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…but find bemusing, part 4,332: A weblog devoted exclusively to “Starbucks Gossip.”
AS THE GANG at Anthropologie take down the Xmas window displays, we mark the end of a damn-depressin’ year, both here at MISC Towers and out in the world at large.
But there have been some not-altogether-unpleasant events during it, particularly this past week or so.
On Christmas Eve Eve, the Wall of Sound folk put up a holiday fete starring the improvised vocal stylings of Les Voix Vulgaires (from left, King Leah, Detonator Beth Lawrence, and Amy Denio).
Then this past Tuesday, K Records held an intimate li’l CD release party at the Green Room bar in the Showbox building. It promoted reissue compilations by two early-’80s local “art-damage” bands, the Beakers and the Blackouts.
Ex-Beaker (and fellow Stranger refugee) Jim Anderson is shown above, introducing longtime local musician/producer Steve Fisk, who performed for the packed room on a vintage ARP synthesizer. Also in attendance: Ex-Blackout Bill Rieflin and ex-Beaker Francesca Sundsten, who’ve been a lovey-dovey couple for perhaps more years than they care to remember.
I have more memories of the Blackouts than of the Beakers (I saw more of the formers’ gigs, including several at the Showbox). In Loser, I marked the birth date of the “Seattle scene” as the date, in 1976, of the premier gig by the Blackouts’ previous incarnation, the Telepaths. The Beakers, meanwhile, were among the earliest incarnations of the Olympia scene’s indie-ideology purity shtick.
In the blurry mists of hindsight, both bands now seem to belong outside of their time and place. The bands they borrowed from (Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, the Pop Group) didn’t become VH1 nostalgia faves. Their sounds remain as brittly dissonant, yet strongly compelling, as ever.
But some retail institutions did not survive the holiday season. One was the second incarnation of Video Vertigo, East Pike Street’s own friendly neighborhood horror-and-porn video store.
Another was the Sam Goody music store at Third and Pine. It’s been there, under one chain-name or another, since the late ’70s. The building owners now want to carve the space into several smaller retail spots, possibly including (you guessed it) a Starbucks.
Among the seminar speeches and dry-research releases put forth at the recent newspaper-biz convention in Seattle was one study that claimed the elusive youth market started reading daily papers more often during the Iraq war, but didn’t stick with the habit. The trade mag Editor & Publisher quoted the survey company’s boss John Lavine as saying:
“Coffee in a can is a dead ringer for where newspapers were: It was a mature product, it was dying, everybody said its time was over — and then Starbucks came along.”
We’ve already written that the current push by the Seattle Times to kill its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer, and by extension to kill the P-I itself, could instead be an opportunity to reinvigorate the P-I as a truly independent paper, and by extension to revive the newspaper biz.
I’m convinced it can be done. Yes, a JOA-less P-I would need to get its own ad sellers and delivery vans, and either buy or hire printing presses. Getting the financing for such a venture just might be easier if it were for a new paper for a new era, something this country hasn’t really seen since USA Today first targeted the everywhere/nowhere of shopping malls and airports 21 years ago.
A post-JOA P-I, or an all-new paper that could be launched in the wake of the current JOA mess, could be a paper devised from scratch to meet the ink-on-paper needs of the Internet age. It could be neither old-American-journalism boredom nor Murdoch sleaze, but something lively and forward-looking and written to be read.
…to “Value Added Marketing” and “The Fake Little Laugh That Means ‘Bad Acting,'” Phil Agre’s compiled a long, thoughtful, personal list of “Minor Annoyances and What They Teach Us.”
IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).
THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:
…on the field? Just look at the league’s regulations regarding what corporate logos its players can wear in public.
Trick or Treat
by guest columnist Mr. Hedley Bowes
MUSINGS ON THIS PAST All Hallow’s Eve season:
It’s 1991 (the shitter) economically; and after hundreds of thousands of layoffs this year and entire sectors wiped out, the government and business communities are looking to consumers to save our collective asses.
Sen. Patty Murray introduced the “Let’s Go Shopping” bill, which would put the Federal government in the business of rebating state sales taxes for a 10-day period during the fourth quarter of the year. This was announced on Halloween, a day when we’ve all been scared into avoiding shopping malls at all costs, lest we put ourselves at risk of terrorists.
It’s been said quite often in the last month it’s our patriotic duty to go shopping. And spend money. Tell that to the corporate community and the venture-capital investors.
Never mind the record: Consumers continued to spend and buoy a sluggish economy in the four quarters since last year’s “election.” Business spending fell sharply after last November and has continued to be soft. Sure, there was a rush in the energy sector; for a while it looked like that would be where the action was. But look where Enron is today (near-bankrupt and seeking a buyer). Gasoline prices (everywhere but here) are the lowest in years.
The second “economic stimulus” package this year is aimed at stimulating big players like IBM ($1.4 billion), General Motors ($833 million), General Electric ($671 million), Chevron Texaco ($572)r, and Enron ($254 million). Any one of these corporations has the option to:
A) take the tax break and rehire or retrain employees at risk of layoff;
B) plow the money back into the balance sheet, thereby improving earnings and buoying stock value; or
C) exercise option B, while shutting domestic facilities in favor of continued offshore outsourcing.
Go ahead. As a contracted bonus-getting, shareholding C-level executive, pick your optimal A, B, or C.
Krispy Kreme, a franchise operation not from here, opened its much anticipated and over-hyped Issaquah store early one late October morning. Lines formed the night before as people camped out. One would think Mick Jagger himself was making the fucking things.
We were privileged to have a friend who camped out overnight for the precious things. After tasting one, we can say the secret ingredient of Krispy Kreme doughnuts is their high fat content. The stuff is also very likely airwhipped with powdery sweet confectioner’s sugar. A new drug for these tough times.
What’s going on here?
Historically, this region creates national (and global) trends: Microsoft, Redhook, Starbucks, Chateau Ste. Michelle, Red Robin (and any number of mid to high end theme restaurants) K2, JanSport, et al.
But things have been so quiet around here lately that a relative unknown from across the country can come in and leverage enough free PR from the local press to offset hundreds of thousands of startup dollars. And people are lining up overnight, as if they were waiting for a rock star to show up. Nope, it’s just a doughnut.
Have we lost our special place as an idea and business incubator? Or did we simply over-commit to high technology (a once darling sector) and big business that we forgot about the little things (like doughnuts)?
Game Three: Made for TV. GWB throws out the first pitch in the third game of the World Series. I watched the final inning, waiting for truth to prevail. I wanted so much for Arizona to bring the game to an even 2-2, to take it into extra innings so that we might have some hope that this was not just a made for television win. But it was not to be. And so the writing is on the wall. Through their own special brand of black magic, New York was now certain to take all three games at Yankee Stadium and take the series in seven.
Is it a matter of will? Destiny? Or (as with elections, energy markets, layoffs, tax breaks, and doughnuts) just the way things are “meant to be?”
Thankfully, this was not the way it played out. I don’t favor the Diamondbacks that much (indeed, the irony of a bunch of “desert snakes” taking on the New York Yankees in this of all years was not lost on me)
But the Yankees have come to represent the way things seem to be done in America: Presidents not elected but awarded the post by a court; corporate executives taking bonuses on declining returns on top of salaries that outstrip those of average workers by multiples of 1,000. Our world seems to be one where things are not decided but predetermined, where the decisions we do make as a people are somehow subverted, where the deck is increasingly stacked toward wealth and power: Don’t Mess With Texans (or those with Texas-sized appetites for power, wealth, fame…).
Then, in the ninth inning of the seventh game, a simple sacrifice brought the wealth and power of dynasty down, leaving in their places a restored sense of truth and hope. What’s great about baseball is that it can accomplish this peaceably. Baseball, our national catharsis—this American oddity is still very much alive.
Some local activists had a great idea, to hold a “Reclaim the Streets” party Saturday afternoon, along the lines of similar events in England and across the U.S.
The premise: A party, a celebration, an outdoor rave of sorts (albeit without a DJ booth) in a big public place, unauthorized and unofficial.
The justification: The streets, and the city, belong to the citizens, not to politicians or cops or retail chains.
The organizers wanted the event to be a celebration, not a protest. Instead of complaining about society, attendees were asked to make positive statements about creating a new world without cars or malls or dumb laws.
But that was enough of a premise to draw the usual protest infiltrators from the Revolutionary Communist Party and other bands; plus individual marchers who believed in taking any opportunity to call attention to fervently believed-in causes (Mumia Abu-Jamal, police brutality).
And, natch, it was enough to draw great phalanxes of cops (who, at one point near the event’s end, may have outnumbered the participants).
There were cops in riot gear, cops on bicycles, cops on horses, cops in cars, and cops in a big van. There were lines of cops guarding the Convention Center, a Starbucks, the new Hyatt Hotel, and Pacific Place.
There were pepper-sprayings; there were cop horses sticking their heads out at protesters. There were an estimated 18 arrests (almost 10 percent of the marchers).
“Rioting” on the protesters’ side, meanwhile, was limited to just a couple of hammered-at windows at the Gap and Banana Republic, which attracted the extended gazes of the TV news crews, which were apparently out to tell a violent-assault-and-righteous-retribution story no matter what the real situation was.
So why the heavy police over-reaction?
It’s been pretty obvious these past few weeks that Mayor Paul Schell, heavily trailing in the polls for his re-election bid, has been staging silly PR stunts to make him look better in the public eye. The amassing of all those cops (clearly instructed to protect private property above all other priorities, just as they were at Mardi Gras) may have been, at least partly, a show intended to make weekend downtown shoppers believe Schell’s finally got his act together.
And what of the event itself? How could it have more effectively communicated its message and attracted a larger, more diverse set of supporters?
The “Reclaim the Streets” ideology, borrowed whole from out-of-town and out-of-country events (the first was a protest against a British highway project), wasn’t specific to the particular situation of downtown Seattle (or even of U.S. big-city downtowns in general). There are already lotsa Northwesterners who like to live and play where there aren’t malls or cars; these people are sometimes called exurbanites or backpackers. People who’ve chosen to live in town have often done so because they enjoy the bustle and the excitement. A New-New Left celebration in Seattle ought to welcome those who actually like city life, inviting them to help try and take charge of how their city develops.
(Of course, that means it would also have to be inviting toward older people, nonwhite people, non-vegans, and people who don’t necessarily enjoy wearing face bandanas.)
‘TWAS A QUARTER-CENTURY AGO THIS MONTH that yr. humble reporter first settled in the Jet City, embarking upon adulthood after a forgettable adolescence in smaller places.
With all the hype these days about ’70s nostalgia (or was that already over by 1998?) and all the talk these days about the monstrously “World Class” burg Seattle’s become, it’s a good time to look back upon the Seattle of 1975.
Even then, the municipal cliches and cliques still plaguing us now were in force. There were the business boosters out to make us a Big League City (the Kingdome was under construction on the site of a disused railroad yard).
There were the grumblers who blamed Californian newcomers for ruining everything, who bitched at the “provincial” ways of the folk already here, or both. There were other grumblers who said Seattle was too much like Los Angeles, not enough like San Francisco, or both.
There were the folks still in their late ’20s who seemed to feel that their real lives had already ended with the end of “The Sixties,” and who saw the verdant Northwest as a place to live out their remaining years in smug contentment. There were young proto-punks who craved passion and excitement, and who naturally loathed their elders who demanded an entire city devoted to peace and quiet.
Downtown Seattle’s transformation had begun seven years before with the Seafirst Tower (now the 1000 4th Avenue Tower), and was well underway by ’75. Freeway Park and the first phase of the Convention Center had been built. But thre were still plenty of blocks of two- to six-story brick and terra-cotta buildings. The most stately of these, the White-Henry-Stuart building, was being demolished for the tapered-bottomed Rainier Bank Tower (now Rainier Squre).
Nordstrom had expanded from a shoe store into a half-block collection of boutiques, and had instituted its infamous sales-force-as-religious-cult motivational system (later imitated at Microsoft and Amazon.com). Frederick & Nelson was still the grand dame of local dept. stores; J.C. Penney still had its biggest-in-the-company store where the Newmark tower is now.
Also still downtown: Florsheim, Woolworth, the old Westlake Bartell Drugs (with a soda fountain), and a host of locally-owned little restaurants, some with dark little cocktail lounges in the back.
The “Foodie” revolution in the restaurant biz had begun, and Seattle was one of its strongest outposts. Because the Washington Liquor Board demanded that all cocktail lounges have a restaurant in front, and that those restaurant-lounges earn at least 40 percent of their revenue from food sales, operators were constantly scrambling for the latest foodie fad–French, fusion, Thai, penne pollo, nouvelle cuisine, pan-Asian, sushi, organic, and that “traditional Northwest cuisine” that was just being invented at the time (mostly by Californian chefs).
And in the U District, a little alleyway-entranced outfit called Cafe Allegro had just begun serving up espresso drinks to all-nighter exam-crammers; while Starbucks’ handful of coffee-bean stores had already been promoting European-style coffee to Caucasian office warriors. One of Starbucks’ founders, Gordon Bowker, would later help start Seattle Weekly and Redhook Ale.
There was no Weekly yet; but there was a small weekly opinion journal for movers-and-shakers called the Argus, which had just been sold by Olympic Stain mogul Philip Bailey to the Queen Anne News chain of neighborhood papers. There was also the Seattle Sun, a struggling little alterna-weekly which ran, between neighborhood-vs.-developer articles and reviews of the latest Bonnie Raitt LP, some of Lynda Barry’s first cartoons.
MONDAY: A little more of this; including the old sleaze district, the daily papers, the TV, the economy, entertainment, the arts, and politics.
IN OTHER NEWS: Some local Green Party candidates don’t get to share the stage at the big Ralph Nader rallies.
ELSEWHERE:
YESTERDAY, I discussed my ongoing ponderings about my career future. I closed with a brief remark about the burgeoining mini-industry in guidebooks, lectures and courses aimed at people with this same obsession to worry about their own career futures.
One of these books is Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, excerpted in a recent Fast Company cover story.
Godin, who’s posted his book’s full text online, is one of those many commentators who treat, as an unspoken “given,” the idea that business is, and ought to be, the single driving force and operating metaphor for human life.
He’s also one of those who proclaims that business, in this supposedly post-industrial age of global trade and info hi-ways, is entirely about marketing.
And the key to marketing, according to Godin, is The Idea.
But not every idea makes it in this ruthless, hectic world. The ideas that succeed are the ones with the capacity to spread among people like a contagion; hence the “Ideavirus” rubric.
Godin is also one of those business writers who treats the hipster-vilified Nike as an ultimate success story. He sees the Nike concept as a quintessential Ideavirus. The idea was turning athletic shoes from a commodity into a high-profit-margin fashion statement, by spending lavishly on advertising and outsourcing the manufacturing to those cheap overseas subcontractors. The flashiness of the shoes and their ever-prominent logos comprised the “virus” that helped spread that idea.
Another of Godin’s great Ideaviruses is the now Microsoft-owned Hotmail. It was not only a simple idea with a powerful promise (free e-mail forever), but it advertised itself within its own product (every free e-mail message ended with a blurb for the service).
Indeed, looking at other hot or recently-hot local companies through Godin’s prism can be quite instructive.
Of course, this is a gross oversimplification. Many enterprises start out with potentially lucrative concepts, but fail to profitably execute them. Or, the concepts are imitated by bigger outfits. Or, the concepts are successfully quashed or discredited by bigger outfits with their own agendas to push (remember solar energy?).
But simplification is what Ideaviruses appear to be all about.
It’s certainly what best-seller business books appear to be all about.
MONDAY: Should I reinvent myself according to the Ideavirus concept?
EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote something for Seattle magazine, expanding on themes I’ve been exploring here about the new face of “hipness” around town.
For the sake of our out-of-town readers and others who missed the mag, here’s the uncut version of that piece (the mag didn’t cut much):
There’s a new definition of hipness emerging in Seattle, and it’s a lot more than just “Not Grunge.”
It’s a repudiation of the whole bohemian notion of an “alternative” to “mainstream society.”
The new hipness doesn’t oppose society; it wants to lead it. It doesn’t repudiate material wealth; it wants to use it more stylishly. It’s about dressing up, seeing and being seen, and making the scene.
For a long time, to be a hipster in Seattle all you had to do was proclaim your antipathy to squareness.
And that meant almost everything approved by our civic powers-that-be.
Squareness ruled Seattle, absorbing all anti-status-quo movements.
In the ’50s, regional Teamsters boss Dave Beck turned a once-militant labor movement into a force for conservatism.
In the ’70s, many local hippies aged into either docile Deadheads or domesticated professionals.
In the ’80s, Starbucks made the coffeehouse, that beat-era symbol of artful rebellion, safe for strip malls.
In the early ’90s, college station KCMU moved away from raw noise bands, toward more retro-country and ethnic acoustic music.
For every incarnation of squareness, an incarnation of hipness emerged in response.
Ultimately, that led to the anti-fashion look and gritty sound of the “grunge” scene, so loud and aggressive it could supposedly never be tamed by the squares.
The new hipness denounces that dichotomy of having fun vs. having funds.
It says you can enjoy a creative, active life without taking a vow of poverty; that you can earn a good income without becoming a dull homebody.
It’s fueled by waves of cyber-wealth, bringing in people with youth and money, and by real-estate inflation, scatterring many old-style bohemians out of town or into non-artistic careers.
A locus of the new hipness is ARO.Space, the one-year-old dance club at 10th and East Pike. The building used to house Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, the old hipness’s most lavish (yet still funky-chic) rock club. It’s now a sleek palace of pastel colors and recessed lights, where DJs mix the latest subgenres of electronic dance music for gay and mixed audiences. The design’s fancy yet understated and reassuring, a spot for beautiful people to show off their good taste.
Under Seattle’s old hipness, gay bars were obscure, underground-cachet places (some didn’t even have exterior signage).
Under the new hipness, they’re the high-profile trendsetter spots, where straight people try to look good enough and dance well enough to fit in.
The ARO.Space formula’s worked so well that two similar clubs have opened within walking distance, Spintron and the new Vogue.
The old Vogue space in Belltown (previously a new-wave bar called WREX) was an old-hip institution done up in basic black, where two generations of rock and dance-music fans co-mingled (and where Nirvana played its first Seattle gig). The new Vogue’s a little less funky, a lot more chic, and all-DJ.
[Update: Since this was written, the new Vogue added Tuesday live gigs, a former tradition at the old Vogue.]
The owners of ARO.Space just opened the Ace Hotel in the Belltown building where the Seattle Peniel Mission and Operation Nightwatch used to be. Its stark, Japanese-inspired look of small rooms with hospital-white walls and futon-level beds got it written up in hot design magazines.
The magazines’ writers were aghast that something in Seattle was so understated, so clean, so (you guessed it) not-grunge. They apparently forgot what ARO.Space’s name implies–we make passenger planes here, so a few people here would know how to make small spaces slick-looking yet efficient.
Downstairs from the Ace is the new Cyclops restaurant. The old Cyclops (demolished in 1997) was a hip icon, serving tasty food at affordable prices to aspiring artists and musicians. The new Cyclops’s decor bears some resemblance to its homier prior self, but it’s a fancier place, serving fancier dishes at fancier prices to folks who loved the old Cyclops but can afford nicer fare now.
Establishments that served the old hipsters had to keep prices down, because their customers didn’t have much money and didn’t ever expect to. Even after “grunge” bands got big, many hipsters continued to believe nothing you ever did here mattered; lasting change or influence was impossible in squaresville Seattle; the most you could do was form a community of fellow outcasts.
The new hipness, despite its occasional lapses into shallow hedonism, at least thinks certain achievements are possible. It says high-energy music and contemporary art and design play big roles in vital urban life.
But will the new hipsters’ achievements prove worthwhile in the long run? That’s a topic for another time.
IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Bring people with you.
TOMORROW: The latest in fun inventions and designs.
ELSEWHERE: Somebody else who thinks irony is dead, and who dares to say it without “air quotes”… A next-big-thing story about Internet radio notes that traditional AM/FM listening “among those 25 and under has plummeted 10 percent in the last six years…”
FROM THE LAKE TO THE SOUND, it seems everybody in Seattle’s just giddy to find our once-fair city depicted as the fictional headquarters of the arch criminal Dr. Evil (Mike Myers) in the new sequel movie Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me. Someone who’d been frozen as long as the movie’s hero might not understand why, but from the present day it’s easy to get.
Back in 1969, when most of the film’s time-traveling plot takes place, Seattle’s World’s Fair-derived aspirations toward “world class” status were starting to stall. Boeing was heading toward massive layoffs; the Seattle Pilots baseball team was struggling through its one-and-only season before moving to Milwaukee; and a generation of young adults was starting to turn the cusp from wannabe-revolutionaries to sedate Deadheads (and, before long, to domesticated urban professionals).
Nowadays, the municipal zeitgeist’s a little different.
No longer is Seattle seen as a town to move to when you wanted to stop doing anything; a semiretirement home of smug baby-boomer complacency.
It’s now seen, by its residents and outsiders alike, as a dynamic, bombastic, even arrogant burg of hotshot movers-‘n’-shakers. Dennis Miller has referred to Bill Gates as the only man in the world with the kind of power once held by governments. And Starbucks, the booming mass-market food-and-beverage chain that still claims to offer “gourmet” products for persons of quiet good taste, is openbly reviled by Frisco elitists and by aging bohos who cling to far homier notions of what a coffeehouse should represent.
So, while the swingin’ hero Austin Powers continues his retro-mod “mojo” thing, Dr. Evil moves with the times by setting up HQ atop the Space Needle, which has been festooned (in the digitized stock-footage establishing shot and the studio-set interior) with Starbucks signs inside and out. An image of late-modern, Global Business treachery. And Seattleites love it, even if it’s a throwaway gag with no ultimate plot relevance. Oh we’re just so bad, don’t you know–but bad in a sleek, stylish way, just like Dr. Evil’s shaved head and shiny white suits.
(The film’s titular hero also gets a Seattle connection of sorts: During the opening titles, he dances to a remake of an old track by Seattle’s own musical legend Quincy Jones.)
Meanwhile, I’m surprised nobody’s compared the Starbucks reference to a similar corporate-conspiracy plotline in another thriller-spoof movie. The President’s Analyst, directed in 1967 by Barney Miller co-creator Theodore Flicker, starred James Coburn (whose In Like Flint is briefly excerpted in the new Austin Powers) as a shrink who personally treats an unseen Commander-In-Chief, only to get chased and trailed by many nations’ spies who all want whatever secrets he might know. But the ones who want Coburn most, the most dangerous force of treachery in that peak-of-the-cold-war era: The Phone Company!
Monday: Speaking of swingin’ hipcats, there’s a U.K. social critic who sees the “sexual revolution” and “queer culture” as just more consumer-culture selfishness.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
STORE #1: I love lists, so I love how the silly Random House/ Modern Library “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century” list has inspired so many folks to attempt better (more ambitious, more diverse, funnier) lit-guides. One such effort’s being compiled at the Twice Sold Tales used-book chain. Get your recommendations (up to 20) to Twice Sold’s Broadway & John store by Sunday. They’ve gotta be originally written in English and originally published since 1900; any list including Richard Bach or Bridges of Madison County will be thrown out.
STORE #2: The huge new Safeway at 15th & John opened a week before the region’s long-dominant food chain (begun by Boise’s prominent Skaggs family; now owned by leveraged-buyout kings Kohlberg Kravis Roberts; but never owned (despite the rumors) by the Mormon Church), lost its spot as America’s #1 food vendor to the merged Albertson’s and American Stores (both with Skaggs family members in their origins). The new Safeway outlet easily matches the new Broadway QFC (now owned by Fred Meyer, which was formerly owned by KKR) in size, opulence, and ready-to-eat goodies.
Why has supermarket square footage on the hill more than doubled in the past ten years (including Central Co-op’s big new branch soon coming to 16th & Madison), when its population’s increased by much less? There’s relatively fewer kids in the area, for one thing (big folks eat more; big folks without dependents can often spend more). Big stores bring more customers past the lucrative side departments (pharmacy, video, photo, floral). And, as we mentioned when the new QFC opened, supermarkets are trying to take back business from restaurants with delis, salad bars, and convenience foods.
There’s also a semi-intentional side effect: Monstrous stores, with wide aisles and gargantuan shopping carts, bring back some of the wonder that grocery-shopping trips meant when you were a kid, mesmerized by the bounty of goodies and the old Safeway yin/yang-esque logo. Just don’t do wheelies with the carts, OK?
STORE #3, OR JUST WHAT’S A BRASS PLUM, ANYWAY?: To me, the new Nordstrom store’s opening will be the final true end of Frederick & Nelson; I’ve been able to half-pretend the grande dame of Seattle retailing was still around, I just hadn’t shopped in it for six years. It’s also (as of yesterday) the end for the old downtown Nordstrom. I’ll miss that awkward amalgam of three buildings, with the front-and-back-doored elevators, the unpretentiously-pretentious all-lower-case signage, the cramped awkward floor spaces (which suited Nordy’s then-novel “collection of boutiques” concept better than any open-plan mall space could)–a place where, no matter what year’s fashions were on the hangers, the style year was always 1974.
The Stranger’s previously criticized Nordy’s sweetheart deals with the city over the new store, its parking garage, and its reopening of Pine. But let’s remember what else this company’s wrought, for good and/or ill. The downtown Nordy’s as we’ve known it opened when lots of downtown office towers were going up. Instead of the affluent-yet-careerless women F&N targeted, Nordy’s targeted office people (particularly women) who’d begun seeing themselves not as sedate corporate drones but energetic corporate warriors. (Not exactly a feminist ideologue’s vision of empowerment, but still a change.) It told the country our far corner indeed had a fashion sense (an early Forbes article mockingly called the store “Bloomie’s in the Boonies”)–and an entrepreneurial sense. Nordy’s helped perfect the workforce-as-cult model of employee relations now associated with the likes of Microsoft. Like its dressing-for-success clientele, its staffers were encouraged (or hounded or pressured) to give their all to the company and then some.
Even as its catalogs and its out-of-state stores spread an image of the Northwest as a land of carefree outdoor leisure, its practices instilled a vigorous (or obsessive or oppressive) work ethic now common at “growth oriented companies” here and elsewhere.
A piece on Microsoft’s Slate last year suggested companies like MS and Starbucks had to have copied N.Y. or L.A. styles of institutional aggression; such drive couldn’t possibly be indigenous to our countrified region. Nordy’s proved it could be and is.
SORRY TO LET YA DOWN, but Misc. just couldn’t come up with a sufficiently good/bad pun to describe the announced Quaker State/ Pennzoil corporate merger. Not even one involving the phrase “lube job.”
THE MAILBAG (via Michael Miller): “Regarding your question about being televised during a future Seattle Olympics under the `quaint local customs department,’ the answer depends. If a film crew expects me to walk around in Doc Martens, drink Starbucks, wear flannel, drive a 4 x 4, and brainlessly idolize Bill Gates, Boeing, and that idiot Chihuly, then the answer is `blow me!’ However, if they are willing to film me coming home from work in my classic Mustang, changing clothes, playing with my dogs, sneaking over to my neighbor’s mailbox, `borrowing’ her Victoria’s Secret catalog, and then jerking my stuff before yelling `Hi mom!’ into the camera, then fine, film away.”
LOADS OF SUDS: Anheuser-Busch, ever on the prowl for ways to replenish flat or slightly-declining beer sales, is now test-marketing Catalina Blonde, the “first beer for women,” in select areas (not around here yet). It’s a lighter-than-Lite concoction–half the alcohol content of regular Bud; fewer calories than Bud Light. No word on whether it’ll be promoted with tightly-dressed Catalina Blonde Boys tossing out key chains at the Flower & Garden Show.
PILOT LIGHT EXTINGUISHED: We neglected to previously report on the early-April passing of Dewey Soriano, the tugboat pilot who took effective control of the Pacific Coast League in the mid-’60s, and was rewarded for his efforts by the baseball establishment by getting Seattle’s first MLB franchise, the 1969 Pilots. He held a name-the-team contest as a PR stunt, but had already chosen to name it after his own former (and future) profession piloting commercial boats; that’s why its logo had a nautical, rather than an aviation, theme. Of course, his thin pockets could only take one year of losses at the beloved yet creaky old AAA ballpark, and by April 1970 (the same season Boeing laid off half its staff) the Pilots were sold and became the Milwaukee Brewers (now threatening to move again). The City of Seattle sued the American League, and in the settlement got the Mariners franchise seven years later. While the local dailies’ obits praised Soriano for bringing the majors to Seattle, I still wished the Pilots had owners who could’ve kept the team alive until the Kingdome finally got done. And it was touching, in a way, to see the ’98 Mariners remember Soriano by serving up Pilots-quality relief pitching in the weeks immediately following his passing.
SODDEN: Damn! The webzine Salon already did what I wanted–to request your own phony Microsoft support letters. If you’re tuning in late, the LA Times revealed a scheme wherein MS’s hired PR firms would concoct a supposedly spontaneous gush of letters and newspaper opinion pieces–all begging state and federal governments to back off from their assorted antitrust actions against the software giant. Commentator Jim Hightower calls these sorts of fake-grassroots campaigns “AstroTurf politics.” MS denied the allegations, claiming the newspaper had merely uncovered documents of unapproved PR-campaign proposals. The paper stood by its story.
It does read like something with which MS could conceivably try to get away. Except the trickery would’ve been all-too-obvious if all these supposed ordinary civilians all spouted the same leap-O-faith line–that the company’s dominance wasn’t really the result of its relentless deal-wringing and strong-arm tactics, but simply of releasing “popular” products within an unfettered open marketplace. It’s the kind of complex reality-distortion construct that too easily collapses when you try to translate it from spin-doctor lingo into more “natural”-sounding prose.
That’s where Salon’s invite comes in. They’re asking for original, equally preposterous, leave-MS-alone arguments. (Their own example letter: “Since I upgraded to Windows 95, my pancreatic cancer has gone into remission, my daughter was accepted to law school, and I won $50 in the Lotto Quick Pick.”) Send your own to www.salonmagazine.com. Or send ’em to us at clark@speakeasy.org.
