themselves that they could command high prices if they would compromise with their principles. They become radical painters and writers to excuse their failure to themselves and disguise it to their friends.

Greenwich Village 20 years ago was a haunt of sloppy fakers who said they desired to live their lives in their own way, unfettered by middle-class conventions — which was another way of saying that they wanted to engage in some promiscuous sleeping-around and didn’t like soap. They had read about the art and independent thinking in a dirty quarter of Paris, and for a time maintained a similar artistic and intellectual slum in New York, most of whose inhabitants overdrank and produced punk poetry and short stories and incompetent smears on canvas.

There were quite a few young corn-fed frauds of both sexes from the Middle West, putting into effect ideas of conduct and morality which they had heard talked up on the campus, but the colony in New York, as well as the one in Paris, also in included unsightly females of considerable age with small private incomes who liked to sit around nasty little joints listening to the talk and reading of the unwashed literati and squinting at distorted pictures and imagine themselves to be of the arts.

In summer groups of such people move to places in the far suburbs to go around half-naked, if not altogether nude, and the town of Westport, Conn., which did have a colony of legitimate artists, suffered from the presence of carousing counterfeits. The neighbors got an impression that art meant free love, personal filth and drunkenness, and that most writers and artists were Communists, because the incompetents are likely to condemn a system which refuses to appreciate their talents.

It was not any scientific curiosity that prompted the fad of Viennese mind-probing, but an appetite for horribly foul sex stuff and the hope of dirty people that some head-feeler would tell them that they could cure their nervousness only by spending a week-end in a cabin off somewhere away from it all with some other man’s girl or some other woman’s gentleman friend. Medical necessity might just justify conduct which otherwise would be difficult to explain, and when both members of a domestic combination were similarly troubled the doctor’s orders were likely to be regarded as law.

Radical thought and belief does not truly express itself in filthy attire and dirty fingernails, for radicals purport to be intelligent, and it is only the ignorant who have an excuse for dirt when soap and water are almost free and whiskbrooms are a dime. Nevertheless, affected frowsiness has come to be offered as evidence of advanced thought, and profane and obscene speech is sometimes offered by women as proof that they are fighting mad at the condition of the poor or the sufferings of the Spanish Communists and don’t give a damn for the opinion of the complacent respectables who wash their smug and stupid faces.

Probably it is not so much the radical ideas but offensive personalities, and on warm days an odor as of something not quite fresh, which have made most Americans suspicious of radicalism. There is also a deterrent in the apparent, though not real, requirement that to sympathise with radical ideas one must give up hygiene, become personally filthy and, as between husband and wife, each agree that the other may jump the fence whenever he or she is troubled by a dream.

YOUTH AT `DEAD END,’ WHAT’S THE CURE?: Young people — mobs of them! Laughing squads of lovely girls, husky boys, lining up for the annual graduation parade. Studies over, school days at an end, off they go. Into what? Into a world which yesterday petted and encouraged them, but is now suddenly indifferent to their need, hostile to their demands. Into an enforced idleness that wrecks their pride and enthusiasm, destroys their ambition and illusions…turns dreams into doubt, determination into despair and patriotism into an embittered sneer.

“Scarehead stuff”? No! The tragic and shameful truth. Yearly, 2,000,000 — TWO MILLION, COUNT ‘EM! — young Americans, cream of the crop in brain and brawn, leave our schools and step down and out to join the ranks of the unemployed.

Timber lands, oil wells, scenic beauty, fruit trees, livestock — cows, apples, pigs, peaches – all these precious “natural resources” the nation fights strenuously to protect and conserve — spending, willingly, billions in that struggle. Yet each year, two million young graduates and uncounted thousands of uneducated youngsters — more precious to America than all her other “natural resources” combined — are junked!

For, remember, unemployment means more than an empty pocket. It means an empty spirit… an empty spirit which breeds maggots as surely as dead flesh.

Have you seen the play Dead End? There’s as shocking a sermon-in-the-flesh as a nation ever faced. Hush…darkness…the curtain rises on such a scene, such a problem as you may find in any American city today. An east side’s “dead end” terminal at the river’s edge. Rotting tenements…crumbling warehouses…cluttered with filth, riddled with hideouts. Above the brawling, blowsy, fly-blown hell juts the hanging garden of a millionaire. Below — scuttling through the stinking darkness like a pack of rats, goes The Gang.

The Gang! All children — some of them mere babes — they paw the garbage for food, pounce like beasts on anyone they hate — anything they desire. Snickering — without a flicker of conscience — they inflict incredible torture, retail absolute depravity. Why not? Unwanted, unloved, not one of them has ever known decent pride or joy. Cut off from all life’s honorable trails, they seek adventure in the “Dead End” slime.

Are the young people themselves to blame? Have they become spoiled by the easy luxury of this Machine Age…are they “too choosey” to accept jobs which their fathers took gladly?

Or is society responsible? Should the Government, regardless of party, conserve and protect youth as it now conserves and protects its timber land, scenic beauty, livestock? Is not youth the most precious of all “natural resources” and should it not be treated accordingly?

Do you remember Henley’s magnificent rallying cry, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”? In those lines the fighting human spirit hurls its defiance at adversity. Time and again that spirit – blazing in the heart of the Youth — has swept America out of its “Dead End,” ON TO VICTORY!

I, `SPY’: Shirley was not especially astonished to learn that following a press breakfast with some of the girls from the cast of Minsky Follies that I was helping them find new lodging… Cheryl Taylor was the young lady in question and I picked up facts I hadn’t known about, like she ordinarily sings, but had to be a “Show Girl” because she had her jaw broken in an automobile accident some months back. A show girl, I find, is one who walks around “with” clothes. A Minsky “model,” on the other hand, has most of her clothes artfully removed. Glamorous Lili St. Cyr, however, is one of the “stars” along with comedian Pinky Lee… And she doesn’t exactly wear a “Mother Hubbard.” At the Orpheum.

Annie will be getting out her gun at the Aqua Theater at the behest of Greater Seattle Inc., starting July 2. Vivacious Gisele McKenzie will play the part of Annie and I might mention she’s doing one of my favorite musical comedies – Annie Get Your Gun!

The new Tiki Shop down at Leschi along Lake Washington is one to really flip over, the girls tell me. Betty Minor Evans, an old school friend of mine, and her partner have, to my knowledge, the only Seattle sop specializing in Hawaiian clothes for men and women. They went to Hawaii (how’s that for tough work?) and had things made up to their own specifications. Not the loud Aloha shirt bit, but elegant casual and cock-fashions, displayed in a tasty shop along with rare black coral and other types of jewelry and fine handmade wooden ware for the table. Betty’s off to Hawaii again this week, and I must say this sure beats doing your buying in the 7th Ave. Garment District in New York.

The Seahorse, that wonderful restaurant at Mukilteo, begs to report that it now can up the population of Mukilteo by 70 per cent every day without discommoding anyone. They’ve doubled the capacity of the restaurant and now there are two lines to the groaning smorgasbord tables. Mukilteo population — 1,000. Usual Wed. smorgasbord and dinner, at the Seahorse, about 700.

WHAT’S NUDE AT THE MOVIES?: Gamercy, Madison & Broadway. World premiere The Immoral West & How It Was Lost by producers of Erotica and Mr. Teas. Nudes & Dudes. Color, ample parking, free coffee… Guild 45th Street, 2115 N. 45th Street. Surftide 77. Hilarious parody of TV “whodunits.” Detective Bernard Bingbang seeks beauteous babe with birthmark. $500,000 color production.

FOR YOU PHOTOGRAPHERS: Hollywood Studios, 111 Stewart St., has comely models like the above posing 1-10 pm daily. Technical aid, lighting provided; camera rentals; individual or group sessions. MA 2-5555.

AND NOW ABOUT LIQUOR: Never on Sunday. Bootleggers are hard to find and expensive. If you don’t have a friend with a well-stocked liquor cabinet, you’ll be dry on Sunday if you don’t stock up. Some liquor stores open from 11 am to 11 pm. Check phone book… Beer taverns can be walked in on off the street & ladies can sit at bar, but they can’t call it a bar… Cocktail lounges are tucked away behind food. You can’t let children see liquor prepared so teen agers have to eat & or dance concealed from the bar. Women can’t sit at bar, but can sit at piano, which is why we have so many “piano” bars. Liquor hours: ‘Till 2 am except Saturday, when it’s midnight. Sit still when you’re doing your drinking. I don’t think it’s the law, but it certainly is the custom not to carry your drinks in a cocktail lounge. The waitress will call you on it if you do.

SHIRLEY’S COLUMN: One of the most often-asked questions by visitors to the fair is, “where can I order good salmon?” One of the best answers to that question is “The Viceroy.” We were there for lunch the other day and were delighted to find that Henk Straatmann not only is their Maitre d’ now, but served us salmon with his practiced continental flourish. It was poached, juicy — with his wonderful Hollandaise – and a bottle of Wente Bros. Riesling. An elegantly satisfying place to dine in style — The Viceroy.

We’ll be partying about the HMS Bounty (of MGM movie fame) as this issue comes out. It’s arriving 9 days late on account of storms. No wonder they used to sail to Seattle via Honolulu in the old days! She’ll be at Shilshole Marina for a week or so for the public to sample.

Our Mr. Fecker, Mayor of Pioneer Square and one of the partners in Louie’s and the Blue Banjo, reports that attendance at Louie’s has doubled since they put the entrance on the alley, complete with peephole for doorman, “Wolfgang.” You can depart by the backdoor of the Blue Banjo, step down the dark alley to Louie’s. It all gives you a wicked “prohibition era” type feeling.

•

(LATTER-DAY NOTE: Former Stranger editor S.P. Miskowski had the novel idea of turning one entire issue of the paper into a collection of “found texts,” cut and pasted together with no overt acknowledgment of their true origins. My entry combined Eleanor Roosevelt, conservative Hearst Newspapers columnist Westbrook Pegler, some Depression-era activist whose name I’ve since forgotten, and Seattle Guide editor and Underground Tour founder Bill Speidel.)

8/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns

and one newsletter-only essay)

…AND THIS CEILING TILE WILL FLLLYYY AWAY!

Here at Misc., your most welcome piece of info since the news that Shannen Doherty will star in a TV movie about the author of Gone With the Wind, we think the just-released Flintstones TV soundtrack album is great and far superior to anything to do with the movie version, but it’d be greater if it had included Ann-Margarock.

UPDATES: Somebody called to report that there’s another salt-and-vinegar potato chip out there, made by the Kettle Chips brand and available at a few scattered outlets….

The family feud between Month magazine and Northwest Monthly, a rival formed by former Month staffers, ended with the Month publishers giving in and folding. The last Month art director has inherited the last Month office space and is using it to start yet another music/art/fashion tabloid, to be called Neo.

OUR “HOWCUM” FILE is puzzled that booze is sold on the car ferries, but prohibited on the passenger-only ferries. Lessee: It’s OK to drink if you’re gonna be driving, but not if you’re not.

THE NEW LITTER: The post-Dog House saga gets curiouser and curiouser. The legendary old roadhouse diner’s “Time to Eat” sign suddenly appeared in a longtime “restaurant graveyard” site at 5th & Denny. A window sign promises the mid-August opening of “The Puppy Club.” Yes, it’s run by the old Dog House people, and will have some of the old staff and some of the old amenities, but with no organ in the bar, some different menu items, and windows. It’ll be open all night weekends but (at least at first) will close at 11 during the week. Let’s hope it’s more of a Dog House revival than the joint now in the old Dog House building (a perfectly adequate restaurant but that’s all).

STAMPING OUT CRIME?: Misc. hasn’t said many nice things about the Seattle Police, but we do think it’s nice that new Chief NormStamper appeared in the Gay Pride parade. Odd name, tho: Down in P-Square, “stamper” is a term for guys wandering around with Joint Cover hand stamps, sometimes getting drunker and more unpleasant at each successive venue.

SERVING THE SERVANTS: An Aberdeen sculptor and ex-monster truck driver, Randi Hubbard, is making a 600-lb. concrete statue of Cobain. She wanted to give it to the City of Aberdeen, but city fathers were uneasy about putting it up in public. Those feelings were supported for other purposes by Novoselic, who wants his bandmate to be remembered according to what he’s called “the punk rock ethic” in which there are no monuments to superstars. Hubbard’s withdrawn her gift of the statue and will offer it to private buyers. Sounds like the futile attempt to make the Seattle Parks Dept. put up a Hendrix memorial, a drive that led only to a “hot rocks” monument in the African savannah exhibit of the zoo. Speaking of creativity and cultural independence…

DANCE FEVER: We now must say goodbye to XLR8R, the local rave-techno-disco-dance tabloid; its publishers are moving their whole operation to Frisco. The move highlights the chief problem with the local dance-music scene: its willingness to merely consume trends created in Calif. instead of growing its own talent and ideas. As XLR8R has reported, most every bigtime rave event in town gives its starring slots to Frisco DJs, with local spinners permanently relegated to opening slots. It’s a longstanding tradition that any creative endeavor in Seattle dies when it becomes just a market for Frisco artists. The original Northwest Rock bands (1958-66) created some all-time great sounds and filled the region’s ballrooms, but once acid rock hit big there was nothing for local bands to do but open for touring bands. To become something more than simple followers, the Northwest (not “West Coast”) dance scene will have to champion its own DJs, its own sounds, its own spectacles, and (yes) its own zines. Speaking of original artistry…

YA KILL ME: Of the current advocates of indie rock as a quasi-religion opposed to the orthodoxy of the major-label industry, few have a more adamant reputation than Kathleen Hanna, co-leader of Olympia’s Bikini Kill. Her band has gained a reputation as defiant tough women, even among mass-media people who’ve never heard its music. One person who has heard the band’s music is punk legend Joan Jett, who produced a 45 for the band. Now Hanna’s co-written three songs for Jett’s next album, Pure and Simple. What’s shocking is that one, “You Got a Problem,” was also co-credited to Desmond Child, corporate-rock producer for the likes of Kiss and singer in ’70s meathead band Desmond Child and Rouge (and a longtime Jett collaborator). Not only that but one of her Kill Rock Stars labelmates, Mary Lou Lord, has signed a publishing contract (but not a recording contract) with BMG Music (née RCA Records). You tell me: Selling out or buying in? Speaking of strong women of song…

A SHORT COOL WOMAN IN A BLACK DRESS: The tribute-album craze continues with a CD of modern stars covering Ms. Romantic Doom-n’-Gloom herself, the legendary Edith Piaf. Her signature tune, “La Vie en Rose,” will be covered by Donna Summer. If you think that’s an inappropriate stand-in for the late Little Sparrow, other non-waify, non-Euro voices on the CD will include country singer K.T. Oslin, Pat Benetar, Juice Newton, Corey Hart, and our own Ann Wilson. (What, no Morrissey?) It may only prove how great Piaf was, that no contemporary female artist can attempt her material without seeming like a bad joke. Even today’s “adult acoustic alternative” women singers are too level-headed to approach Piaf’s delicate combination of power and despair. What woman today would dare present herself as torn apart by romantic anguish, and as finding strength through such turmoil? (Maybe Diamanda Galas.) Speaking of modern women’s images…

DRAWING THE LINE: In a recent Stranger, comix artist/ editor Trina Robbins said a leading deterrent to women in comix (as creators and consumers) is the offputting ambience of comic-book shops. Now, comic-shop chain Dream Factory is opening six “Dream Factory for Her” shops at malls in Connecticut, Illinois and Ohio. A USA Today item quoted exec Lori Raub claiming the stores would have a “feminine look” with rose and purple colors. The article says the stores will sell clothes, art and jewelry in addition to comics, but doesn’t say how they’ll get enough appropriate comix product for their shelves. As Robbins noted, major comic book companies produce few titles with cross-gender appeal (notable exceptions include DC’s Sandman) and fewer specifically aimed at females (and those tend to be for younger readers, like Marvel’s Barbie titles).

Any store looking for comix product to sell to femmes will have to seek independent publishers of woman-made titles (like the locally-drawn Dirty Plotte, Bitchy Bitch, Tomato and Girlhero) and of general-interest titles that emphasize storytelling instead of shoot-’em-up action (like Jim, Deadface, Love & Rockets, and Eightball). A female-friendly store would be friendly toward comix outside the action-violence genre, and would be a great tool for developing the potential of the medium–something fans of any gender can cheer about. Still speaking of modern women’s images…

THE REAL SKINNY: The ultimate charm of the Fox summer serial Models Inc. is that it’s an anachronistic show set in an anachronistic world. One subplot involves a model whose creepy musician boyfriend is trying to raise $25,000 to make a professional demo tape to send to major labels. All he’d need to raise these days would be $2,000 to press an indie CD, get it in stores, and take control of his own career. Similarly, the models themselves are already-arrived faces of pouting perfection. A realistic show about would-be supermodels might have young naive image-obsessed walking skeletons trying to break themselves into a model’s lifestyle, maybe by trying out a new fruit-flavored Syrup of Ipecac. Some would indeed have schemer boyfriends who preyed on their low self-esteem, while others would be giving up on boyfriends who talk sincere enough but just don’t understand the emotional compulsion necessary to become a would-be model, to make the world love your body by relentlessly hating it yourself. (There are women whose figures I liked more than they did; they essentially told me that I was just a tourist while they had to live there.)

RAILING ON: Mass-transit planning is firmly controlled by an insider clique of hard-bitten bureaucrats and number-crunchers who don’t understand the aesthetic and cultural influences that would persuade people to take up non-car transport. That’s why I cheer tour-bus driver Dick Falkenbury and his Initiative 39. If it makes the ballot and passes, it’d create a public agency to build a 35-mile elevated light-rail system, and to find private financing for it if possible. It’d probably look and run like Vancouver’s SkyTrain, but it’d be sold to voters as an update/ extension of the Monorail. The county’s transit planners apparently never thought of this brilliant PR stroke. Nearly everybody loves the Monorail, even if few people have a regular use for its one-mile run. Just think: We won’t be sinking $700 million into some overpriced albatross that few people will use, we’ll be fulfilling one of the Seattle World’s Fair’s dreams for Century 21!

THE MUSIC OF YOUR LIFE DEPT.: ABC’s asking producers of its prime-time shows to not have opening theme songs this fall. The idea is to start out right away with credits flashing beneath actors trading their opening barbs, a la Seinfeld and Murphy Brown, to discourage remote-control zapping. Don’t they know they’re destroying one of the key rituals of the viewing experience? Without theme songs, what’ll nostalgic commercials use in the year 2010?

THE SOUND OF COLIC: Unemployed San Diego aerospace engineer Rick Jurmain and his wife Mary have invented “Baby Think It Over,” an anatomically-correct, battery-powered, squishy-faced baby doll that cries loudly and shrilly at what its makers call “random, but realistic intervals, simulating a baby’s sleeping and waking patterns to its demand for two.” The $200 dolls come in four ethnic varieties plus a special “crack baby” version. The inventors want the dolls to be used in schools to warn teens that having babies isn’t always cute and cuddly. To really do that, they’d need a whole line of dolls, like Baby Stinky Pants, Baby Barf-A-Lot, and Baby Climb-Into-The-Dryer.

THE INCREDIBLE BULK: Had some thoughts while wandering through the massive new Aurora Village Costco warehouse. There are four major national retail institutions from Seattle: Nordstrom, REI, Starbucks and Costco. The latter chain is the closest to the “Seattle scene” aesthetic. At first, punk rock and Costco might not seem to have much in common. Punk is an urban thang; most warehouse stores are located way out there. Punk is built around independent retailers filling highly specialized desires of cult audiences. A warehouse store offers only a few popular items in each department; Costco’s puny CD department doesn’t sell any alterna-rock more obscure than In Utero. But look further: We’re not a scene of debutantes spending Daddy’s money buying designer duds and snorting nose candy in discos. We’re a scene based on thrift, no-nonsense graphics, and the glorious excesses of the common capitalist American. We thrive on low-budget spectacles of glorious lowbrow pleasure. We believe in empowering small business (something Costco claims to also believe in), and in subcultural communal experiences (which Costco shopping certainly is). We like to gather at obscure sites away from the glare of malls. And we much prefer to shop among Laotian immigrant families and self-employed cab drivers than among the Bellevue Squares. And Costco’s got great beer and coffee prices. Speaking of which…

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: One item found in some warehouse stores is Tongue Splashers Bubble Gum, a Canadian-made product that promises to “paint your mouth in a splash of color.” These colors include Bleeding Red, Color Me Blue, Orange Crunch, Slime Green and Slurpin’ Purple. Even cooler is the package: a real paint can, with 240 pieces inside! …

The official Seattle Seahawks chewing gum is a lot like the team. It seems tough for the first couple of seconds, but very quickly proves just how soft and pliable it really is. Speaking of odd consumptible concepts…

HOW DRY I AM DEPT.: Powdered beer has been announced by a Czech brewery, intended at first for export to Russia. “All you need is a pot and a spoon, and you can have your own beer in about 10 days,” brewery spokesperson Jan Oliva told the AP. It contains active yeast cultures that quickly form alcohol once you put the powder in water and let it mature to taste. It costs about 25 cents a quart. “It looks like beer, it tastes like beer, and it has a head too,” Oliva said. “It is beer, and a good one at that.” Maybe it’ll become a fad item over here; heck, anything’d be better than the ice-beer and clear-beer campaigns…

Except, perhaps, for the rumored new product of the St. Ides/Black Star people, an item as yet unnamed but said to be “a malt liquor for white people.” Speaking of beverage products aimed at young markets…

PR LINE OF THE WEEK (postcard to a band’s mailing list): “This is a postcard to promote `Running With Scissors‘ and to tell you things are going to be okie dokie. … The Scissors Manifesto: 1. Attending our shows and buying our CDs are the keys to `okie dokie-ness.’ 2. People who request our songs on the radio are okie dokie. 3. Actually, sex is much better than `okie dokie-ness’ but no one will pay us for sex. 4. It would be really great if young people had a reason to feel better than just okie dokie. 5. Foul tasting, over-hyped beverages do not make you feel okie dokie…. Not affiliated with any patronizing multinational beverage company.” Speaking of which…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The OK Hotel (a great music venue, no relation to any lousy soft drink) almost finally went all 21-and-over last month, a year and a half after its owners first threatened to. The owners were looking for a way to make the ol’ music-n’-art cafe more financially stable, and decided to add a tavern in an unused storefront area of the building. This would’ve made the whole space officially a bar, and hence verboten to minors during entertainment hours; but (for once!) the Liquor Board agreed to an arrangement wherein the music room will still be open to all, but over-21s can access the new bar area. The loss of Seattle’s only full-time all-ages music space would have been an incalculable blow to the development of new bands and new audiences, and would have hindered the continued growth of the local scene. The occasional Velvet Elvis, Penny University and King Theater all-ages shows help a little, but what we really need is a way for a commercial venue to meet its expenses while letting both under- and over-21s in. Let’s hope the new OK layout proves to be one such way. Speaking of kids-n’-culture…

THE YOUNG AND THE CLUELESS: I saw a horrendous CNN interview session at the KNDD studios (don’t blame the station for any of this). Twenty-three people in their mid-20s (a CNN publicist insisted on calling this age group “kids”) took turns in a conference room, where a camera crew taped them in three-quarter profile on the left side of the screen, before a speckled-blue backdrop, while a producer asked them such probing questions as “Is there such a thing as Generation X,” “Is there a generational conflict with baby boomers?”, and “The media generally says Gen X is defined by divorce, AIDS, poor economy and a distrust of politics. What do you feel about each issue?” Not attending was ex-MTV guy Adam Curry, who’ll narrate the finished show, Boom or Bust?–airing (natch) on Woodstock ’94 weekend. Aargh!

COLD AS ICE: Penthouse may soon run stills from home sex videos of Tonya Harding, supplied by ex-hubby Jeff Gillooly. Haven’t seen ’em, but can probably assure you that the pix will reveal that Harding (1) is a woman, and (2) used to have relations with someone to whom she was married. BFD.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (outside Megan Mary Olander Flowers on 1st Ave. S.): “Clues That You’re In the Wrong Age Group: You walk into the party and everyone hides their beer. Your bell bottoms and platform shoes are originals. No one knows who Marlo Thomas is. Rad is not a unit of radiation. They talk Star Trek and you drop the name William Shatner. All your friends are taking Retin A and Alpha Hydrox (isn’t that a cookie?). You were around when martinis and Tony Bennett were cool the first time.”

OTHER VOICES (Fintan O’Toole in a recent issue of The Irish Times): “We have now reached the point where every goon with a grievance, every bitter bigot, merely has to place the prefix, `I know this is not politically correct, but…’ in order to be not just safe from criticism, but actually a card, a lad, even a hero. Conversely, to talk about poverty and inequality, to draw attention to the reality that discrimination and injustice are still facts of life, is to commit the new sin of political correctness…. Anti-PC has become the latest cover for creeps. It is a godsend for every curmudgeon and crank, from the fascists to the merely smug.”

CLIPPED: Northwest Rock, one of the only two regularly-scheduled outlets on Seattle TV for regional acts (especially indie and unsigned acts), has been canceled by KTZZ. It can be argued that the station’s sales staff didn’t know how to market the show, and that it was hurt by its 1 a.m. Saturday time slot (when people who liked these bands would be out seeing them). Producer Frank Harlan, a.k.a. Bill Bored, isn’t giving up; he’s got plans for occasional specials, and may try to relaunch the show under some other financial setup, on KTZZ or some other outlet. It might help if you write KTZZ, 945 Dexter Ave. N., 98109, tell ’em you want to keep seeing “Northwest music history in the making” and would watch it in a better time slot.

‘TIL WE BAKE SLIGHTLY LESS in Sept., check out the Thursday night “Rock n’ Bowl” at Imperial Lanes on Rainier (the real-life equivalent to the “Soul Bowl” depicted on a recent Stranger cover), be sure to catch TV Nation, Fox’s great reruns of Thunderbirds Sat. morns and Lifetime’s great reruns of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman Sat. nights, and recall the sage advice of the immortal James Thurber: “Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy, wealthy and dead.”

PASSAGE

Bucky Fuller’s classic definition of a human being: “A self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped…the whole complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range-finders, a spectrascope, etc., the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake.”

REPORT

Still looking for pix (photos, posters, record art) for my book on the real local music history.

If you’ve any comments on what ought to be in the new bigger newsletter (i.e., if you think the fiction’s cool or sucks), lemme know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Sedulous”

THE MEDIA SEATTLE

There are many Seattles more or less co-existing in the same real estate, but practically the only one you hear about in the local mainstream media is what we might call the Media Seattle. The Media Seattle is the only Seattle you see on Evening Magazine, in the Weekly, in Pacific Northwest magazine, in commercials, and in Nordy’s ads. It’s the only Seattle you see when Good Morn. America or Tom Snyder’s cable show come here: Pike Place Fish, houseboats, Starbucks, microbrews (but never any drunks), Bill Gates, the Museum of Flight, and maybe Boeing. You see Westlake but not Eastlake, Green Lake but not the Duwamish. The Media Seattle myth tries to condescendingly explain away “the grunge explosion” without acknowledging that the Punk Seattle is diametrically opposed to the obsessive smarminess and blandness of the Media Seattle.The Media Seattle often brags about its “commitment to diversity” or “multiculturalism,” but it’s a sham. The Media Seattle only gives a damn about you if you’re an affluent member of the baby-boom generation (or a pre-teen child of one), and only if you’re either a non-Catholic white or an assimilationist minority trying to be a white boomer. A few Japanese-Americans are allowed in the Media Seattle, but no Koreans or Vietnamese and certainly no Samoans.

Representatives of the traditional news media sometimes try to scare you that the Info Hi-Way will make information accessible only to the affluent, but that’s what those traditional news media themselves have been doing for the past 20 years. When was the last time you saw minority or working-class people depicted as non-buffoons in the local dailies, as non-criminals on local TV news, or at all in the Weekly? When was the last time you saw our “Seattle” mainstream media treat city residents with respect, instead of aiming only at some mythical average family out in the higher-priced subdivisions? There’s this one very narrow class of people that the media want to reach. If you don’t belong to it, you won’t be shown in the media (and that includes “alternative” media that try to be “progressive” but still all-upscale) unless you get arrested for something bad.

When I see images of the Media Seattle, I think what a dull, utterly bourgeois place that would be if it existed. The Commons and the Urban Villages are attempts to make that smarmy fantasy a reality. Thank God we still have some other Seattles in our midst, at least for now.

7/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

PRAY FOR PEACE IN KOREA.

OTHERWISE, WE’D RUN OUT OF SIMPSONS EPISODES

Welcome back to the Henry Mancini memorial edition of Misc., the pop-culture newsletter that’s the only thing wilder than a Vancouver hockey riot.

UPDATES: For those who called about the Hanna-Barbera sound effects library but didn’t want to pay $495 for the professional-studio edition, a popular-price set will be out on Rhino this fall…. I wrote that KING-AM has been bleeding red ink for eons; a staff producer there writes to claim the station finally turned a modest profit last year…. A Wired article traces the currently-popular notion of “The Other,” that art- and lit-crit cliché I wrote about some months back, to French postmodern philosopher Julia Kristeva. She’s apparently the one who first thought of collapsing sociopolitical class analysis into an oversimplified two-tier model of The Dominant Order and The Other, a model that so narrowly defines society’s insiders that it allows many affluent white English majors to classify themselves as outsiders.

FEEDING FRENZIES: Our thanks to those who graciously attended our Misc. 8th Anniversary party and junk food film festival at the Pike St. Cinema. Among the beautiful old Frigidare promo films and Tony the Tiger commercials was a serious issue: Why should you care about junk food (a broad name for things people eat and drink for enjoyment, rather than sustenance)? Because it’s the sure sign of a culture. You won’t find the real Britain on Masterpiece Theatre; you’ll find it in cucumber sandwiches, room-temperature beer, and fish and chips wrapped in newspaper. American junk food represents everything this nation stands for: advanced technology and efficient distribution, under the direction of clever marketing, satisfying people’s wants instead of their needs. Take the new Bubble Beeper, an orange plastic box with a pocket clasp and a metallic front label. Inside the flip-top, the 17 sticks of rather ordinary bubble gum (made by Wrigley’s off-brand division) come in wrappers decorated with LCD-style type reading I’LL CALL YOU!, CALL ME, SORRY LINE BUSY, URGENT, or SEE YOU LATER! It’s a “value-added” (costlier than it absolutely has to be) version of what’s already an entertainment food product, with no nutritional purpose. But it’s an expression of many things–our fascination with personal tech, kids’ love of gadgetry and telephony, and corporate America’s drive to commodify the accessories of gangsta rap for suburban consumption.

JOINT VENTURES: We weren’t at the Grateful Dead shows. Hard to attach counterculture street-cred to a band that has a PBS pledge-break special (complete with yuppie phone operators in tye-dye shirts) and its own merchandise show on QVC.

LAVA LITE: We’re not too worried that Mt. Rainier could blow any day, according to a recent National Research Council report. There’ll likely be enough advance warning that any blast zone could be evacuated in time. And maybe it could blow away Southcenter, or the Boeing site that replaced Longacres, so we could start land-use planning in the area over again, only doing it right this time.

`METAL’ MELTDOWN: Adams News, Seattle’s dominant magazine wholesaler, refused to carry the July Heavy Metal, whose cover depicted two robotic stormtroopers (labeled “Tom” and “Jerry”) holding an S&M babe wearing a few strands of leather and a blindfold. Stores serviced by direct-market comix distributors are getting it and some are selling out, even though it’s indistinguishable from anything in the “adult” comix mag’s tradition of gory violence mixed with leering sex.

CYBER SPACES: With the U Book Store cutting back on sales to non-UW personnel, Ballard Computer (which bought The Computer Store) is now the only full-line, all-takers Apple dealer inside the Seattle city limits. Some electronics stores carry some Apple products like the Performas, but only Ballard sells PowerMacs, hi-end laser printers, et al. If you don’t like their prices or their service, you’ll have to go to the suburbs or to mail-order.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The KIRO Radio News Fax is Seattle’s first new daily print publication in our lifetimes (not counting suburban papers). Wish I could say its content was equally momentous. It’s a five-page newsletter (the first is wasted on a cover sheet) with about two dozen brief news, sports and feature items (most shorter than this paragraph) and a few ads, phoned in free every weekday morning to any fax machine whose owner asks for it. A cute idea, but poorly executed. The items are too superficial to be interesting; you get more depth (and a lot more advertising) in a half-hour of KIRO-AM. It might’ve been better if KIRO were in charge. Instead, it’s run by an independent media firm in Bellevue; the station licenses its name and local news briefs to it. The Daily Journal of Commerce used to publish an afternoon “Newsgram” page of tightly-written financial items, distributed in downtown office towers; that was a much better example of condensed info of practical use to its readers.

STREET SEENS: Just because I oppose the Seattle Commons, don’t think I’m against all developments. I say a rousing Yes! to a symphony hall at 3rd & Union, and to moving A Contemporary Theatre into the Eagles Auditorium at 7th & Union. Next: turn the triangle between those two sites and Westlake Center into an all-night strolling and hanging-out area. Seattle needs something like Granville Mall in Vancouver, an all-hours, year-round, open-air gathering place. It’s too late to save the old movie-theater district; and our finally jump-started nightlife is scattered across a half-dozen areas, none feeding into downtown retail. But we can take advantage of real estate possibilities to put nightspots, live theaters, bowling alleys, pool halls, etc. in the Pine-Pike zone. Speaking of great hangouts…

SPACES IN THE HEART: I spent many a lonely evening at Andy’s Cafe on Broadway, home of honest food at honest prices; even got my heart broke by a waitress there. Now it’ll be an expanded version of Belltown espresso haven Septieme (“7e”). The last places to get unpretentious food on the Hill are Dick’s, the Jade Pagoda, Emil’s and IHOP. Why’s it seem that the more streets like B’way strive to become “arty” or “funky,” the less diverse or interesting they get? Speaking of homogenization…

HOPPING MAD: Redhook brewery products will be distributed by Anheuser-Busch, in the brewing equivalent of an indie record label going to bed with the majors. So much for the mystique of microbrew as a bastion of independence from the big boys (expressed in a rival microbrewer’s slogan, “Think Globally–Drink Locally”). Now when you doff a Ballard Bitter, you’ll contribute to the guys behind Spuds McKenzie, the Bud Dry “Alternative Beer” ads, and the capture of killer whales for Busch’s theme parks. (If I didn’t like the stuff I wouldn’t care this much.) Speaking of great independent foodmakers gobbled by “the majors”…

IN THE CHIPS: Tim’s Cascade Chips recently merged with Nalley’s, the Tacoma-based regional food legend, which in turn is being split up into two companies. The potato-chip operation, including Tim’s, is going to Dean Foods, while the rest of the company (chili, sloppy joes, enchiladas, mayonnaise, salad dressings, pickles, et al.) will go to Hormel. You might remember recent ads in which Nalley favorably compared its chili to Hormel’s; we probably won’t see those again. Let’s just hope the new owners don’t mess with the products too much or pay for the purchases by firing people (cf. the Oscar-winning documentary American Dream, on Hormel’s wage-slashing and union-busting). And let’s hope they keep Nalley’s Picadilly Chips, the last salt-and-vinegar potato chips left in the area now that Lay’s version is being discontinued.

(latter-day note: The Nalley/Hormel deal fell through.)

THE WORD: The arrest of Seattle Black Muslim preacher James Bess shocked me and probably other public-access fans. Bess, who allegedly shot and injured another ousted Nation of Islam leader in LA for reasons unknown at press time, was perhaps the most visible face on channel 29. While other volunteer producers found their shows shifted and bumped in the channel’s semiannual lotteries for scarce time slots, Bess always seemed to have from two to four shows every week. He entered each time-slot lottery with multiple applications under multiple program titles, to make sure he’d always stay on the air. His sermons were fiery and assertive, but he held himself with such an air of confidence and stand-up-straight persuasion that it’s hard to imagine him resorting to armed assault, a tactic of the weak and desperate.

SLIPPED DISCS?: After several years of relentless growth, are indie-rock labels overextended? Not only has C/Z cut back on its personnel, eMpTy has moved from its own office to a shared space. Label boss Blake Wright took a day job at Aldus; assistantTammy Watson took a PR job at Fantagraphics (replacing Larry “call me an Iconoclastic Visionary” Reid, now starting his own promo firm). The label reports good sales of its new Sicko CD and hopes to be back at full strength later this summer, even though its top-selling act, Gas Huffer, just signed with the larger indie Epitaph.

There are now between 20 and 75 record companies in Washington, depending on whether you count band-owned and vanity labels. Can they all survive? In theory, if you could get record buyers to support 50 20,000-copy albums instead of any one million-copy seller, you’d have a healthy indie scene.

It’s not that easy, of course; indies sell among the in-crowd fine, but still aren’t accessible by casual consumers in many areas (despite KNDD and the Insomnia and Tower 800 numbers). There are 16 stores in Seattle that sell appreciable amounts of non-major-label discs (plus seven others with limited selections), and four on the Eastside. But just try to find the Spinanes in Moses Lake (Ellensburg yes, but…). Heck, even Bellingham doesn’t have a decent indie store. There’s no quick-fix to this growth ceiling. We’re talking retail infrastructure here.

We can only hope that the underground-rock mystique stays hot long enough that a demand for the real thing filters through across the vast American landscape. That’ll require fans, zines, college and “alternative” radio, clubs, booking agents and bands to hold stronger loyalties to the indie scene, remembering that the media conglomerates are not necessarily our friends. Speaking of which….

COLD TYPE: Are major labels financing “independent” rock zines? So sez Maximum Rock n’ Roll. The self-proclaimed punk bible claims the majors are secretly investing in zines “in exchange for unspecified favors.” You can imagine what those might be–cover stories on bands the label (or “sham indie” companies controlled by the label) wants to hype. It sure explains why certain “alternative” zines have run big stories to plug bland but heavily promoted acts, movie soundtracks, and even TV tie-in discs.

VIRTUAL MATERIALISM: I’ve often felt sorry for poor little rich Barbie; just ‘cuz the character’s got a big chest people think she’s a bimbo, even when she’s a doctor or an astronaut. What she is, is an unabashed celebration of certain traditional feminine values that help drive the consumer economy. She doesn’t teach girls to be passive and dumb; she teaches them to make and spend all the money they can.

This training for life in corporate America is evident in the Barbie video games by Hi Tech Entertainment. In the Barbie game, she (you) searches for what a USA Today report calls “fashion treasures.” In Barbie Game Girl (for Game Boy, natch), you navigate “a mall maze” with Ken at the other end. And in Barbie Super Model, you’re “on a quest to become the hottest of supermodels in Aspen, New York, Hawaii and Hollywood.” There’ll soon be an interactive CD-ROM tour of Barbie and her Magical House. The makers claim they’re performing a service by getting girls interested in computers. But it won’t hurt society if one gender doesn’t get hooked on the left-brain opiate of passive-aggressively manipulating screen objects under pre-defined rules. We don’t need more female gamers, just more female programmers. Speaking of models out for money…

COME ON DOWN DEPT.: Darrington-born MC Bob Barker‘s lately called The Price Is Right “the highest-rated game show on network television”–a sly acknowledgment that it’s now the only game show on network television. But his triumph as last survivor turned sour when Dian Parkinson, the former “Barker’s Beauty” who became a Playboy model at 47, slapped him with an $8 million sexual-harrassment suit. Barker, now 70, countered that they’d had a voluntary affair in the late ’80s, at her instigation.

In an Internet message, a former contestant in beauty pageants he’s hosted claims his straying hands were infamous on the pageant circuit. But modem users love to wean gallows humor from the most serious issues, as in these jokes from America Online: “Would this have happened had he been spayed or neutered?” “The lawyers should have to guess the final settlement amount without going over.” “Hope he made sure he didn’t get Parkinson’s Disease.” “Overheard backstage: `Higher, higher, lower, lower–Plinko!'” And best/ worst of all: “I guess he really does like fur.” Speaking of controversial daytime celebs…

CATHODE CATHARSIS: Having meditated long and hard, I’ve decided I no longer hate Barney the Dinosaur. There are good reasons kids like the Purple One: (1) Parents hate him, so he’s a secret club for kids with none of that “sophisticated” humor that the grownups go for, going against everything boomers expect kids to like; (2) he’s purist television, a long-attention-span show on two obvious studio sets, unlike those disconcerting cut-up video shows like Sesame St. that their parents watched as kids. The show is as calming and reassuring as its star. Beneath its veneer of smarmy cheese it preaches civility and honor in an age ruled by selfishness and rudeness from gangsta rap to Rush Limbaugh, from left-wing elitists to right-wing boors. My only fear is that the Barney generation might grow up to be a reincarnation of the Victorians, who reacted against the decadence of 18th Century England by promoting extreme moralism. Either that, or they’re going to be just as irritatingly perky-bland as some of their elders. Speaking of which…

THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE SMUG: One thing that bugs me about San Francisco writers is that they seem to think the entire world’s just like San Francisco–an isthmus of self-styled “civilization” surrounded by vast fascistic deserts of heathen polyester-clad Sunset magazine readers. A worldview of hip liberals vs. square conservatives is impractical in Seattle, where so many of the closed-minded bourgeois squares fighting to stamp out original expression and true diversity claim to be political liberals. A square liberal loves “The Arts” but doesn’t want anything too new or harsh. Square liberals mistake Dave Barry for outré social comment, Linda Ronstadt for rock, and Chiluly for cutting-edge art. Squre liberals support Hollywood location shoots in town, but ignore indigenous local filmmaking.

Seattle politics is run by square-liberal boomers, by a Democratic machine in cahoots with high-powered attorneys and construction magnates. This machine’s progressive reputation is now cracking, as its obsessive-compulsive ideal of “A Clean City” (all-affluent, all-boomer, almost all-white) becomes more irreconcilable with reality and also with basic ideals of social decency. We’re witnessing an end to the premise that whitebread 1968 liberal arts graduates know what’s best for everybody and have everybody’s best interests at heart. With the poster law, the sitting law, the Commons plan, and the concerted drive to subsidize a bigger Nordstrom without bothering to replace Woolworth’s, it’s clear that the square-liberal boomers, and the politicians who strive for boomer appeal, aren’t always on the side of what’s best for the whole city.

MEMO TO THE MEDIA: Please stop using that dorky name “Generation X” to describe modern-day teens and young adults. Nobody likes it except stupid journalists. Generation X was a British punk band that broke up when today’s high schoolers were still in kindergarten. Speaking of which…

TONY! TONY! TONY!: The media mavens have been going agog over Tony Bennett’s well-received MTV Unplugged special last month, acting like it’s just so totally weird that a guy that old could appeal to their stupid stereotype of the younger generation. The reporters saying this are, of course, working for the same media industry that perpetually defines young people as A Market to be reached by whatever boomer-age marketers currently imagine to be Hot, Wild and Now. This approach invariably leads to such pathetic excuses for hipness as rapping cartoon animals, Details magazine, suntanned square-jawed surfer dudes in New York-designed “grunge” wear, and Marky Mark. The media business (and various related marketing businesses like restaurants) don’t get that many young adults don’t want to be force-fed patronizing simulacra of trendiness. They want things that are actually good, including things that evoke a sense of connection to some artistic tradition. That’s why the old Coke bottle’s so in now, along with vintage clothing stores, old magazines, and classic funky home furnishings. That’s why you see 20-year-olds at Dead shows, or reading Bukowski and Burroughs. That’s why great old restaurants lose all their coolness when they start trying too hard to be hip. Most recent case: The new owners of Vito’s Restaurant on First Hill trashed the place’s great old juke box full of Peggy Lee and Hank Williams for a CD player equipped with the requisite recent rock hits. Speaking of mistaken attempts to be hip…

RETURN TO THE OK CORRAL: The Coca-Cola Co. isn’t placing all its now-generation marketing bets on OK Soda. It’s also test-marketing its faux-Snapple line of fruit drinks, Fruitopia. Thsee strange-tasting sweetened beverages come in 16-ounce bottles with labels in ripoff World Beat label designs, with the flavor names “The Grape Beyond,” “Strawberry Passion Awareness,” “Citrus Consciousness” and “Fruit Integration.” At least one of the varieties uses taste-neutral pear juice to manipulate its sweetness, a trick used for years by Tree Top mixed juices. (For an independent taste of the same premise try Arizona Ice Tea and Cowboy Cocktails, made in Brooklyn, in big 24-oz. cans at the Gollywog Grocery on 1st and Blanchard.)

SOCCER TO ME: I confess I had a long couple of days and passed out on the sofa while trying to watch my first World Cup match. Still, it was great to see the entire US sports press go agog over the first American World Cup victory in 44 years, burying deep in their stories the fact that the game was won on a fluke (an opposing player mistakenly deflected the ball into his own team’s net). And it’s cool to see the games without commercial breaks, just corporate logos in the corner of the screen. Other kinds of programs oughta consider this device. Let’s see uninterrupted movies, shown in widescreen letterbox format with AT&T ads scrolling across the black bars. Or run the soaps with little logos denoting the toothpastes and hair-care products of the stars, alternating with subtitles explaining every character’s convoluted past for the benefit of new viewers. Just expect some actresses to make demands in their contracts that their big dramatic scenes not be accompanied by Massengill logos. Speaking of global broadcasting concepts…

NAFTA NASTIES: The trade papers claim Fox is going to finally start having daytime soaps, sorta. They’re contracting with the Mexican network Televisa to produce English-language versions of Televisa’s infamously sappy, 100-episode telenovelas. They’ll be made like the Spanish-language versions of early Hollywood talkies were made, with a separate cast taking over the same sets after the regular cast is done for the day. Somehow, it just won’t be the same to see these shows and know what they’re saying.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Craisins, recently given out in half-ounce bags downtown, are the Ocean Spray grower co-op’s attempt to find yet another non-winter-holiday market for the tart little red bog fruit. As the name implies they’re dried cranberries with juice added back in and pumped full o’ sugar (the leading ingredient). They look like regular raisins with red food coloring. They taste like the lumpy bits of holiday cranberry sauce.

KRISTEN PFAFF, 1967-1994: Yet another creative free spirit destroyed by the global drug cartel, an even more sinister institution than the major record labels. I’m no straight-edger but I know there’s nothing even remotely “rebellious” about getting hooked on smack. It makes you less capable of assertive action. It greatly increases your need for money while decreasing your ability to earn it. It makes you an even bigger slave to the system than you already are. Which may be one reason why neo-fascist dictators and the US “intelligence” establishment love to be part of the business of selling it to you.

‘TIL OUR NEXT VIRTUAL GATHERING, be sure to visit the new Costco on the big concrete cavity that used to be Aurora Village, and heed these prophetic words from a 1970 Esquire fashion spread about the “Pepsi Proletariat” look: “It consists of overalls, flannel shirt, and heavy work boots, the traditional accoutrements of the working class…. To adopt the Pepsi Proletariat guise is to express one of the more euphoriant pipe dreams of the counterculture: the hope that a coalition may someday be fashioned out of workers and freaks.”

PASSAGE

An anonymous Searle pharmacologist, quoted in that spiritual guide for our times, Listening to Prozac: “If the brain were simple enough for us to understand, we’d be too simple to understand it.”

REPORT

Again, thanks to the select few of you who attended our little film screening/soirée in June. Another might be held this fall; watch this space for details.

Am currently heading into the slimy depths of production on my local-music history book. I really need two things right now: (1) Pictures, including band photos, record covers/sleeves, posters, tickets, ads, and old zines; and (2) Your recommendations on which current Seattle-Tacoma-Olympia-Bellingham club bands should be in the book.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Nunatak”

6/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THIS WAS TO BE THE YEAR

THE SONICS WENT ALL THE WAY.

INSTEAD, THE FANS GOT A HEADACHE

Welcome back to Misc., your friendly roadside diner along the Info Hi-Way, the kind with the big neon sign facing the road that just says EAT. This edition is dedicated to Jim Althoff, one of the last local talk-radio hosts to dare to be smart instead of sleazy. He and wife Andee Beck (formerly the region’s smartest TV critic) are off to do a show in Milwaukee. We’ll miss ’em. (More on Althoff’s ex-station later.)

DEPT. OF CLARIFICATION: I don’t normally write about my personal life, but half the stuff written about me in the 5/11 Weekly isn’t true. If you need to know which half, send a SASE.

UPDATES: The pirate radio station Free Radio Seattle has had equipment problems and isn’t on the air yet, but now plans a 90-minute inaugural broadcast for midnight June 4, somewhere near 88 FM…. The people who left Month magazine and tried to start a copycat free mag called Monthly have subtly changed their name to Northwest Monthly to avoid confusion with what a Monthly editorial called “a junior high rag.” They’re also putting out Bean: An Idea Cafe, a literary/poetry zine with reviews of only old-hippie-acceptable music (folk, jazz, blues). (One corec: Month and Monthly‘s common ancestor, Face II Face, was originally sold for $2 a copy; it later became a freebie.)

REMINDER TO THE MEDIA: When Bob Hardwick, Seattle’s leading middle-of-the-road radio personality for 30 years, tragically shot himself a year or two back, you didn’t see any dorky commentators claiming the suicide proved that all middle-aged Sinatra fans were pathetic losers.

FADE AWAY NOT: In the first weeks after the Cobain tragedy, I heard several locals privately refer to it as the closing chapter in the “Seattle scene” mania. Does it really mean “the party’s over” locally? Ever since Mudhoney first appeared on the cover of Melody Maker almost six years ago, some people here have expected (and even hoped) that the bigtime music-biz would quickly tire of Seattle and everyone could go back to playing just for one another. It hasn’t happened yet, despite the concerted efforts of the media to shoehorn all Seattle bands into one stereotyped fad, and then to declare that fad over. Face it: The corporate entertainment establishment’s scared of people outside NY/LA making their own culture, refusing to be good passive consumers.

Seattle rock isn’t one singular sound, but it does represent an attitude of DIY production and distribution, of creating things you really like that communicate directly with audiences because they really like it. Just how well this formula worked was proved by the immensity with which Cobain’s death shocked and saddened people. The tragic loss of a singular artist and the end of Seattle’s premier band threw everybody for a big harsh wallop and made everything seem a whole hell of a lot less fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that the NW has two dozen other major-label bands at last count. There are as many as 50 other world-class indie acts in Washington and Oregon, playing a wide variety of sounds, plus hundreds of fascinating/fun/dull/bombastic club acts.

I’ve found that California people used to like Seattle when it was thought of as little more than a good market for Calif.-made culture product (LA films and fashions, SF rock bands and authors), a friendly rival to the LA aerospace-defense industry, and a middle-aged-hippie retirement home with good pot and lotsa magic ‘shrooms ripe for the pickin’. But somewhere along the line, us Nordic hicks started getting uppity; some of us thought we could create some of our own culture for a change. Maybe it was these Seattle rock bands and theater troupes that got the southwesterners to notice our new attitude; maybe it was when the pivot point of the PC biz moved from Palo Alto to Redmond.

In any event, I’ve seen a lot of attempts by Calif. writers and commentators to put us northern yahoos back in our place. The corporate culture industry of LA and the bohemian culture industry of SF both have a vested stake in preventing the movement of DIY empowerment that Seattle represents. All the rock-journalism hype about “Looking for the Next Seattle” was based on trying to promote the image that Seattle had just been a place where a few good bands were ready to be absorbed into the media machine, and that any other town might have similarly-exploitable talent. They’re not willing to admit out loud that Seattle and the other local scenes represent a threat to corporate rock’s very existence, that we want to replace the media machine with what that NY-centrist Patti Smith called “the age when everybody creates.”

PHILM PHACTS: Movies based on TV series have one basic flaw: A TV series isn’t a story. It’s a concept, a set of characters, running shticks and situations; more like a role-playing game manual than a story. A movie script is a sequence of events with a set beginning and end. Once a TV-based movie has established the characters and running gags or dramatic elements of the series, it finds itself with nothing to do and an hour of screen time to fill. The Fugitive avoided this problem by stringing together the initial premise and conclusion of the original series with some Steadicam chase scenes, avoiding the plot elements that made up most of the series episodes. Maverick, The Flintstones, Car 54 Where Are You?, The Beverly Hillbillies, et al. haven’t solved this.

THEIR MONEY: Let’s set the story straight about that ubiquitous right-wing bogeyperson, the infamous “added costs” that prevent businesses from pricing products and services at the cheapest price. Anything beyond the cheapest possible cost of making and shipping a product is “added cost.” Yes, that includes the standard old talk-radio nemeses of taxes and environmental regulations, plus the new talk-radio nemeses of employee health insurance; but it also included mob payoffs, excessive executive salaries and perks, advertising, lawyers, bank fees, lobbying, donations to the symphony, losses on bad real-estate investments, etc. Any Gucci-clad executive who whines that health care for his workers would be an excessive “added cost” oughta be willing to give up half his salary. If the conservatives had their way, we’d all be dying of TB caused by unsafe living conditions so the privileged could have even more privileges.

HARD BARGAINS: The Nordstrom family apparently learned a lot from its former ownership of the Seahawks about wringing forth public subsidies for private business. Nordstrom now allegedly won’t move its downtown store into the old Frederick’s building unless the city gives it big tax breaks, the state builds a bigger convention center, and the feds change rules to encourage cruise ships to dock here. (Store officials don’t call this a list of absolute “demands,” just suggested steps to improve the “business climate.”) If all this doesn’t happen, according to a meeting between corporate and government officials leaked to the P-I, the Nordies hint at threatening to diminish their current downtown store and to move their corporate offices to Oregon or California. Not quite the image of selfless customer service, eh? Speaking of businesses that demand your support…

EVERY BREATH YOU TAKE DEPT.: I’ve already harped about the self-serving hypocrisy of vegetarians who smoke, but this is a life-n’-death issue so I’ll continue with another argument: If you’re such a rebel bohemian, why do you give up your money and your body to the tobacco industry, one of the most reactionary and anti-humanistic forces on the planet today? And don’t think you’re avoiding the campaign coffers of Jesse Helms if you buy that brand that’s falsely billed as Native American-made (it really isn’t; it only advertises to be “true to the Native American tradition,” whatever that means). That’s just a smaller company within the same huge legal drug cartel that’s gotten federal subsidies to keep making products that kill when properly used. Now the US cig industry’s responding to declining domestic sales by seeking new people overseas to enslave, like women in China. Speaking of legal drugs…

THE FINE PRINT: The Rainier Ice bottle prominently displays the product’s bountiful alcohol content twice, but you have to look to find out that you only get 10 oz. of the stuff, instead of the standard 12. Speaking of questionable beverage marketing…

THE EDGE OF WETNESS: In a desperate attempt to rebuild its still scandal-damaged US market, Perrier‘s launching four designer bottles with pseudo-art-deco designs by what its PR calls four “artists of the future” — really professional ad artists. This attempt to start a collectible craze ruins what had been the finest bottle design in its market segment, and doesn’t disguise the fact that what’s inside is still filtered H2O plus CO2, just like the cheaper domestic stuff. Still speaking of questionable beverage marketing…

LIKE A VELVET GLOVE CAST IN RECYCLABLE ALUMINUM: The Coca-Cola Co. has made the most brazen attempt yet at reaching the young PoMo sensibility. OK (billed as “A Carbonated ‘Beverage’ “) is an orange-lemon-lime-cola melange with caffeine and a dark-pinkish color, test-marketed here and in eight other towns. It tastes and looks like that stuff you made as a kid by squirting a little from every 7-11 Big Gulp nozzle into the same cup. It’s got a set of package designs by ex-Seattle cartoon legend Charles Burns and another with the monochrome ennui of Eightball cartoonist Dan Clowes, who got $7,000 for the rights to existing panels of his art. According to Time, the brand is the product of two years of research into youthful attitudes, including data from MIT’s “Global Teenager” project, and is meant to sell to skeptical kids here and worldwide (one possible reason for the non-sequitur texts on the packages, which read like Japanese English ad copy.) The whole marketing campaign’s the work of Weiden & Kennedy, the infamous Portland ad agency that gave us Nike, Black Star beer, and the Subaru commercial with the line “It’s like punk rock, only it’s a car.” Speaking of Rose City media products…

PUTTING THE X IN PDX: Several parties have tried to create a heterosex mag for the now generation. But Bikini is too steeped in snowboarding graphics, and Future Sex is too slopped in the anti-human dispassion of cybersex (masturbating with robots being the fantasy of male computer nerds who grew up with too few girls and too many issues of Heavy Metal; if traditional porn is fantasizing for purposes of masturbation, cybersex is fantasizing about masturbation).

It took a low-budget effort from Portland, the double-entendre-titled X Magazine, to come at least close to doing it right. It’s nicely printed on non-slick paper, with type you can actually read. The 42 photos (most in that “arty” black and white) include visual and verbal depictions of young women and men who like one another and themselves–the “alternative” press’s only current sexual taboo, the taboo against inter-gender friendship. The most erotic pic, for me, is on the contents page, with a friendly female face glancing playfully-knowingly toward the staff list. There’s also a spread of a passionate couple stripping out of grunge fashions (you don’t see whether the guy’s hair is his longest feature), some not-too-dumb poetry, an actually-funny spoof of the Tonya Harding media feeding frenzy, and a nice profile of Miss Red Flowers, Portland co-ed rock band that (like Seattle’s Sick and Wrong) has sometimes gone naked on stage. The only downsides: a dumb woman-in-bondage photo (illustrating a man-in-bondage fiction piece) and a puff piece on this moment’s worst corporate “alternative” band, Paw. Available at Bulldog News and Fantasy (Un)ltd. Speaking of sexy printed matter…

NEW MONEY: The feds are talking about redesigning our paper currency, starting with the smugglers’-favorite $100 bill. About time. We’ve got some of the least inviting-looking money in the world. Why should the Canadian buck be worth less but look so much more colorful? Hey, let’s have commemorative bills, just like stamps — money with a thin and fat Elvis, a thin and fat Jim Morrison, or a fat and thin Oprah.

DEAD AIR REVISITED: Irv Pollack is the kind of feisty senior citizen you might hear calling talk radio, unafraid to call the host on a grievously wrong point. When KING-AM was put up for sale, Pollack wanted to buy it, to make it America’s first for-profit community station. He had no experience in broadcast management (tho’ he was a former KCMU news volunteer) and no capital to invest, but he hoped the Bullitt sisters, who were selling the station to endow their environmental foundation, would give him the time to assemble a deal by raising funds from the likes of Robert Redford, Ben & Jerry’s, the Working Assets long-distance service, and author Paul Hawken. But neither time nor money were on the side of Pollack’s quixotic quest. Within weeks, KIRO agreed to pay $2.5 million for the station, which has lost money as long as anyone can remember. This kind of artificial price is only possible because the Feds now let big station groups to own up to four stations in a town. This policy reduces competition, stifles a diversity of voices, and helps nobody but the owners. Speaking of lost opportunities…

SPACES IN THE HEART: Tugs Belmont is now a non-gay bar called Beatnix, with a pool table and jazz and spoken-word shows. Thus ends a tradition that goes back to the original Tugs Belltown (1979-89), a less exclusively-gay disco than Tugs Belmont was. It was also, on weeknights, the first above-ground punk/new wave dance club in town. When Tugs #1 was evicted by its landlord for redevelopment, the Tugs people took over the space that had been Squid Row (1986-90), a gloriously stinky and dank live-music club that hosted a variety of sounds but was best known as one of the chief sites where a few people developed the beer-sodden growls that the outside world still mistakenly thinks all Seattle bands sound like. Both Tugs incarnations had their troubles with a Liquor Board that couldn’t appreciate gay erotic images or queer-positive performance art. Tugs #2 was slapped with a week’s suspension due to a recent underwear party. The owner, who according to inside reports was getting tired of keeping the joint afloat, decided to close it instead….

Also now closed is Belltown’s last lowbrow watering hole: the notorious tavern on 2nd, north of the Crocodile, that hadn’t had an outside sign for several years but was officially known as Hawaii West (I know we’re east of Hawaii; the name referred to a previous Hawaii Tavern in another part of town). As the last place of its type in the area to not get upscaled (besides the Rendezvous), it was a refuge of barflies who’d been 86’d or made unwelcome everywhere else….

And while nobody was looking (or rather, because nobody was showing), the Vogue quietly dropped its last live-music nights in favor of an all-DJ format. Now, nobody’s new band will be able to play the little stage where Nirvana made one of its first Seattle shows, that had hosted Seattle’s best & brightest since 1980 (as WREX). It now seems like a lifetime ago, but before 1990 the Vogue’s Tues. and Wed. night shows were some of the most important showcases a local band could get, back when the only other places to play were the Central and the Ditto (which were only open weekends) and the Rainbow (which had “new music nights” early in the week). Speaking of musical memories…

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 1: During most of my adult life, “Classic Rock” meant 1956-71 hits only. Then came the ’70s Preservation Society, Rhino Records’ Have A Nice Day CD compilations, the movie Dazed and Confused, ’70s dance parties in some cities, revival bands like the Gin Blossoms, and (most importantly, biz-wise) the aging of ’70s teens into the advertiser-preferred demographic brackets. ’70s-nostalgia radio formats have hit the airwaves in over 20 cities. Barry Ackerly’s turned the old K-Lite into KJR-FM, playing some of the hits heard on KJR-AM during that station’s Emporer Smith/Norm Gergory silver age (which followed its Lan Roberts/Pat O’Day golden age). The emphasis is on whitebread corporate-rockers (Eagles, Springsteen, Jackson Browne), not on the era’s wacky AM hits (as chronicled in Barry Scott‘s new book We Had Joy, We Had Fun), certainly not on late-decade punk, and not even on the decade’s great R&B-pop (much of it recorded by ex-Philly soul producer Thom Bell at what’s now Heart’s Bad Animals studio, then owned by KJR’s parent company). For that you’ll have to catch this season’s two ’70s-soul nostalgia movies or catch Spike Lee’s current Nike ads. The ’70s-nostalgia format just regurgitates the stupidity that the early punks rebelled against. What’s scarier is that it means corporate ’80s nostalgia will eventually appear. I can guess how horrid that’s gonna be: They’ll claim we all really were in love with Reagan and Rambo, just like corporate ’60s nostalgia claims that everybody alive back then was a white liberal-arts student.

YESTERDAY ONCE MORE, PART 2: A quarter-century ago, self-styled “visionaries” among the downtown business elite proposed radical solutions to two “blighted” areas of Seattle. They wanted to turn Pioneer Square into one big parking area, and to replace either all or most of the Pike Place Market with offices and condo towers. The pro-development forces (which included the local dailies and the mayor’s office) dismissed the people who lived or worked in those districts as bums, marginal types and hippie-dippies who were impeding the way of sacred Progress. Fortunately, the hippie-dippies et al. prevailed. Watch for similar arguments to be made against Commons opponents.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (meticulously painted on the facade of Sam’s Super Burger, 26th & Union): “No trespassing. No loitering. I don’t come to your place and sell my burgers, so don’t you come to my place and sell your drugs.”

COMMODORE BUSINESS MACHINES, RIP: Jack Tramiel was an Auschwitz survivor turned hard-headed entrepreneur, who took over a calculator company in the mid-’70s and brought out one of the very first PCs, the Commodore PET. Clever low-cost engineering and lowball pricing helped make the PET’s successors, the Vic-20 and Commodore 64, the first computers of many an early-’80s hacker-dude. In ’85, as the industry was consolidating (and just before Tramiel was ousted from his own company), the firm brought out the Amiga, a mid-level home machine with a proprietary operating system and one unique component — standard NTSC video input/output. The Amiga failed as a home machine but found a niche market among audio and video mavens, especially after the NewTek company brought out the Video Toaster add-on circuit board in 1990, which enabled budding TV-hackers to perform pro-level video editing and effects for less than the price of a big-screen monitor. The Amiga finally had a “killer app,” a third-party application that drove hardware sales. But it wasn’t enough, and now Commodore is being liquidated. No word yet what’ll happen to the Amiga or its loyal users.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Don’t be mistaken, newcomers: Eggheads are not larger versions of Cadbury Creme Eggs. They’re really miniaturized Mountain Bars (have a Northwest native tell you what those are). Just remember for now, “Brown & Haley Makes ‘Em Daily!”… Orville Reddenbacher’s microwave popcorn now comes in “Artificial Movie Theater Butter Flavor.” Actually, it tastes better than the popcorn you get in artificial movie theaters…. Ginseng-flavored chewing gum, a staple of Asian groceries, has been hyped in the new-age press as an alleged aphrodisiac. Something called Gum Tech International has responded with Love Gum (for “the woman with a healthy attitude” and “the man who wants peak performance”), Chiclets-like nuggets with just a touch of ginseng powder. The primary flavor? What else: cherry…. And be sure to attend our junk food film festival and Misc. 8th Anniversary party, 8pm Wednesday 6/8 at the Pike St. Cinema (all ages this time), 1108 Pike St. at Boren Ave., just east of the freeway.

WHERE THEY BE NOW: I finally tracked down ex-local performing artist Tomata du Plenty in Miami, where he makes paintings at a studio in Little Haiti and tends bar in the Design District. He looked back fondly at his wild days in Ze Whiz Kidz (Seattle’s first gay theater troupe, and font of the homespun-camp-cabaret influence in local theater to this day) and the Tupperwares/Screamers (one of Seattle’s first punk bands). He was saddened to hear that fellow ex-Screamer Dave Gulbransen (aka Rio de Janeiro) had closed his family’s business, the Dog House.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, be the first on your block to get FutureTech’s new disposable 3-D still camera, root for the Vancouver Canucksin the NHL hockey finals, and heed these words from Calvin Trillin‘s classic tome Alice, Let’s Eat: “Never eat in a restaurant that’s over a hundred feet off the ground and won’t stand still.”

PASSAGE

Some more words-O-wit from that “self published aphorist” (zine publisher) of ’20s Vienna, Karl Kraus: “I hear noises which others don’t hear and which disturb for me the music of the spheres, which other people don’t hear either.”

SPECIAL EVENT!

Celebrate the 8th anniversary of this little literary serial and the launch of my next endeavor (see next item) with the MISC@8 party and Junk Food Film Fest, Wednesday, 6/8, 8 pm, at the cozy Pike St. Cinema (1108 Pike & Boren, just east of I-5 and the Convention Center).

My book on the history of the Seattle punk scene, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, will be published early next year by Feral House, the Portland cult-faves who brought you the anthology Apocalypse Culture and the Ed. Wood Jr. bio Nightmare of Ecstasy. I’m selling off my remaining stock of photocopy rough drafts. Get yours now, or wait for the real book.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Myxoedema”

5/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating five Stranger columns)

Here at Misc. we can’t wait for the longtime local label K Records to start a joint venture with the new local label Y Records. The connection between the two would undoubtedly go very smoothly.

THE MAILBAG: Thanx to all the Aldus people who E-mailed words of reassurance after the piece here about the software giant last time. One guy said not to worry about Aldus’s future, that the firm’s forthcoming merger with Adobe Systems would be more like a “marriage” than a corporate takeover. (I think we’ve all seen marriages that were like corporate takeovers, but that’s beside the point…)

FOR LOVE OR $$ DEPT.: For shameless audience manipulation, nothing could compare to KCTS‘s weekend marathon of Getting The Love You Want, a home-video marriage counseling series. The facilitator picks a couple from the audience, has them reveal their issues and conflicts, then leads them in working out their differences. He closes the segment by getting the couple to hug and avow their continued empathy. This moment of tenderness and generosity closes, and then we see another pledge break.

THE NEW LITTER: The P-I reports that the much-hyped closure of the legendary Dog House restaurant was just a ploy by its owners to get out from its lease and its union contract. But it backfired; the eatery’s landlord decided not to sign a new lease with the Dog House people, but instead to let the owners of that other legendary 24-hour hash house, Beth’s Cafe, take over the space. The newly-christened Hurricane Cafe doesn’t have a bar, organ player, murals (its walls are newly painted in the same plum color as Linda’s Tavern on E. Pine), or such old-time menu items as liver and onions, but it does have big food at reasonable prices at all hours. The Dog House folks are reportedly looking for a new downtown site to open a non-union cafe, which may or may not have any of the old Dog House iconography.

FOUL TIP: The Mariners opened another season amidst new hype about the team actually maybe winning a division this year (a new mini-Western Division shorn of the powerhouse White Sox). And as usual, a new season brings out the usual media hype of “Whither Baseball?” Here’s what I think’s wrong with the game: 1) a new TV contract worse than hockey’s, with half the national cable games, no network games until July, and regional-only playoff telecasts — a setup that won’t help promote the game to new fans; and 2) its reputation as the sport of writers and other dullards, who blather on about such esoterica as the dimensions of the field (I’ve never seen ponderous essays on how a basketball court’s 96 feet long, a multiple of the sacred numbers 8 and 12). When they’re not doing that, writers use baseball to conjure up images of that Bygone Innocent America, that nice all-white-middle-class wonderland that never was. Face it: a game marketed to exploit grandpa’s selective memories isn’t gonna attract enough kids to maintain a decent supply of players, let alone a decent supply of fans.

PUFF PIECES: The King County Council may vote this month on a plan, drafted by the county health department, to ban smoking in restaurants. If approved, the ban would first take effect in the suburbs, then spread to Seattle in ’95 when the county takes over Seattle’s restaurant regulation. You could still smoke in taverns, lounges, and in restaurants that were willing to serve adults only, at least until they pass a broader ban. I think smoking is a wretched habit; but everybody I meet these days smokes, especially the vegetarians. This is Big Brother-ism at its most persnickity.

INK STAINS: Fourteen months ago, some dudes in Lynnwood started Face II Face, a free monthly newsprint magazine with equal emphasis on fashion, art, music and fiction. The Face II Face team split up un-amicably last November, with several members relocating to Seattle and re-starting under the name Month (though the cover flag said “November,” “December,” etc.). That crew just had another falling out. Jim and Jodi Madigan continued to publish Month, unveiling a slightly revised graphic design in their April issue, while their ex-colleagues Bill Maner, Tom Schmitt and Roger LeBlanc just put out something called Monthly, whose premiere April issue is billed as “Vol. 1 No. 6” and looks just like the first five issues of Month except it’s not stapled. To add to the confusion, neither publication mentions the family feud in its pages. We’ll see if they start up fistfights over press credentials to runway shows.

WANKING ON PARADE: That professional egotist and artistic has-been John Lydon, in town on a book tour, was scheduled to appear on The Spud Goodman Show. Goodman had outlined half an episode to the Lydon interview, the most he’d ever alloted to a single guest. KNDD’s Norman Batley, who’d took on a volunteer producer position on the Goodman show, was in charge of bringing Lydon from his hotel room to the studio. But somebody, either on the local PR team handling the tour stop or one of the print-media reporters keeping him busy, dissuaded him from going, charging “that’s not even a real TV station.” Goodman and his normally scripted cast had to improvise a new show on the spot, shuffling in segments written for other episodes and making introductions for location segments that don’t exist yet, that will have to be shot and edited into the episode before it airs.

THE MARGINAL WAY: There’s been a big media blitz over the county’s plan to revive the beautifully rusty Industrial District between the Kingdome and Tukwila. The stories quoted officials claiming that unless We Act Now, the zone could become a “rust belt” a la the abandoned factories of Michigan and Ohio. The top paragraphs of the stories mentioned all-well-n’-good stuff like fixing roads and cleaning up toxic waste. But if you read further you find out that there really aren’t many vacant sites in the area, that it’s well-occupied by small and medium businesses. Most of the horror stories cited in the articles about companies leaving the ID turn out to be about firms that wanted bigger tracts than they could get.

It doesn’t take much between-line reading to wonder whether the politicians are really seeking an excuse to condemn and consolidate tracts down there, evict some of the little guys, and turn the area over to bigger operations by bigger companies — the sort of companies that employ proportionately fewer people, but make bigger campaign contributions.

MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “race-blind casting” as the courageous risk of daring theatrical directors to award all major roles, no matter what ethnicity the characters may be, to white actors.

THE LAST WORD ON GANGSTA RAP: When hiphop was ruled from NY, it was an explosion of creativity with a social conscience. Then the Hollywood showbiz weasels took charge and, as usual, ruined everything. If I believed power, money, intimidation, sexism and egotism were the answers to everything, I would’ve become a Republican.

LITERAMA: Clever people across the country are discovering a real use for the Apple Newton Messagepad, that overpriced electronic Rolodex that’s supposed to read your handwriting but usually can’t. It may not be able to make an exact digital version of what you write on it, but it can turn it into computer-assisted cut-up poetry! Yes, you can make your own faux-Burroughs without having to shoot anybody or get addicted to anything. In my own experimental-fiction days, I used to be in a group that played the “writing games” devised by the French Oulipo group (Raymond Quaneau, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, et al.). One of them was “n + 7”: take an existing passage and replace each common noun with the noun seven dictionary entries past it. Similar discoveries await when you Newtonize a familiar saying. Here’s some vintage “Abe Newton” as posted on the Net: “Foyer scrota and severe heavers ago our flashovers brought force on thy cosmetician a new notion conceives in lubricate and deducted to the prosecution that all men are crated quail.”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Thomas Kemper Weizen-Berry might be America’s first raspberry-flavored beer. I wouldn’t say it was particularly good, but it might qualify as an experience in learning just how bizarre foreign-inspired food-and-drink recipes can really be…. Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls is the first basketball-shaped cereal! They’re wheat/corn puffs, sorta like oversize Kix with alternating pink and brown basketball seams dyed onto them and an odd brown-sugar taste. Better still is the hype on the side: “Hey Mom & Dad! Tired of putting on the full-court press to get your kids to eat a wholesome breakfast? Introducing new Dunk-A-Balls, the one-of-a-kind breakfast cereal that will have your kids fast breaking for the breakfast bowl. Dunk-A-Balls is the perfect tip-off to the whole day…. Score a slam dunk with your kids, sky-hook them a bowl of Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls now, before the buzzer sounds on this limited time offering!”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: My Spokane is Evergreen student Jon Snyder‘s oversize photo-essay book on the sights, sounds and dreams of his beloved Inland Empire hometown (though he does complain in an insert that he couldn’t find an Eastern Washington printer willing to run it, due to a chapter on adolescent sex fantasies). Of special interest to west-side readers is his ode to the Spokane Dick’s Drive-In, a completely separate enterprise from the Seattle Dick’s chain (and servers of superior flesh-n’-grease products, or so he claims). $7.50 at Fallout Records or from 214 S. Coeur D’Alene St., Spokane 99204….

Sell Yourself to Science is, at first glance, just another Loompanics Unlimited tome of quasi-demimonde self-help access; in this case, about how to make small sums of money by participating in medical experiments or by selling your blood, semen or other bodily products. What sets it above the Loompanics norm is the oft-hilarious writing, by local kid Jim Hogshire; especially when he asserts that you should be allowed to sell post-death rights to your organs to the highest bidder. Even better is the collected set of Hogshire’s zine Pills A-Go-Go, which studies pharmaceuticals (legal and otherwise) the way Spin studies music (available at Pistil Books on E. Pike, that handy place to go mag-shopping on a Fri. night while avoiding an opening act at Moe).

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT?: You don’t have to be in Ulster to get harsh treatment at an Irish cultural event. A couple of bouncers at the Moore were overheard vowing to “get” some kids at the Pogues show a few weeks back. And they did, grabbing people (particularly the small and/or female) from the pit, forcibly removing them. One frustrated attendee tried to leave voluntarily, only to get grabbed and tossed outside herself; she reports still having sore limbs and muscles. The bouncers in question are reportedly no longer at the theater; its new owners were already planning to hire new security.

BOOZE NOOZE: Dewar’s Scotch, whose youth-appeal magazine ads we’ve discussed, isn’t the only distilled liquor trying to capture a younger generation weaned on cheap beer. The trade mag Market Watch: Market Intelligence on the Wine, Spirits and Beer Business just had a special issue about it. The opening note from the publisher, pictured as a plump moustached old guy, declared, “They’re diverse. They’re young. And they have decidedly different attitudes about alcoholic beverages than do baby boomers. Just who are these new consumers, you asked? Generation X, that’s who.” Inside, we learn the market strategies aimed at pushing spirits, extra-sweet chardonnays, ice beer, and mass-produced pseudo-microbrews to under-30s. But the most telling parts of the issue are the ads, boasting to retailers of the youth-market atrategies of Southern Comfort (“One small age group buys enough spirits to empty your store every hour”) and Black & White Scotch (“They’re passive-aggressive vidiots who grew up too fast and have no faith in the system and think holes in jeans are cool and that party is a verb and will never buy anything in your store anyway. Congratulations. They’re your new Scotch customers”)….

Meanwhile, that new desperate-to-be-hip malt beverage Zima has reportedly been casting locally for commercials, seeking out models who are 25 or older but look younger. Encouraging underage drinking, you say? Heavens no! Just looking hip and urbane! Speaking of which…

SNOWED UNDER: I’d hoped that springtime would bring a seasonal end to articles about snowboarding, full of all the requisite MTV Sports-style hyperbole, neon-drenched graphics, “unfocused” typefaces, and Prince-esque spellings (“D Place 4 U 2 B”). But instead there are now at least six year-round snowboard magazines, all more or less drenched in “grafique XS.” The art aside, there’s a bigger issue at work: the case of a countryside athletic activity attracting an urbane-hip mystique. I’m meeting intelligent, club-going, artistically-minded young adults who play the sport, who either don’t mind the hype about it or like it.

To many old-line punkers and wavers like myself, athleticism was the suspect domain of the Evil Jock Mentality, or of anti-intellectual adults (cf. “Get High On Sports Not Drugs” programs in school, which posited that the only alternative to being a mindless junkie was to be a hopeless jock). Artistically-aware people weren’t into sports; they were more likely to be beaten up by the guys who were into sports. But in recent years, some free-thinking youths have begun to accept that the human body might be useful for activities besides dancing, fighting, fucking, and dressing (cf. Vedder‘s surfer-dude acrobatics). Speaking of sports…

FROZEN IN TIME?: The New Times, that monthly new-age broadsheet, offers a specialist perspective on recent events: “Tonya and Nancy: An ECKist’s View.” That’s Eckankar, “The Ancient Science of Soul Travel.” Author Robin Adams McBride claims Harding’s misdeeds and/or lapses in judgment resulted from her personal development over successive reincarnations over the centuries, “as the soul sets up its scenarios for learning and then forgets that it had anything to do with planning her experiences….Tonya Harding can experience the ultimate transformation of an evolved Scorpio personality if she responds to this wake-up call positively. The phoenix arising from the ashes of personal humiliation and defeat can replace the scorpion which stings its enemies to gain advantage.”

THE FINE PRINT (from promo copies of the Sister Psychic CD Surrender, You Freak!): “Advance CD — Instore-airplay promo only. Will explode if sold.”

MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “classic rock” as the work of radio station managers wistfully looking back to a more innocent age, before the radio was controlled by people like them. Speaking of which…

LIVE AIR: Here’s all I know about Free Radio Seattle, the new pirate station advertised on flyers around Capitol Hill this past month. It was scheduled to go on the air at midnight 4/30 for a 90-minute broadcast, transmitting somewhere in the vicinity of 88 on the FM dial. Further broadcasts are tentatively scheduled on a weekly basis. Content will include community news and commentary, club listings, and freeform music (“like what KCMU used to be,” according to an anonymous communique sent to me). Because this whole thing’s somewhat illegal, the broadcasts will be recorded at one undisclosed site and transmitted from another; to avoid (or at least delay) FCC detection, the portable transmitter will be set up at a different place each time. If these guys are putting their butts on the line to do this (and there’s a strong chance they’ll get caught before long), they’d better have a good reason, like having something important to say.

CATHODE CORNER: A recent wire service item placed Married… With Children as one of the top 10 TV shows among African American audiences. (The only white-cast show with more black viewers is Blossom, which until recently shared a time block with the black-starring Fresh Prince of Bel Air.) My theory: Married‘s black co-creator, Michael Moye, clearly set out to devise a family that would affirm the stereotypes some hard-striving black middle-class families have about lazy, privileged white trash. It’s either that, or the utter failure of Bud Bundy’s attempt to play-act as “Street Rapper Grandmaster B.”

BAN, ROLL ON: Yes, the Washington legislature tried again to revive the Erotic Music Bill, a misguided attempt to shore up the morals of Those Kids Today by restricting selected rock records (Gov. Lowry vetoed the “anti-porn” package of proposals that included the music bill). In the short term, control-freak schemes like this can be dangerous to free expression and personal privacy, and must be fought vigorously. But in the long term, the tide is starting to turn against the forces of cultural suppression, because it’s bad for capitalism.

In the pre-industrial age, censorship was a tool of economic as well as social control. When only the upper classes were taught to read, the number of potential rivals for prestige positions was kept within means. The class system was kept in place by restricted information.

In the industrial age, supporting censorship was a convenient way for big business interests to forge convenient political alliances with more populist right-wing elements (note Michael Milkin, Jesse Helmes, et al.). The Republicans of the rural west proved particularly adept at using the religious right to help elect politicians whose real loyalty wasn’t to churches but to big ranchers, miners and real estate developers. Censorship was also a convenient way for the corporate power structure to deny responsibility for some of the social upheavals its own machinations had caused. Corporate America could say: “We’re losing our technological edge to Japan? Don’t blame us; all we did was encourage slashes in education spending so the government could reduce business taxes. Blame the decadent liberals — yeah, that’s the ticket! Sexual permissiveness did it! That, and the devil’s rock music, and those naughty TV shows!” Or: “Urban crime? We didn’t cause it; all we did was move all our jobs to the suburbs! Blame the homosexuals, or the immigrants, or the lack of family values!” Or: “Child abuse? Don’t look at us; we merely promoted a culture where selfish aggression was treated as a virtue. No, just get rid of those magazines with the pictures of bad women in them. That’ll solve everything!”

But in the Information Age (which spread into the realm of politics about 18 to 24 months ago), censorship is a threat to what is becoming big business’s most prized asset — intellectual property. Free expression is the new frontier of post-industrial capitalism. The Viacom-Paramounts and the Time-Warners will begin to fight against the principle of censorship in the same way the timber industry has fought designated wilderness areas, or the way GM has fought pollution controls. A key connection of the old Reagan coalition has been severed, perhaps for keeps. The religious right, having outlived its usefulness to much of the business community, just might find itself sent back into the shadows due to a slow drying up of big-money support, destined to become just another of the many isolated subcultures in today’s fragmented society.

But it won’t go away quietly. There will be more kooky drives like the Erotic Music Bill and that initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination. These campaigns will become blunter, shriller and more divisive, as their instigators strive to hold on to their own core support base.

UNTIL NEXT TIME, root for the Sonics and for single-payer health care, and ponder this sign outside Catholic Community Services on 2nd: “Depression Support Group, 8:30 a.m. Wednesdays.” If you can get up that early, do you really need to go there?

PASSAGE

Words of love from the animated, syndicated, underrated 2 Stupid Dogs: “The world is our pancake house, and you’re my flapjack stack with a scoop of butter and maple syrup and a side of hash browns and some toast and a large orange juice.”

REPORT

A small publisher of cult-appeal books has expressed serious interest in my book, The Real Seattle Music Story. Once I sign a contract, I probably won’t be able to sell any more printout copies of the text. So if you want a Preview Edition, you’d better order it now.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phylloxera”

LET YOUR KIDS SEE ANY MOVIE THEY WANT. JUST DON’T LET `EM NEAR THE POPCORN

3/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WHEN POSTERS ARE OUTLAWED,

ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE STAPLE GUNS!

Here at Misc. world HQ, we celebrated yet another lonely-guy Valentine’s Day by scarfin’ down those Brach’s Sour Hearts candies.

UPDATE: Patrick Purdy says I shouldn’t have been so harsh a few months back about the hand-carved Zuni fetishes offered as promotional trinkets by Time-Life Books: “They’re (the tribe) developing a cottage industry for themselves so that they may upgrade their standard of living without having to leave their home. The fetish carvings have proved so successful that they’ve opened a few fancy galleries…That they must have signed a fairly lucrative contract with Time/Life is not a matter for despair, but for congratulations.”

ONE OF THE FEW negative aspects of this gig is that people come up at parties and demand that I be angry for them on cue. They seemingly expect me to always have some shoulder chip, some fresh beef ground daily. But as Johnny-one-note expectations go, it’s easier than if people asked me to be funny for them on cue, ‘cuz I can always fall back on being angry about being expected to be angry.

MY $.02: As some of you know, Misc. is at least partly an homage to the great prewar columnists. The only similar columnists in modern dailies are Army Archard in Daily Variety, Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times, and of course our hero Larry King in USA Today. Just for fun, let’s start out with some Kingisms: “When it comes to great ear-poppin’ tunes, you just can’t do better than Built to Spill… To this pair-O-eyeballs, nobody wrote page-turners like that past master Donald Barthelme… Has anybody ever made that Mock Apple Pie from the recipe on the Ritz cracker box?… As that local sage Dick Balch used to say, if you can’t trust your car dealer, who can you trust?… New name to watch: Combustible Edison. Hip enough for the kids, and parents like ’em too! They’re gonna be big; trust me.”

THIN ICE: The “media-beat” analysts on C-SPAN and in NY opinion journals are predictably aghast over Tonyamania. The commentators seem to think all newspapers used to be like some idealized memory of the pre-1974 NY Times, that only in today’s dark times would papers put scandal and sleaze on their front pages. Not so. Newspapers always were as exploitive as they are now, only they used to be a lot better at it. The old Hearst papers or the old NY Daily News would’ve done a much hotter job on it than today’s wimpy rags.

THINNER ICE: As the nation awaited the Nancy/Tonya faceoff, it faced the usual abundance of commercials and sponsor-ID announcements. Again, as in previous Games, some advertisers were able to boast that they were “proud sponsors of the U.S. Olympic Team,” while other companies, that had opened their wallets to nothing Olympic-related beyond their own commercials, tried to fudge their commitment to Our Kids by plugging themselves as “a proud sponsor of CBS’s coverage of our Olympic heroes.”

CIVIC VALUES: So the Dog House restaurant is now Closed 24 Hours a Day. Woolworth’s is an empty palace of bargains. And the city government talks only about attracting more rich people’s retail. Between the Commons, the poster ban, and the big downtown development proposals, Seattle threatens to become a city by the upscale, of the upscale, for the upscale and to hell with everyone else. Hey Norm: How ’bout getting some stores the rest of us can afford to shop at? Support the plan to put a Marshall’s discount clothier in the Magnin spot. Next, we need a Freddy’s where Woolworth was, and an all-nite restaurant on 7th where you can get a good $6 pork-chops-and-mashed-potatoes dinner. Planet Hollywood? Who needs it! (Also note: KCTS’s Dog House closing-party special was technically well-done but suffered from that upscale-media disease, smug boomer condescension; much of the narration could be rewritten into “Look, Muffy: Ordinary people! Let’s gawk!”).

MISC. RULES FOR LIFE: another exciting ennui-filled column, how ’bout some Misc. rules for life: Don’t trust anybody who nevvuhwatches teh-levision. Don’t trust anybody who calls a car “an investment.” Don’t trust anybody who only talks about how “hot” a movie or a band is, not about how good it is. Don’t buy diet pills from an infomercial with the fine print “No Orders Accepted From Iowa.” Don’t buy anything advertised by white guys in Dockers dancing to James Brown‘s “I Feel Good.” And don’t move into a former slaughterhouse or brothel that’s been “restored to its original elegance.”

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT.: A few weeks ago, KING reported that the state’s highest youth suicide rate was on the Eastside. I could believe it, after having gone for a job interview in the heart of darkest Redmond. Once-lovely farmland, ploughed under and paved over with winding roads to nowhere, abutted by finished and unfinished cheap poured-concrete lo-rise office park buildings, some with gaudy entrances tacked onto their otherwise hyperbland facades, all recessed from the road by moats of parking and/or dirt where grass will eventually be. No “public space,” no pedestrians, just people working in isolated cubicles writing software that presumes that we’ll all someday be working in isolated cubicles. A sterile landscape of silent dread that only author J.G. Ballard or filmmaker Atom Egoyan could properly fictionalize.

HOUSE MUSIC: Tuff times have hit C/Z Records, the scrappy li’l label with perhaps the strongest current stable of Northwest bands. Honcho Daniel House rushed five CDs into the Xmas season, but his distributor RED (half-owned by Sony) only sold 200 units in December (after subtracting returns from stores). He’s putting three employees on two-month layoffs (“We need that time to get back on our feet”). House’s right-hand-dude Tim Cook is one of the casualties; he says he might look for permanent work elsewhere, having had managerial differences with House lately, but doesn’t have anything specific to announce yet.

House still plans a slate of 10 albums this year (down from 14 in ’93), including most of his top acts (7 Year Bitch, the Gits, Treepeople, Alcohol Funnycar, Dirt Fishermen, Engine Kid), the just-out In the West by new signees Silkworm, and a women-in-rock collection. He’s also negotiating for a retrospective of Seattle’s top new-wave-era band, the legendary Blackouts.

An indie-label purist might use this case to claim that labels don’t necessarily get top service from pseudo-indie distributors with major-label backing like RED (or Caroline, with whom Sub Pop parted ways, citing similar frustrations). (House has been negotiating for some sort of major-label alliance with Sony; nothing’s been signed yet.) The real problem’s more complicated than just big guysvs. little guys. Distribution remains the weak link of the music biz (and of the print biz, but that’s another tale). There are only so many slots in store bins (even at the 1,500 or so new-music specialty stores). Getting a new act into those stores, and promoting it to customers once it’s there, remains a pseudo-science. Articles in Musician and Wired look forward to proposed in-store downloading stations, where you could special-order any recording and get it transmitted onto a CD while you wait.

The major labels, natch, don’t want any part of a technology that might threaten their market share. Music-by-info-highway would be great for oldies and classics, and would destroy the fetish-object aspect of record collecting (thankfully), but wouldn’t solve the promotion issue. I can get umpteen thousand books from The Reader’s Catalog, but somebody still has to tell me why I need any particular one.

(latter-day note: By the end of 1994, most of C/Z’s remaining bands either broke up or went to other labels. House moved the company into his basement.)

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (UW Daily, 2/10): “In the best of Peter Medak’s films, irreverence is something of a sacred cow.”

HARDWARE WARS: This home-store fight is getting out of hand. You’ve got Ernst promising to undercut Eagle, HomeBase vowing to undersell Price Costco. Now Home Depot has taken the battle to the next level. It’s established its own bridal registry. Now you can make sure cousin Mindy doesn’t get 24 identical Skilsaws.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: When the Washington Free Press first came out, I said it was a feisty little rag that had the potential to be better. With the latest issue, it’s approaching that potential: a great piece on Boeing workers getting sick from icky production chemicals, with the company dismissing the complaints as some sort of mass hysteria, plus a well-argued essay warning against “job blackmail” — companies’ threatening to take their jobs elsewhere unless governments scrap those pesky environmental laws. Speaking of which…

DEMO DERBY: A couple of readers have asked me to stop constructively-criticizing the failings of “progressive” types, player and just stick to slamming Republicans. I still do that when appropriate; but our president, governor, mayor, most of our state Congressional delegation and most of our city council are Democrats who at least profess to some degree of progressive ideals. It’s important to note when they stray from or compromise these ideals in the name of “creating a climate for business” or whatever; and when the popularly-accepted definition of “progressive” thought might not be the best way to solve our problems. That’s why I sometimes question some of the unquestioned premises behind urban-bohemian ideology, premises that some other publications have taken as Gospel truth. Speaking of which…

SPY, 1986-1994: Gee, maybe the Reagan Era really is over. The magazine’s entire humor was predicated on opposing the Reaganites while accepting the Reaganites’ terms of debate. Spy completely bought into the notion that the Right held a monopoly on political/social popularity, that the only people not enthralled to the GOP were a few big-city artist types. Spy reveled in its self-righteous posturing, in its concept of lower Manhattan as the lone outpost of wit and civility amidst a nation of heathen predators.

If Reagan and Bush invoked a romanticized social past where authority was seldom questioned and resources existed to be exploited, Spy invoked a romanticized cultural past where New York was the only place that mattered. Both notions are now more widely seen as the ancient relics they are. Readers turned away from a magazine that kept rehashing the same tired gag formats attacking movie stars and local NY celebrities as if they were worth the attention. The last Spy editor, Nat. Lampoon vet Tony Hendra, announced a new-look magazine that would take a fresher, funnier look at postmodern America, but the money ran out before he could implement the new format.

(latter-day note: Spy returned later in 1994, with mostly the same format as before.)

AD VERBS: Dewar’s Scotch has a magazine ad with an Alice Cooper/Peter Criss lookalike, complete with boa constrictor as scarf. The headline: “Your tastes in music have changed. Your taste in drinks should too.” Yeah, I know just what they’re saying: When I was younger, I didn’t appreciate acts like that. Now I do.

THE INFORMER: KCTS has been running “public service” spots from the King County Police, asking folks to keep their eyes on their neighbors and report any activity that might be potentially drug-related — visitors at odd hours, darkened windows, et al. Somebody on a computer bulletin board called the spot “Gestapo TV” and wants anyone who doesn’t like it to tell the station they won’t give it money. I won’t go that far, but I will use the case to note that in the nascent Information Age, not all information’s gonna be shared freely or used benevolently.

CATHODE CORNER: In a welcome surprise, MTV’s 120 Minutes played the new Sage video, albeit deep into the show’s 1-2 a.m. hour. Too bad the show’s latest clue-deficient host, Lewis Largent, had to introduce the clip with that now-chichéd line, “They’re from Seattle, but don’t get any preconceptions; they’re not grunge.” Aargh! The next person who thinks all local bands are alike, please tell me just what Flop, Mix-A-Lot, Amy Denio, Alice in Chains and Sister Psychic have in common.

The media turned “grunge” into a stereotype so exact that no band really matched it; then they used that to dismiss our diverse music as if the stereotype were true. Largent’s seemingly well-intended statement really perpetuated the false myth. He oughta say, “Yes there are lots of bands in the NW, lots of different bands, and here’s another.”…In a more positive homage, an episode of NBC’s off-again Homicide included murder-suspect characters named Layne Staley and Crist Novoselic.

SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (on Safeway Mrs. Wright’s Sesame Cheddar Snack Crackers): “Baked For Your Enjoyment!” Ever see a snack baked for your seething frustration? If you find one, let me know.

THE FINE PRINT (fortune cookie-like slip of paper inside a Sears CD player): “Warning: Protection Rubber must be removed before using.” Unless you’re playing one of those sounds-of-lovemaking CDs. Speaking of which…

LOSS-OF-ERECTIONS DEPT.: Leno joked that after the MLK Day Quake, LA had become “a community united behind one shared goal: to move to Seattle.” A week later, an AP article noted that many LA porn-video companies were in heavily quake-hit buildings. Some outfits might move rather than rebuild among the So.Cal. radical right. One unidentified exec said, “Our people will find another place where the climate is more liberal, and the ground more stable. Someplace up north maybe, like Seattle.”

We’re not all that quake-safe ourselves (if you believe the mass-media scare stories). And any hetero (or sex-positive-gay) hardcore producers would face our PC censorship advocates, who can be as obstinate and closed-minded as any Fundamentalists. But we’ve got a strong community of trained video technicians (with the Art Institute supplying more every year), and hundreds of underemployed actor-dancer-model types who don’t have to worry about tan lines. It’ll be even more fun if the producers apply for the tax breaks politicians usually love to offer to relocating companies.

(latter-day note: I’m now told there are already at least two hardcore adult-video producers regularly shooting in Seattle. I don’t have any names to refer you to. They haven’t provided much of an economic boost to the local production community, since they use small crews and maintain their own in-house post-production units.)

MOUTHS-O-BABES (overheard gleeful shriek of an 8-year-old girl on a bus, passing the Bon’s Chihuly window promoting ArtFair ’94): “See mom, I told you! Big cereal bowls!”

SHRINKING VISION: Seattle’s “public art” establishment has long been known for its private privileges. Jurors pick friends and/or lovers for top grants, organizations tailor project specs to favor their favorite artists, programs are publicized just before (or even after) their deadlines. Now comes word that the visual-art programs in this year’s Bumbershoot festival will be awarded by invitation only; tho’ if you’ve got an idea for something, you can send in an informal suggestion and maybe they’ll look at it. We’re going in the wrong direction, folks. We need arts people whose top loyalty is to art, not to specific artists. We need truly open processes, where a total unknown can come out of left field and bowl people over with a spectacular idea. We need to encourage art that blows minds, not art that kisses butts. (If it’s any consolation, one of the exhibits will be culled from the city’s “Portable Works Collection,” one program that does sometimes buy from non-insiders.)

MY SOAP BOX: When an ad agency designed the Tide box in the ’50s, it never knew that its concentric patterns would look just like the computer-animated psychedelic visuals of the ’90s. The orange box has become an icon of rave graphics. It’s on countless techno-party flyers. Portland’s Sweaty Nipples used it on a CD label; a Seattle band was going to use it before the Nipples used it first. I’m told that the brain can perceive the circles as moving in and out at the same time, making the image a “mandala” that can send the mind into another world. I’m also told that the orange circles look great under blacklight, and that Liquid Tide makes a great medium for making black-light paintings that can’t be seen in normal light (the “bleach substitute” ingredient contains a fluorescent dye). What’s next: acid-trip costumes based on the playing-card guy on the ol’ White King box?

‘TIL WE NEXT CROSS INK STAINS, recall these words of Wm. Faulkner: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

PASSAGE

Gregory Hischak in the new issue of the lovely local zine Farm Pulp: “The planet is an unstable being. Little earthquakes rumble up and down our coast. The earth has a lot of bottled up stress…pent up aggression. The earth really needs to get out more. Spend more time in the woods. Feed the ducks. The planet needs to stop operating on that second shift mentality.”

SPECIAL OFFER

Uncorrected, autographed proof copies of my book, Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story, are now available for a $10 donation plus $2 postage from the address below. Be among the first to get a piece of local cultural history! Tell your friends.

Either next month or the month after, this newsletter thang’s gonna get twice as big: a whopping 4 pp. of ennui and unwarranted assumptions clogging your first-class mail the last Friday of each month, including weird fiction and non-Stranger material. Larger print not guaranteed. New sub rates will be announced then; current subs will be adjusted accordingly.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Cathexis”

The Gaul of Them

Film essay for the Stranger, 1/10/94

I’d always figured the French Ministry of Culture to be an institution of bureaucratic nepotism, taking the taxes from laid-off Citroen assembly workers to subsidize incomprehensible books by irrelevant semioticians (“How many angels can dance on the head of a text?”) and “art” films chock full of social criticism and softcore sex (admittedly, two of my favorite genres). You know, Eurosocialism at its finest — bleeding the workers to support the bourgeois.

But I’ve got more respect for the Ministry of Culture now that it’s stared down the Hollywood monster and held to its demand to keep “free trade” from gutting the European film industry.

Before I proceed, some background. You know how all those movie people clamored to contribute to Clinton’s presidential campaign? It was more than just your everyday liberal-celebrity primping. The entertainment industry is an economic force, and saw a chance to make friends and peddle influence. In return, the new administration has supported or accepted every move toward big-media consolidation and domination. Broadcasters can buy more and more stations; networks can again control the syndication rights to their shows; cable operators and phone companies and movie studios can plan huge megamergers without a peep of antitrust interference.

And Hollywood got the White House to push its cause at the GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Teriff) negotiations. At one point the US delegation threatened to let the deadline for the 1993 round of GATT talks expire, killing agreements on dozens of other trade issues, if France wouldn’t agree to stop using movie-ticket taxes to subsidize its domestic filmmakers.

This was just the sort of thing that leftists like Noam Chomsky warned against during the NAFTA debate: Big corporations using “free trade” as a justification for interfering in domestic policies, short-circuiting democracy.

The French officials had screwed over their farmers in other trade talks, but held their ground on the culture issue. The issue of French film support was set aside for discussion at a later date.

It was a great triumph over Hollywood’s pathetic longtime flack Jack Valenti, whose incessant whining about the poor helpless media conglomerates got lamer every time he spoke (“We’ve got 60 percent of your country’s box office; we demand the rest”). After he lost the fight, Valenti apparently realized the bad PR he’d gotten as a Goliath figure trying to push around the Eurofilm Davids. Valenti wrote to the NY Times that his industry group hadn’t really wanted the breaks it’d lobbied for. He now claimed Hollywood only really wanted a piece of any European taxes on blank videocassettes, revenues earmarked for the Euro film industry as a compensation against home taping. The studios (and the major record labels) have lobbied for similar taxes in the US. I think blank-tape taxes are unfair to begin with; they feed cash from indie video producers and home-movie makers toward the bigger boys. They’d be more unfair if they made overseas governments funnel cash toward US media empires.

Vice President Gore was in LA on the 11th. He spoke to a convention of media and telecommunications giants, with guest appearances by Lily Tomlin and Nancy Sinatra. He assured the throng that the administration would keep hounding the pesky Europeans to provide US “information providors” with “full access” to these “major world markets.” He added that as an ol’ Nashville guy he was proud that “you can turn on a radio almost anywhere in the world and it won’t be long before you hear American music.” To Gore, and to most of the people at the convention, music and film and video are Product, and those who resist the Hollywood (or the Nashville) cartel are mere nuisances meddling in the natural flow of commerce.

Some of us think differently. We think music, film and video are, or should be, vehicles for communicating ideas and emotions. We want to break the stranglehold of The American Entertainment Business on the world’s (including America’s) expressions and dreams. The stand-up comics are wrong: today’s big cultural rivalry isn’t NY vs. LA, it’s NY and LA (and Tokyo) vs. the rest of the world. We need more Chantal Akermans and Almadovars, and could live with fewer John Hugheses and even fewer George Lucases. Even a bad Euro movie (and I’ve seen plenty) is a better viewing experience than your average A-budgeted B-movie from the Hollywood stimulus-response factories.

There will be many similar battles in the years to come, as the entertainment conglomerates maneuver to subdue the economic and technological trends that threaten to make them obsolete.

So raise a Brie and a glass of fine wine in saluting the Ministry of Culture, preferably in front of a (now French-owned) RCA VCR running Camille Claudel.

10/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`HAMMERING MAN’ ISN’T ART. THE BALL-AND-CHAIN IS.

Return now to Misc., the column that wished the new local fringe-drama outfit Theater Schmeater was related to the former local fringe art-outfit Gallery Schmallery.

WHAT WE DID THIS SUMMER: Couldn’t help but be amused by the preprinted Sizzler kids’-meal coupons in the Sunday funnies the week of the chain’s e. coli crisis. Thought KIRO-TV’s retreat back to the anchor desk should’ve been accompanied by Alice in Chains‘s “I’m the Man in the Box.” Noted that the station that banned two Picket Fences shows clearly showed the slogan on a new pro-Huskies T-shirt, “Puck the Fac-10.”

BOWING DOWN: For years, the Huskies struggled in the LA powerhouses’ shadows, even though the UW was far bigger than any single California campus. But in the ’80s the team grew toward three straight Rose Bowls and one of those “mythical national championships.” We now know these achievements partly came by cheating on the vague regulations that let college ball pretend to be an amateur sport. Husky players had pathetic graduation rates, despite simplified classes and elaborate tutoring. There were allegations of drug dealing in the team dorm. Some players got cushy jobs and cushier cash, arranged by rich boosters.

Now, the Pac-10 Conference saddled the team with recruiting restrictions, a two-year ban from bowl games, and other penalties. Coach Don James (who wasn’t implicated in the charges) quit. The violations had to have been known by authorities.

How could they excuse the overzealousness? I think it’s ‘cuz the UW itself has become a big-money grant factory that relegated teaching to a very low priority. It’s partly the legacy of our late Sens. Jackson and Magnuson, who funneled tons of federal research pork our way. The campus got obsessed with being “a world class research institution,” regardless of how well it serviced the state’s kids.

We’ve discussed the yuppification of KCMU in the context of the UW corporate culture. The administration thought the station could raise more donations with tamer programming; they’d funnel that into enough salaried staff positions to qualify the station for public-broadcasting grants. The men who turned KCMU into the New Coke of radio weren’t malicious; they just behaved like good UW administrators (including manager Chris Knab, who resigned after his pay got cut in half due to sagging donations). They saw no purpose higher than organizational growth.

Similarly, the football program was allowed or encouraged to grow by any means available. While tuitions skyrocketed and academic budgets stagnated, the team generated big cash surpluses. But little football money went up to the main campus.

If rich alums want to pay for football, let ’em, within limits at least as strict as those set by the Pac-10. But funnel part of that income, and a portion of Husky merchandising money, into academic scholarships. And go further with a professed priority of new athletic director Barbara Hedges: getting the players an education. As a kid who used to get beat up by jocks, I’m not intrinsically sympathetic to their plight. But they are risking permanent injury for the slim chance of a brief NFL career. If they can’t get under-the-table cash, they oughta get a degree that might help ’em earn some bucks in the future.

KICKS: The Seahawks used to have a 5,000-name waiting list for tickets. But after last year’s spectacular flop, they’re running commercials pleading for walk-in traffic. Between that and the Huskies’ debacle, Seattle’s football “Wave” may finally crash.

MISC.’S INDEX: Number of local bands profiled/reviewed in the Rocket since June 1992 that are described as “not a typical Seattle band”: All of them.

WHERE FRIENDS MET FRIENDS: It’s time for concerned citizens to again rally behind a preservatory call: Save the Dog House! Not only is it one of the few things in the world that my father and I both like, not only is it one of the last old-time roadhouse diners, it’s a remnant of everything that used to be cool and unpretentious about pre-Yup Seattle. We need a sympathetic investment group to take over the place under two directives. (a) Don’t “restore” it into some plastic imitation of itself. Keep the signs, keep the menu designs, keep organist Dick Dickerson, keep the low drink prices, keep the dogs-playing-poker prints. (b) Revise the food only as much as you have to. Many people love the Dog House’s murals but not its meals; the new owners will have to provide some new things to attract them, and make careful changes to existing items without imposing that gentrified faux-diner cuisine seen in some newer places.

FOR MEAT LOVERS ONLY: One local chow-down institution still going strong, Dick’s Drive-Ins will celebrate its 40th anniversary by publishing a “Memory Book” early next year. They’re asking for people’s stories and photos of life at Seattle’s classic burger emporia (top prize: $100). I know a guy from Vancouver who makes a point when he’s in town to visit all five locations (even the obscure Holman Road outlet, the Dick’s That Time Forgot). In the mid-’80s the Broadway Dick’s was the teen cruising hangout, until the parking lots were closed by the powers that be. It was the setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway,” the first proof that an artist could reach a national audience without pretending not to be from Seattle. One important memory is gone: they stopped selling their orange T-shirts (“Dick’s, where TASTE is the difference!”) to the public, and now outfit their staff in new blue designer jobs (not available to civilians). The new shirts betray Dick’s heritage as a place that didn’t follow trends, but just made the greatest grease and sugar products anywhere.

ELECTORAL COLLAGE: Rice, Sidrin and other politicians sometimes loathed in these and other pages are up for re-election this year but are either unopposed or have only token rivals. For all the boasts people around town give me about how “political” they are, there’s damn too little real organizing going on to provide a truly progressive influence on (or alternative to) Seattle’s Democratic machine politics. To really be “political” doesn’t mean to stand around and proclaim how morally superior you are. It means to form alliances with other people (yes, even with squares, meat eaters and TV viewers) to forge a popular consensus toward rebuilding our frayed social fabric.

BE “R” GUEST: The Stouffer Madison Hotel not only stamps its logo into all the ashtrays every day, it replaces its elevator carpets daily: “Have A Pleasant THURSDAY.” An excessive service perhaps, but it is useful to business travelers who need to be reminded where they momentarily stand in the time-space continuum.

GOO: The UW alum mag Columns reports that researcher Patricia Kuhl’s got some big govt. grant to try and decode baby talk, believing it holds the key to language learning. Why doesn’t she just read some Sugar & Spike comic books or watch Rugrats?

COLOR ME BEMUSED: Why’s any sweatshirt or trinket boutique that screechingly claims to be “Seattle Style” invariably drenched in California-airhead pastels that have nothing to do with how light and color look here? A real “Seattle Style” would start with the misty hues of the Northwest School painters, then add the muted tones of bark brown, pine-needle green, and the steely gray of a lake on an overcast day. No pink, no “sky blue,” no saturated brightness, no neon violet, no harsh contrasts.

CLEANING UP: Sit & Spin, the new cafe/laundromat on 4th, apparently stands on the ex-site of Vic’s, a jazz club run in the early ’30s by local big-band leader Vic Meyers. I’ve told you about Meyers: In ’32 he ran for lieutenant governor as a publicity stunt, won in the FDR landslide, and stayed in office 20 years. S&S promises to open up a back room for performances later. One current local band would be perfect for its opening: Laundry. Past bands that oughta consider re-forming to play there: Red Dress, Skinny Ties, Green Pajamas, and Ironing Pants Definitely. They could cover songs from Nirvana’s album Bleach.

FROM FLY II SHAI: A year ago I predicted that by 2002 there’d be upscale rap festivals in tourist towns, where nouveau riche couples would listen to perky Vassar grads perform a cross between scat singing and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. Since then, new (arrested) developments made that obsolete. We’ve already seen the (PM) dawn of soft hip-hop, and it’s different from my prediction (never trust sci-fi stories that think every present trend will keep going forever). You could see it at last month’s KUBE Summer Jam: two dozen acts (most with recorded backing tracks), who had rap names but sounded like neo-Commodores or neo-Pointer Sisters. These groups celebrate the only recent black music hip white guys haven’t muscled in on: “quiet storm” love songs of the ’70s and early ’80s. The new R&B eschews the white-hipster image of blacks as lust-crazed savages. Mall rats are still appropriating gangsta rap’s romanticized violence, selfishness and sexism (in both directions); while the neo-doo-wop aesthetic finds sexiness galore in solid black-middle-class values: good grooming, hard work, mutual support. Since the black music of today usually becomes the white music of tomorrow, those white hiphop shows of the early 21st century are now more likely to have Boyz II Men cover bands, and today’s preteen daughters of Bellevue lawyers may someday go to their first bars awkwardly crammed into En Vogue dresses.

BUDDY LOVE LOST: The French may still love Jerry Lewis but his ex-wife doesn’t, according to her soon-to-be-published memoir that lists his extramarital escapades over the years. It may be painful for some of you to imagine Lewis having sex, but I can envision him afterwards, looking the lady in the eye, pointing a finger at her face and declaring, “Did you know that this is one of the greatest humanitarians this business has ever known? Give her a big hand!”

DEAD AIR: The ex-KJET went soft again. The Z-Rock network dropped its AM affiliates, so KZOK-AM quit the Hard Rawk to simulcast KZOK-FM’s tired oldies. The sign-off brought the end of the station’s local afternoon shift, facilitated by Jeff Gilbert. For the first time in 35 years, nobody’s playing new rock records on Seattle AM radio.

`IT’S,’ A CRIME (graphic during an ad for HBO on ABC): “Has Saturday Night Lost It’s Magic?” No, but apparently HBO has lost its ability to spell.

MIXED ICONS DEPT.: The Times ran an article comparing home mortgage rates today with those during the 1960s. It was festooned with all the cliché images of hippie nostalgia: a peace sign, a VW bus, et al.; all in tie-dye-ish colors. They should’ve used images appropriate to the kinds of folks who were buying houses back then: plastic-smiled suburbanites in green pantsuits and Sta-Prest slacks holding barbecues with delightful recipes from Sunset magazine.

STAN RIDGWAY REVISITED: The greatest channel on cable these days, without peer, is Univision. Everything on that channel is utterly cool: Variety shows with sensational female performers; outrageous game shows; goofy (and obviously censored) sex-farce movies; dubbed kung fu movies; and best of all the novelas, semi-lavish tearjerker dramas of sin and betrayal that run to 50 or more episodes and then stop. In a way it’s even more fun if you don’t know Spanish; you can just absorb the energetic performers, the great clothes and the cool-camp graphics without worrying whether the dialogue makes any sense. If that’s too much trouble for you, one of the channel’s greatest stars, the utterly remarkable children’s entertainer Xuxa, now has an Anglophone show at 3 pm weekdays on KTZZ. Who else would get cabaret singer/gay activist Michael Feinstein as the first guest on her US show — a show bankrolled by Pat Robertson? No wonder Forbes listed her as the second-wealthiest entertainer based in the non-English-speaking world (after Julio Iglesias).

ACTIVE CULTURES: In a Stranger article a few months ago I called for the death of Hollywood. Now, the decentralization of American culture looks unstoppable. New means of production and distribution are bypassing (or influencing) media monarchies. With Hi-8 camcorders people can make pro video for less than the annual cost of many prescriptions. The music video format has freed a generation of moving-image makers from the tyrannies of linear narrative and feature length. With DTP and quick-printing, the last financial barrier to self-publishing is the cost of binding to bookstore specs. The revolution is here, it is being televised (at least on odd cable channels), and it’s gonna be rough. You’ll see a lot of unlistenable indie records, unwatchable direct-to-video movies, unreadable desktop-published books, and unbearable fringe-theater plays. It’s the natural stumblings of people learning painfully to make their own culture, instead of merely choosing which prepackaged NY/LA/SF/UK worldview to adopt.

GE WANTS TO BUY BOEING, according to a Wall St. Journal rumor: If this column had editorial cartoons, it’d show a pilot’s seat occupied by a six-foot weasel.

SCENE STEALING: As late as 1990, there were only a couple dinky places to hear original rock bands in Seattle. Those times may return. The Times published a map showing the Seattle Commons proponents’ plans for east downtown. You know they want a long park from Denny Way to Lake Union. That’s the sugar-coating for their real scheme: thousands of condos and apts., mostly upper-income. The Times map showed all the blocks the Commons advocates plan to demolish. The Off Ramp, RKCNDY, and Lake Union Pub are all slated for removal. (The neo-folk Eastlake Cafe and the 911 film-video center would be allowed to live; Re-Bar might also be spared.) If I were paranoid, I’d call this another plot in the 15-year official conspiracy to crush local music. But my more understanding nature believes the rich suburbanites behind the plan are disinterested in live music and don’t care whether bands have a place to play. In the ’70s, citizens saved Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from smaller redevelopments; those areas are now tourist traps. The powers that be don’t get that the music scene is Seattle’s new major tourist attraction. This summer, you could hardly walk downtown without spotting Euro and Japanese young adults in the finest flannel, poring over maps and Strangers. (On a recent Fox TV magazine show, Ron Reagan Jr. had to tell Mayor Rice who Mudhoney was!)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, go look at Seattle’s first color TV camera (now on display at Olympic Lincoln-Mercury on Aurora), tape theamazing early talkies at 2 a.m. on KTZZ, and worry about your favorite waterfront businesses getting “discovered” and ruined after the Weekly moves there.

PASSAGE

Bonnie Morino on the Vicki Lawrence show, telling how excited she was to be hired as a Playboy model: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that doesn’t happen very often in one’s life.”

REPORT

Still working on my new book. Still nowhere near selling it.

Will the person in Calif. who left a message about participating in one of my publishing projects please call again? The number given me doesn’t seem to work. Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Audile”

5/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THE STATE PASSES A HEALTH CARE PLAN;

THE MARINERS CAN HARDLY WAIT…

Misc. (one of the few local entertainment thangs John Corbett hasn’t tried to muscle in on yet) is moderately disturbed that no review of the Empty Space‘s new Illuminati play even mentioned the Space’s old Illuminatus! play, a 1980 three-part circus of by-the-numbers blasphemy and political conspiracy theories based on the Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea comic novels; it was one of the theatre’s biggest hits at the time.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MARK WORTH, Wash. Free Press: I’ve been trying to sell out for years; it’s just that nobody’s been buying.

IT’S BEEN A WACKY couple-O-weeks here in Misc. Country USA. The Weekly “discovered” a “New Art Scene” centered around the Galleria Potatohead folks, a year after that space closed. The Cyclops Cafe storefront got stuck into an AT&T ad inviting Americans to call up their ol’ Seattle grunge pals. Had a mixed time at the Crocodile’s Stumpy Joe goodbye party: great sloppy bands, but unwisely cranked up to inner-ear-pain level; at that distortion point, even the Young Fresh Fellows sounded like a fast Tad. I found an old Artforum review of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video, where the guys prance around and act silly in dresses like Bugs Bunny; the reviewer somehow called it a profound anti-homophobic statement. And, while cable-cruising one midnight, I heard a bad instrumental of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” accompanying a Male Best Body Contest.

NUMBERS RACKET DEPT.: Sorry, I can’t believe there are only approx. 1 million adult gay men in the USA, as implied in that national sex survey by our Laurelhurst friends at the Battelle Memorial Research Institute. The national gay mags claim more than that many readers (including paid circulation and the industry-standard estimates of “pass-along” copies). I’ve met guys who claim to have had more than that many guys. If there are that few gay guys, then who’s buying all the non-Nutcracker ballet tix and Judy Garland laser disks?

SUMMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL: We’re amused that Clinton and Yeltsin‘s prearranged walking path led to Vancouver’sWreck Beach, known in warmer months as the Northwest’s largest nude beach. Hope it inspired ’em toward shedding outmoded political put-ons and attaining fuller disclosure.

TUNED OUT: The Supreme Court’s using 2 Live Crew‘s Roy Orbison takeoff “Big Hairy Woman” to decide if copyright holders can ban song parodies. It won’t affect MAD (which prints only its original lyrics “to the tune of” extant songs) or Al Yancovic (who always gets OKs from the original artists). It would inhibit satirists from commenting on copyrighted or trademarked material. Imagine the Squirrels pleading for permission to trash Frampton songs!

THE MAILBAG: Stacey Levine writes, “A friend whose judgment I trust thinks Clinton is a true radical, more than he let on during the campaign. The Nation says he’s middle; another friend professes that Clinton is not at all interested in real change, backed as he was by the major oil corps.” Good question. He made his name with national party brass as part of the Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the Reagan years to defend the party’s institutions (if not its ideals). Some members wrote books suggesting that Reaganism was irreversible, that the Dems could survive as an organization only by embracing GOP policies. Clinton wasn’t quite like that; he’s more in the tradition of Washington’s late Sen. Warren Magnuson, a master deal-cutter who believed in social progress thru government paternalism and economic progress thru industrial policy. Clinton’s a well-meaning compromiser who’ll only go as far as he thinks he can go. He won’t lead us out of our assorted messes; but, unlike the previous couple of guys, we might be able to lead him.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME: The Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at 2nd & Pike was the sort of “social concern” experience my old Methodist youth group would’ve gone to. You walked past real street people (studiously kept outside) to enter a cleaned-up simulation of street life. You wandered thru a maze of tight corridors, small rooms, and plywood cutouts of muggers, drug dealers, johns, cops and bureaucrats; all to a Walkman soundtrack of interviews with street people (by a Calif. art troupe), tightly edited to shock suburban innocents with near-romanticized images of urban squalor. It worked as a thrill ride, but didn’t communicate how tedious and numbing that life can be.

BIRD GOTTA FRY: The Legislature’s reclassified flightless birds (ostriches, emus, rheas) as poultry, so they can be raised for food. The AP quotes breeders as saying they “taste just like beef.” It’s appropriate that Washington starts an industry in birds that run along the ground, since one of the state’s top poultry firms is named Acme.

ON THE WALLS: Art cafés are the apparent Next Big Thing in town. By serving espresso and pastries to gawkers, Offbeat Cafe (in the old Art/Not Terminal on Westlake) hopes for a steadier income than art sales alone could give, showing artists who can’t yet carry a whole gallery themselves. Offbeat also has some live-music and DJ parties. CyberCity, a similar place in the old Arthur Murray studio and Perot campaign office on Terry, closed almost before it opened. Most ambitious of the lot: Entros, in the old Van de Kamp’s bakery near South Lake Union, a huge space with several interactive and hi-tech exhibits — and a $15 first-time cover charge. The northern Californians (natch) running the place seem to think alternative-art lovers in this town have money (hah!).

ON THE AIR: KTZZ was put into involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy by three big syndicators. It’s over debts by the station’s ex-owners, who bought some high-profile reruns and sold few ads. The current (since ’90) owners say they’re on schedule for paying back the old debts. This debt service is why the station’s even cheaper now than it was before: less off-air promotion, more televangelists and infomercials. It gets those “Prime Time Talk” shows for free (the distributor keeps some of the ad slots)….KOMO wants to buy KVI, under new FCC regulations allowing it to have two AMs in the same town again. In the Golden Age of Radio, KOMO was sister stations with KJR, broadcasting from the Terminal Sales Bldg. (now home of the Weekly and Sub Pop) and affiliated with NBC’s Red and Blue networks respectively. From the ’50s to the ’70s, the tightly-formatted KOMO and the personality-driven KVI were arch rivals for the adult-pop audience. The Ike Republicans who run KOMO will likely interfere with KVI’s current talk format (despite current contrary assurances). They might be too patrician to keep the Agnewish rants of Rush Limbaugh, KVI’s top-rated show. And they’ll surely drop KVI’s use of news from KING-TV (now corporately divorced from KING radio).

PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD: Tucci Benucch, a new restaurant in Westlake Center, is the first local outpost of Lettuce Entertain You, Ron Melman’s Chicago outfit that revolutionized food service as entertainment. Its eateries have distinctive poppy decor and decent food at almost-decent prices. Its Chi-town flagship, Ed Debevick’s, launched the fake-diner fad. It uses young actors and comics as “character” waiters and buspeople, haranguing and cutting up the willing clientele. The acts are even more intense at the LA Ed’s, where every server’s a would-be star and every customer’s a possible casting agent. Melman also has Chicago spots bearing the licensed names of local celebs (Oprah, Cubs announcer Harry Carey), and sponsored that contest where a guy won $1 million for shooting a basket from opposite court during a Bulls game. Alas, none of that action’s slated for Westlake. All we’re getting is “rustic Italian food in a country atmosphere.”

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH LA: LA Riots II: The Sequel failed to make its scheduled premiere, gravely inconveniencing the original producers (police) and distributors (news media). Back when Repo Man came out, one of my gothic-punk acquaintances described for me what was so different about it. His first sentence: “It was made in LA.” He meant that this film used the parts of LA that other LA films didn’t (and mostly still don’t). A few weeks ago, I found myself in the company of a semi-retired Hollywood bigshot. He talked about how he’s looking to move here, how “everybody (in the business) wants to get out of LA.” The LA people scattering across the western states are just re-creating the La La Land mentality in an exile made possible by faxes and FedEx. The airheads are leaving Hollywood so they can keep their worthless Hollywood culture alive, so they can stay unbothered by the issues of people other than themselves. They symbolize America’s withdrawal from social community into private hedonism. Beverly Hills is the reason South Central exists. The “Northwest Lifestyle” described in newspaper “Living” sections is usually defined according to misplaced LA priorities, as a narcissistic life of private pleasures. The yuppie dream of “Moving to the Country” (without depending on a rural economy) is just an upscale version of the suburban dream/nightmare. It reflects the abandonment of neighborhoods, cities, social services, education, health, infrastructure, etc.; all as guided by a politics that purported to celebrate the Rugged Individual but really just gave more power to the already-powerful. Reagan was the Spielberg president — and not just because both shared a nostalgia for a nonexistent past. Just as Spielberg turned the genres of sleazy fringe movies into the foundation of the modern film biz, so Reagan turned the hatemongering and quick-buck tactics of the west’s right-fringe political circles into the foundation of national government policy. Both camps trafficked in contrived sentimentality, not in real social intimacy. It’s way past time for this to end. Don’t move to the country. Stop running from your problems, America! Stay in town! Fight to make it better!

STAGES: The biggest thing to me about Ramona Quimby, now at the Moore Theatre (one of umpteen spaces Seattle Children’s Theatre’s using ’til its new building gets done) is that Beverly Cleary wrote and set the original stories in Portland. As a kid, I found that amazing. Cleary was the only author given me who wrote about a place I had been. Everyone else either wrote about a mythical Mayfield USA, the streets of NYC, or war orphans in Korea. From Cleary, I learned the importance of thinking globally/writing locally.

DEAD AIR: Manager Chris Knab still insists that his new KCMU-Lite will eventually be popular ‘cuz it’s more “professional” than Classic KCMU, even without most of the station’s experienced DJs. One volunteer who stayed, Marty Michaels, got rewarded for his loyalty by getting to host weekend public-affairs shows. In early April, after a taped segment on Jewish Holocaust survivors, Michaels told listeners they’d heard “one personal opinions about the alleged Holocaust.” He told irate callers (off the air) there was no proof that millions of Jews ever died in Nazi camps. Knab persuaded Michaels to resign; it would’ve been hypocritical to fire people for mentioning CURSE and keep Michaels. Also, anti-Semitism is one of the few offenses the UW Regents (who’ll ultimately decide KCMU’s fate) don’t easily forgive.

SKIN DEEP: Playboy had model recruiters at the UW recently. The Daily ran a series of columns and letters reiterating all the 25-year-old complaints about the mag. Most anti-Playboy arguments are as trite as the pictures themselves. Here’s some fresher criticism: There’s nothing intrinsically bad about the het-male sex drive, or about entertainments that exploit it. But the best erotic art is about passion, about the mysteries and compulsions that drive disparate humans together. Most Playboy pix, especially the centerfolds, are bland works of commercial ad-art. The models portray soulless, unlustful characters, overly “dressed” in hyperrealistic lighting and Charlie’s Angels hair, their flesh digitally retouched to look unlike any real-world biological entity. The models aren’t “degraded” in the sense most critics invoke; they’re “honored” with the same perverse reverence given to The Brand in magazine ads. These “Playmates” are made to look incapable of having any real fun. I want better.

THE OUTLAW LOOK: The Oregon Dept. of Corrections (sez Media Inc.) is doing brisk biz in felon-made jeans, Prison Blues. They’ve got no known Seattle outlet; Nordstrom had ’em for a while but stopped.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Nabisco SnackWells Devil’s Food Snack Cakes are the hit of the year, regularly selling out to diet-conscious snackers. They don’t have fewer calories than regular cookies, but they are fat-free, and in many current fad diets that’s what counts. The chocolate-covered cakes are big and chocolatey, if dry (halfway between a microwave brownie and a shrunk Ho-Ho).

`SELF’ INTEREST: I’ve heard from people who want more “personality” in the column. Some even suggested that I oughta try to be more like Hunter Thompson and make myself my own #1 topic. I never figured you cared who I was. So far it’s been a self-fulfilling assumption; when I tell people at parties or in bars that I do stuff for The Stranger, they only want to know one thing: “What’s Dan Savage really like?” I don’t do narcissism in print because I hate it when others do it. I review new novels in one of my other freelance gigs; I can usually tell when a story’s autobiographical because the dullest character gets the biggest part. I’ve seen too many young journalist-wannabes fancy themselves the next Hunter Thompson and turn every story into a rehash of their personal experiences — even if they have no such experiences worth reading about, even if they’re 25 and still living with their parents. Ya wanna know how long it’s been since I got laid? Didn’t think so. Gonzo journalism belongs to the unstructured narcissism of the late hippie era. I harken back not to “gonzo” but to the precision writing of pre-’50 newspapers, back when papers were more populist (and popular), when a columnist was someone with something specific to say and who seemed anxious to say it.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Gladhanding comic Ross Shafer, who started Almost Live on KING-TV in ’84 as a straight talk show with current host John Keister as a sidekick, then left in ’88 to be the final host of the Fox Late Show, has joined the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher: an infomercial for a VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials, that take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see Marsha Burns‘s exquisite photos of alternately-beautiful people at the Bellevue Art Museum thru 5/16, and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”

MISSION CONTROL: Everybody’s got a mission statement these days — construction projects, gas stations, even porno mags. My mission: To challenge your mind. To awaken your imagination. And to stop talking right now.

PASSAGE

James Darren in a pseudo-profound moment in Venus in Furs (1970): “When you don’t know where you’re at, man I tell you time is like the ocean. You can’t hold onto it.”

REPORT

Still working on the big history of the Seattle scene. Thanx to those who’ve contacted me thus far. The rest of you, if you’ve got stories or mementos, write to me.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Matutinal”