BASEBALL, like Pokemon, is a game of complexities.

And so is the game of stadium blackmail, as practiced this past decade in nearly every major-league city except Green Bay.

Seattle’s sports-team owners (all of whom are now either based here or have strong local business ties) have been among the deftest practitioners of the arena-finance game. Sonics boss Barry Ackerley first assembled land south of the Kingdome for his proposed “New Seattle Arena,” then struck a deal with the city to build KeyArena on the existing Seattle Center Coliseum site–and to make it too small for NHL hockey.

Seahawks owner Paul Allen got a statewide vote on subsidies for his new football palace to replace the Dome, thus ensuring the Hawks’ fans in the working-stiff counties beyond Seattle would get to put the measure over the top.

The Nintendo-led consortium running the Mariners narrowly lost a county vote to get new-ballpark bucks; then, after one winning season in ’95, went to the state Legislature to set up a Public Facilities District–a taxing authority with no other function than to build America’s most expensive ballpark on Ackerley’s former “New Seattle Arena” site.

And what a park it is. A sliding “retractable roof.” Luxury boxes and way-costly “seat license” sections (still not sold out as of this writing). All the high-tech comforts, snuggled within that retro-industrial look that’s all the rage among the George Will-readin’ pseudo-intellectuals in baseball land.

And, thanks to the team’s amenity demands and its mandated fast two-year construction schedule, $100 million in cost overruns (almost twice what the Kingdome cost some 23 years ago).

When the PFD scheme was announced, the team owners pledged to pay any construction costs over and above what the PDF’s taxes were expected to bring in.

Now, as the new stadium (complete with the paid-for name “Safeco Field”) is about to open, the team’s come back to the PFD wanting more money.

Rabid newspaper letter-writers and talk-radio callers seem to think the team’s asking for new and additional taxing schemes. The team’s attorneys claim they merely want the PFD to sell more construction bonds, based on additional bucks the already in-place taxes are expected to generate over the next 20 years (on restaurant meals, car rentals, lottery tickets, etc.) that, thanks to the economic boom, will be as much as $60 million higher than originally estimated–or so the team claims.

What do I think? Corporate sports is finally reaching the end of its ridiculousness limit. Some of the annual “Whither Baseball?” essays in the papers this April said teams are running out of cities to threaten to move to; even big-market teams are having trouble keeping up with Yankee/Dodger spending levels; and ever-splintering network ratings mean TV revenues for baseball won’t grow much more. No matter how this current Safeco Field impasse is resolved, it’ll likely be one of the last debacles of its type.

But for the here-‘n’-now, I think the PFD bureaucrats are right to tell the team to hold off. Despite what the purveyors of no-load mutual funds might wish you to believe, a booming economy today doesn’t mean there’ll be an even-booming-er economy for the indefinite future.

Tomorrow:Remembering the maybe-not-so-bad-in-retrospect old days of stagflation and Watergate.

MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?

THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.

UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…

BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…

FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.

OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:

• Blaine Stare: “The Hostess factory on Dexter/Aurora. Love the neon hearts; like to see the embossed heart on the side as we zoom down 99 and enjoy looking through the windows at the treats as they go by on their assembly line. That dusted donut smell too–yum. Do you remember the Lynda Barry cartoon about the little boy who got lost there on a tour and was raised in the ways of the ding dongs and donuts? It was so sad.”
• Anne Silberman: “I’ve always thought the Columbia Tower was graceful and lovely. Even though it is a little ominous with all of that black glass.”
• Sabrina: “While Georgetown has some wonderful-beautifully-ugly buildings, there is alot to be found in the area just SE of Ballard, all the shipbuilders warehouse structure things. Down Leary Way, there is that supremely cool old-tacky-neon sign fetish house. Then just west of that, along the Burke-Gilman trail it’s a lonely stretch of railroad track with the huge industrial buildings and haunting noises that come from swinging two tons of steel into a pile. Oh–here’s another one–there is a cool and spooky statuary next to the Uneeda car place in Fremont. That’s cool… Of course, I would be devastated if we ever lost Hat-n-Boots in G-town. What about that building, it’s like where Western becomes 15th, if you’re heading north, it’s on the left side and the sign says something like `K-6 MATH BOOKS’ and `LIVE LADYBUGS.’ I always dug that even though I have no idea what the story is there. I like that building across the street with `Bedrock’ painted on it. Here’s an ugly beaute that is the best place to see a movie in the entire world–The Grand Illusion–Now I am totally bummed that they `remodeled’ the cafe. That was a suckorama idea. Please–Please don’t destroy the groovy gothic theatre area by `remodeling.’ UGH!!!!”

Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).

As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.

And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:

• Mike’s Tavern and Chili House at the north end of the Ballard Bridge.
• The Streamline Tavern on lower Queen Anne.
• The apartment building above the Lava Lounge on 2nd Avenue south of Bell.
• The pair of ’60s-modern apartment structures at the east end of Market Street in Ballard, one of which bears the friendly name “Steve’s Apartments.”
• The whole row of warehouses on 1st Avenue South between the Kingdome and Sears, culminating in the gorgeous old furniture barn now known as National Furniture (it was formerly the Corner of Bargains). Let’s hope the development mania resulting from Safeco Field’s appearance doesn’t decimate them all.

(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)

OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.

THE LONG ORDEAL of the coup attempt is over at last. MISC., your thank-God-it’s-after-Valentine’s-Day online column, wishes it had something intelligent to say about it, but doesn’t. All that can be said now is Clinton won what may have been a calculated risk, putting his own career and the institution of the Presidency on the line in an attempt to break the Religious Right’s popularity base. After he spent his first term trying to woo big business away from the GOP, he’s spent his second term engaged in bringing the Right’s pious hypocrisies to a kind of public referendum. I’m not saying he tried to get caught cheatin’ on his wife. I am saying he and his team artfully managed the crisis, to turn it away from being a judgement on him and into a judgement on his accusers. Speaking of smut and its purveyors…

CLIMACTIC MOMENT?: A few weeks before Dan Rather tried to shock America’s TV news viewers with the “rise and rise” tale of Seattle cyberporn tycoon Seth Warshavsky, Business 2.0 magazine claimed his empire’s probably peaked. The cover story alleges Netporn (and specifically Warshavsky’s IEG group of paid-access sites) has hit the wall, can no longer commercially expand at its accustomed-to growth rates. The mag claims we oughta see pay-per-view skin sites consolidate and thin out this year. Warshavsky, as we’ve noted in previous weeks, has already planned for such contingencies by attempting to branch out into other Web-programming genres (gambling, stock quotes, even online surgery videos). Still, having come of age in a Seattle that thought itself to be just another sex-repressed northern city, there’s a kind of almost-kinky delight in knowing the world now thinks of our too-fair city as the cutting edge of sleaze spectacle. Speaking of entertainment dollars at work…

THE ART OF THE DEAL: So highbrow arts are worth the corporate/government investment, according to a highly publicized Corporate Council for the Arts report. It claims 200 King and Pierce County arts groups (specifically the bigger, more “professional” ones) generate $373 million in “economic impact,” hiring 16,000 people (mostly part-timers and contract workers) and selling 5.9 million tickets a year (almost 20 percent more admissions than major pro sports generate here). That’s all nice to know, but will the positive fiscal PR generated by the report be used to help promote more funding support for the arts, or just for more arts-related construction projects?

STRIKING: It’s spring training time, and the sports pages are once again spouting questions of Whither baseball? (Not again?) This time, the athletico-pundits claim that despite the recent NBA player lockout, pro basketball (and pro football) are in much better fiscal shape than baseball. With no salary cap to keep a few well-heeled team owners from grabbing all the top stars, the sport could become as uncompetitive as it had been in its alleged golden age, when the Yankees and the old New York Giants were always at or near the top. This time, the commentators warn, the deck’s so stacked against the less-rich teams that some might go under.

How about a better question: Whither major-league sports as we know them? Player-salary inflation can no longer be supported by TV contracts, now that the explosion of channels has decimated network sports ratings. Sneaker endorsements and team-logo merchandise may also be nearly tapped out as revenue sources. Almost every team in each sport either has a new luxury-box-beholden arena or is working to get one, so that particular money well’s just about maxed out as well. And with each of the big sports suiting up 30 teams or more, there aren’t many cities left to threaten to move a team to. The salary-cap sports have a few more years to deal with this trap than baseball, but they’ll have to deal with it eventually.

Here’s how I’d save major-league pro sports: All new teams, teams that get sold, and teams that move into publicly-funded stadia should be controlled on the league-franchise-contract level by regional, quasi-public corporations, similar to the organizations running many of the stadia. In turn, they’d contract out team operations to management companies, essentially turning team GMs and presidents from owners into contractors. Teams can only build new arenas or pay hyper-inflated salaries if the management companies can financially justify such moves. If a management company can’t make a team pay, it could let its contract to run it expire. Teams could move only if the regional authorities couldn’t land a feasible operator. Speaking of home teams worth saving…

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: On the day after Stroh Brewing (current owners of Seattle’s Rainier Brewing and Portland’s Blitz-Weinhard Brewing) announced it was getting out of the beer business and selling off its brewing plants and beer brands separately, the sidewalk sandwich sign at 2nd Avenue Pizza read: “Keep Rainier in Seattle.” The loss of the Rainier Brewery (at 121, perhaps Seattle’s oldest manufacturing enterprise) would mean more than just the loss of some 200 jobs. It would mean the real end of one of our proudest local institutions, even if a beer continues to be sold under that name.

In the days before microbrews and Bud Light dogs, most of the beer drunk in the Northwest came from five places: Rainier in Seattle, Carling-Heidelberg in Tacoma, Olympia in Tumwater, General Brewing-Lucky Lager in Vancouver U.S.A., and Blitz-Weinhard in Portland. Rainier pretty much owned the Seattle market (and had a nice sideline with its drunkard’s-favorite Rainier Ale, whose dark green label inspired the nickname “The Green Death”); and Blitz-Weinhard (and its later flagship brand, Henry’s) likewise in Portland. But Oly was by far the biggest of the quintet, shipping enough product in 13 western states to qualify in some years as America’s #6 beer vendor (after Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Miller, Pabst, and Coors, which was also a western-only brand back then).

But industry-wide sales stagnations and the onward marketing pushes of Bud, Miller and Coors saw all these Northwest favorites tumble in the marketplace. The Lucky and Heidelberg plants closed down; the other three breweries changed owners several times. Now, perhaps only the Oly plant will be left. Oly’s facility is now owned by Pabst but is to be sold to Miller as an aspect of the complex Stroh asset sale (though it may still engage in “contract brewing” on behalf of Pabst, which would keep the Olympia trademarks and would buy the Rainier’s and Weinhard’s brands and distribution networks from Stroh). Because Oly used to sell so much more beer than Rainier and Blitz combined, that brewery has far more underused capacity; it could easily produce what all three now make, plus Miller’s brands.

The problem in this scenario is that Rainier’s and Henry Weinhard’s brand identities are closely tied to their sources of production. A Rainier beer not brewed in Seattle, or a Henry Weinhard’s not brewed in Portland, would not carry even a fraction of the decades-developed goodwill built into their names. For the Stroh people (who’d already collected the trademarks and a few branch plants of such prior fallen giants as Heilman and Schlitz) to sell the brands without the plants will only doom them to permanent secondary or tertiary status, like Pabst’s ownership has instilled upon such once-proud brands as Lone Star, Hamm’s, Lucky, and Olympia itself.

A better scenario would be for locals to make a counteroffer to Stroh to buy Rainier and Henry’s (the brand names AND the facilities). Could it happen? The Stroh folks would probably want a higher bid than it’s getting from Pabst for just the brands, and Pabst might also want some dough to walk away from an already-done deal. Could that kind of investment work out for a local buyer, given the stagnant state of both mainstream and upmarket “micro” beer sales? Just maybe. Could such a local buyer sell more Rainier and Henry’s than a Pabst-Miller-Olympia contract venture? Undoubtedly.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, join the drive to keep the soon-to-be AT&T/TCI combine from monopolizing high-speed Internet access, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building for our current survey via email or at the bubblicious Misc. Talk discussion boards, and heed these words from one Peter Wastholm: “All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy.”

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1: An outfit in northern California’s selling officially-licensed Space Needle brand bottled water.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: Banners have been mounted all along the streets of the Darkest Eastside, calling on one and all to “Celebrate Redmond.”

WORKIN’ IT: A week or two back, we recounted alarming statistics in Variety claiming kids’ TV viewership was significantly down in each of the past three years. Now, other articles offer up a reason why. Not too long

ago, Those Kids Today were constantly berated as illiterate videots and Nintendo-junkies whose slacker study habits were going to be America’s downfall as a productive player on the global economic stage. Now, Time, the NY Times, and other media outlets are crying in alarm that kids as young as the first grade are being inundated beneath piles of homework so daunting nobody has time to be a kid. The NY Times account, citing a U. of Michigan study, claims in the last 17 years “homework for first- to third-graders had nearly tripled, to 123 minutes a week.”

The first caveat, naturally, is the mass-media biz might be worrying that young eyeballs are getting too captivated by mandatory attention, therefore limiting the young’uns’ ability to be marketed to.

Beyond that, another question arises–at a time when the effective application of knowledge is more nonlinear (or, rather, multilinear) than ever, when Net-based reference tools may make data acquisition as simple as using a calculator, why should we be dooming our children by force-feeding them a rigorous, narrow discipline of left-brain rote memorization? The most likely answer’s that in the ’80s, everybody was so darned worried we weren’t keeping up with those other industrialized nations in producing quantifiable test-score results. Test-score results, of course, don’t really equal knowledge; and knowledge certainly doesn’t equal wisdom–let alone economic “success.” As far as I’ve been able to figure, Japan’s schools are just as tough and soul-sapping as ever, while the nation’s economy’s gone to the dogs for reasons totally unrelated to study habits.

POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: In a recent PBS hour called We the (Rude) People, Morton Kondracke joined the chorus of those who bemoan the death of “civil society” and who blame America’s subcultural fragmentation and in-group politics and just about everything else wrong (or perceived to be wrong) with America on those darned ’60s antiwar protesters. Really, for a veteran panelist on The McLaughlin Group to claim the liberals are causing all the hatemongering is beyond ludicrousness!

THE FINE PRINT (In the closing credits of Artisan Entertainment’s video trailer to Jerry Springer: Ringmaster): “All characters and events in the preceding motion picture were entirely fictional, and nothing is intended to depict any actual participant in, or aspect of, ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’ which is broadcast on television. This motion picture is not connected to ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and is not licensed from its producers.”

THE OTHER FINE PRINT (from a brochure soliciting public-art proposals for the UW Medical Center’s new Maternity and Infant Care wing): “Since not every MIC patient outcome results in a live or healthy birth, the successful artwork will respect this fact with appropriate imagery. For example, the artist may decide to omit direct references to children, babies, or reproduction.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I seem to always be praising the NW punk bible 10 Things (Jesus Wants You to Know). Its latest issue (#20) is its best yet. Besides the usual acreage of interviews and reviews, it’s got editor Dan Halligan’s tale of his Vegas wedding, a woman named Mels disappointedly relating how punks turn out to have most of the same sex hangups as other Americans, interviews with two DIY Netporn entrepreneurs, lotsa talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance repeal advocates, an art-photo by Wendy Wishbone of three goth models representing “the Three Fates of Punk: Death, Hypocrisy, Capitalism,” and Ben Weasel’s cogent analysis of how a vital, energetic subculture’s degenerated and ossified into a conformist, formulaic, commercialized “New Punk Order.” (Mightily timely reading during last week’s ESPN “Winter X Games” with all the post-Green Day noisemakers used for snowboarding sountrack tuneage.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $3 from 8315 Lake City Way NE, #192, Seattle 98115.

LOSS OF DOWN: Another Super Bowl Sunday’s on the way, and with it the usual pseudo-intellectual garbage about pro football as an institution of violence and stupidity and that perennial fall guy testosterone–even though football puts more kid through college than any other sport, even though it’s really a game of coaching and choreography as much as one of hitting and tackling, and even though it’s got enough female fans for QVC to offer NFL-logo costume jewelry trinkets. Time staff essayist Lance Morrow recently claimed, “Football, still in bad odor among thinkers, needs a fancier mystique;” then proceeded to offer up a “deconstructionist theory” of the sport–which, natch, turned out to be less a defense of the gridiron game than a spoof of PoMo egghead jargon. (“Football enacts the Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or ‘fakes’ or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everytyhing that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole — the game lui-meme.”)

I, however, am not afraid to stake whatever remaining highbrow street-cred I might have on the line by actually and sincerely stating my praise for the game. I’ve (largely) grown out of my sensitive-post-adolescent jock-hating phase (my above remarks about snowboarding hype notwithstanding), and have come to an honest appreciation of the Big Game played by Big Dudes, their bodies (and usually their faces) hidden beneath the group-identity of the uniform, their individual heroics interdependent upon the coordinated effort of the entire team. A game with separate offensive and defensive players, in which fully half the participants can usually do nothing but “loss prevention.” (Hmm–maybe Safeco should’ve bought the naming rights to the new football stadium instead of the new baseball stadium.)

Here, then, is my partial list of what makes the perfect Super Bowl experience (please feel free to print this out and keep score at home):

• At least four hours of increasingly shrill yet picayune pregame “coverage.”
• The National Anthem sung by somebody who can’t hit the high notes or forgets the words.
• At least one safety.
• A missed point-after-touchdown.
• A successful really-long field goal.
• First and third quarters ending within the 10 yard line (if the teams are going to change sides at the quarter breaks, it should be as overt as possible).
• A homemade sign in the stands listing a Bible verse other than John 3:16. (My fantasy: To hold up signs displaying the verse numbers for the passages about Onan spilling his seed, or David spying on the bathing Bathsheeba, or a sequence of the verses that turn out to be “And Judas went into the potter’s field and hanged himself,” “Go thou and do likewise,” and “Whatsoever ye do, do so quickly.”)
• At least 20 increasingly shrill promos for the premiere of a new hit series, or the special episode of an established hit series, to air “immediately following the game.”
• A marching-band rendition of a contemporary hit song not originally meant for horns. (“MMMBop,” or maybe “Cop Killer.”)
• A scoreless third quarter (so you can get to the convenience store for restocking without missing the halftime extravaganza).
• A really ridiculous touchdown-celebration dance. (Perhaps involving pirouettes.)
• A couple of wasted time outs early in the fourth quarter.
• A penalty assessed against one team for having 12 men on the field, negated by a penalty for the other team having 13 men on the field.
• A true blooper-reel moment (a player running in the wrong direction, or the inadvertant tackle of a sidelines microphone operator).
• A good Master Lock commercial.
• A dumb Pepsi commercial.
• The whole thing coming down to one last come-from-behind miracle play that either somehow succeeds or at least comes very close.
• At least one hour of anticlimactic postgame rehashing.
• A premiere premiere of a new hit series, or the special episode of an established hit series, eventually following the postgame denouments and turning out to really suck.

NEXT WEEK: The long-delayed final results of our quest for appropriate honorees on a mythical Seattle women’s walk of fame. ‘Til then, here’s your next topic to mull over via email and our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards: What’s the most beautiful “ugly” building in town (i.e., a beautiful structure the official tastemakers would despise)?

MISC., your own four-man luge derailment-accident of online journalism, couldn’t help but be bemused by the awkward coincidence of Salt Lake City’s Olympics scandal (wherein local officials were forced to admit bribing Intl. Olympic Committee members as part of their successful bid for the 2002 Winter Games) just weeks after some Seattle movers-‘n’-shakers announced their overt displeasure with the City Council’s refusal to pursue a bid for the 2012 Summer Games. It also shows that they may profess to be sexual neo-Puritans over there in the Beehive State, but they know how to be corrupt when and where it proves materially valuable.

MADE FOR WALKING?: We still don’t have many nominations for our proposed, mythical, Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame. So we’ll keep the topic open one or two more weeks at our Misc. Talk discussion boards and by email to clark@speakeasy.org.

WHILE ROME BURNS DEPT.: I’m on two major e-mail lists these days, besides my own: One for the regional punk-rock community, and one for readers of the hi-brow novelist David Foster Wallace. Both lists descended to Nazi talk in recent weeks. On the punk list, a discussion about unfortunate fistfights and bullies at the Breakroom’s New Year’s show has descended into list members quibbling about Nazi skinheads (the general consensus: Not all skins are Nazis, and not all Nazis shave their skulls). On the Wallace list, somehow a discussion about an essay Wallace wrote about Dostoyevsky devolved into a shouting match about whether German philosopher Martin Heidegger was really a Nazi or just pretended enough to be one so they wouldn’t track him down & kill him like they did to so many other intelligentsia members in 1939-45 Europe. (Meanwhile, the Republican Sleaze Machine is attempting nothing less than the destruction of the U.S. electoral system, and nobody on either list (or I) has given it even a cursory mention.)

OF COURSE, the relative lack of public discourse over the coup attempt may be just what the coup plotters want. The Sleaze Machine may very well want you to be so completely disgusted by its coup attempt that you’ll stop paying attention. That way they can continue to ply their methodical annihilation of democratic governance with even less public scrutiny.

DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: I may have been overgenerous last month in wistfully nostalgizing about KSTW’s former ownership by Gaylord Entertainment (owner of the Grand Ole Opry radio show and theme park, and co-owner of cable’s Nashville Network). The Columbia Journalism Review just named Gaylord’s flagship property, the Daily Oklahoman, “the worst newspaper in America.” According to the CJR story, old man Gaylord allows his other media enterprises to be professionally run, but continues to lord over his Oklahoma City monopoly daily like a back-country version of those oldtime reactionary press lords like Hearst.

IT’S ONLY WORDS (via Joe Mabel): “Have you noticed the recent rise of `actionable’ used to mean `able to be acted upon’ rather than `giving cause for a lawsuit’? Last night at the Washington Software Alliance awards ceremony, the keynote speaker actually said `content on your web site must be actionable.’ I guess we all knew what he meant, but my oldspeak ear couldn’t help hearing this as `make sure you slander someone.'”

ACCESS BAGGAGE: No, P-I “Arts Beat” writer Douglas McLennan, you’re wrong to suggest the city exploit TCI’s default of its city cable contract (the company admitted it wouldn’t upgrade service to all city neighborhoods by a contract-imposed deadline of next week) by getting the cable company to fund an “improved” public-access channel–a city arts channel, in which a professional programming staff would ensure “quality control” by picking who got to be on it. That wouldn’t be real public access at all. The whole point of public access is nobody chooses. Anybody can get on it and many do–evangelists, female and male strippers, pot-legalization advocates, UFO conspiracy theorists, Y2K scare-mongers, rappers, racists, zither players, video artists, cabaret performers, karaoke singers, high-school football players, political activists, etc. etc. etc. The city already has a designated TCI channel it currently barely uses to document council meetings and public hearings. It could put quality-controlled arts shows on that channel whenever it wanted to. If the city can get production funds for such shows as part of its settlement from TCI, that’d be great. But leave public access to remain true public access.

FOX TAKETH AWAY, FOX GIVETH: The X-Files is no longer produced in Vancouver, but another prime-time network show is now being filmed 150 mi. from us–in the opposite direction. The PJs, that instant-hit Fox 3-D cartoon, is animated by our Portland pals at Will Vinton Productions from scripts and soundtracks generated in Hollywood. Instead of the modeling clay Vinton’s crew’s famous for (“Claymation” is their registered trademark, ya know), The PJs utilizes foam-rubber dolls with wire skeletons and detachable-replacable facial parts. The result looks sharper on the small screen, and (vital for a weekly series) is a heckuva lot more efficient than clay-sculpting every figure for every frame. This means The PJs is the only animated series besides South Park to use no overseas subcontractors. It also means you can judge for yourself whether these aging Oregon hippies can accurately visualize the show’s setting (a generic east-coast inner city neighborhood), or if in the necessarily-exaggerated world of animation that even matters.

GOING GOING…: J.K. Gill’s last mall-based paperback and stationery stores are closing sometime this month. This was a Portland-based chain that had bought the retail arm of Lowman & Hanford (which claimed to have been “Seattle’s Oldest Retail Business,” and whose old Pioneer Square building later housed the startup incarnations of both Aldus (now Adobe) and Progressive Networks (now RealNetworks)). Countless former junior-high girls have fond memories of going out to Gill’s to steal Shaun Cassidy notebooks and unicorn figurines. Speaking of youth-culture memories…

REVERTING TO TYPE: The Delaware-based House Industries, a purveyor of retro-hip computer typefaces, is now selling “Flyer Fonts,” a $99 computer disk containing “18 hardcore and punk fonts, based on type from punk and hardcore flyers of the ’80s.” For only several times the combined production budgets of the original posters, you can get exact digital re-enactments of hand-lettering, cut-out, stencil, and umpteen-generation-photocopy faces with such titles as Distortion, Vandalism, Straight, Filler, Malfunction, and All Ages. You also get 25 clip-art images (skulls, skateboards, a circle-A), a T-shirt, and a CD with ancient noise-rants by the likes of Suicidal Tendancies, Youth Brigade, and the Circle Jerks. You could call it high tech trying to ape the street credibility of low tech. Or you could call it a service for aging punks now stuck in commercial graphic-design careers who want to relive their former artistic styles without the bother of re-learning the use of X-Acto knives and rubber cement. (For the whole House catalog, call 800-888-4390.) Still speaking of youth-culture memories…

THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Among the old buildings demolished in recent weeks for yet more homely office/retail/condo collossi was the old church just east of downtown known from 1977 to 1985 as The Monastery, an all-ages, primarily-gay disco. Its operators had Universal Life Church mail-order ordinations and called its DJ events “church services.” As a place where underage males publicly came out, it would’ve attracted negative scrutiny even without the rumored use of common disco and/or teen drugs. Rumors at the time (unconfirmed then and unconfirmable now) claim a dad with major city-government connections blamed the Monastery for his son’s emergence as an openly gay user of some substance or another; the dad then persuaded his politico pals that all-ages nightlife was A Menace To Be Stopped. The result: The infamous Teen Dance Ordinance, widely blamed for helping make (live or recorded) music shows for under-21s nearly impossible to profitably mount in this town. Only today, with a somewhat less reactionary faction on the council authorizing a Music and Youth Task Force, is anything being done to correct this past over-reaction. By now, though, it might be too late. The cost of real estate’s getting so damned high in town, even if larger booze-free clubs were legalized (small ones like the Velvet Elvis have been exempt from the ordinance), there might be no place available in which one might feasibly be operated.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, ponder these words from Leonard Maltin, made while discussing the 1923 version of The Ten Commandments: “Sometimes people laugh at silent films because they find them corny or feel superior to them. I can understand that. I felt the same way about Armageddon.”

IT’S A DOG-DAYS-OF-WINTER MISC., the online column that couldn’t help but be bemused by the huge, handsome “Iams Sold Here” poster advertising yupscale pet foods, a poster taped to a window at the Queen Anne Larry’s Market–specifically, a window directly above the store’s cafeteria.

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The Downtown Seattle Association/Community Development Round Table clique, via one of its frequent planted front-page puff pieces in the P-I, believes the Seattle City Council doesn’t have enough big-business toadies on it? What’s wrong with this picture?

THE FINE PRINT (from the Internet service provider Xensei): “The requested URL was not found on this server. No further information is available. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And it looked so promising for a while there too.”

PUTTING-ON-AIRS DEPT.: A kindly reader did some seeking out on the FCC’s website and found some interesting license applications on file. KCMU’s applied for a power increase from 450 to 720 watts. Even more interesting–KSER, the Lynnwood-based successor to the late Seattle community station KRAB, has applied to move from 1000 to 5800 watts (will residents south of Shoreline be able to receive the station everybody in the Seattle area’s talked about but almost nobody’s heard?). And two more UHF TV channels are in the works: KHCV on channel 45 (which has been broadcasting black screens and computer graphics promising great shows any month now), and something called the African American Broadcasting Co. has filed a construction permit to start transmitting locally on channel 51.

I-KID-YOU-NOT-DEPT.: A headline in Variety announces a grim portent for our nation’s future: “Kids may be toddling away from television.” The story sadly relates, “Kids viewership is down a massive 13% so far in the fourth quarter compared with the same dime period a year ago,” across network, syndicated, and cable schedules; continuing and accellerating a two-year trend. Maybe the most recent demands that broadcast stations stick more educational content into their kidvid has worked to drive the tots away from the screen, something the anti-TV Luddites have wanted all along. Of course, it could mean the young’uns are simply switching to violent shoot-em-up video games on the Playstation instead.

The same Variety issue (12/21-1/3) also contained the trade magazine’s annual “International Locations Supplement” (containing absolutely no mention of any Washington location work but plenty of Vancouver stuff). It’s a document of either frustration or misplaced commercial ambition that all these cities, states, and countries are investing heavy amounts of public and/or private investment, not into making their own films but simply into providing scenery and/or cheap labor for Hollywood.

GAME THEORY: At a time when Hollywood rules the popcult globe, but Hollywood’s increasingly under foreign investment capital, The Price is Right has been running an opening banner “Made In the USA.” The show’s still churned out in LA, but it’s now owned by the British media conglomerate Pearson (owners of Penguin Books and a lot of other stuff), which acquired what’s left of Goodson-Todman Productions in order to strengthen its position as the global leader in administering foreign remake rights to new and old game show concepts. Indeed, it claims to either produce, co-produce, or control the rights to half the game shows now airing around the world, from the French version of The $25,000 Pyramid to the Australian version of Sale of the Century to the British version of Family Feud (retitled Family Fortunes). It’s even offering international remake rights to The Honeymooners (“Le Pow! Le Zoom! Dans la lune!”)

PHILM PHUN: The Faculty, that dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-space-aliens movie, is being hyped with an MTV video featuring the voice (and, for just a couple of seconds, the image) of erstwhile Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley (who’s otherwise still in his self-imposed hiatus from the stresses of the music biz), covering the Pink Floyd chestnut “Another Brick in the Wall.” The coincidence (well, maybe not a coincidence if Staley knows his local-film history): The onetime supergroup that recorded the track’s credited as Class of ’99. Very close to Class of 1999, the title of a dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-robots movie filmed ten years ago at Seattle’s old, now reopened, Lincoln High.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dinosaur Creamy Coolers are fruity drinks made with ultra-pasteurized milk, corn syrup, flavorings, a slight tinge of carbonation, and wild colors-not-found-in-nature. The label lists flavors by colors, just like Jell-O afficianados: “Red (cherry), orgnage (orange), blue (tropical punch), green (lime).” And it all comes in a little plastic miniature sports bottle, which you have to cut or rip open at the head of the built-in flexible straw. Made in California but sold at Uwajimaya.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jet City Maven is a feisty, independent free tabloid for the near-north-end neighborhoods of Seattle (Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford, et al.), run by former North Seattle Press participants Clayton and Susan Park. Besides remiscinces by old North Central Outlook cofounder Stan Stapp, it’s got the usual business briefs, community-planning updates, neighborhood-vs.-developer articles, and arts-and-entertainment notices (by local journeyman musician Jason Trachtenburg). However, I’m personally a bit perturbed by the front-page editorial in its Jan. issue. The story involved Civic Light Opera musicians seeking union representation against management’s wishes, even while the company mounts a show (Rags) about old-timey working-folks’ struggles in 1900s NYC. Nick Slepko’s commentary on this not only is accurately summed up by its Newtesque headline, “BIG Labor takes on small community theater,” but goes on to Cold War-nostalgiac Red-baiting by gleefully describing picketers outside the show as including “UW Socialist Workers Party diehards outside blocking the theater.” I’ve worked for big employers and small employers, and trust me: workers at small outfits need a living wage and basic rights as much as workers at big outfits, and may require representation to attain ’em. (Free each month at drop-off sites in the targeted neighborhoods; by subscription from 12345 30th Ave. NE, Suite HI, Seattle 98125.)

DOUBLE DRIBBLES: The evening before the NBA’s belated return was announced, I witnessed Seattle Reign Appreciation Day at the Seattle Center House. The center floor of the cavernous old National Guard armory was full of mourning and love-festing fans–teenage girls, moms and daughters, dads and daughters, hand-holding lesbian couples, and more than a few gents like me who simply love the grace of the female form in action. To the corporate sports world, ABL pro women’s basketball may have been just another short-lived, underfunded wannabe league like the ones I mentioned two weeks ago (WFL, USFL, NASL, WHL, ABA, Liberty Basketball Association, several indoor-soccer attempts, Arena Football). But to the 500 or so at Reign Appreciation Day, and the two or three thousand regular gamegoers they represented, the ABL represented something different–a dream (albeit a commercially-exploited dream) that girls could one day be valued not merely for their bodies (as objects of desire) but for their bodies (as machines of active achievement), in an organization that understood the street-level, populist aspect of women’s-sports fandom and didn’t try to treat it as a junior version of all that’s icky about corporate sport.

(Meanwhile, a few pamphleteers at Reign Appreciation Day wanted to spread the news about some adamant fans in San Jose, CA who want to rescue the ABL by recruiting a few thousand of the league’s loyal followers to put up at least $1,000 each to collectively buy and resuscitate the league.)

The morning after that celebratory wake for this now-deferred dream, the NBA owners (purveyors of the ABL-killing, corporate-as-all-heck WNBA) ended their player lockout (the sorriest demonstration of what’s wrong with corporate sport since, maybe, 1995). As many of you know, the Sonics are owned by local billboard czar Barry Ackerley; for almost a year, the team’s dedicated Ackerley billboard site outside its practice gym facing Aurora Ave. has borne a message encouraging fan noise: “Your voice will come back. Eventually.” During the lockout, it seemed like a desperate promise that games would again be played one of these months (or years). Now, though, maybe it could be a rallying cry to encourage all the frustrated fans to raise their own voices against corporate sport’s increasingly pathetic edifice.

BE SURE TO ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS for our still-hypothetical Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame by email to clark@speakeasy.org, or at our very own Misc. Talk discussion boards. Results will be announced in this space next week. Until then, see Elizabeth, pray for snow, and consider the potential application of these words from Samuel Butler to the current D.C. tragicomedy: “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”

IT’S A RELATIVELY POST-HANGOVER MISC., the column that looked for streetside strangeness at the full-moon New Year’s and found lots (unfortunately, none of it printable without violating either libel laws or personal discretion.)

ST. PETER TO NORMAN FELL: “Come and knock on our door…”

COFFEE PRESS: Starbucks is starting an in-store magazine. But Seattle writers and editors need not apply–or rather, they’ll need to apply to NYC. The yet-untitled quarterly, due out in May, is being produced by Time Warner’s “custom publishing” unit under contract to the espresso chain. An NY Daily News report claims it will be “modeled on The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, with contributions from both established and emerging writers and photographers.” If it’s anything like the chain’s in-store brochures (or CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir Pour Your Heart Into It ), you can expect material that’s nice, laid-back, mellow, and ultimately forgettable.

MARKET EXPOSURE: Seattle’s own cybersmut magnate Seth Warshavsky’s Internet Entertainment Group has become notorious for its sex websites (the official Penthouse magazine site; the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee hardcore video). But now, with the commercial skin-pic trade apparently plateauing, IEG’s expanding into new e-commerce realms. Some of these expansions are a little further from the company’s original shtick (an online casino, a home-mortgage buying-guide); some are a little closer. One of the latter’s a nude stock-trading site, sexquotes.com (“the mage-merger between high finance and high society”), mixing business news and stock prices with small but free pinup pix. You can choose the gender, explicitness level, and general physique type of your temporary beloveds, who appear on the left side of the screen; you can also choose up to 20 stock and mutual-fund prices to scroll across the right side. It’s free, with plenty of ads for Warshavsky’s other sites. One of those other sites is ready to show you how Net-porn starlets are made–www.onlinesurgery.com!

CATHODE CORNER#1: Viacom management may have killed KSTW’s local-news operation, but at least they’ve let the station maintain one of its traditions–the annual alkie movie on, or shortly after, the hangover-strewn Jan. 1. In years past, the station’s assauged the suffering viewers with Under the Volcano, When A Man Loves a Woman, and more. This Jan. 2 (the night of Jan. 1 was, unfortunately, taken up by Viacom’s dumb UPN shows): Clean and Sober.

CATHODE CORNER #2, or BANDWIDTH ENVY:A couple months or so ago, the feisty indie Summit Cablevision finally added a bunch of the cable channels viewers have been pleading for for two years or more. Most TCI customers elsewhere in Seattle (as well as viewers stuck with similarly outmoded cable systems across the country) are still wondering what all these supposedly great channels with these supposedly great shows are really like. Herewith, a few glimpses:

• Win Ben Stein’s Money (Comedy Central) is easily the best non-kiddie game show ever made for cable. After years of badly-structured, badly-timed, badly-designed, and badly-lit shows like Loves Me, Loves Me Not, a cable channel’s finally figured out what makes a great game show great–it’s a pure televisual experience, involving the audience in a well-planned ritual of fun. WBSM is also that rarity, a “hard quiz” show with truly tough questions.

  I just wished I could feel a little less guilty about finding such screen-magnetism and loveability in a host whom you know as the monotoned droner from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Wonder Years, and Clear Eyes commercials, but who in “real” life is a former Nixon lawyer who writes virulently anti-choice, pro-impeachment screeds for Rabid Right journals such as the American Spectator–and who keeps a home-away-from-Hollywood at the infamous compound collection that is Sandpoint, Idaho.

• One Reel Wonders (Turner Classic Movies) exhumes some of the live-action short subjects that thrilled and/or bored movie-theater audiences in the ’30s and ’40s, and which have generally remained unseen ever since.

  Besides finally giving lifelong Looney Tunes fans an at-last reference to the original sources of many cartoon running gags (Technicolor travelogues ending “as the sun sinks slowly in the west,” etc.), they fill in a vital hole in any film buff’s historical knowledge. And any aspiring filmmaker (or storyteller) could learn a thing or two about how these shorts told complete stories in seven to 10 minutes.

• ESPN2 has recently devoted its 10 am (PST) hour most weekdays to reruns of its past Fitness America Pageant shows. These were originally conceived as a cross between aerobics and bodybuilding, skewed toward audiences (and advertisers) scared off by the masculine-looking figures popularly associated with women’s muscle meets.

  So instead of weightlifting and other tests of pure strength, each contestant performs two minutes of Flashdance-esque athletic dancing, then returns to the stage for a short swimsuit-modeling stroll. The swimsuits (and the dance costumes) are often of the bare-bunned variety; and the dances often display a vigorous eroticism that would probably be particularly popular among western-states men (it’s in our blood to admire a woman who’s no dainty waif, but who instead looks like she probably could’ve survived a frontier winter in the years before rural electrificaiton).

  But don’t for a second think the show’s “male oriented”–the ads are all for women’s vitamin supplements, women’s workout gear, and Stayfree. This is intended for a woman who likes to admire other women’s bodies, but who’d slug you in the stomach if you accused her of maybe, just maybe, having closet lesbian desires.

  Also of note: During set changes beetween segments, an announcer narrates short taped clips of past champions, most of whom are described as now working as “fitness celebrities.” Our fame-ridden culture’s gone so far, we not only have people who are famous merely for “being famous,” we have obscure people who make a living for merely “being famous” among relatively small subcultures–lingirie models, motorcycle-magazine centerfolds, pro wrestling’s “managers” and other outside-the-ring costars, CNN “expert commentators,” “celebrity greeters” at Vegas casinos, and, yes, Internet-based commentators.

• Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Cartoon Network) started out as the “hip,” grownup-oriented spot on a channel usually devoted to relentlessly exhuming old Hanna-Barbera and Kids’ WB shows.

  But the producers and writers have gotten further and further afield from the original talk-show-spoof concept over each of the show’s five seasons (CN often pairs a new and an old 15-minute episode in the same time block). It’s now the ultimate metashow, deconstructing not just cliché host-guest banter and backstage politics (the stuff of so many, many other self-parody shows from Conan to Shandling) but the very narrative structures of TV and of commercial entertainment in general.

  The show sometimes plays so fast and furious with viewer expectations, one can leave it fully forgetting how clean it is. (Its self-imposed rating is the squeaky TV-Y7.) Two or more generations have grown up equating avant-garde artistic styles with risqué subject matter (an assumption spread in part by CN’s sister channel HBO). But one of the most innovative Hollywood films of the’60s, Head, was rated G. Maya Deren’s experiments in filmic form and storytelling could have passed the old Hollywood Production Code; Satyajit Ray’s exquisite films all passed India’s even-tougher censorship.

  I’m not saying artists, filmmakers, or TV producers should be prohibited from creatively using what used to be called “blue” material. I am saying they shouldn’t feel they have to, either. Space Ghost can thoroughly alter your notions about well-made comedy while still being funny, and without a single poop joke.

• Star Trek: The Sci-Fi Channel Special Edition presented its presenters with a time-management dilemma. Sci-Fi execs wanted to promote this as the most faithful rerunning in decades of the old Kirk-and-Spock episodes, but they weren’t about to give up the extra minutes of commercials their channel (and most ad-bearing cable channels, except Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon) stick into their reruns. Network shows of Star Trek‘s day usually ran up to 51 minutes of show per hour. Sci-Fi usually cuts that to as little as 43 minutes.

  The answer: Stretch the shows into an hour and a half! That way, they could add even more commercials, promos, etc. To pad the remaining time, Shatner and Nimoy have been propped up to offer ponderous behind-the-scenes commentaries. (Q: Just how do they manage to speak in segments totalling 10 to 13 minutes about the making of even the minor, budget-balancing episodes? A: Very patiently.)

  Most viewers I know claim they tape the shows and fast-forward past the ads and extraneous material. But I like the new segments, for the sheer unadorned Shatnerity of them.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, consider these seasonally-appropriate words attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches fifty, and a fool if he doesn’t drink afterward.”

MISC., your post-print column for (what the Times Personal Tech section calls) the post-television age, was amused by the double standards and double dribbles in that front-page P-I headline on 12/22/98: “Reign star Enis judges basketball, parenthood.” Y’ever see a headline like that about, say, Shawn Kemp?

Alas, that P-I story was one of the last written in the local dailies about the Seattle Reign before the team’s parent American Basketball League announced its sudden, permanent shutdown, leaving fans as bereft of pro women’s b-ball as it is of the men’s game. One could lay the blame for the ABL’s demise on the rival WNBA, with its megabucks backing, its marketable-superstar orientation, and its stranglehold on sponsors and TV outlets. But a less-discussed factor was the league’s management structure. While it claimed to be a grassroots, fan-level outfit, it was really a centralized company which owned all its teams, hired and assigned all its players, and otherwise tightly ran all operations and marketing–just like the Roller Derby, Arena Football, and other assorted marginal team-sports ventures of the past three decades.

The graveyard of new team-sports organizations in North America is full of four decades’ worth of great and less-great visions, from the American Basketball Association to the World Football League and the U.S. Football League, to World Team Tennis and several attempts at indoor soccer. Aside from the American Football League (which got all its teams merged into the NFL in the late ’60s), none were long-term successes. (The only current such ventures with a chance at making it are Major League Soccer and the aforementioned WNBA.) None of those attempts found the formula for nationwide popularity and profits; though some tried to find such a formula thru centralized management. A single-ownership league structure (like that of the ABL) can present a unified public image and prevent a single well-heeled team owner from attaining an uncompetitive dynasty situation (like that which ruined the old North American Soccer League). But it also means local team managers can’t build their own squads, around personalities or playing styles popular in their own towns. And when league HQ runs out of cash and/or ideas, there aren’t local team owners (or buyers) to come up with individual solutions other teams can copy.

But for now, the WNBA (with its emphasis on megabucks and celebrity-driven advertising, and its neglect (or worse) of any lesbian fan base) is the remaining structure for women’s pro hoops, at least until the parent NBA can no longer afford to subsidize it (which, if there’s not even a mini-NBA season, might be more likely and sooner). Wish I had more encouraging news for stranded Reign fans, but a pro league of any sort, especially one with teams scattered across the continent, is an undertaking requiring immense logistics, savvy, and long-term backing. The ABL way didn’t work, and neither has just about any other way.

THE HOLIDAY TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 13th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical Misc. In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions via private email and the public Misc. Talk discussion boards; and apologies to those whose board postings I accidentally erased last week. (I think I’ve gotten the hang of the discussion-board software scripts by now.) As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of ’99; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Tickle Me Elmo dolls to sell you.

UNTIL NEXT WE MEET in the year so great there’s a Washington highway named after it, pace yourself by toasting the New Year once for each North American time zone (starting with Newfoundland at 7:30 p.m. PST), and ponder these thoughts attributed to Lillian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.

AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.

JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.

YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?

SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).

WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.

UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.

UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.

SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?

WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.

Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.

SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:

• “Country music women nude”
• “Shaping breasts”
• “Essays on rap music”
• “woman size evening gown”
• “showering women”
• “loner loser `no friends'”
• “large breast”
• “large breasts”
• “my breasts grew”
• “nude gymnastics”
• “half naked comic book”
• “`thrown into’ near tub”
• “building on the moon”
• “cartoon squirrels picture”
• “Croatian Curses”
• “pretty preteen”
• “essays drinking”
• “mideval europe”
• “world images”
• “fun neon signs”
• “hetero handjob”
• “boggle”
• “women playing volleyball”
• “pageant and topless”
• “describing my dad”
• “Dr. Dreadful”
• “elliot gould naked”
• “Football throwing machine”
• “PHAT BLACKS”
• “naked waterfalls”
• “naked women on bikes”
• “nude women in tanning bed”
• “Masturbation Techniques”
• “anton chekov”
• “leaning (sic) to play guitar”
• “applepig”
• “warez windows 98”
• “Mary Throwing Stones”
• “collage (sic) football bowls”
• “patio furniture safety”

(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)

(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)

BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”

WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….

WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).

WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?

WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.

WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.

WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.

THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.

LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….

Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)

SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”

THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”

HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?

NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.

As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:

“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”

A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:

“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.

“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”

Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.

I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’

YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”

YOUR EVER-HOPEFUL MISC. would really, really like to believe Newt is really gone for good, even though it knows he’s probably just repositioning himself for the 2000 presidential run. (More material tangentally related to this toward the column’s end.)

THE MAILBAG: Thanks to all who responded to our request for new pro-sex public-service slogans, designed to encourage teens and young adults to get off the streets and on each other. While no snappy slogans were suggested, one reader did propose a TV commercial with two gal-pals chatting at the water cooler: “How do you manage to feel so fresh and positive in the morning?” “Simple: I don’t leave the house without some sex.” Or, alternately, a print ad could feature the big face of a sensitive-looking young man staring out from the magazine page to say at one time, a man was expected to take care of a woman, to provide for her material needs. Nowadays, such traditional roles are increasingly passé. But still one important way you can help a woman achieve her goals in life. Share some sex with her, today. Not only will she feel better–but so will you.” At the bottom of the page would go a common-sense disclaimer, similar to that used by liquor advertisers, to the effect that those who enjoy sex best enjoy it responsibly.

PHILM PHUN: The Big Chill is actually going to be re-released in theaters, giving late-’90s audiences a chance to relive the alleged good old days of early-’80s nostalgia for the late ’60s. I say, forget the original movie (even though it was, and is, a depressingly-accurate depiction of the original Seattle Weekly target audience). Instead, why not remake it? The new Big Chill-Out could depict a circle of aging late-’80s punks who whiningly long for the good old days of simplistic heroes and villains, bond in the tribal solidarity of smug self-righteousness, and enjoy the timeless tuneage of Killing Joke (while sneering at those Hanson-listening kids these days).

GOIN’ SOUTH?: The Portland tabloid Willamette Week ran an essay package two or three weeks back, on the topic “Seattle Envy.” For those whose only notion about either Portland or Seattle is they’re not New York, the essays provide a valuable intro to the real differences between the two towns, only 185 miles away and nearly identical in size (though Seattle’s greater metro area has almost a million more folks than Portland’s). All six writers (four current Seattleites, two Portlanders) agree Portland’s older, smugger, and more civic-minded, while Seattle’s brasher, louder, and more globally aware. That leaves them to disagree on which they prefer….

• Intro-story writer Kris Hargis claims, “for all its charms, Portland has always seemed a bit burdened by what you could call a Napoleon complex. `So we’re little, so what?’ we say. `We can still kick your town’s butt on social services, city planning and parks’–all the things Seattle forgot about in its quest to become a Goliath of global commerce.”
• Seattle author Robert Clark: “Portland’s calculated attractiveness and livability exist at the cost of some of the spontaneity and un-selfconsciousness that has distinguished Seattle and lent it a certain funky charm…. I simply don’t find it as warmhearted a place as Seattle. But Seattle is changing–and not, I fear, for the better…. Our previous and current mayoral administrations have a rube-like fear that Seattle is not a `world-class’ city and are unable to resist the blandishments of developers who promise to put our backwater town into the same league as, say, Houston or Branson, Mo.”
• Seattle Weekly music writer Jackie McCarthy believes “Portland is like a Spinanes record: smart, sincere, comforting, underappreciated. Seattle, on the other hand, is a lot like Mudhoney’s music: Cool, sarcastic, insular, overrated.”
• Seattle website drudge Chip Giller relates how “Portland is, to many, a more intense place, a more real place, than Seattle. In Portland, mean is meaner, clean is cleaner, hip is hipper.” He quotes one ex-Portlander, “The rain is more depressing. The sun is brighter. If you were a songwriter, your songs would sound better in Portland.” But another tells him Portland “is Disneyland. Everybody’s white and happy.”
• Portland State grad student Lizzy Caston: “Seattle has manic-depressive fluctuations between being a nouveau riche rock star and a used-up junkie lying in the gutter underneath the Alaska Way Viaduct. Portland is the creative writer on Prozac–often brilliant, sometimes smug and antisocial, but convinced of its own intellectual superiority.”
• And Seattle freelancer Kristy Ojala takes a cautionary view to the subject: “The differences between the two cities are hinged on small details, not life-altering differences. It’s like a pointless high-school rivalry (`Our team can kick your team’s ass!’), where thickheaded generalizations serve as absolutes. We’re both stuck with software companies and rain and the coffee/lumberjack stereotype.”

Now if you ask me, the differences are at the same time more blatant and more subtle than Willamette Week’s crew suggests. The subtle ones come from Portland’s stronger sense of “society,” the kind of community-spirit that means both public-transit systems and beauty pageants get taken a lot more seriously there than here, where traditionally more folks headed to out-of-town recreations on the weekends. The blatant ones come from one prime source, Boeing. Without Boeing, Portland was free to build its economic base on timber, shipping, and insurance. With Boeing, Seattle came to see itself as a player on the world stage. Also with Boeing, Seattle gained a civic hierarchy built around the dual elites of gladhanding deal-makers and obsessive-compulsive engineers, hierarchies which would eventually find their ultimate meeting point at Microsoft. (Though Nike proves Portlanders can easily match Seattleites in the ruthless pursuit of profits and market share at any cost.)

A LOVELY MAT FINISH: The Monday after Newt resigned and Jesse Ventura became governor of Minnesota, I tried to watch the competing pro wrestling shows on cable. No longer the pseudo-sport for dummies, wrestling’s now a pair of complex soap-opera plot threads that no first-time viewer can even hope to sort out. These threads play out all year long on the basic-cable shows (one of which, WWF Monday Night Raw Is War, will hold a cablecast from the Tacoma Dome on Dec. 14); leading to climaxes not during Neilsen ratings sweeps weeks but on separate pay-per-view events. On some shows (the World Wrestling Federation has four hours a week on USA; the Time Warner-owned World Championship Wrestling has seven weekly hours split between Time Warner’s TNT and TBS channels), the shouting and the theatrics drag on far longer than the action.

The theatrics, the action, and the characterizations are all far more “X-treme” than during rasslin’s last heyday when Ventura pretended to hate Hulk Hogan. The matches themselves now bear only a miniscule resemblance to real (high school, college, and Olympic) wrestling, and have more in common with that banned-in-every-state gorefest known as “ultimate fighting” (tactics include kickboxing, bare-knuckles boxing, and explicit crotch-grabbing).

The combatants’ grandiose personas and rhetorical bombast certainly have a lot in common with Newt’s now-disgraced system of governance by blowhardedness–except wrestlers, unlike Republicans (and particularly Republican talk-radio hosts) are always ready to directly confront their foes, instead of staying safely within one-sided environments. In this regard, Ventura (as the first candidate from Ross Perot’s Reform Party to make it to a high office) may actually prove more effective than Perot himself would have.

And then there’s the strange case of WWF proprietor Vincent McMahon Jr. A few years ago he presented himself to the world as the underdog of faux-sports titans, a third-generation family businessman (with a son he was grooming to eventually take over from him) struggling to compete against the conglomerate-backed WCW. These days, he’s taken on the TV persona of a corrupt corporate overlord, taking personal sides in the matches he telecasts to favor the baddest of the bad guys. (He even designates his favorites as “corporate champions”!) At one time, rasslin’ villains bore the colors of Russians and Iranians. Now, they’ve captured changes in the popular imagination and re-emerged as the toadies of Big Business. McMahon, who’s perfectly willing to be hated by his audiences as long as they keep watching, has caught onto a shift in the public zeitgeist, before WCW’s sister company Time magazine discovered corporate welfare. He could’ve taught ol’ Newt about this, if either had cared. (Does Ventura know about this shift? Most likely.)

TO CLOSE, take the Kalakala tour, and enjoy the next 10 weeks’ worth of long nights and short days (like you’ve got an alternative).

(Still seeking your pro-sex ad slogans (not one-to-one pickup lines). Send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org.)

SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”

As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.

Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.

HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.

Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.

My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.

My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!

NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.

In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.

So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…

PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)

As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!

At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!

STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.

(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.

WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: Here it comes! No, not television’s most exciting hour of fantastic prizes, but the next phase in the 12.5 year history of the Misc. column. You can think of this as Misc. Version 4.0 if you like. The first version was a monthly column in the old Seattle tabloid ArtsFocus, from June 1986 thru July 1989. The second was the self-published monthly newsletter beginning later that summer, and continuing until January 1995. Third came the weekly installments in The Stranger, starting in November 1991 (concurrent with the newsletter version) and eventually reaching some 200,000 Seattle-area readers before the “alternative” tabloid’s bosses stopped running the column in October 1998.

THE NEW ONLINE COLUMN MIGHT BE more leisurely paced than the previous print versions, given that for the first time the column has no pre-set space limit. I may also experiment with different types of content, shuffling topics and departments in and out to test reader response. And new audience-building features might be added to the Misc. World website as well. More about that next week.

BUT FIRST, for those who came in late, a restatement of the column’s purposes and concepts. Under the classic “three-dot” newspaper column format, and within the meta-topic of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond,” Misc. World discusses the people, places, and things that combine to make up public life here at the edge of America and the end of the century. Some of the items in the column are as short as one sentence (or sentence fragment; some take up the whole space by themselves. Some of the subjects I write about are Seattle-specific; some are national (or have their equivalents in other towns across the country). Some involve big sociocultural trends such as stock-market fluctuations and downtown redevelopment schemes; others involve matters as small and specific as new junk foods and catch phrases. But they’re all parts of the cacophanous racket that is postmodern, pre-who-knows-what urban life, and as such they all have lessons to teach us about the cross-currents and cross-pollenizations of culture.

DISCLAIMERS: Misc. World contains no rain jokes, slug jokes, or coffee jokes. All statements of fact in Misc. World are, to the best they can be verified, true. The author will gladly retract all items proven false. All statements of opinion represent the author’s sincere beliefs; not spoofs. This column does not settle wagers.

COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The same week The Stranger pulled the plug on the newsprint version of Misc., the art-studio lofts at 66 Bell (where the first ArtsFocus Misc. was written a dozen years back) started getting vacated under orders from the building owner, who’s finally making good on his year-long threat to upscale the place out of artists’ price ranges.

BOARD-ING SCHOOL: At ARO.Space a month or two back there was this performance-art night hosted by an apparent New York snotface who, after each act, taunted the audience with condescending remarks like “This is something called performance art. Something nobody in this town has ever heard of.” I never learned whether this dork was being real or just playing a character. If he really was as parochial and obnoxious as he made himself out to be on stage, he could’ve learned a bit about Seattle’s love of the ol’ perf-art by following the growth and institutionalization of our main perf-art staging outfit.

For 20 years, the On the Boards organization staged dance, music, and mixed-performance events at Washington Hall in the Central District. For the past 10 of those years, OTB’s been trying to move to a bigger, newer facility. Finally, the opportunity arose when A Contemporary Theater abandoned the lower Queen Anne digs it had occupied since ’63, and moved into a fancy multi-million dollar remodel of the old Eagles Auditorium downtown.

OTB then raised its own big-donor bucks to remake the old ACT building for its own purposes. The results are quite impressive: A 350-seat, proscenium-style main auditorium with state-O-the-art sound and light gear, a 99-seat studio theater (still unfinished as of this writing), a library/video room, and all the other tech and support facilities a bigtime staging entity needs.

OTB had always had a reputation as one of the most “ground-level” of Seattle’s full-time arts organizations, as being open to new local talent (even in years when most of its major shows were touring imports) and in touch with the frontiers of live art and music (even in years when much of its fare rehashed the previous decade’s avant-garde).

The Brave New OTB, however, is a whole different animal. The new building, like most other new public buildings around here, bears the name of somebody who paid for the privilege (it’s “the Behnke Center for Contemporary Performance”). The group’s newsletter announcing the opening of the new building is full of plugs for various corporate sponsors and contributors, (including AT&T, US Bank, Boeing, and Microsoft), offers a “new and expanded Business Club” which “gives local companies of all sizes an opportunity to benefit from a great incentive package–while also supporting On the Boarts.” Only time (specifically forthcoming schedules) will tell how well local and smaller-scale creators will fit in the new OTB’s scheme-O-things.

SO THAT’S WHAT’S IN THE SECRET SAUCE: McDonald’s stores now sport Big Mac 30th anniversary posters, featuring pseudo-psychedelic graphics reminiscent of Starbucks’ 25th anniversary posters from two years ago. Hippies then and now, of course, have loved to invoke McDonald’s as a quintessential symbol of everything they hate about corporate America, suburban lifestyles, and meat consumption.

The mistrust was mutual. The company’s dress code back then, natch, frowned on excessive male hirsuteness. More importantly, the chain’s whole operation was (and is) built around the un-hippie values of uniformity, conformity, neatness, and efficiency. The Fifties (a Learning Channel cable documentary series based on David Halberstam’s book of the same name) featured a telling memo from McD’s top management, calling individualism a dangerous trait and asserting all managers, employees, and franchise owners will be broken into the organization’s proper spirit of total conformity. McD’s arch rival Burger King briefly used the ad slogan “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules;” Outback Steak Houses currently feature the slogan “No Rules, Just Right.” These are so false they’re not even preposterous: A restaurant chain, especially a fast-food franchise, is nothing but a set of rules. Without the standardized products, prices, and premises stipulated in a franchise agreement, there’s no reason for the national advertising or other brand-building techniques that make a chain franchise more valuable to a franchisee than simply starting his or her own indie restaurant concept. (Of course, even that’s no guarantee of success, as seen by the bankruptcy of the once-booming Boston Market circuit and the resulting sudden closure of all its Northwest outlets.)

OTHER VOICES (from KJR-FM DJ Norm Gregory): “The Washington State Liquor Control Board has a proposed new rule which would limit beer and alcohol sales at events when 25 percent of the fans are under age 21. This could end beer sales in the stands at the football and baseball games. Part of the thrill of going to the games for my kids was passing drinks down the row. I didn’t mind them handling alcohol–it was when they started the one-sip-per-drink rule.”

SURVEY SAYS: I’m asking your help for next week’s column. Seems the aforementioned changes in my publishing situation have triggered what self-help books used to call a “midlife crisis.” I don’t have a spouse to mercilessly cheat on or thinning hair to cover-up. I wouldn’t buy a monstrous SUV even if I had the money, and I’ve no desire to do the Green Acres thang (I grew up in the countryside and won’t go back). But that still leaves lots of new directions into which a gent could place one’s life. Please send any suggestions on how I should devote the next year or three (for cash income or otherwise) via email to clark@speakeasy.org. The best will appear in this virtual space next week.

‘TIL THEN, ponder these words attributed to one Louise Beal: “Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.”

AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)

I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:

• Appreciating different aromas, textures, and tastes. Discerning the difference between Ritz and Hi-Hos.
• Rudimentary knowledge of a foreign language.
• Intelligent discourse with persons of other subcultures.
• Hosting a successful party.
• Dancing (Lindy hop, Virginia reel, tap, lap).
• Holding your liquor; preventing or relieving hangovers.
• Personal health and hygeine; including brushing and flossing.
• Contraception and STD prevention.
• Chemistry; including different pharmaceuticals’ good/bad effects.
• Tanning without burning.
• Posture and bearing; preventing carpal-tunnel syndrome.
• At least one athletic or semi-athletic activity (downhill skiing, swimming, yoga, step aerobics, bowling, bicycling, Buns of Steel).
• One or more social games (poker, Scrabble, Twister, pinball, foosball, Quake,

  street hockey, et al.).

• Knowledge of the major professional sports (other than wrestling).
• Food preparation and storage; knowing how long to microwave a leftover pizza slice.
• Dining for pleasure, not merely for sustenance. Creating unusual food combinations (peanut butter on mashed potatoes).
• Discernment of fine yet reasonably-priced liquors and beers.
• Knowledge of agriculture, food technology, and the dangers of fad diets.
• Architecture and civic planning.
• Home building and repair.
• Interior design and/or Feng Shui.
• Gardening; mulching and composting.
• Acquaintance with U.S. and world literature, art, comics, film, theater, TV, and periodicals.
• Knowledge of the world’s assorted cultures, philosophies, and religions.
• Music theory and history; awareness of at least one country singer other than Patsy Cline.
• Awareness of the natural environment of your home and the larger world.
• Awareness of the history, politics and economics of your home and the larger world.
• Political action and organizing.
• Dealing with corporate and governmental bureaucracies.
• Judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the color of their lip gloss.
• Inquisitive skepticism toward public, political, and commercial speech.
• Holding your own amid hostile situations (i.e. workplaces, playgrounds). When to engage in verbal self-defense; when to keep your big flap shut.
• Value shopping; bargaining and haggling.
• Cordial relations with neighbors, relatives, and postal workers.
• Politely yet firmly declining the entreaties of proselytizers and telemarketers.
• Being nice to young children without letting them walk all over you.
• Caring for and feeding pets (biological or virtual).
• Getting along with housemates, lovers, cubicle mates, or bandmates without killing one another or even wanting to. Social negotiation and consensus-building (deciding which film to see or which pitcher to get at happy hour).
• Falling in love hard; falling out of love soft.
• Developing a healthy self-esteem, not an unhealthy egomania.
• Reinventing oneself every few years, a la Madonna or George Carlin.
• Personal discipline (getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop without biting).
• An area of knowledge associated with a different ethnicity or gender (for a man, Barbara Cartland novels; for an African American, butoh).
• Fashion design, selection, color-coordination, accessorizing, and repair.
• Sorting laundry.
• Programming a VCR and remote (not that hard, really!).
• Personal law (wills, contracts, income tax, warranties, et al.)
• Improving or repairing your credit.
• Packing a carry-on suitcase.
• Traversing your city via public transportation; reading a timetable.
• Solving crossword and jigsaw puzzles.
• Short-term weather forecasting.
• Ability on a musical instrument (including the voice).
• At least one of thevisual arts(painting, drawing, calligraphy, photography,

  cinematography, videography, Photoshop).

• Rudimentary computer usage.
• Desiging a website with no annoying “construction signs” or bad MIDI music.
• “Netiquette”: Writing e-mails to the point, but not too pointedly.
• Grammar and spelling; knowing the difference between “its” and “it’s.”
• Composing effective thank-you notes, resumes and cover letters, yearbook salutations, personal ads, and responses to threatened legal actions.
• Dressing and grooming for various occasions (seductions, funerals, job interviews, Halloween).
• Magic tricks and parlor games.
• A healthy sense of humor; jokes and anecdotes for all occasions.
• A repertoire of film, music, and TV trivia.
• How to tell different types of trees from a far distance. Number one–the larch….

———————–

Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person
Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM
Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM
From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org

Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.

Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…

I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.

Thanks for hearing me out!

Erinn Kauer / eakamouse

P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.

THE 1998 MISC. MIDSUMMER READING LIST: For the second year, we’ve a pile of old and new bound verbiage (in no particular order) to recommend as mental companions while you sit in airports, on ferry docks, in the breakfast nooks of RVs, in rain-pelted tents, and wherever else you’re spending your summer leisure hours.

The Ruins, Trace Farrell. In the ’80s I was involved in “Invisible Seattle,” a group of writers who (among other exercises) fantasized about an alternate-universe Seatown with Old World traditions and grit. This is what local author Farrell’s accomplished in her hilarous parable of working-class discipline vs. New Money hedonism; set in an Old World seaport town but based on a real Seattle supper club and on Seattle’s current caste-and-culture wars.

The Incomparable Atuk, Mordecai Richler. From the Great Canadian Novelist, a 1963 fable still relevant amid today’s Paul Simonized nobel-savage stereotypes. Atuk’s a supposedly innocent native boy from the Northwest Territories who’s brought to Toronto as part of a mining company’s publicity stunt, and who quickly falls right in with the city folk’s hustling and corruption.

Machine Beauty, David Gelernter. One of these skinny essay-books everybody’s putting out today; only this one’s in hardcover. The premise is admirable (advocating simplicity and elegance in the design of industrial products and computer software), but it’d have been better if it were longer, with more examples and illustrations.

Consilience, Edward O. Wilson. Giant essay-book by biologist Wilson, who proposes all human behavior (and indeed all knowledge) can be ultimately traced to biology and physics. He puts up a solid defense, but I still disagree. To me, the world isn’t a tree with a single trunk but a forest of interdependent influences. Life is complexity; deal with it.

The Taste of a Man, Slavenka Drakulic. For “erotic horror” fans, a novel of psychosexual madness by the Croatian author of How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. Not much laughing here; just a heroine who takes the female sex-metaphors of absorption and consumption to their logical extreme.

Self Help, Lonnie Moore. Short stories by the author of Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams, reworking women’s-magazine clichés into a far less “motivational” but more realistic worldview.

Coyote v. Acme, Ian Frazier. Light yet biting li’l funny stories like the old-old New Yorker used to run. The cast includes a cartoon lawyer, a Satanist college president, Bob Hope, Stalin, Mary Tyler Moore, and “the bank with your money on its mind.”

Eastern Standard Time, Jeff Yang, Dina Gan, and Terry Hong. Asia’s economies are on the ropes but Asia’s pop cultures are going strong, as shown in this breezy coffee-table intro to everything from pachinko and sumo to Jackie Chan and Akira Kurosawa.

Sex, Stupidity, and Greed, Ian Grey. For all haters of expensive bad movies, essays and interviews depicting Hollywood as irrepairably corrupt and inane (and offering the porn biz as an example of a slightly more honest alternative).

Behind Closed Doors, Alina Reyes. An ’80s teen-romance series, 2 Sides of Love, told its stories from the girl’s point of view on one side of the book and the boy’s on the other. Reyes (author of The Butcher and Other Erotica) applies this gimmick to more explicit sex-fantasies, putting her two protagonists through separate assorted sexcapades in assorted dreamlike settings with assorted opposite- and same-sex partners before they finally come together at the middle.

Soap Opera, Alecia Swasy. Intrigued by Richard Powers’ corporate-greed novel Gain (based on Procter & Gamble, and named for one of its detergents)? This real, unauthorized P&G history (named for the broadcast genre P&G helped invent) is even stranger.

Underworld, Don DeLillo. Mega-novel spanning four decades and about many things, principally the U.S. power shift from the northeast (symbolized by NYC’s old baseball dominance) toward the inland west (symbolized by chain-owned landfills). But with the Yankees back in dynasty mode, and financiers now overwhelmingly more influential than industry (particularly resource-based western industry), DeLillo’s march-of-history premise seems like reverse nostalgia.

The Frequency of Souls, Mary Kay Zuravleff. The best short comic novel ever written about refrigerator designers with psychic powers.

AND A READER SELECTION of sorts:

Subject: Northwest Lit
Sent: 7/26/98 5:29 PM
Received: 7/26/98 5:36 PM
From: LSchnei781@aol.com
To: clark@speakeasy.org

Clark:

Your review of the above subject completely ignored the best of the lot–Ivan Doig. Here in Fort Wayne IN where more books are read per capita than in any other city in America (there just isn’t much else to do), Mr Doig’s books enjoy a wide readership, and he is considered by many of us to be in the first rank of contemporary American writers.
Lynn Schneider (LSchnei781@aol.com)