HERE IT IS, a mere 40 days before the last Presidential election of this century (unless you’re one of those who believes decades and centuries start with the “1” year instead of the “0” year), and it’s receiving about as much public hoopla as a Behring-era Seahawks home game. This despite the novelty of a Dem actually favored to win re-election while the Repos flay around trying to prevent internal ideological spats from imploding their coalition. You can tell the Dole guys are desperate when they resort to the lowest of smears (unsupported allegations of Clinton carrying STDs) while still claiming to be the campaign of “character.”

Needless to say, my search for even unfunny Jack Kemp/Shawn Kemp puns is a washout, as Kemp’s own campaign role has been as of this writing. Kemp’s succeeded merely at “doing no harm” to the Dole ticket, making no Quayle-esque standout moves that might attract criticism. Indeed, if you got all your info about the GOP ticket from Clinton and Gore’s speeches, you might thinkGingrich was running for prez and Dole was running for veep. There will, of course, be a vice-presidential debate in the next couple of weeks, which will let Kemp shine in the spotlight for one evening trying to out-wonk Gore. (The syndicated Ike-conservative Bob Novak claims unnamed higher-ups in the Dole camp are displeased with Kemp for spending too much time talking to African-American voters about inner-city revitalization instead of luring back wayward white Reagan Democrats.)

CORREC: The revived Spud Goodman Show is actually on KCPQ at 1 a.m. Tuesday nights/Wednesday mornings. The new show, produced with spit, bailing wire, a couple of Betacams, and massive tape editing (the cast easily outnumbers the crew) actually looks more professional than Spud’s studio-based old show ever did.

WHAT’S IN STORE: The boarded-up Westlake Center storefront with the mysterious sign mentioned here a month or so ago is now open. It turned out to be Inside Out, a boutique offering interior accessories and knick-knacks of pseudo-rustic and “provincial” bents. Sort of like that Complete Gardener plant store at 2nd & Pine, but without any plants.

IN THE CHIPS: Thanks to reader Joseph K. Aikala, who found it while traveling to Colorado, I now have a giant bag of Doritos Max tortilla chips, a test-marketed Frito-Lay product with the molecularly-engineered fake fat Olestra. I’m happy to report none of the digestive problems consumer rabble-rousers have associated with the stuff. On the other hand, they’re not the tastiest snack foods I’ve ever had–there’s a peculiar brittle, unsolid feel to them, and a blandness only partly covered by the heavy dosage of Cool Ranch flavoring. For a lo-fat chip I’d still recommend the same firm’s Baked Tostitos product.

KEEPING TABS: The tabloidization of American media, viewed with alarm by media critics for over a decade, may be on the wane. Daytime sleaze-talk TV ratings peaked over a year ago; most all of last year’s new talk shows died swift, painless deaths. And now comes word that the supermarket tabloids, having finally gotten grudging respect from mainstream media as a source of stories, are on a long-term downswing. An NY Times story reports the National Enquirer, its sister rag the Star, and the rival Globe have each lost 30 percent of their average circulation since ’91, even despite OJ. What’s more, the tabs’ audience is aging, with young adults either less interested in celebrities’ private lives or finding enough of that fare elsewhere. (The article didn’t mention the self-parodicWeekly World News, the third member of the Enquirer trioka and the favorite “slumming” material for people who think they’re the only readers in on the joke.) I admit to being one of those post-Boomer readers who are indifferent to the grocery tabs’ fare. But the format itself is one of your classic literary forms, and could theoretically be revived by people who knew how to tell intriguing stories well.

(I’ve met “radical” guys who claim to hate “The State,” but love the Presidential bid of Ralph “There Oughta Be A Regulation” Nader. Why do you suppose this is? Leave your ideas at clark@speakeasy.org.)

WELCOME TO A late-summer sunspotted Misc., the pop-culture column that knows there’s gotta be some not-half-bad Jack Kemp/ Shawn Kemp jokes out there. If you know any, send them to clark@speakeasy.org.

UPDATES: Adobe Systems will indeed keep the former Aldus software operation in Seattle; it’s negotiating to build offices in the Quadrant Industrial Park next to the Fremont Bridge… Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, winner of this column’s no-prize last year as Seattle’s best regulation-size supermarket, won’t become an Alfalfa’s “natural” food store. It’ll become a QFC. The wonderful Food Giant sign, its nine letters blinking on and off in not-quite synchronization and with a few neon elements always out, will shine for the last time around mid-November. The store will then be redone to QFC’s standard look, floor plan, and merchandise mix. Oh well, at least Wallingford will still have the original Dick’s.

AUTO-EROTICA?: A home video called How A Car Is Made, currently plugged on TV ads, is sold in separate adult and children’s versions. Does the adult version show more explicit rivet scenes? Or maybe nice slow shots of a car’s steel frame descending into a paint bath, emerging moments later all dripping-damp and pink?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: It took the long, slow, painful death of Reflex before this town could get the take-no-prisoners (or grants) visual-art zine it’s needed. The new bastard-son-of-Reflex bears the highly apt title Aorta. (The name was chosen long before Jason Sprinkle’s big steel heart became the most important work by a Seattle visual artist in this decade.) EditorJim Demetre seems to have the right priorities: Northwest art, he and his contributors believe, ought to be something more original than copying the latest flavor from NY/Cal, and something more personal than the upscaled decorative crafts now dominating the local gallery market. The first issue’s highlighted by a clever piece by Cydney Gillis on how local artists were persuaded to donate their time to benefit SAM’s Chinese-textiles show, while SAM still does little on its part to support non-Chihuly local art. The only problem so far: Like Reflex, Aorta will only appear every two months, so no exhibit it reviews will still be up when the review comes out. Free around town or pay-what-you-can to 105 S. Main St., #204, Seattle 98104.

SIGN-O-TIMES (on the readerboard at the Eastlake flower shop): “Pro-Environment Bumper Stickers–Joke of the Century.”

DAUGHTER OF `DESIGNER GRUNGE’: The trumped-up media outcry over the alleged Heroin Chic look has brought atention to a new outfit called Urban Decay, which has been cleaning up on helping young women look dirty. Its cosmetics, sold with slogans such as “Burn Barbie Burn,” just might be the only products sold at both Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom. Its nail polishes and lipsticks have dark un-shiny colors and come in styles named Pallor, Bruise, Frostbite, Asphyxia, and Plague. Its ads read like the work of professional ad copywriters trying to sound like slam poets (“Colors from the paint box of my life. Pallor is the sheen of my flesh.”) Founder Sandy Lerner has promoted herself everywhere from the fashion mags to the NY Times as an expert on pseudo-dirty “street” looks; even though she’s quite non-street herself (she co-founded Cisco Systems, a computer-networking giant) and her company’s based on the not-so-mean streets of Silicon Valley. But then again, fashion has always been about role-playing, and in that context “gritty reality” is just another fantasy. It might be more expedient, marketing-wise, for Lerner and company to be closer to the mall kids who wish they were on the Lower East Side than to actually be anywhere near the Lower East Side.

LET US MAKE a pledge to meet in September, and until then ponder these Ways to Praise Your Child, from a refrigerator magnet available from KSTW: “Terrific Job. Hip Hip Hurray. A+ Job. You Tried Hard. What An Imagination. Outstanding Performance. You’re A Joy. You’re A Treasure. A Big Hug. A Big Kiss. I Love You. Give Them A Big Smile.”

HANK-ERING: Misc. received an anonymous letter from somebody complaining about a recent ish of No Depression, the “alternative country” zine co-run by Rocket vet Peter Blackstock. The letter-writer felt outraged at the cover image of the late Hank Williams Sr. posing alongside two white Negro-dialect impersonators. I highly doubt Blackstock intended to endorse the show’s crude ethnic humor. Rather, I’m sure he intended to explore Williams’ work and its historical context–like the Robt. Christgau Village Voice piece last month claiming Williams took his vocal shtick from NY performer Emmett Miller, who sang in blackface from the ’20s thru the ’40s.

CLUB IMPLOSION, CONT’D.: The Weathered Wall, for four years Seattle’s poshest (in a friendly way) live-and-recorded-music club (and the only local club to use a blown-up photocopy of an old Misc. column as a wall poster), shut its doors in mid-June. It’s been used since then as a location for a made-for-TV movie. Various interests are looking into getting it sold and/ or re-opened, but there’s nothing to announce now. Meanwhile, the Pioneer Square Theater has hosted its last all-ages gig. Promoters tried to raise prices after fire marshals halved the building’s legal capacity; but that put the concerts out of range of much of the underage crowd. Reportedly the marshals offered a list of improvements that had to be made before full capacity could be re-granted; but the space’s landlord balked at the expense. (If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d wonder why the marshals didn’t go after the building back when it housed non-punk music and plays.)

And the Lake Union Pub, home to some of Seattle’s punkiest shows (and to some of the Liquor Board’s heaviest enforcement details), just had another 10-day closure, amid rumors the joint would be sold and turned into a sports bar. If it happens, the closure would mean three of the four alt-music clubs on the Commons Committee’s ’94 map of blocks it wanted to condo-ize would be dead (leaving only Re-bar). On the upside, the Pub’s quasi-neighbor, the Store Room Tavern, has been booking bands again; while the Seattle Parks Department (!) has co-promoted Wednesday night touring-punk bands at the Miller Community Center on east Capitol Hill.

THE BIG TURN-OFF: The Sonics’ recent successes reminded me how one of the joys of televised sports has always been the excuse to loiter among a department store’s TV displays, sharing the moments of triumph/ despair with instant friends without having to buy (or drink) anything. But that’s another of those disappearing urban pleasures. The Bon Marche’s new management, having disposed of the Budget Floor, the Cascade Room restaurant, and the downtown pharmacy, is now closing the electronics departments. Besides leaving Radio Shack (and pawn shops) as the only source for home electronics in the central downtown, the loss (effective August) leaves but a few public TV walls in the greater urban core (Sears, Fred Meyer, Video Only). At least we might see no more dorky Bon cell-phone ads (we love ya Keister, but keep your night job).

The changes show how the Bon, once powerful enough to rise above retail’s sea changes (documented in an ’80s P-I headline, “Bon Marches to Different Drum”), now bumps along in the tides like the rest of the industry. Further proof: the parent company’s apparent threat (still officially denied) to consolidate the chain with another of its holdings, Macy’s California, and planned cuts in commission pay which might lead to a clerks’ strike this month. Still, for now, the Bon remains the store “Where All Seattle Shops,” from dowagers hanging out in the women’s rooms to brides seeking just the right bread machine. It’s also the city’s crossroads point, having struck a deal in the ’20s to make its 3rd Ave. side one of the town’s biggest bus stops. While the downtown store’s merchandise mix is now based on strategies devised for mall branches, it’s still the first place to go for lots of stuff, sold in a respectful, relatively unpretentious manner. Would hate to see it deteriorate into just another store.

UPDATE: I recently sought your proposed new uses for the Kingdome. The best came from one J. Drinkwater: “1) Fill it with water and house the sea lions from the Ballard Locks. 2) Rename it the Seattle Commons.”

SPACES IN THE HEART: Back when Seattle bands were just starting to attract out-of-town notice, the center of the town’s live-music action was a pair of clubs near Eastlake and Howell, connected by a walkway under a freeway overpass. The Off Ramp and RKCNDY weren’t posh by any means, but their drinks were strong and their PAs were loud. Newer and fancier clubs since stole their thunder. RKCNDY is closed and for sale; financing for a planned remodel apparently fell through. The Off Ramp has struggled as well. A new owner and new booker vow to keep things going; but the liquor-license transfer apparently hit a snag, and the home of Gnosh Before the Mosh is, as of this writing, also shut. Meanwhile, the all-ages music scene continues to take it on the chin. Fire marshalls suddenly halved the Pioneer Square Theater’s legal capacity the night of a show, making future shows there fiscally iffy. The Velvet Elvis almost stopped hosting concerts after a few rowdy punkboys disrupted a show in late April. Instead, the VE will continue to let indie promoters run all-ages music in the space, but has asked them to de-emphasise hardcore-punk lineups. In a final note, Park Ave. Records, lower Queen Anne’s Taj Mahal of collector vinyl, has called it quits. Its purported replacement: a branch of the Disc-Go-Round chain.

LOVE, ITALIAN STYLE: Director Bernardo Bertolucci shot his share of requisitely-picturesque Seattle scenes for his film Little Buddah. Now he’s introducing that other popular image of Seattle into his work. In the trailer for Bertolucci’s new film Stealing Beauty(no relation to Britain’s 1988 sexy-novice-priest movie Stealing Heaven), a pastoral scene in a decaying Italian farm shed is gloriously interrupted by Liv Tyler (daughter of Aerosmith’s Steve Tyler), as a teen brought to the farm against her will by her family, loudly singing and dancing to a tape of Hole’s “Rock Star.” The scene transforms a personal jeer at one particular clique (the Oly rocker-than-thous) into a universal defiance against cliquishness in general.

THE DRAWING ROOM: The Meyerson & Nowinski art gallery has instantly become the ritzy-upscale “contemporary art” emporium for Seattle. The splashy opening show gathers drawings and prints from artists of different nations and decades, collectively referred to by the gallery as “Picasso and Friends.” (It’s really no worse than TNT sticking Tom & Jerry cartoons onto a show called Bugs Bunny and Friends.)

Many of you remember Bob Blackburn Jr. as the sometime statistician and broadcast assistant to his dad, the SuperSonics’ original radio announcer. Bob Jr. also played in assorted Seattle bands (including the Colorplates) before moving to L.A. in ’89. He now works for the Westwood One satellite-radio empire, conducting celebrity interviews and organizing promotions. Last month his job led to the fulfillment of a longtime dream, the chance to meet ’50s bondage model Betty Page. As you may know, the sweet-faced, dark-haired Page posed mostly for obscure and under-the-counter publications for about 10 years, then retired to a very private existence. Only now, long after her pictures became the icons of a new mainstream-fetish cult, has she partly resurfaced, giving a few select interviews and authorizing a biography. Blackburn chatted with her for an hour and got her to autograph a picture for his friends in the Seattle sleazepunk outfit Sick & Wrong. He says Page “still looks really good” at 73, but won’t be photographed. The audio interview was mostly done, he says, “for the record.” Westwood One has no plans to air it on any of its satellite feeds, most of which aren’t carried in Seattle anyway. I think Blackburn should invite her to come work with his ex-employers. The Sonics (especially Kemp) could use someone to teach some discipline!

(Be sure to keep Sunday, June 2 open for the magnificent, marvelous, mad mad mad Misc. Tenth Anniversary Party at the Metropolis Gallery, on University St. east of 1st Ave. Details forthcoming.)

12/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.

WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA

This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).

REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.

Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.

COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.

ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.

RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.

POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?

THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.

DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”

TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.

PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.

BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”

SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.

PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.

THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.

ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.

XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.

FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”

PASSAGE

Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”

REPORT

My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?

Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phenocryst”

1/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

ST. PETER TO MARK GOODSON:

`WILL YOU ENTER AND SIGN IN PLEASE?’

It’s another year, another Misc., and another Xmas review. Again this year, the Hasbro cartel (comprising over a dozen once-independent brands) had the coolest new games. In Mall Madness (“the electronic shopping mall game”), players move pieces around a 3-D game board while buying merchandise, as directed by “specials” announced on a digital sound chip. In Dream Phone (“guess who likes you in this talking telephone game”), young females use a fake phone to “call 24 boys and listen to what they have to say.”

From other companies, the preschool set’s ruled by Barney the Dinosaur (a smarmy guy in a purple felt suit who hugs kids and sings “Caring Is Sharing” songs). The Ninja Turtles may be on the way out but still have a few tricks left, like the new Subterranean Sewer Hockey Game (gee, they could play against Victoria’s WHL team). Mattel’s Baby Rollerblade and Tyco’s California Roller Baby ought to settle their competition once and for all on a Roller Derby track.

In a throwback to the days of TV-based board games, PC users can play computer versions of Beverly Hills 90210 (set on “Rodeo Drive, where shopping fantasies come to life”), Wayne’s World (“join up with those infamous public-access TV stars on a hilarious quest to save their show from a most bogus cable executive”), and L.A. Law (“working your way to become a senior partner by trying an assortment of challenging cases”).

The PBS merchandising catalog hyped Free To Be Me, a short-haired, wider-waisted fashion doll that looks like Barbie’s square suburban cousin (she doesn’t offer a line of PBS-lifestyle accessories, so you can’t get her own Volvo or wine cellar). At least F.T.B.M. doesn’t do anything as silly as the new Rappin’ Rockin’ Barbie, who wears a black vest and miniskirt, a baseball cap on her blonde tresses, a gold chain, and a boom box with digitized “scratching” sounds. (At least she doesn’t wear the new Rap Musk spray perfume.)

Rappin’ Barbie’s pure blue-eyed whitebread, but there are black Barbie and Ken dolls (sold separately, so you can mix-n’-match), and a new Mattel line called Shani (“A world of beauty and success”) with her friends Nichelle and Asha. The independent Olmec (“An African American Owned Company”) has Imani (“An African American Princess”) with her pals Consuelo and Menelik. It’s also got some pre-teen characters, the Hip Hop Kids (“We’re into everything cool…like music, rap and school”). Local creator Tobias Allen received big-time scandal but only modest sales with his Serial Killer board game, where you get to slay old people across state lines.

SMELLS LIKE $$: I spoke too soon about a hypothetical “Grungeland” tourist attraction. Rumors claim that Disney World plans a “Northwest theme” resort hotel on its Fla. grounds. And the Boston Globe reports the opening of the Other Side Cosmic Cafe, a “Seattle style” espresso bar with soups, sandwiches, Tim’s Cascade potato chips, and wheatgrass juice. The paper calls the cafe’s owner “a Northwest native who recently migrated east to cash in on the Seattle craze.” The paper even ties the Celtics’ hiring of former Sonics basketballer and Singles bit player Xavier McDaniel into some Seattle-mania, “a loosely defined amalgam of guitar-heavy rock music, retro-hippie fashion, laid-back attitude and cafe culture”. On another front, investors are reputedly sought for a proposed syndicated TV show about the local music, to be titled Seattle Backstage and to be hosted by last summer’s Playboy centerfold from the UW Communications School. Cameron Crowe has, however, declined offers to turn Singles into a weekly sitcom.

AFTER THE GOLD RUSH: What’ll really mean something is if all the Seattle hype leaves, as World’s Fair promoters say, a “permanent legacy” — if we build an infrastructure of clubs, record labels, agents, producers, and players who stick around and keep their creative spirit. Consider this an open letter to everyone in the Seattle music scene who’s making it: Please don’t move to Los Angeles. For 70 years, the Hollywood cartel has controlled the world’s expressions and dreams. We don’t need that anymore. We need music that’s made everywhere. Heck, we even need movies that are made (not just location-filmed) everywhere.

SCENE STEALING: With the OK Hotel going 21-and-over and KCMU turning to soft alternative hits, the music scene is increasingly inaccessible to the next generation of would-be Iggys. This could potentially lead to the next wave. The “Seattle sound” bands had the time and space to make their own identities because they were shut out from most of the bar circuit; they had nothing to lose. Shutting 16-20-year-olds out from the current scene is bad for everyone in the short term, but may lead to a new scene that could kick the faded jeans off of what we’ve got now….

The Colour Box recently had a dress code on Saturday industrial-dance nights: “Leather, Vinyl or Lots of Black. No Exceptions.” The code, and the dance nights, are now replaced by an all-live format. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether an all-black requirement contradicts the “Colour” name, since technically black is the absorption of all colors.

WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The P-I‘s Art Thiel wants the city to rename a street near the Kingdome in honor of the late Seahawks radio announcer Pete Gross. There’s already S. Royal Brougham Way, a short side street south of the Dome named for a P-I sportswriter who died (in the press box!) in ’77 after 60 years on the job. I think the city also oughta turn one of the streets on the Dome’s 4th Ave. S. side into “S. Long St.,” so the Hawks could have an official street address at 4th and Long.

THE FINE PRINT (on the outer wrapper of Deja Vu Centerfold trading cards): “All models pictured are over 18 years old. Models’ stage names are used. Neither photos nor words used to describe them are meant to depict the actual conduct or personality of the models. All photography was completed before 5/11/92.”

AT THE HOP(S): The Black Star beer campaign is legendary Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s intricate, loving tribute to advertising art of the past 50 years. Each ad is like a mini-visit to Portland’s Museum of Advertising, which W&K helped instigate. Oh yeah, there’s also a product to go with it, in case anybody cares (the agency seems not to). The real history of Black Star is that Minott Wessinger was a descendant of Henry Weinhard and a marketing genius behind the Henry’s brand, until the family sold the Blitz-Weinhard Co. in ’80 to the Heilman combine (which also owns Rainier). The deal included a 10-year “non-compete” clause in the general beer market. Wessinger kept busy as an owner of St. Ides malt liquor, whose ads targeted inner-city African Americans using several rap stars (and one impersonator of Public Enemy’s Chuck D., who sued to stop the mimicry). Some critics charged that St. Ides promoted underage drinking among blacks (as opposed to the brands that promote underage drinking across ethnic lines). Now that Wessinger ‘s contractually free to market regular beer again, he’s made a product almost identical to Henry’s (taste differences are subtle at best). If you buy it you’re supporting an independent company and encouraging it to push fewer 40-oz. jugs of the strong stuff.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: I’ve finally found a place that sells the hot and sour candy mentioned on KIRO as the big new fad among grade-schoolers: the gift shop in Roosevelt Place, the ex-Sears store on 65th. The hot licorice by one “How Can It Be So Sour Co.” is really just sugar-gritty; the Heide Silly Sours are tame jelly bean-like creations. But the Canadian-made Mr. Sour candy rolls are the real thing: a burst of brash intensity that hits you like a bugle call. One of the all-time greats….

Quaker Oat Cups, a microwave oatmeal currently being test marketed, represent a classic American art form, the junkifying of classic “real” foods. In about the time that it takes to nuke the water for making regular oatmeal, you can heat up a pre-cooked cup of oats, sugar and fruit flavors. Not only is it hearty eating, but you can use the foil-sealed cups as aerobic weights.

ENRAPTURED: Faith healing has come to Moscow, with a twist. England’s Guardian newspaper reports that one Boris Zolotov, a “bulky blond family man” who “believes man’s role is to make women happy” draws hundreds of women at a time to 10-day healing seminars at former Communist Youth League discos and campgrounds, for about $40 (an average month’s pay). The scene at a Zolotov rally includes “a huge communal bed, a sea of sweaty tracksuits and pulsating American soul music.” In the midst of a rousing speech he calls out, “Who wants an orgasm?” Dozens of women scream back, “I do.” According to the paper, “He grimaces with concentration. The music stops. The lights go up….About 50 devotees [of a total attendance of 400] are found to be lying in a heap, moaning. About 30 appear to have had a sexual climax.” And we’re stuck with Oral Roberts.

IT’S NOT OVER OVER THERE: One of the “Ins” on last year’s Misc. In/Out list, the united Europe, is limping along. Countries still bicker and delay, playing for points of privilege in the new movement of people, money and things. I’d hoped for a dynamic, enlightened Euroland to bring prosperity to the rest of the western world and to lead the U.S. toward the benefits of the mixed-economy welfare state. Instead, we’ve come on our own path toward the detriments of such a state without the benefits. In the quasi-socialist countries of pre-Thatcher Europe, a profit-making enterprise would often be used to feed money up toward supporting other enterprises (armies, opera companies, public broadcasters, health care). In our post-capitalist economy, profit-making enterprises are now used to pump money back into their owners’ takeover debts.

WIRED: TCI vows to bring over 300 digitally-compressed cable channels within two years, at least to some customers. NPR did a typically-smug contest for ideas on filling those channels; most were puns on C-SPAN, the only cable channel NPR listeners admit to watching (“She-SPAN,” “Tree-SPAN,” “Ski-SPAN”). More practically, you’re likely to see every major league sports event. Music channels with all the genres (and probably all the stupidity) of mainstream radio. Specialized movie channels (all-romance, all-war). Umpteen immigrant languages. Here’s what I’d like to see: Channels for non-fundamentalist religions. National public access, with the best/worst of indie video from all over. A channel with every city’s local news, for folks who’ve moved around a lot. The entire BBC schedule, including all-day darts tourneys and other cheesy shows we never see. An abstract-art channel. Live sex channels of every preference. An All-Pearl-Jam Channel. Cameras permanently aimed on Times Square or the French Quarter. A channel of people in their underwear reading 19th Century poetry.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Deran Ludd’s Sick Burn Cut (published by the art imprint Semiotext(e)) is something I’ve wanted for years: a serious Seattle-based novel with no “Emerald City” mawkishness. It’s the gritty-yet-empathetic tale of a white transvestite gangster (made more believable than it sounds here), shooting guns and drugs in a Belltown that Ludd’s fictionalized to the extent that its grimy pre-condo milieu still exists in the present day. I’ve worked on Ludd’s performance art projects in the early ’80s, but his “Clark” character (host to an S&M/house-music party at the late Savoy Hotel) is all fictional….

I’ve also longed for a book like The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap, by Evergreen prof Stephanie Coontz. At last, someone shows that the ’50s family fetish wasn’t the way things had always been. In fact, Ike-age America was a lot more like the Kramdens than the Cleavers.

‘TIL OUR FAB FEB. ISH, be sure to check out the Hot Circuits video game retrospective at Pacific Science Center and the exhibit of other classic toys at the Museum of History and Industry, and maybe also visit SAM’s exhibit from the collection of CBS founder William Paley (you’ve gotta perversely admire a guy who gave the world Jed Clampett and bought Cezannes for himself).

PASSAGE

Cyberpunk author John Shirley, quoted in the Mondo 2000 compilation book: “It’s a big world. It’s a swollen world. It’s a tumescent world. It’s an overburdened, overflowing, data-loaded, high-content, low-clarity world, soaked in media and opinion and, above all, lies. What’s important in all this input? Who decides? Which filters have you chosen? Have you mistaken the filters for the truth?”

REPORT

Those seeing this before 12/31 can see my Stranger colleague Dan Savage at the Crocodile Cafe’s New Years shindig. I’m looking for a scrupulous publisher for my next book concept, an extended essay on the Real Northwest as I see it (guaranteed: no slug or espresso jokes, no hiking trails).

WORD-O-MONTH

“Flocculent”

AMERICA’S ONLY TRUE AND ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

For the seventh consecutive year, here’s our comprehensive guide,

not to what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the next 12 months.

9/90 Misc. Newsletter

NORTHGATE BACK-TO-SCHOOL SLOGAN:

“DO THE BRIGHT THING”

Welcome to Misc., since 1986 your honest source about the weird, the gross, the fresh, the beautiful and the damned. One reason take pop culture seriously is that the “serious” media don’t. The NY Times did a long profile of actor Paul Benedict, mentioning his roles on Broadway and in such films as The Goodbye Girl, but completely ignoring his 11 years on The Jeffersons. The New Republic, the opinion mag that recently decided it would rather be rich than liberal, did an interminable essay about Madonna as Image, as Marketing Machine, as Sociological Phenomenon — as everything but an entertainer.

IRAQI AND HIS FRIENDS: Saddam Hussein used to be a U.S. ally. We were asked to pity his poor government in its long hard war against Khomeini’s Iran, not quite realizing that each leader was ruthless in his own way. Again, “realpolitik” (unquestioned support for strategically-convenient dictators) has backfired. There are no democracies in that region to support, only monarchies or other dictatorships which treat their women, dissidents, and intellectuals with greater or lesser severity. Even Israel, the lone multi-party state in the area (besides the powerless govt. of Lebanon), is not the example of tolerance and human rights that it still could become. Among the frozen Kuwaiti assets are the oil ministry’s 6,500 gas stations in Europe, bearing the genuinely cute name of Q8.

KOMO SAID IT: “Bush is laying down an iron curtain on Iraq.” Thirty years ago, we condemned the immorality of E. Germany trying to starve West Berlin. Now we do the same. The would-be Oil War fulfills 11 years of accumulating U.S. warlust, incompletely satiated by the conquests and skirmishes in Latin America and the Caribbean; all as the long-lead-time monthlies still displayed think pieces about the possibility of a post-Cold War, post-military nation. Was this conflict escalated so sharply, so swiftly, as a way to keep the Pentagon and its suppliers in business at current levels?… Meanwhile, a Sony-owned theater chain in NYC changed its marquees to promote the temporarily-renamed IRAQNOPHOBIA. There will, of course, be movies about all this. Unlike Vietnam movies, these films could all be made in the close-to-Hollywood Mojave desert; like Vietnam movies, they’ll likely depict conflicts between different American characters, with no Arabian people in sight.

ROSEANNA ARQUETTE IN PLAYBOY: What would her grandfather Charley Weaver have thought?

RUSTLE THEM SOYBEANS: B.C.’s own k.d. lang has based her career around appropriating the music and the images of the cowboy culture, as filtered through kitsch art over the years. Now she speaks out against the industry that all the real cowboys were in – meat — and gets flack from country radio stations afraid of offending today’s cowboys, not to mention fast-food advertisers. It leads one to wonder what country music would have been like with no burgers, no cattle drives, no branding irons, no rodeos. k.d. may be the Angel with a Lariat, but with nothing to lasso.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: MU Press’ Balance of Power comic book is mostly the same old stuff about corporate assassins and ninjas jumping around, but the futuristic Seattle setting does give us one cool panel: a sign on Broadway, “Dick’s 60th Anniversary: 1954-2014.”

THE LAST LAFF: The Improvisation, a national chain of comedy clubs, is moving into the Showbox. Now, where the leather-jacketed vegetarians used to pogo and fight, where the Police and Psychedelic Furs once played to under 800 people, now generic yups will pay a big cover charge to sip cocktails and hear well-dressed smartasses tell insults about all the rest of us.

GOODWILL GAMES LOSE $44 MILLION: Did the official theme of the “spirit of goodwill,” of international friendship and pulling together, diminish the spirit of ruthless battle TV sports viewers have been used to?

WHAT’S IN STORE: The Bon had this really strange Goodwill sculpture by the main-floor elevators. Three male figures held up a large sphere, while wearing bottom-baring loincloths over what from a side view clearly showed as hemispheric, one-part bulges. The Bon also quietly closed the 62-year-old Budget Store, a refuge not so much for moderate prices as for moderate styles, an island of calm in a sea of fashion victims. Now we’re all expected to go to chains in the far suburbs to get cheaper clothes.

ELEVATOR MUSIC IN ONE-STORY BUILDINGS: A Tillicum 7-Eleven store drives teens away by blasting easy listening music into the parking lot. This music was scientifically engineered, based on 40-year-old principles, to be as inoffensive as possible; but to today’s generation, this is the most offensive thing imaginable (with the possible exception of worldwide environmental disaster or Ed McMahon). But the Muzak company is now trying to reshape its image. It’s getting the rights to make easy-listening versions of contemporary hits by such artists as P. Abdul and even U2. Maybe if 7-Eleven could get a tape of the Muzak “Pride in the Name of Love” and play it over and over, they’d never worry about anybody under 35 showing up within half a mile of the place.

THE FINE PRINT: “At Kellogg Company, we are committed to making the highest quality toaster pastries available. We do not make generic or store-brand toaster pastries. To insure Kellogg quality inside the box, make sure there is a Kellogg’s label outside.”

WASHINGTON MAGAZINE R.I.P.: It tried to do nothing but make money, and failed at that. The next people to try a regional magazine should learn from Washington‘s mistakes and, instead of just running lavish but bland peans to scenery, pay some attention to covering people.

ADS OF THE MONTH: The McDonald’s commercial in which a white guy, shaving, sees a black female singer in his mirror (with shaving cream on her face!), exhorting him to start his day with an Egg McMuffin…A Wild Waves amusement park commercial shows a teenage boy in swim trunks sliding into a tunnel section of a water slide, intercut with shots of bikini-clad females. Honest, this really aired! . . . Frito-Lay‘s youth-bashing ads, which alternate between condescendingly depicted kids and childishly acting alleged adults only prove how smugly out-of-it the yups really are (or at least the role-model yups who may be more populous in advertising than in actual existence).

HOW INFOTAINING: KIRO is actually running those commercials disguised as talk shows, in the former Pat Sajak slot. Those “shows” belong on the chintzier cable channels, if even there (though, I must admit, most of them are funnier than Sajak ever was). . .

HOW COME?: King Broadcasting is about to be sold; bringing an end to its status as the largest women-owned company operating in Washington (with the possible exception of the Sisters of Providence). KING is a Seattle institution, one of the few network-affiliate stations in the country that has its own strong identity. The papers have talked about KING’s documentaries and editorials, about its Seattle magazine of the ’60s (still perhaps the best thing published here). They haven’t talked about its great movie The Plot Against Harry, or about KING’s once-great arts coverage, or about The Great American Game (the first public-affairs game show, where all the contestants had to be volunteers in community organizations) Or about Wunda Wunda, the TV kiddie star who was this sort of harlequin character, and her potted flower Wilting Willie. When she watered it every day and sang the Wilting Willie song, you never knew whether the flower would proudly rise up to become Stand-Up Willie (with appropriate fanfare from the organist) or stay Wilting Willie and lie there drooped over the edge of the flower pot. God, don’t let GE buy the station.

AUTO MOTIVES: Chrysler is offering cash payoffs to any of its 60,000 union employees who retire early. Or, as Joe Garagiola might say, “Quit your job — Get a check!”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Chicago’s Viskase Corp. will supply any company with hot dogs containing an advertising message printed in edible inks. So far, no takers… A Dallas-area company that already makes Miracle Smile teeth bleach, is now entering the soft drink field with Cool Cola, a drink that’s not only caffeine-free and preservative-free but vitamin-enriched.

READERBOARD AT MEAD MOTOR CO. on Roosevelt: WE PAY CASH FOR ARS. If Roosevelt Way were in England and this were the new Ms. magazine, you’d be reading this on the “No Comment” page.

BREMERTON, MOST LIVABLE CITY?: Maybe in the past, when there was a cool, compact downtown with Bremer’s Dept. Store and one of the nation’s last classic 3-story Montgomery Ward units. But not these days. Other Money ratings: Seattle 2, Tacoma 4, Eugene 6, Olympia 8. Michael Moore would love to hear that Flint, Mich. is no longer last on the list of 300 metro areas; it’s not even in bottom 10. Why does Money’s list so often favor the Northwest? Could be that a Portland consulting firm, Fast Forward, does the research and makes the judgements.

YOUR CHEATIN’ MAYOR: In the city that made adultery the stuff of gold records, Nashville, Mayor Bill Boner (no jokes please), 45, has been appearing in public with aspiring country singer Traci Peel (ditto), 34. He’s calling her his fiancée, even though he hasn’t yet divorced his third wife (whose $50,000 salary from a defense contractor had led to a House ethics committee investigation of him, before he left Congress to be mayor). A local newspaper reporter said they’d told him he’d called them “at a bad time,” with Peel adding that they’d gone at it with one another for as long as seven hours.

BUT AREN’T ALL POLITICIANS LIKE THAT?: Illone “Cicciolina” Staller, the ex-porn star in Italy’s parliament, offered to sleep w/Hussein to persuade him to make peace. Perhaps she was inspired by the New Age book, The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take War Out of Them, about ancient “sacred prostitutes” who performed spiritual rituals (of which sex was merely a part) to initiate returning soldiers back into the community.

NAKED TRUTH: If I may overgeneralize, the women at the Silver Image Gallery‘s Nudes show seemed much more comfortable with looking at women’s bodies than the men were with looking at men’s bodies. It’s odd, considering that men pay big money to look at men’s bodies that are dressed in athletic uniforms.

UNTIL OUR BRISK AND COOL October ish, demand the saving of the Boeing Supersonic Transport mockup plane (now in a Fla. church), read Willie Smith’s Oedipus Cadet (an odd little novel about troubled boyhood), and work for peace.

QUOTATION

An El Camino with major dents, parked outside Temple de Hirsch Sinai, bears white press-on lettering on the driver’s door: “Graduate of the Dale Ellis Driving School.”

REPORT

Still no ads in Misc., still no bigger size, Probably won’t be unless some generous reader’s willing to help out (selling space, distributing copies, etc.).

More of my writing can be seen in The Comics Journal (a magazine available at better comics shops; accept no substitutes) and occasionally in the Times arts section.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Celerity”

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH

“Jimmy, the dominant male of the Seattle Aquarium northern fur seal colony, has died of congestive heart failure. Jimmy had been receiving medical care for the bast month from Drs. Joslin and Richardson of the Woodland Park Zoo. Jimmy was collected in the Pribilof Islands in November 1976, at the age of two years. In his 13 years at the Aquarium, Jimmy fathered two pups — Baabs, born in 1988, and Woodstock, born in 1989 — and was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. One of the Aquarium’s females is currently pregnant and, if all goes well, will deliver Jimmy’s third pup this summer. At age 16, Jimmy was indeed an ‘oldster,’ having lived a normal lifespan for males of this species.” (Thanx and a hat tip to Sunny Speidel)

6/90 Misc. Newsletter

Look Out, Tuna Boats!

The Incredible Mr. Limpet’s Got A Gun!

Welcome back one and all to the fourth anniversary (and still ungraduated) edition of Misc., the essential news source for all local“Posties” (a term used in a silly KING report about all of us who are postmodern, posthippie, postpunk, etc.).

UPDATE: The Blue Moon Tavern lives; while the shell of the old Rainbow Tavern next door will be sacrificed to luxury condos. In the midst of all the fuss, developer Scott Soules (a bystander in the dispute) said about the western U-District, “The area is prime for redevelopment.” Tell that to the folks who lost affordable housing to massive apartments supported by steel posts over ugly street-level parking, or to anyone driving on NE 45th during Safeco rush hour.

AXL ROSE MARRIES DON EVERLY’S DAUGHTER: “How we gonna tell your pa?”

LOCAL BOOM #1: The 10th anniversary of Mt. St. Helens was a lot of fun. I know full well that the eruption killed 57 and could have killed hundreds more. Still, seeing the old blast footage on the endless TV retrospectives brought back fond memories of a spectacular, exciting event that affected most everybody here. My memories are also all tied up with general memories of 1980, a year when it began to look like things were getting hopeful in music, in fashion, in world affairs (the start of Solidarity, the fall of Somoza) — until the end of the year brought the rise of Reagan, the fall of Lennon, and all the stupidity that followed. Now it’s another “zero year,” and things are again looking cautiously hopeful in most areas of the world culture (except, for now, in U.S. partisan politics). This time, let’s hope it sticks. (Also loved a Spokane candy firm’s chocolate mountain with a powdered-sugar middle that you can “erupt” with a tiny plastic air pump.)

LOCAL BOOM #2: In 1980, Seattle was still (mistakenly) perceived by many people here and elsewhere as some backwater burg, an overgrown town instead of a city. Some loved the image, some hated it, but few disbelieved it. But in 1990 I’m preparing myself for the expected onslaught of Northwest Chic. Twin Peaks has turned a tiny cafe seen in two minutes of the first show (re-created in an LA studio for later episodes) into a tourist/reporter mecca. It’s going to get worse when the show appears in Europe (at last word, UK documentary crews were still prowling the streets of Dallas for anything reminiscent of J.R.). After that, throw in all the national hype over the local coffee, those flashy local sportswear companies like Generra and Nike, the Nordstrom labor flap that still helps publicize Nordy’s “uniqueness,” the increasing sight of local landmarks in national car commercials, the acclaim over local cartoonists, rappers and thrash-rock bands, and a certain upcoming cable-TV sports event. Responding to this and other activity, Newsweek almost opened a Seattle bureau this past winter, but then decided to save its money. Can such a sparsely-peopled region (only 10 million including B.C.) deserve or survive much more limelight? Well, that’s more people than N.Y.C. and much more than other places that get far more attention in the U.S. as a whole, places like Nicaragua and Israel, so why not let it be our turn (preferably without warfare).

CATHODE CORNER: While the eruption footage on the St. Helens TV specials still looked spectacular, some of the news tape from the weeks before the blast was washed out and bereft of many “scan lines”. Will current video footage last? When high-definition TV comes along, will current video images look so bad in comparison that they’ll be retired from common viewing? If so, that’d make filmed shows and news footage from the ’50s and ’60s eternal but leave taped stuff from the ’70s and ’80s to rot. The Beverly Hillbillies would live forever, while Married With Children becomes a trivia question. Many shows now shot on film are still edited on tape, and would also look decidedly low-definition on HDTV…. Graham Kerr is taping a new syndicated series at KING. The ex-Gallopping Gourmet still lives in Tacoma, across town from the Frugal Gourmet’s house.

AD VERBS: Those spots touting Puget Sound Bank as the last home-owned big bank also display an anti-city bias. The outside-owned banks are represented by urban scenes of LA, SF, Portland and NYC (for Key Bank, actually based in Albany), while the narration about the good home boys accompanies country and suburban scenes….The Home Club hardware warehouse stores are running commercials with The Addams Family theme song (“Yes!, I wish they said, “your house can look just like theirs!”)….Those cable commercials for Mace for women, in tasteful pocketbook-size applicator cans, exploit fear of the opposite-sex, opposite-race stranger in the parking garage (while most violent crimes against women are actually done by acquaintances).

THE FINE PRINT (small sign posted in downtown library): “Title Change: Switch Fund Advisory has become Mutual Fund Investing.“

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Tina is the typewritten/photocopied journal of the Church of Tina Chopp in Bellingham. It’s a variant on the Church of the SubGenius fun and games, built around the “Tina Chopp is God” graffiti that was everywhere in B’ham and Seattle in the early ’80s. Like real churches, it has a detailed philosophy and an us-vs.-them demarcation (in the “Tinite” worldview, to “go Safeway” is to become that most unforgivable of sinners, a suburbanite). Don’t expect any facts about who Tina Chopp is or was (various rumors peg her as a male WWU student’s unsuccessful love pursuit or as a Seattle rock groupie). If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.

Latter-Day Note: On 9/28/99, I received the following email:

the little blurb about The Church finished with the request “If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.”

now i realize that this article was originally written in 1990, and someone may have directed you towards our web site since then (it has been online since 1995), but if not, you can read “the true story” for yourself at http://www.aa.net/cotc/

if you would like any further information about the church, please feel free to write.

Praise Tina Chopp!

Rev. Guido S. DeLuxe, DD, LDD, OGG, OHS, ST, MSU

High Priest – The Church of Tina Chopp

deluxe@marijuana.com — http://www.aa.net/cotc/

CUCKOO’S NEST CUISINE: Officers at the Oregon Correctional Center in Salem can now resume their experiment in disciplining inmates while reducing waste. A state appeals court ruled that Nutra Loaf, baked ground leftovers served to disobedient prisoners, was not cruel or unusual punishment.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Envir-O-Mints are little chocolate mint wafers from Seattle’s Environmental Candy Co. Each mint is stamped with the image of a different endangered species; each wrapper also holds a tiny photo-card of another threatened animal, plus an address on the back for your own Wildlife Action Kit (free) or Endangered Species T-shirt ($3 and 20 wrappers).

IN A JAM: Like most tots in the (then) farm and sawmill town of Marysville, I served my penance as a summer strawberry picker at Biringer Farms, a large operation that sold fresh fruit to traditional wholesale markets. It also had a U-Pick operation and shortcake stands at county fairs. Now my past has risen, in the form of a Biringer store and shortcake stand in the Pike Place Market. Besides breakfasts and desserts (with local fruit when in season), it sells its own new line of gourmet jams, fruit taffy, honey, tea, cocoa, dessert pasta, rum cake, and “Ecstasy” ice cream toppings. They package many of the items in gift sets; they take mail, phone, and fax orders. I know they had to do something like this or lose the farm to tract houses. Still, there’s an ol’ loss-O-innocence about it all, like a nice homely old building “restored” with gaudy paint.

PHILM PHACTS: The most belovedly odd hit of this year’s Seattle Int’l Film Festival could be The Documentator, a 3.5-hour Hungarian orgy of re-cut video (action and sleaze films, TV commercials, socialist economic speeches), interspersed with the story of three people illegally amassing western currency by selling pirated videocassettes. This decidedly peculiar attraction sold out (though several dozen left the Harvard Exit at the start of hour 3).

SONIC DOOM?: It’s quite appropriate that Barry Ackerly’s proposed basketball arena, for which city taxpayers would directly and indirectly bribe him not to move the Sonics, is on the site of a former railroad yard, near the old terminus of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific. These and other lines received massive tracts of free land by the U.S. government and decades of virtual land-transportation monopoly in their operating regions, in return for “opening” the American west to white settlement.

BORN TO HUSTLE: Convicted swindler Ivan Boesky has deducted his fines from his income tax, and even bribed fellow prisoners to do his laundry. Did he ever see the last scene ofThe Producers ?

CENSORY OVERLOAD: Dennis Miller got to perform at the White House, but all his jokes were pre-screened for questionable content (can’t have any obscenities in earshot while you’re working on strengthening our friendship with the Chinese government). Locally, the King County Arts Commission put part of an exhibit in its upstairs Smith Tower gallery behind black butcher paper, later replacing that with a partition. The hazardous image? A male nude.

O NO CANADA!: My favorite foreign country may be irreversibly headed toward dissolution, yet the U.S. media virtually ignore it. If the confederation fails, will it be considered a sign of the inherent weakness of the North American capitalist system?…In lighter news, the new Toronto Skydome has hotel rooms overlooking the stadium, where one guest couple made their own show with the curtains wide open during a Blue Jays/M’s game.

UNTIL OUR NEXT EXCITING CHAPTER, get all the plastic postage from cash machines that you can (bound to be a collector’s item), avoid the espresso bar at University Ford (inferior lattes fail to protect against thermal breakdown of viscosity), get those neato Graffiti Gear jackets that you can decorated with marking pens then wash clear, see the Russian constructivist art at the Henry Gallery, and join me in celebrating the 25th birthday of the Lava Lamp.

PASSAGE

Author-social critic Barbara Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling ) in New York mag: “I left my exercise session after I’d only done one leg. I risked asymmetry.”

HYPE

The Weekly seems to like Misc. “The best one-page read in town,” sez their Bruce Barcott. All Weekly readers are invited to subscribe to Misc. this month for $6 and get a bonus sample from my forthcoming novel. Age, height, race not important.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Optative”

HOW OFFICIAL ARE YOU?

In order to be a true Goodwill Games fan,

you must consume as many Official Products and Services as you can.

Use this handy checklist.

5/90 Misc. Newsletter

NEW PACIFIC 1ST FEDERAL TOWER BROKE, FOR SALE.

SERVES ‘EM RIGHT

FOR TEARING DOWN

THE MUSIC BOX THEATER

Welcome back to Misc., the column that is almost certain that the Log Lady did it (though we’re still trying to figure out what foghorns are doing on a small hydroelectric lake).

Clean, Reasonably Priced Accommodations: You may know by now that Twin Peaks’ Great Northern (named after a predecessor to today’s Burlington Northern Railway) is really the Salish Lodge. It was the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge for many years, a family-owned place known for honeymoon suites and a weekend farm breakfast; my parents went there often. Then Puget Power, which owns the building (and the dam behind the falls), decided to “upscale” the place by bringing in a new operator, who yuppified much of the old charm away.

Another Sawmill Soap Opera: The spotted owl is just a symbol of a whole eco-scape in danger. It’s not “environmental elitists” reducing timber-country jobs, it’s companies with their “efficient” automated clearcuts and log exports. If the forest lands now used were used in a more sustainable manner (as opposed to the short-term cash amortization of “high yield forestry”), we wouldn’t need to destroy the last of the old growth.

Behind Closed Doors: The Tacoma News Tribune revealed a Community Development Round Table, a group of business and media leaders started by the Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1933, now including execs of the Times, P-I, KOMO and KIRO as well as bankers and business leaders. Members are bound by the group’s charter never to mention it to outsiders. A Columbia Journalism Review item about the TNT scoop noted that during the Boeing strike the Round Table invited a speaker from Boeing but not from the unions. Before you forment conspiracy theories, note that the press people in the group were execs, not editors, and that the media firms involved have long supported the business community. KIRO, for instance, shared a big booth at Earth Fair 1990 with the Forest Products Council.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Community Catalyst proposes to be the next great local alternative paper. The first issue’s a modest clearinghouse of info from assorted activist groups, plus a substantial background piece by Rich Ray on the making of the aforementioned Earth Fair, in which a commercial festival-organizing company pleaded with everybody to keep all exhibits upbeat and non-offensive to the major sponsors.

As it turned out, the people jamming the roads to Marymoor Park in their single-occupancy vehicles concentrated at the big tent crowded with all the little tables for the real environmental groups, with only a few straying out in the rain to the spacious covered displays for Chevron and Puget Power. Most of them missed the Wash. Natural Gas display, with free samples of a spirulina plankton-based protein drink packaged by its Hawaiian aquaculture affiliate.

Past Futures (from Uncensored magazine, April 1970): “A fascinating new book, The Country of the Young, paints a gloomy picture of what life will be in 1990 — when the generation war is all over and the drop-outs, pot-heads and sandaled freaks have become Old Hippies. The author, John W. Aldridge, says that the failure of the young today to develop their human resources, to cultivate discipline and skills, is going to backfire on them. If the hippies have their way and become catatonics, with all their needs supplied, `They will simply stare at walls for weeks on end, looking fascinated at such things as the copulation of insects. Having been relieved of the struggle of becoming, they would simply exist to be.'”

Phood Phacts: From in-flight magazines to the P-I to CBS This Morning, major attention has been drawn recently to something called the “Northwest cuisine.” WHAT Northwest cuisine? I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian and never heard of any of these fancy dishes involving rhubarb, rack of lamb and alternatively-processed fish, let alone of many of their ingredients. It sounds suspiciously like some of those other western regional cuisines, invented from scratch from ex-LA chefs (Santa Fe, Colorado), allowing itinerant suburbanites the fantasy of “place” while the real communities of these places succumb to mall-ism. I am certain that we will see the “discovery” of Montana cuisine, North Dakota cuisine, and even Utah cuisine. Ya wanna know the true Northwest cuisine (at least among white people)? It’s Dick’s burgers (or Herfy’s burgers, now all but gone, in the outlying towns), barbecued fish with really thin bones, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken, canned vegetables, Krusteaz pancakes with Mapeline-flavored syrup, maple bars, strawberry shortcake with Dream Whip, Fisher scones, Red Rose tea, Mountain bars, and Rainier Ale (the now-discontinued weak version). I don’t know if Lutefisk counts, since it seems to be perennially given as a gift but never eaten.

Your Own Private Idaho 1990: Many of Idaho’s civic leaders were all over the media in ’88-’89, insisting that the presence of a dozen neo-Nazis didn’t make them a fascist state. They were right, in a way. It’s the drive (vetoed by Gov. Andrus) to keep women barefoot and pregnant that makes them a fascist state, at least in potential. There ARE many truly non-fascist Idahoans, like liberals everywhere who complain but don’t vote. Some of these, there and here, are the same folk who eat fantasy regional cuisines. Maybe now that will change, as folks see the consequences of staying home and letting the Right win.

Junk Food of the Month: Again from Idaho, J.R. Simplot Inc. (best known as the nation’s top supplier of fast-food potatoes) brings us MicroMagic Microwave Milkshakes. You buy them frozen solid, then semi-thaw them in the zapper for 45 seconds. Will this be the foundation of the new Idaho cuisine? I doubt it. Some of the fun ingredients: Mono and diglycerides, guar gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan. The taste? Like a shake at a minor fast-food place that might buy its shake mix from the same source as its fries.

The Fine Print (from a Mr. Coffee coffee filter box): “Additional Uses: Use as a cover when microwaving. Line the bottom of your cake pans. Create snowflakes and Christmas decorations.”

Cathode Corner: KING sacked arts critic Greg Palmer after 14 years. I liked him most of the time, but that’s showbiz. What’s more shocking is that the the new KING news director is also vehemently opposed (sez the P-I) to on-camera signing of the 7:25 a.m. news insert, a friendly face and beautiful spectacle that’s helped many hearing people get through rough mornings and worse news. I once met longtime KING signer Cathy Carlstrom, who also signs church services and other events. She and her fellow signers deserve more respect…. So the world athletes in the Goodwill Games commercials are really local actors and models. What’s the fuss? We’ve all seen enough “Up Close and Personal” segments during the Olympics (or Lite Beer ads) to know that athletes are poor actors.

Ad of the Month (from the Weekly): “Sales, retail. MTV, trendy, fun & outrageous clothing. Mature person, exp’d only.”… Meanwhile, the newest batch of Rainier Beer ads soft-pedals the Only Beer Around Here” theme, dropping the slick stereotypes of mountain climbers and basketball players in favor of a partial return to the humor that made the old Rainier ads such favorites. One billboard reads in big black type, “Californians just don’t get it.” As far as I know, they’re made by the same Frisco ad agency that did last year’s unloved campaign.

Philm Phacts: It’s a shame that Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is so gory, because people will love or hate it just for that instead of for its many other qualities. It’s written for the screen, but could easily have been a five-act play. It mostly takes place on one huge 4-room set; the first hour unfolds in “real time.” The Thief, while nominally a gangster-extortionist, incarnates the whole history of English villainy (Henry VIII, Richard III, Dickens’ venture capitalists, on up to the Thatcherian present).

News from Medicine: A White Rock, B.C. man who walked around with a broken back for almost three months without knowing it was awarded $625,000 (Can.) damages. A Surrey, B.C. hospital had failed to notice the fracture when it treated him following an accident.

Who the Hell Are You?: The Kids Fair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall was an ex-substitute teacher’s nightmare. A whole hall full of screaming kids, frenzied parents, and merchant booths grabbing for the parents’ wallets. Everything from Looney Tunes frozen dinners to back yard jungle gyms, professionally installed. The high/lowlight was when they brought out guys in 7-foot Bart and Homer Simpson felt body costumes, hugging adoring little fans who lined up for photos. If a real Bart were there, he’d have pelted the oversize imposter with a pile of Ninja Turtles coloring books.

Arena Football: Barry Ackerly will build a new Sonics home directly south of the Kingdome (thankfully not, as was threatened previously, where Sears is now), but only if the city shrinks the Coliseum’s capacity, making it commercially worthless. In its original life as the World of Tomorrow exhibit in the ’62 World’s Fair, the Coliseum housed a scale model of the Puget Sound region dotted with new domed cities. What’s one of the few present-day structures shown to be still standing in this fantasy future? As the taped narrators said, “Look! There’s Coliseum Century 21!” “Yes, in the future we will retain the best of the past.”

Sell It to Murph: Unocal Corp. (née Union Oil), which once boasted of being the last company to still make gas for older cars, is now going to buy hundreds of hi-smog clunkers in the L.A. area, in order to retire them from the road. As an Earth Day PR stunt it was very effective and probably cheaper than paying for a cleanup of their old Elliott Bay terminal, where the Port of Seattle is having to deal with the residue of 60 years’ worth of minor product leaks and spills.

‘Til the fourth-anniversary Misc. next time, don’t get caught trafficking in counterfeit Nintendo cartridges (lest they sick a lawsuit equivalent of the Hungry Goriya on you),watch the new international-music show Earth to MTV, and ponder these thoughts by my goddess Tracey Ullman on her role in I Love You to Death: “Because the accent is Northwestern, it was tough to stay in character all the time. Southern accents are easy and so are New York accents, but the Northwest accent is the most pure of all the accents. You can’t just put one accent on top of another. You have to lose your accent completely.”

PASSAGE

One of the less-controversial lines in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:

“Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell.”

REPORT

If you want Misc. every month (we don’t get to every drop-off every time), subscribe.

My novel The Perfect Couple is available on Macintosh discs for $10.

CALL TO ACTION

ABC will soon decide whether to renew Twin Peaks. Send cards & letters to ABC Entertainment, 77 W. 66th St., NYC 10023.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Syncretize”

3/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

CAT STEVENS JOINS RUSHDIE MURDER CALL,

LEAVES EMPTY SEAT ON PEACE TRAIN

Welcome back to Misc., where we only wish Billy Tipton, the deceased Spokane jazz “man” who wasn’t, had recorded a duet with Wendy Carlos.

The Great ’89 Snow turned everything beautiful and made everyday life a temporary adventure. Monitoring the news coverage, KING gave hourly updates on wind-chill conditions, while KIRO interrupted the very interruptible CBS This Morning for the ritual reading of school closures. KOMO, whose news gets more Murdochian every year, ran promos saying they had the latest forecast but wouldn’t tell it until the regular news time.

Cathode Corner: MTV replaced its Closet Classics Capsule with Deja Video: clips from 1980-85. What a concept! ’80s Nostalgia!…David Lynch is shooting an ABC pilot in area logging towns. Lumberton on your TV every week! We can only hope…. The newGumby show is pleasant and surprisingly funny for a show for the primary-grade crowd. In one episode, Gumby’s “rock band” (more like a clunky jazz fusion) is chased manically by some grandma-age “wild girls.” In another, the jolly green one comes out of a box of fun costumes in an Eddie Murphy mask.

Hearts and Wallets: I saw the “Single’s Festival and Trade Fair.” The Trade Center’s labyrinth of booths was full of merchants. Some insisted that I’d find the love of my dreams if I’d spend hundreds on dating services “for quality, professional people.” I told them I was an amateur person but was trying to break into the pros. Others claimed that my life was really missing the satisfaction that’d come with their “mind control” seminars, or the security that’d come with their network marketing plans.

“It’s,” A Crime: The Times noted the poor grammar in the title “Single’s Festival;” the apostrophe indeed seems to be a lost art. There’s a big supermarket poster that reads, “Fresh Produce: Safeway Is Picky About It’s Quality.” I wish the company was pickier about its punctuation.

Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Reporter, a biweekly newsletter trying to cover the whole progressive community. In its inclusiveness, it may avoid the fate of the old Northwest Passage tabloid, which kept narrowing its definition of “politically correct” until almost nobody qualified.

(latter-day note: This remark was written at least two years before it became so damn fashionable to boast of being “politically incorrect.”)

Your Little Landmark: Local firm Archimedia makes a lovely Space Needle Paper Model Kit, available at Peter Miller Books. Unfortunately, it comes with the 100′-level restaurant; but at least with no interior, it can’t get a “new look” inside like the real Needle just got. Also, your 40′-tall Needle will never have a plastic crab on it unless you put it there.

Philm Phacts: The monthly Media Inc. (formerly Aperture Northwest ) sez Seattle cops are choosing film projects to cooperate with on the basis of script content. Stallone’s Cobra, which wound up shooting elsewhere, was one victim of this de facto censorship. (Stallone might have been trying to make it up to the Northwest, after filming First Blood in Hope, B.C. and calling it Washington). If the selective OK of police help (needed for most any major production) is true, the citymight be trying to avoid the fate of New York, where they worked to lure films only to get all those films about how awful New York is.

Big Storewide Sale: Mark Sabey’s become a major retail mogul by buying Frederick & Nelson and setting himself up as middleman in a proposed sale of Sears’ store and ex-warehouse (a beautiful building which should be saved) to the Sonics. One big thorn in F&N’s financial recovery has been its site at Aurora Village, the Mall that Time Forgot. Almost a third of the spaces there are boarded up, with few prospects for new tenants. The closest thing we have to that in town is Broadway, where landlords’ve become too greedy for even trendy restaurants to afford.

Bank Shots: Pacific First Federal is going to Toronto’s Royal Trust, as a gateway into the U.S. market. By some accounts, the Canadians don’t even care about doing business here, just as establishing a beachhead for a move into California. Expect home-loan funds to dry up as PFF becomes a cash cow.

Junk Food of the Month: Marilyn Merlot by Monticello Vineyards, with a cleavage portrait of Monroe on the label. It could be the first wine named after somebody who died from a drug addiction…. It’s bye-bye to Carnation Dairies, a locally-founded firm that got rich selling canned milk to the western frontier, expanded, moved its HQ to LA and got bought by Nestlé. To help finance the buyout, Nestlé sold the local dairy division, as announced in the papers by an appropriately-named spokesperson, Dick Curd.

A New Gear: Japanese cars are now on the cutting edge of creative design, but in models sold only at home. Nissan has a shockingly cute little delivery vehicle, the S-Cargo (almost as tall as it’s long). But it’s Mazda that’s taking a hesitant plunge in the US, with a British-inspired sports car that’ll fit two small people snugly. Also coming here, alas, is a Lamborghini 4 x 4: leather & mahogany inside, VW Thing-ish outside, $124G. Wake me if anybody ever drives it off-road.

It’s spring-training time, when Mariner fans briefly dream of glory. I’m just hoping the real M’s can be as entertaining as the fictional M’s game in The Naked Gun — or as dramatically tragic as the Vancouver mega-production of Aida coming to the Kingdome.

(latter-day note: Aida ran out of funds before it could get to Seattle.)

‘Til April, be sure to see Julie Cascioppo mid-week evenings at the Pink Door, watch or tape Sunday Night at midnite on KING, and heed the words of rapper KRS-One: “The new fad is intelligence.”

1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?

Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.

XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.

FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.

CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.

MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).

ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.

JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.

CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.

CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.

SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.

CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.

INS AND OUTS FOR ’88

6/87 ArtsFocus Misc

(one-year anniversary)

Welcome to the first issue of the new Arts Focus and the first anniversary of Misc., the at-large column that tries to keep ahead of a world where Hüsker Du goes on the Today show, the Central Area’s Liberty Bank becomes the largest Seattle-owned commercial bank by default, the M’s briefly take first place, and the Pope tries to stop people from doing all they can to have babies.

Top story of the month: Procter & Gamble, Kellogg’s and other top national advertisers are refusing to place any ads in Florida, after that state passed a tax on advertising and other professional services. If Booth had gotten his original tax plan past our myopic Legislature, we too would be sharing in this rare and wonderful blessing.

At that same time, Contragate and Hartbreak battled for the public viscera, with many Americans somehow finding lying, cheating, and killing in the name of democracy to be less immoral than sleeping around.

Local junk food of the month: Midnight Sun Dark Chocolate, made in south King Co. by an Alaska firm, with such a bold flavor that it’s the Everclear of candy bars. No relation to the “Midnite Sun Chocolate” in Eskimo Pies.

Local publication of the month: Moviemakers at Work. Despite what the Times says, this is Microsoft Press’ first non-computer book, and its choice of interviewees reflects the real star system in late-industrial Hollywood. Not a single actor, writer or composer is in the book; the only subjects with director credits are two animators. Instead, we get audio technicians, photographers, editors, and most especially special-effects artisans. The newfound prominence of these people indicates how the big-money boys now in charge at the movies have dropped all notions of story, dialogue and character in a relentless rush toward old Darryl Zanuck’s dream: to find a movie formula wherein investing in a certain level of pure spectacle will bring a guaranteed return. It didn’t work for Zanuck (Cleopatra, Dr. Doolittle); it’s not working today.

Time Travelers, one of this column’s favorite record and comic stores, hopes to move away from 2nd near Pine this summer. The folk there say it’s ‘cuz the neighborhood has become too scuzzy, and I agree. That Nordstrom Rack has attracted totally the wrong element. In other comic news, Marvel is now owned by New World Pictures, presumably meaning we’ll get more great comic-based films in the grand tradition of Howard the Duck. Gary Larson, meanwhile, has sold rights for a live-action Far Side movie to Alan Rudolph (Trouble in Mind, Welcome to L.A.) would fit in perfectly, as long as he doesn’t sing.

Sports spurts: Have the Sonics’ recent playoff successes led me to reconsider my stance against letting more than half of any league’s league’s teams into its playoffs? No. This does not mean I don’t love the Supes or will approve of any move to Bellevue (what would they be called then? The Evergreen State Warriors?)…

Most of the potential new local owners for the Mariners are stingy bean counters just like George Arduous. They might meet the requirements of Commissioner Peter Uberalles, but could keep the team strictly a stop for players on their way up or down. The M’s may be contenders now, but the question is whether this year’s stars’ll get paid what they deserve here next year or go to someone who will.

Cathode Corner: Joan Rivers has finally been fired by Murdochvision. Why didn’t it happen sooner? ‘Cuz Rivers & Rupert shared the same worldview, one based on gross-out aesthetics and Righteous Right politics. With any luck Murdoch’s Fox Network will fold this year, leaving KCPQ to running its great movies (with the usual breaks from greatness for the monthly Gratuitous Violence Week). I’d hate to see the Ding-Ding Channel’s uniqueness become lost to more of those fashionable-but-dumb Fox shows, shows which prove that it’s square to be hip.