Misc. began on June 6, 1986 as a column in ArtsFocus, the Lincoln Arts Center’s monthly tabloid. When that paper faded in 1989, Misc. became a newsletter with as many as 1,000 free copies and 100 paid subscribers. It joined The Stranger at the paper’s ninth issue in November 1991. Last year I stopped the newsletter and started the Misc. World HQ website, <http://www.miscmedia.com>.

Over these 10 years I’ve discussed many things, loosely tied to the concept of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond.” I’ve shared a few laffs and a few tears. But I’ve had one overriding subject–the city with which I have an ongoing lover’s quarrel. Seattle’s always had more than its share of vibrant, creative people. But they’ve long struggled against a social order opposed to anything too unclean, unrich, or unquiet.

The Commons people never understood why so many have grown tired of a city government exclusively By The Upscale, Of The Upscale, and For The Upscale. The “Parks Are For Everybody” slogan was clearly a desperation move by campaigners uncomfortable with the existence of non-yuppies and the need to appeal to such proles.

In much of the US, politics is controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “conservatives.” In Seattle, it’s controlled by money-stooges pretending to be “liberals.” Other politicians pay lip service to abortion foes and censors; ours pay lip service to gay-rights advocates and environmentalists. Both sets of politicians do these to buy votes while holding to their real cause, the worship of Sacred Business.

But I also believe politics is a subset of culture. Seattle’s politics tie directly into a culture that merely pretends to value “diversity.” A culture so thoroughly whitebread, it remembers the Sixties only as a playtime for college boys. A culture descended from Anglo Protestant “progressives” in Wisconsin and Minnesota, who’d championed an elitism of educated, understated “taste” to help keep working-class German Catholics out of power.

When Misc. started, Seattle’s arts had been for seemingly ever (at least since 1973) under the thumb of an extremely conservative “liberalism” I’ve since called Mandatory Mellowness. You know, the standard of “good taste” that wouldn’t merely discourage but forbid any art more challenging than Chihuly, any music more contemporary than Kenny G, any theater more immediate than doo-wop versions of Shakespeare, any literature more urbane than whale poems, any apparel more daring than “Casual Friday” suits, or any lifestyle more “decadent” than drinking whole milk instead of 2-percent.

While this aggressively bland anti-aesthetic still rules the city’s official culture, something else arose from the underground. Punk rock remained a relevant stance in Seattle throughout the ’80s precisely because it was the best available means of rebellion against the hypocrisy of mellowness. What the media called “grunge” was and is an aesthetic of darkness, but also one of honest discourse, passionate expression, and real pleasures. It values thrift and ingenuity, not the dictates of fashion. It sees Seattle as a city for Tugboat Annie, not for Niles Crane. It loves the south Lake Union neighborhood as it is. It would rather be “unhappy” yet truly alive than succumb to the Stepford-Wifedom of “The Northwest Lifestyle.” What the media call “cocktail nation” is the expression of these values through other means, to relive the best of pre-hippie pop culture and even to make jazz a populist genre again. Indeed, the staccato, disjointed Misc. format has always been a (perhaps feeble) effort to preserve the jazz-age three-dot column of Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I era Emmett Watson–perhaps America’s greatest literary invention.

If I’ve played any tiny part in popularizing these values, the values that made Seattle and real progressivism great, then I’ve succeeded at my goal–the Highlights for Children slogan, “Fun With a Purpose.”

(Thanx and a hat tip to those who attended the Misc. 10th anniversary party and to those who helped make it plausible; including Glen Allen, the band Big Sister, BSK(T) Screenprinting, Cellophane Square, Staci Dinehart, Rebecca Frey, Joseph Givens, Laughingas Productions, Verlayne McClure, Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, Moe, Mountain Sound, the New Store, Occupied Seattle, Charlotte Quinn, Frank Randall, Jeannine Uhrich, Joseph Weaver, and a host of others.)

Welcome back to Misc., the local pop-culture column that tried to follow its bliss, until its bliss filed a restraining order against it.

WHERE THEY ARE NOW: Ross Shafer was poised to make it big in 1988 when he quit as the original host of KING’s Almost Live to star in the final post-Joan Rivers version of the Fox Late Show. His career since then has been one pathetic comeback try after another. Now he’s shamelessly ripping off the “Guy” comedy of Tim Allen, Jeff Foxworthy, and Red Green. He’s showing up on celebrity talk shows in overalls and no shirt to promote a “humor” book, Cook Like a Stud. You can imagine the routine, wreaking creaky gags out of the use of shot glasses as measuring spoons, claw hammers as meat tenderizers, and hubcaps as baking sheets.

WHERE THEY WERE THEN: Some of you may recall Marni Nixon as the singing hostess of KOMO’s late-’70s puppet showBoomerang. A few of you might also know the Seattle-native Nixon had a studio-singing career in the ’50s and ’60s before she returned home. She was perhaps the most famous “unknown” in Hollywood, the real soundtrack singer in such musical hits as Gigi, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and My Fair Lady. But few know her connection to that more-popular-now-than-ever master of space age pop, Juan Garcia Esquivel. In the liner notes to the recent CD compilation Music From a Sparkling Planet, vocal director Randy Van Horne credits Nixon as a session singer on Esquivel’s first U.S.-made LP, Other Worlds, Other Sounds (1958). Somehow, the vision of the perky, homey Nixon of Boomerang shrieking “Pow!” and “Zu-Zu-Zu!” seems oddly satisfying.

ANOTHER KIND OF PAY TV: The Seattle area’s getting an all-new TV station for the first time in 12 years, but don’t look for it to have any shows between its commercials. A Minneapolis company called ValueVision, partly owned by Montgomery Ward, is planning to launch an all-new UHF TV station in Tacoma (tentative call letters: KBGE). Actually, the broadcast transmitter’s just a loss-leader (at a reported cost of $4.6 million); they’re going on the air in order to force their home-shopping informercials onto local cable systems, thanks to an FCC rule requiring cable systems to carry all local over-the-air channels.

WHAT’S IN STORE: Vintage clothing was considered the latest “hot” thing in some circles, even before KING-TV heard of Cocktail Nation. And where there’s hype, money invariably follows. So it should come as no surprise that corporate-backed vintage chain stores are moving in big on what had been the territory of indie merchants and (usually) nonprofit thrift stores. You already know the Bufallo Exchange circuit; similar outfits rumored to be Seattle-bound include Crossroads (no relation to the Bellevue mall) and Wasteland. The Urban Outfitters chain has recently offered shelves of reconditioned garments alongside its new inventory. One indie vintage operator, the New Store, has started trying to defend its market share with flyers touting itself as the local, homespun alternative to “big corporate resale chains.”

GOOD NEWS: Centralized globalist culture may have peaked! An NY Times story, “Local Programming Cuts Into MTV,” notes with thinly-disguised alarm how broadcast and cable producers in assorted European and Asian countries are capturing viewers by offering local videos, in local languages–something MTV’s continent-wide satellite feeds just can’t offer. Seems audiences in assorted countries have increasingly had it with passive-aggressive acceptance of prepackaged superstar acts.

Since some global MTV acts in recent years have emanated from Seattle, some of you might see this as another sign of the long-hoped-for end of Seattle’s musical influence. I don’t. Most of our best bands and promoters weren’t trying to become global superstars; they were trying to smash the concept of global superstars. They were trying to promote a different attitude toward making and listening to “pop” music, as a creative force speaking directly to audiences rather than a brand-name entity to be manufactured and marketed. The more people there are around the world who make their own sounds, the more the Seattle scene’s real message to the world will have taken hold.

As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.

INSVILLE..................OUTSKI

Mac clones.................Windows 95

Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft

Gentlemen..................Guys

Pete & Pete................Friends

Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men

Bravo......................HBO

Flagship Ale...............Muenchener

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

Many-to-many...............One-to-many

Freedom....................Censorship

The City...................Melrose Place

Bizarro....................Dilbert

Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe

Curling....................Snowboarding

Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"

Albuquerque................New Orleans

Rotterdam..................Prague

Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk

Steak houses...............Coffee houses

Puppetry...................Computer animation

Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s

Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline

Fedoras....................Baseball caps

African food...............Thai food

Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism

Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy

Citizens Utilities.........Green Day

Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks

Padded butts...............Silicone

DVD........................CD-ROM

ADSL.......................ISDN

Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes

Coal.......................Alanis Morissette

Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey

Lounge.....................Techno

Zog Logs...................Pog

H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson

Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics

Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody

Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource

Crossroads.................Bellevue Square

Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers

Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball

Poker......................Magic: The Gathering

Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs

Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets

Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex

"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"

Mandalas...................Fractals

The power of love..........The love of power

Skepticism.................Cynicism

Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings

Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings

Black Jack.................Bubble Yum

Free Quebec................NAFTA

Percogesic.................Melatonin

Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven

Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone

ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view

Infobahn...................Wired

Phrenology.................Astrology

Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna

Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)

In Praise of Male Heterosexuality

Original online essay, 1/9/95

I write to defend, yea to praise, the most commercially exploited sexuality in the so-called “mainstream” culture and the most viciously disrespected sexuality in the so-called “alternative” culture.

I assert that male heterosexuality is just as valid a lifestyle as female and/ or gay sexuality, and that male heterosexuals are just as human as women and gays. Not superior, but not inferior either.

The male heterosexuality I praise is neither the crude stereotype presented by the commercial sex industry (which seeks to turn men into mindless stimulus-response machines) nor that presented by the anti-porn movement (which avers that men already are such machines). Nor is it the “mystic warrior” stereotype (often a regression to presexual YMCA/ Boy Scout notions of “playing Indian”), nor the postmodern masochist (all too eager to accept self-pitiful guilt trips over other men’s crimes), nor the crude sexual boasting of “macho” rappers and metalheads (all about playing dumb power games with other guys and nothing about reaching out toward a woman’s heart).

No, I praise the man of passion and soul, of heart and joy, of unpretentious self-confidence and mutual respect, the man who eats and drinks and makes love with a big heart, who gives his lust to a woman while receiving grace from her and vice versa.

It is this passion, this yang zest for living and loving, that is obscenely absent from most manifestations of “sexual liberation” inside the “alternative” culture.

Without going too far into my private affairs, I will admit that I’m still on the path toward discovering my passions and releasing my inhibitions. But at least I know now where I need to be. I need to explore the fullness of my positive male self.

This does not mean by becoming a mere consumer of corporate sex, which is even more life-denying and unfulfilling than corporate food or corporate entertainment.

Nor does it mean the soulless “casual sex” advocated by the Hipster Chamber of Commerce types in NY, LA and especially SF. TheCyborgasm CD, hyped to death in the Frisco “alternative” media, is as loveless a formula product as any XXX video. And S/M can be equally life-denying. Of all the pictures in the recent local “Definitive Erotica” fetish-photo exhibit, only one held any real eroticism. It was also the only picture in which the two models appeared to like one another.

Perhaps love’s opposite isn’t hate or even indifference but power. It’s easy for some of us to see the destructive effects of power madness in the political Right. It can be harder to see it within ourselves. Power madness destroys the heart through the mind, by instilling the false but oh-so-tempting concept of Good People and Bad People (instead of average people who do good and bad things).

The people (of any demographic or political stripe) who claim to be The Good People are the ones who most need to be confronted with their averageness. That’s one of the things sex can teach you, that you’re not one separate loner rebel but a node of the biological continuum.

The devilish temptation of power is not the exclusive property of the Right. You see it in gay bars that use slogans like “Dare to be Different” then post a six-foot-long dress code inside the door. You see it in new-age “men’s movement” zines that promote misogyny in the guise of denouncing misandry. You see it in the stifling codes of thought emanating not only from the Right (denouncing almost all sexualities) but also from the neo-Puritan Left (endorsing almost all sexualities except het-male). And yes, you see it in “radical” ideologies that brand straight men as one mass entity of cruel, idiotic woman-haters.

The true heterosexual male, in my definition, doesn’t hate women. He likes them, having alredy learned to like himself. He takes honest pride in abetting the life and dreams of the woman he loves. The Mahabarata said that “the mark of an efficient society is its respect for women.” In olden days when life was physically tougher and women didn’t get enough iron in their diet, supporting women meant one thing. In this age of coed workplaces and two-career couples, supporting women means helping them achieve their goals in and out of the home.

Feminists and gays should invite the support of sympathetic het-males, not spread oversimplistic stereotypes against them. To engage in gender-bigotry is to tacitly, indirectly accept its use–including its use by those who would use it against you. To demand that more men behave humanely, you must first acknowledge those men who already do. And in the Age of Newt, progressive elements need all the sincere supporters they can get, right?

Besides, without an acknowledgement of a positive role for male yang energy, the Left is bereft of the psychic and emotional means to take charge. It can react (passively or aggressively) against the Right’s actions well enough, but it can’t take proactive steps to promote any agenda of its own.

Sexual love, whatever the genders of its participants, ought to be about breaking down the walls between souls, not building them up. Intimate ecstasy is the abandonment of individualistic power trips. It’s the willful sacrifice of cold individualism for the sake of building something stronger.

Real lovemaking, particularly real hetero lovemaking, its most spiritual level is about discovering and connecting on every level with a life force outside and different from yourself. It’s about the yang becoming enveloped by the yin; what a new-age yoga book described as “the jewel in the lotus.”

This is something far beyond the mechanical sex of the porn industry or the even more mechanical sex of much “alternative” erotica (e.g., the Mondo 2000 dream of one day being able to masturbate with robots–yecch!).

I do not condemn the sex industry or its clientele; a starving person without access to a homecooked feast will find at least some sustenance from an Egg McMuffin. And face it, an Egg McMuffin can seem downright tasty at the right time and context. But those who always settle for the most expedient never learn to train their palates.

My vision of het-male sexuality at its best is of a passion, of the Lust for Life that Van Gogh and Iggy Pop advocated in their own ways (not to mention Henry Miller or Cobain). It’s a vision of blood as the life force, the elixer that feeds the soul; of the heart, the vulnerable organ within us that we don’t see; of braving the risk of looking like a fool or an idiot, the risk of rejection; of intimacy; of the pain no one can see. It values sentimentality, the fulfillment of yearning through remembrance of what the heart truly feels. It values emotional equality instead of loveless sex, friendship instead of name-dropping parties to be seen at but not heard. It affirms life, instead of the surface-level soullessness that the “alternative” culture falls prey to just as badly as other subcultures in today’s America. Indeed, the “hipness” defined by NY/ Calif. is in some ways more life-denying and consumerist than a lot of “mainstream” subcultures.

But that’s not to say we don’t have our own cultural constraints working against active love. Seattle, this land of Mandatory Mellowness, this land of pale Edwardian smugness posing as “progressivism,” especially needs to learn the power of positive passion, to really believe in something, to be really attached to someone, to really live.

Unabombs Away:

F.C.’s Dreams for Agrarian Authoritarianism

Manifesto review for the Stranger, 10/4/95

Industrial Society and its Future (a.k.a. The Unabomber Manifesto) was published as a supplement to the Washington Post and as a “virtual book” at the Time website. Because the daily Post is unavailable outside the Eastern Seaboard, this anti-technology tract is accessible to most readers only via computer. [NOTE: The uncopyrighted work has since been issued in an unauthorized paperback edition, available thru this link.]

Its author is known popularly as “the Unabomber,” but he (the FBI believes it’s a lone male) uses the unexplained pseudonym F.C.

While F.C. doesn’t cite ideological inspirations, he stands in a long line of anti-tech thinkers from William Blake to Gerry Mander. Many of these authors are slicker and more coherent than F.C., but that’s part of F.C.’s point. Early reviewers described F.C.’s writing as stilted and dry, detracting from his persuasiveness. I disagree. Any work of criticism carries the aesthetic of its ideal alternative. F.C.’s stodgy, authoritarian pronouncements express his wish for a stodgy, authoritarian future. His rambling arguments visualize his dream for a slower-paced world. His overgeneralizations about human nature reveal a utopia where most people would be treated as “masses,” placed in socially-useful labor.

F.C. believes “the industrial-technological system” is a social, psychological and environmental “disaster for the human race.” He believes people have become slaves to a system working for its own growth, not for human betterment; a system too complex and powerful to ever be “reformed;” a system which, unless overthrown, will eventually destroy the planet. Plenty of non-murderers have said things like that. In his way F.C. essentially says he’s tired of talk and wants action. He’s tired of college leftists because they just talk, and also because Marxist ideals of collective “progress” and planned economies would require the industrial state he wants to smash.

Most dystopians are utopians at heart, and most utopians seek a society in which people like themselves would rule or at least fit in better. While his prescriptions for the world are far more vague than his condemnations, F.C. clearly pines for a society guided not by the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith’s marketplace, nor by the impersonal demands of production and consumption, but by the force of muscle and will — presumably other people’s muscle and his will.

He doesn’t mention that modern experiment in a planned neo-agrarian society, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Here was a philosopher-activist who, like F.C., was willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to bring about a more “natural” state; except his system couldn’t feed an industrial-age population base, and the industrialist Communists of Vietnam had a stronger army. In F.C.’s utopia, there wouldn’t be heavy machinery or internal-combustion engines (he fantasizes about “burning all technical books” so these things can’t be brought back), hence no armies capable of reversing his revolution. Cold Warriors used to rant about the Reds’ ability to “bomb us into the stone age.” F.C. would settle for bombing us into the Bronze Age.

THE ULTIMATE HUNNY TREE: By now you’ve probably heard a broadcast day’s worth of ABC/Disney merger jokes and fantasies. You know, the ones about the deal coming from secret bargaining sessions between Scrooge McDuck and Old Man Quartermaine from General Hospital, or Joel Siegel’s movie reviews getting even less critical, or merging McGyver with Bill Nye the Science Guy, or letting Urkel redesign the theme-park rides, or adding Flubber-enhanced events to Wide World of Sports, or animatronic figures of Jimmy Smits’s butt, etc.

The nightmare reality, of course, is this is a part of the growing consolidation of corporate media. So is the deal in which the rump remains of CBS (without the record, musical-instrument and magazine divisions) joins the rump remains of Westinghouse (itself greatly transformed since the days when Betty Furness opened Westinghouse refrigerators during ads on CBS’s Studio One). Despite Letterman’s jokes, today’s Westinghouse makes nothing you the consumer can buy, except home security systems. It owns TV and radio stations and makes heavy industrial, electrical, and military gear. The deal will also mean two of the traditional Big Three networks will be owned by nuclear-reactor builders.

Unless the rival bid for CBS from Ted Turner and Microsoft (which is denying its participation in the deal in deniable ways) goes through. You can imagine the Letterman jokes about which show they’ll bring back first (Designing Women or Northern Exposure), or about whether Gates’s geeks will demand Price Is Right models be added to the Evening News.

One potential nerd’s-companion show Gates won’t get to buy right away is Santa Monica Bike Patrol, due to air next year on USA. “It’s just police officers on their bikes, fighting crime through the beach community,” says a spokesperson for the producers. Before you say, “But Seattle’s had its own bike cops for years; they’re stealing the idea from us,” remember that even before Seattle’s bike cops, Harry Shearer did a routine on an early Letterman show showing stills from what he claimed was his own bike-cop-show pilot. “We’re always pulling out our guns,” Shearer said back then, “but of course we can’t fire them because we’d fall off the bikes with the recoil.”

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: By the time you read this, the first Miss Deaf Swimwear bikini contest will have been held in L.A. The swimwear-catalog company promoting the event claims it’s doing it “to involve the Deaf community in the modeling world. Many deaf women do not have the self condfidence to compete in this kind of competition, and we are hoping to change that.” It could also be seen as a statement that hearing-impaired women don’t all prefer to spend their free time at signed acoustic-folk concerts. Some like to make universal expressions of pride, vanity, and sneering at other women’s judgmental scorn.

JUNK FOODS OF THE WEEK: Philly’s Best Cheesesteaks and Hoagies, on E. Union east of 24th Ave., is the real thang. Philadelphians I’ve sent there as spies agree. Their secret to a perfect meat-grease-bread concoction? They fly in foot-long rolls from Penna. direct, for that melt-in-your-mouth softness that still holds up under a half-pound or so of sliced, freshly grilled steak or chicken plus fixins. Have one for lunch; you won’t need dinner that day…. Sangria Senorial, imported from Mexico, just might be the first decent-tasting grape soda. Grape has traditionally been one of those minor flavors the US drink giants placed under their catch-all brands (Fanta, Nehi), originally because their sales didn’t warrant their own bottle designs. Senorial, while non-alcoholic, comes in a mini wine bottle. It doesn’t taste like wine, even non-alky wine. It does taste like real grapes with just the right amount of fizz.

YA MIGHT NOT WANNA HEAR THIS BUT: Prepaid phone-sex cards, now sold in the back pages of some alternative publications, are like buying a single bed. They’re both acts of admitting you’ll be alone and desperate for the foreseeable future… The aforementioned Disney co. is making an updated, live-action remake of 101 Dalmations. Expect more than 101 “cute” dog-poop gags… Everyone I know who went to the Johnny Cash/Mark Lanegan concert called it Lanegan’s show that Cash closed, not Cash’s show that Lanegan opened.

I hope you’ll bear with the rambling nature of this week’s piece. Since the horrors of 4/19, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. The following is among them.

The militia and posse cults, such as those being blamed for the Oklahoma City bombing, are the carriers/victims of a classic American ideology, ultimate individualilsm. Individualism is why “socialism” never got far in this country. It’s the root of much of what’s wrong with this country, and also of much of what other countries admire about us. But the flavor of extreme individualism expressed by the militia cults is something different. It’s a case of people foolishly really believing an ideology meant to be taken cynically.

The government-bashing associated with the militias and their less extreme counterparts in religious right is a tool used by the political sleazemeisters to buy votes and to promote a culture of fear and greed. But it may be a tool of something else as well.

The way I read my Bible prophecy, the “Antichrist” isn’t one individual corporeal being. It’s a spirit, a compulsion for doing the devil’s work in the lord’s name. It’s a spirit that’s been around throughout the history of Christendom. The religious right, which for at least three decades has been out looking for 666 under every governmental rock, is now among this spirit’s victims. It bought into conspiracy theories that a single Antichrist dictator would emerge to form something called One-World-Government. The real “world government” in the post-USSR era is global business, the very people who are the real patrons of the politicians vying for Fundamentalist votes. The Trilateral Commission? That wasn’t a secret cabal working to create One-World-Government. That was an above-ground club of think-tankers who wanted to make individual governments more responsive to big business (just like that Global Business Network that those Whole Earth Catalog and Wired magazine people belong to). Conservatives used to claim that Communists promised freedom but delivered tyranny; modern conservatives promise individualism but deliver globalism.

And the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? They could easily be seen as representing the kind of environmental destruction now advocated by “pro growth” politicians and “property rights” lobbyists.

Similarly, many commentators have contrasted Jesus’s disses against rich people to the right’s demonization of the poor and deification of money and property. This contradictory appeal of anything-goes for polluters and developers with fiscal S&M for the rest of us not only contradicts the Big Book, it harkens back to the days of decadent Madness of King George-era England, the England our forefathers had good reasons to secede from. The people most loudly invoking the imagery of the American Revolution are being increasingly corrupted by some of the values this country was founded against.

I’m not saying evangelicals or business executives (or even Republicans) are soldiers of a personalized devil. I’m saying they’re components in a self-perpetuating system that’s accelerating the rich/poor gap, the depletion of the earth’s resources, and other trends that contradict any reasonable definition of “personal liberty,” “Christian stewardship,” or “family values.”

What we’re seeing is a cultural feedback loop. The “programmers” of this loop are the folks who built an economic system that generates byproducts of alienation, greed and fear, but have cleverly found a way to channel that greed and fear back into the system; helping perpetuate the conditions of downward mobility, decreased quality of life, and frayed social relations.

Yet where else is there for the disempowered to go? Release the clutch of corporate interests from the right and you end up with the world of the militia cults. If there are Republicans who haven’t succumbed to the sleaze, they’re keeping low these days. The middle-of-the-road Democrats have been trying to sell the idea of a soft-edged Right Lite for over a decade now, and may now have lost that crusade for good. The American Left was never much able to sell the value of socialism in a nation of individualists; in most of my lifetime, it hasn’t even bothered to offer a coherent vision of an idealized society, let alone try to sell that vision to people who don’t live in college towns. But that’s a topic for another week.

A five-Wednesday month means an extra visit from Misc., the pop-culture column that’s just as tired of people wanting to tell it the good news about hemp as it is of people wanting to tell it the good news about Amway.

WHICH MAG D’YA READ?: New Republic cover blurb, earlier this month: “The Decline of the Black Intellectual.” Atlantic Monthly cover blurb, same week: “The New Intellectuals… Suddenly They’re Back, and They’re Black.”

THE FINE PRINT (the only subtitled closing credit in the video release of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Blue): “We wish to thank Alfa Romeo for authorizing the scene of the accident of the Alfa 164, the dynamics of which were purely ficticious.” (The scene involved a brake-fluid leak.)

UPDATE: For those who wanted to reach the Seattle Volunteer News, plugged here a few weeks back, its address is P.O. Box 70402, Seattle 98107, or email SeattleVol@aol.com. Speaking of helpful zines…

`WAVE,’ GOODBYE: Fourth Wave: Disability News and Views is an outspoken and borderline-courageous local quarterly newsprint mag published by the Disabilities Research and Information Coalition with funding from the state’s Developmental Disabilities Council. Or rather, it was. For six years FW communicated directly with 23,000 statewide readers about, as editor Victoria Medgyesi noted in a last-issue editorial, “such issues as love, sex, institutions, oppression, housing, discrimination, abuse, alcohol and drugs, misuse of funds, parents with disabilities, foster care, funding inequities, education, health care reform, `mercy’ killing, and self-advocacy.” It also “questioned the agencies and organizations that deal with disability concerns by asking them the kinds of questions they ask the community-at-large: How many people with disabilities do you have on your paid staff? On your board of directors?”

Eventually, challenging the bureaucracy that fed it caught up with FW. The state canceled the last year of the mag’s funding contract, feeding the money instead to a PR campaign aimed less at fostering self-empowerment for people with physical, mental or developmental disabilities and more at getting resource listings and positive-role-model messages into the mainstream news media. This spring is the first quarter without an issue of FW.

Medgyesi says of the cutoff, “Mostly it’s an impression of keeping disabled people quiet and out of sight of most people. Most of these (media) programs have been developed to make able-bodied people feel better about how they’ve treated people with disabilities. But we looked how the system oppressed and exploited people with disabilities, how it promoted images of pity regarding them in the media. I’ve gone from `why did they cut our funding?’ to `how did we get away with that for six years?’ ” Medgyesi’s willing to correspond with people interested in starting similar ventures, c/o Whole Note Media, 911 Western, #555, Seattle 98104. Speaking of mainstream media…

THIS JUST IN: The network-switcheroo has one positive byproduct: the new KSTW news. It’s fast, info-packed, straight-no-chaser, almost free of happy-talk, little tabloid trash (aside from the requisite O.J. doses), like a local CNN Headline News instead of the drawn-out, filler-filled old KSTW news or the anchorperson-as-celebrity tedium of the other stations.

MISSING THE TRAIN: The transit vote was actually fairly encouraging. The 53 percent no vote was partly influenced by (1) natural suspicion against big public-works projects; (2) suburban rugged-individualists who mistakenly think they’re not part of the larger community; (3) the usual backlash against alternatives to driving; and (4) city-supported opposition in Everett, which got cut out of the light-rail portion of the plan in a last-minute budget cut. When the RTA resubmits the plan, preferably later this year, they should bring Scoopville back in, get out more urban votes, and work better at turning outlying residents onto the possibility of not just commuting but living without having to haul your personal ton of steel everyplace.

‘TIL NEXT WE STRAIN EYES TOGETHER, first- and second-day Stranger readers oughta consider attending the Sheryl Wiser folk gig Thursday night at the OK Hotel bar. Proceeds from Wiser’s tip jar (there’s no cover) will benefit “The Church of Lingirie,” a local ministry providing new underwear to homeless women. Nice music for a good cause, proving the ol’ slogan “Support Can Be Beautiful.

Far from imminentizing the “Death of Writing,” the new electronic media are replenishing our language with new words, phrases and genres. Among these is the “FAQ List” (for “Frequently Asked Questions”), a handy format to bring new users of bulletin boards and newsgroups up to speed. In our quest to be first to steal a good idea, here’s Part 1 of our Misc. FAQ. Part 2 follows in a week or two.

1. How do you pronounce Misc.?

Just like it’s spelled.

2. How do you spell your name, Humphreys or Humphries?

It is, and always has been, Humphrey–no “s.”

3. Is Misc. a parody of ____ (Frisco gossip columnist)?

Absolutely not. If anything, it’s a revival of the classic prewar three-dot column, still practiced by Army Archerd in Daily Variety and Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times.

4. Do you write “I Love Televison”?

No. Wm. Steven Humphrey isn’t even my relation. I’m from Olympia-via-Marysville; he’s from Alabama. My real younger brother’s studying to be a naturopath. I sometimes make him mad by eating all three of naturopathy’s forbidden foods (meat, wheat, and dairy) in front of him.

5. Does the Stranger have a beef against the Times?

Absolutely not. In fact, we’re now printed by a Times subsidiary.

6. Is there a “PC Police” at the Stranger, like the Weekly alleged? Do you all have to agree on everything you write?

Absolutely not. In fact, just last month local film scholar Steve Shaviro claimed a “Disney ideology” in which “artistic or aesthetic experiences… are supposed to be nice” was “the official American dogma.” My ol’ acquaintance Steve appears to be another victim of that academic “radical” construct that imagines U.S. society as consisting of two and only two cultures: The Mainstream (whitebread right-wingers) and The Alternative (whitebread left-wingers). Certain people, especially certain film scholars, might argue that the unique American aesthetic is really one of Camaros screaming down the open road, hot music playing in sleazy dives, and bikini babes posing for calendar pictures with power tools.

Besides, the heart of the Disney ideology isn’t in inoffensive content but in the control and planning behind that content; what the company calls “Imagineering.” Disneyland is a real-world place created from the logic of an animation producer, who used a sense of intense order to create the illusion of spontaneity–a logic perfectly suited to today’s Age of Marketing.

7. When you wrote ____, you were really just kidding right?

Absolutely not. The only time I wrote something completely facetiously was when I called for a crackdown against violence and immorality in opera music.

8. Why do people think Dave Barry’s funny?

Wish I knew. Probably it has something to do with the ingrained reflex of the ethnic joke, adapted for a baby-boomer audience. Instead of treating people of other races as subhumans, Barry gives the treatment to non-boomers, allowing his readers to still think of themselves as The Superior Generation.

9. Doesn’t it seem weird that the politicians and the news media claim everybody’s a flaming right-winger these days, but MTV and the fashion magazines are full of punk and alternative attitudes?

Absolutely not. Corporate “alternative” music, fashion, et al. is a calculated attempt to short-circuit people’s innate cravings for a culture more “real” than that associated with corporate entertainment, while still keeping these people as consumers feeding the business trough. Right-wing “empowerment” rhetoric operates exactly the same way. It persuades people they’re “rebelling” against The Establishment (bureaucrats) when it’s really getting them to suck up to the real power elite (corporations and their PACs). Disgust at politics-as-usual and at entertainment-as-usual are related and both valid. A left that worked would reach out to both frustrations.

10. But wasn’t there a headline in Fortune, “Today’s GOP to Big Business: Drop Dead”?

Yeah, but the meat of that story was that Republican leaders care more about certain businesses (western land and resource exploiters, financial speculators) than others (the Northeast industrial infrastructure). Neither side is appreciably on “our side.” The story also claims what’s really best for business is long-term economic and social stability, not the Newtzis’ scorched-earth policy. That’s a point worthy of more serious debate than I can offer here.

Welcome again to Misc., the column with only one word for Eartha Kitt’s recent Jazz Alley stint: Purr-fection!

FAT, NOT SASSY: As a civic booster, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by Fat Tuesday, the Mardi Gras for people who are just too boomer wimpy or too laid back to do a real Mardi Gras. Mind you, it’s a screwy notion for a stuck-up Protestant city to attempt a Mardi Gras in the first place (even the northern towns that pull off successful Winter Carnivals tend to be in Catholic-dominated places like Quebec and southern Germany), but the way the idea’s been executed usually hurts. I was at the 1978 Fat Tuesday, the last big nighttime-outdoor one, and it almost became for real (i.e., people getting shitfaced and fucking in public, or dressing up like all get out). Since then, it’s been tamed into a promo tool for the boomer-blues-bar circuit, and it’s been an experience not unlike a boomer blues bar on a bad night: predictable, unoriginal, yet annoying. Every place needs a real letting-go time, a healthy respectful vacation from inhibitions; many of us could use a real Lent too, but self-denial isn’t part of the consumer society’s agenda.

VANITY PLATE OF THE WEEK (on a Suzuki Samurai parked on Queen Anne): “F8L CR8.”

PIERCE-INGS: I heartily recommend voting for the big transit proposal next week. Do we need more freeway lanes? No way. Could we use a reliable regional transit system that makes it possible to live as well as commute sans private wheels? You bet. Public transit is a populist, civilizing force, bringing diverse people together as well as saving resources. I saw it when I took the transit proponents’ demonstration train. Hundreds of eager citizens young and old, sitting in adequately comfy seats and chatting happily while we rumbled speedily past the south King/north Pierce County neverland toward the wonders of Tacoma.

Decade-old bumper stickers used to say “Admit It Tacoma, You’re Beautiful.” Recent T-shirts for local band Seaweed admonished us to “Visualize Tacoma.” There’s no need to be so apologetic. Tacoma really is one of the most honestly attractive cities in the region (and perhaps the nation). Except for one area, it’s a human-scale city with a homey lived-in look to it. Its compact downtown was bypassed by the freeway and hence maintains much of its solid brick prewar buildings. The chain stores may be gone from downtown but there are two great “restored” theaters and an Antique Row, plus your usual array of “unique shops and restaurants” at Freighthouse Square. There’s even an elegant coffeehouse in the storefront that served as Tracey Ullman’s pizza joint in I Love You To Death. The town’s got lotsa wonderful architecture: stoic old warehouses, a music store with a rooftop piano neon sign, the ivory-white world HQ of Roman Meal bread (billed on the building as “Nature’s Nut Brown Food”), and of course the world-famous Java Jive. The one part of Tacoma that sucks, the soulless hole in its urban donut, is the Tacoma Mall area–as whatshername might say, a mall is a mall is a mall–yet even it has its particular charms, specifically one of the area’s last surviving Chuck E Cheese robotic pizza parlors.

And you can go there carless too, without waiting for permanent commuter-train service to start, six days a week on the express buses ($2 each way) run by Pierce Transit (where “Your Ride Is Our Pride”). Better still, you can transfer in T-Town to another express and end up in Indietown USA, Olympia. Too bad these express buses don’t run after 8 p.m.; it’d be great to see a show at T-Town’s Victory Club or Oly’s Capitol Theater (or for those town’s folks to see shows here), and afterward Leave the Driving to Them. But you will be able to use the bus this summer to see outdoor AAA baseball (the most “professional” ball we might get this season) at glorious ol’ Cheney Stadium.

NEXT WEEK: The first-ever Misc. Frequently Asked Questions list. Get yours in now.

UPDATE: Sir Mix-A-Lot turns out to be the best part of KIRO’s anthology show The Watcher. Without Mix’s narrative interludes (which he probably seriously rewrites), it’s just a package of trite morality tales that’d seem dorky even on the USA Network…. We told you last fall that golf was fast becoming the latest hip sport. Now, an All-Golf Channel will be available to cable systems. And aNude Golf tape will be in video stores this week!

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: First, a little background. Sunny Delight is an orange-flavored punch (made mainly of water and fructose) from Procter & Gamble, with typically clever P&G ads. Instead of marketing it to kids as really hot stuff, P&G’s ads try to convince parents that kids already think it’s really hot stuff. They depict kids praising the taste and texture of what they call “Sunny D” (implying the drink’s so popular it’s inspired its own schoolyard slang) and bad-mouthing other vitamin-fortified beverages (including some mysterious product identified only as “Purple Stuff”). Anyhow, the regular Sunny Delight’s only an average faux-OJ, better than Tang but not up to the standard of Five Alive. The good stuff is the new variety, the imitation kiwi flavor Sunny Delight. It’s green, it’s goopy, and the P&G chemists have amazingly synthesized the nutty-tangy taste of what the California Kiwi Commission advertises as “the fruit that feels fuzzy but tastes fabulous.”

BEAN THERE: They hate Starbucks in Frisco. Every snide Bay Arean zine, columnist and cartoonist I’ve read has ranted against the non-funky, high-rent-paying green coffee stands increasingly dotting the City That Thinks It’s God. You never saw any of these people complaining when Frisco-based BankAmerica absorbed Seattle’s two biggest banks. I say it’s the least they should accept in return for NoCal’s past domination of Northwest arts and its present domination of Northwest finance. Besides, experience here has shown that Starbucks hardly drives independent coffeehouses under, as the Frisco writers warn. It increases interest in specialty coffee, which leads some of its new customers to graduate beyond its own chain-store atmosphere toward independents.

DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: Just as the KCMU Kontroversey settles down, we face a bigger problem. The Newtzis wanna eliminate all Federal support for public radio and TV. Despite what editorial cartoonists allege, this won’t knock Sesame St. or similar established shows off the air. More importantly, it won’t harm conservative-biased shows like The McLaughlin Group, Firing Line, and Tony Brown’s Journal that get corporate money.

No, it’s a naked attempt to silence non-conservative voices. Already, producers of non-con dramas (Tales of the City) and documentaries (The ’90s) have had to close shop because neither governments nor corporations want to fund them. The airwaves need a place for non-corporate points of view. Public broadcasting’s already too dependent on pledge drives (which lead to programs biased toward upscale tastes) and corporate grants (which lead to programs biased toward conservative priorities). The disputes at KCMU centered around a management that wanted to lead the station (which gets no money from the Feds) toward sucking up to affluence. Newt’s plan would drive public radio and TV more firmly down that path. (Extra! notes that NPR, the “liberal” star in the public-broadcasting constellation, already shows the same bias toward conservative sources and interviewees that Nightline andMcNeil-Lehrer have.)

Just as local cable systems have to subsidize public access channels, so should the commercial broadcast industry be taxed to provide a floor of support for public broadcasting. This idea was part of the original early-’70s plan for public TV, but was quashed by that ol’ media-hater Nixon.

WITH FRIENDS LIKE THESE DEPT.: In a recent editorial, Weekly publisher David Brewster thinks “liberals” could get back into power by, well, by ceasing to be so darn liberal. He envisions a return to Old Democrat tactics–buying votes by promising construction projects and other goodies in voters’ districts. Everything would work out fine, Brewster apparently believes, if “liberals” and “progressives” got back into big-time ward heeling and stopped worrying about trifles like fighting injustice or helping poor people. This is exactly the attitude that’s causing the Dems’ troubles. By failing to offer (let alone deliver) a competing vision for society, the Dems can only compete with the GOP on the basis of fund-raising and influence-peddling, terms on which the GOP can win every time.

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.

Welcome to a late-January White Sale edition of Misc., the column that knows things have gone ridiculously mainstream-commercial when Borders Books and Music has its own Incredibly Strange Music display table (complete with a Nirvana kareoke cassette) and there’s an officially-licensed Black Flag snowboard. So let’s run with the spirit of the times and have a special all-consumerist column, shall we?

AD VERBS: The highest-visibility week for new TV shows used to be the week after Labor Day. Now it’s the third and fourth weeks in January, when the established networks show off the snazzy new shows replacing last fall’s snazzy old shows. This time we also get two all-new “networks”: WB and UPN. The former has the better promo spots, the latter may have the better shows (‘tho we’ll have to wait to make judgment on Sir Mix-A-Lot’s acting skills as the titular narrator of UPN’s The Watcher).

It’s also the annual high week for commercials, specifically on Sooper Bowl Sunday. In fact, recent years have seen far more excitement for the freshly-premiered ads during the big game than for the game itself, which is usually either a rout or a dogged defensive battle. I know it’s fashionable in “hip” circles to denounce football and those who watch it. I also know why–virtually every sensitive young intellectual type in America had to survive adolescent harassment from crude jocks and/or bitchy cheerleaders, in schools that often gave more honor to touchdowns than to learning. But part of growing up is getting beyond old pains. Besides, you can’t understand this culture without understanding how American football encapsulating the essential myths and images of America. It’s a vast real estate on which violence and raw ambition are held in place by persnickity bureaucratic rules. It’s gross caricatures of masculinity, tempered on the sidelines by gross caricatures of femininity. It’s the dream, fulfilled only occasionally enough to remain tempting, of flying and running free.

CUTE MAG ALERT: Moving from male- to female-oriented consumerism, we may have seen the end of Sassy as we know it. Its publisher, N.Y.-based Lang Communications (which also owns the somewhat less consumerist Ms.) sold the trendy teen fashion-music-product guide to Petersen Publishing, the Calif. firm that puts out the somewhat less trendy Teen (as well as a bunch of car magazines). None of the old editors are going with the move. Sassy’s potential devolution into just another what-to-wear rag begs the question: Does a younger generation exist if grownup journalists aren’t around to define it to other grownup journalists?

OVERCOOKING: Moving into the local consumer scene, we must say goodbye to a longtime dinnertime friend. Yeah, the tragedy of the four firefighters was a bad thing. But I’ll also miss the Mary Pang’s foods made in that destroyed plant, which might never resume production. Pang’s frozen Chinese dinners, entrees and egg rolls (in their happy ’50s-orange boxes) were regular dietary elements for the young and underemployed. Unlike some other slacker staples, Pang’s products never wore out their welcome.

TROUBLE ON DEXTROSE AVE.: An even more universal aspect of the youth diet is changing, as Dolly Madison Bakeries wants to buy the much larger Hostess-Wonder empire. As a kid, I knew Hostess goodies as the real thing. Some kids preferred the cup cakes, some the fruit pies. Some kids liked to unroll the Ho-Hos. I myself was a sucker for the Sno-Balls–even at a tender age, there was something mysteriously appealing about two side-by-side pink hemispheres, soft and bouncy to the touch. Dolly cakes were mysterious things unavailable in this area, known only from commercials on the Charlie Brown TV specials. When the Dollys finally showed up in Washington, they tended to appear at odd convenience stores that for some reason didn’t have Hostess. Their sizes, flavors and textures were strange to a Hostess-reared palate; even the sugar-grit of the creme filling was off somehow. Now, the product lines will probably merge, with Dolly’s Zingers appearing alongside the Twinkies. Let’s just hope the new bosses keep the bright Wonder Bread neon sign in south Seattle (ironically leading you toward our town’s least whitebread neighborhood) and the mentioned-in-a-prior-column Hostess plant off Aurora, beautiful and oh-so sweet smelling, with its giant exterior intake valves labeled for sugar and corn syrup.

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.