A Star and His Bucks

Book reviews for The Stranger by Clark Humphrey

8/21/97

Pour Your Heart Into It

by Howard Schultz and Dori Jones Yang

Hyperion, $24.95

There’s an indie coffeehouse in Belltown with a bumper sticker pasted inside, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Go to Starbucks.” Such folks probably also wouldn’t their friends read Pour Your Heart Into It, the memoir/ success-seminar book by Starbucks chairman/ CEO Howard Schultz. The rest of you, though, might be mildly intrigued by Schultz’s mixture of ’80s-gung-ho hustle with New Age pieties (as polished into shape by Business Week writer Dori Jones Yang). Maybe not intrigued enough to pay $24.95 for the hardcover edition, but enough to leaf through it in the store while waiting for your beverage. You won’t find much nuts-‘n’-bolts stuff about the firm’s operations, but lots of mellow reassurances about life, business, and making it. Like a to-go coffee drink from an office-tower-lobby espresso stand, it’s an unthreatening little pick-me-up that gives you pause to reflect then sends you on your way toward closing that next contract.

Starbucks’ chief asset is its unabashed upper-middle-class image, set by the chain’s original founders in 1971. There had been Euro-style coffee roasters and servers in North America for decades, mainly in college towns and Little Italys. Starbucks founders Gerald Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker (the latter also involved in the launches of Redhook and Seattle Weekly) re-imaged Euro-style coffee as a “gourmet” lifestyle acoutrement for what would soon become corporate Seattle’s favorite consumer and only officially-desired resident, the upscale baby boomer.

A comparison is due at this point: Ray Kroc was a milkshake-machine salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from Dick and Maurice McDonald, went to look at their business, and ended up taking it over. Schultz was a drip-coffeemaker salesman who, receiving unheard-of orders from a circuit of four coffee-bean stores in Seattle, went to look at its business, and ended up taking it over.

Schultz persuaded the partners to make him Starbucks’ resident marketing whiz in 1982. Schultz quit Starbucks in late 1985 to persue his own concept, a planned national espresso chain (originally to be called Il Giornale). Less than two years later, he added Starbucks’ name, stores, and roasting plant to his empire-in-infancy. His book came out on the 10th anniversary of the acquisition that formed today’s Starbucks.

On nearly every page, Chairman Howard’s hyping his company as something other than your standard mega-retailer (“Starbucks grew to more than 1300 stores and still managed to maintain its small-business sense of values”), and himself as a caring corporate citizen and a careful-yet-bold strategic planner (“If you want to build a great enterprise, you hve to have the courage to dream great dreams”). It’s all to encourage those dream-filled entrepreneur wannabes out there (particularly those who want to raise $37.5 million, what Schultz eventually needed).

Except for Schultz himself (a kid from the Brooklyn housing projects who’d gone to college on a football scholarship), the starting Starbucks core team was all local and mostly well-connected. Only when he outgrew the capacity of Seattle capital did Schultz seek out money and talent from across the country. Besides Bowker, most of Seattle’s small core of retail movers-‘n’-shakers turn up here. Jeff Brotman (Costco founder), Terry Heckler (creator of the old, funny Rainier Beer ads), Herman Sarkowsky (Seahawks co-founder), and Bill Gates pere (Microsoft Bill’s corporate-lawyer dad) are among Schultz’s original circle of investors and advisors. Whatever you think about the company, there’s no denying it’s a thoroughly Northwest-bred institution.

Another of those early investors was the uncle of easy-listening saxophonist Kenny G, who became a goodwill ambassador for the chain. Schultz writes about how G’s music perfectly matches the image of Starbucks’ stores (an image now identified with Seattle as a whole, thanks partly to Starbucks’ PR influence). No other Seattle music personality is mentioned in the book, not even Schultz’s former Viretta Park neighbor Courtney Love. Schultz writes about being “shocked” to learn from market research that Starbucks’ stores were considered squaresville by many “twentysomethings,” even though the stores were planned around the bland pseudo-sophistication most local rockers were rebelling against.

Schultz says he’s more than willing to let smaller outfits take that segment of the business. He acknowledges that as gathering places, Starbucks stands leave a little to be desired. That mom-and-pop cafés provide funkier environments, and in some cases better beverages, only feeds into Schultz’s insistence that underdog entrepreneurs can still make it. Today’s Starbucks makes espresso safe for strip malls and main streets, creating new coffee lovers who often move on to more individualistic beaneries. It’s these chain-eschewers, and the risk-it-all entrepreneurs servicing them, who fulfill Schultz’s admonitions to “Care more than others think wise. Risk more than others think safe. Dream more than others think practical. Expect more than others think possible.”

BRIEFS

Thrift Score

Al Hoff

HarperCollins

Not every big-company book made from a personal zine works. But then again, not every personal zine out there serves as a lifestyle bible, a window onto not just a hobby but a total worldview.

Thrift Score, the zine, is chock full of specific thrift stores and thrift-store finds. Thrift Score, the book, is a more generalized introduction to the topic. Ms. Al Hoff is darn near perfect in both realms. Her book’s a comprehensive lesson in the philosophy, science, and art of “thrifting.” For Hoff, shopping at charity thrift stores isn’t just cheaper and more adventuresome than ordinary retail (or commercial collectible-boutique) shopping, it’s nobler. You’re supporting a good cause while rescuing important artifacts of American life and adopting a way of life that’s simultaneously conservatory and decadent.

Existing thrift-scorers might worry: What if Hoff’s book turns too many people onto the life, increasing the number of people after the same clothes and doodads you’re after? She says not to worry: as long as you share Hoff’s eclectic enthusiasm for Stuff with a capital S, and as long as you’re not some thirift-mercenary after big-E Levi’s, there’s bound to be something way cool waiting for you in any decent thrift store.

Jet Dreams: Art of the Fifties in the Pacific Northwest

Lorna Price, ed.

University of Washington Press

The then-“progressive” yet now-unthreatening abstract shapes and colors of ’50s modern art were once new, and once they even shocked. When painter Louis Bunce proposed a big, soothing, yet completely abstract mural for the Portland airport in 1958, protestors called him a pinko and threw garbage into his front yard. Yet, on the other side of the paradox, a lot of 1948-62 arts and crafts (particularly around here) expressed wholesome themes like prosperity, efficiency, gentility, domesticity, and spirituality. They often expressed these themes in a universe of pure visuality, safely removed from the sociopolitical conflicts of everyday reality. And besides, the modernist tradition had been explicitly denounced by Stalin himself–how more cold-war-acceptable could you get?

These are some of the lessons in Jet Dreams, preserving the 1995 Tacoma Art Museum show of the same name with 21 color pix, 112 monochrome pix, and seven long essays about the artists, their works, and their context. It’s got your famous “Northwest School” boys (Mark Tobey, Morris Graves, Kenneth Callahan), their friends and comrades (Paul Horiuchi, George Tsutakawa, Richard Gilkey), and less-famous but equally-cool folks (architect Pietro Belluschi, sculptor Hilda Morris). Because there were only a few museums and almost no commercial galleries in the region then, a lot of these artists congregated around colleges and worked on government and corporate public-art commissions. This means a lot of their stuff’s still around us every day. From the Science Center arches to the downtown-library fountain to the now-old City Light Building [remodled beyond recognition in 1998], the best ’50s art still offers long-ago visions of what were then thought to be timeless themes. It, and this book, also give a glimpse into the peculiarly conservative “liberalism” now pervasive in the Northwest.

EVEN BRIEFER BRIEFS

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories (Vintage) collects 37 of the late Italo Calvino’s odds ‘n’ ends, heretofore not issued in English. While none of its pieces contains the full-borne wonder of his masterworks such as Mr. Palomar and Invisible Cities, most are still fine examples of Calvino’s highbrow fantasizing. Written over a 40-year period (some during WWII censorship), they range from modernized fairy tales to a first-person account of Neandrethal life to sad anti-adventure yarns. My favorite: an imagined interview with Henry Ford, in which the man whose company sponsored the Schindler’s List telecast explains away his own anti-Semitic reputation.

The Pin-Up: A Modest History, Mark Gabor’s thorough 1972 survey of cheesecake illustration from the dawn of lithography until just before Penthouse and Hustler drove all the art and beauty out of the genre, is back in a Taschen/Evergreen coffee-table paperback. The technical quality isn’t up to Taschen’s usual art-book standards (many pix look like they were rephotographed from a faded copy of the book’s first edition). But the pix themselves still shine with the loving efforts of the artists and models, providing a century’s worth of elegant, naughty, slick, and less-slick notions of glamour, beauty, allure, and desire. The only really dated part is Gabor’s intro, in which he apologizes on behalf of his entire gender for the images he exhibits. He’s really got nothing to be ashamed of. These umpteen-hundred pix present feminine power as diverse as all get out and universally compelling, nay dominating.

If the GenX-angst stereotype is passe (and it had better be by now), nobody’s told the Farrar, Strauss & Giroux editors who shipped Blue Mondays, Dutch kid Arnon Grunberg’s pseudo-autobiographical novel about wasting time and going broke on Amsterdam’s legal hookers. Grunberg apparently wants us to view his same-named protagonist’s increasing craving for the empty pleasures of rented skin as something akin to drug addiction. Instead (at least in this translation), Arnon (the character) comes off as an attention-starved egocentrist looking for pity and calling it love. Grunberg (the author) fails at the admittedly difficult trick of attracting readers’ sympathy to such an introverted, ungiving, unrevealing central figure. Raymond Carver handled this sort of cold pathos much better.

AS LONGTIME MISC. READERS know, I love snow in Seattle. That pre-Thanksgivin’ white surprise we had was a perfect example. It kept Eastsiders out of town while blessing urban denizens with a two-day-duration Wonderland of brightly altered vistas. Its glistening blanket offered a temporary respite from our normal Seasonal Affective Disorder-inducing grayout conditions. It created an instant holiday, a Jubilee interrupting the routines of work and school and shopping. It turned everyday life into an adventure, from Counterbalance snowboarding to parking-lot snowball fights. Yes, I know it was a horror for the homeless, but we oughta be taking better care of our brethern year-round anyway.

CATHODE CORNER: As you assuredly all know, Frasier contains enough Seattle inaccuracies to make a drinking game. (“Finish your glass if Niles pronounces Oregon “arra-gone.”) But even that didn’t prepare me for seeing John Mahoney, who plays Dad on the show, miss the following answer on Jeopardy!: “This Seattle-based coffee chain takes its name from the first mate in Moby Dick.” Speaking of local landmarks…

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH THE AVE: No merchant-sponsored rent-a-thugs harassing the street kids will improve the currently sorry state of U District retail. The District’s problems go back a decade, to when Ave landlords decided to jack up rents in one big hike. Longtime indie businesses were replaced by chains. Some of those, like Crown Books and Godfather’s Pizza, then bugged out of their leases at first opportunity). Other stores spent so much on rent, they cut back on interior improvements, merchandise, personnel, etc. Meanwhile, the long-slumbering U Village blossomed into a shopping theme park for the Volvo set. The Ave has risen and fallen several times before. It can rise again. But strong-arm tactics won’t do it; indeed, they’d just make the street’s young-adult target market feel unwelcome. Speaking of questionable neighborhood “renewals”…

WANTON-DESTRUCTION DEPT.: The end of Belltown’s 11-year artist-housing experiment SCUD (Subterranean Cooperative of Urban Dreamers, named years before the Gulf War) and its downstairs eatery neighbor Cyclops had been rumored for over a year. Now it’s official, with MUP boards announcing plans to raze the lo-rise for condos. Cyclops’ owners are already looking for a new restaurant site, perhaps in Fremont. As for the much-photographed golden Jell-O molds gracing the SCUD exterior these past five years, no fate has been announced. I’d have ’em auctioned off to benefit new artist housing (and I mean real artist housing, not the millionaire penthouses sometimes promoted under that term). Speaking of goodbyes…

`PANDEMONIUM,’ 1992-96: Most of what I’ll miss about the idiosyncratic music monthly had already disappeared from its pages in recent months: The schmooze-free gossip column, the Tacoma-centric features, the odd columns like “Town of the Month.” ‘Twas sad to see the tabloid’s “Final Print Issue” carry a Seattle instead of a Tacoma mailing address. Seattle Square, a budding commercial Web company, has bought the Pandemonium name and will now use it for music review and interview pages on its site. Speaking of what’s-in-a-name…

INTO THE DRINK: In the spirit of Husky Cola (that early-’90s fundraising soda for UW athletics) comes Keiko Draft Root Beer, from Newport, OR. Every can bears the image of America’s most famous killer whale, who starred in the two Free Willy films and now lives in a rehab tank at Newport’s Oregon Coast Aquarium. An unspecified “portion of the proceeds” from the pop has been pledged to the foundation paying for Keiko’s veterinary treatment. I’ve only seen the stuff in regular, not diet, so if you consume too much you could become, you know… There’s also Keiko Brand coffee, but I’m still holding to my no-coffee-jokes policy.

ANSWER TO LAST WEEK’S RIDDLE: Because he’s just a commontator.

YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT FOR XMAS: Your suggestions for the year-end Misc. In/Out list. Send ’em to clark@speakeasy.org. ‘Til then, consider these words by ex-Philly restaurant critic Jim Quinn: “Never eat in a restaurant where the menu is larger than the table, the pepper mill larger than your date, and the baked potato larger than your steak.”

CATHODE CORNER: After a little under two months on the air, the NorthWest Cable News channel can politely be termed on a “shakedown cruise”. What oughta be a brisk, informative roundup of regional happennings is instead a clumsy repackaging of footage from the four King Broadcasting stations. The same stories are rerun hour after hour, often with only the weather updated. I won’t talk about the evening sports guy, a comedian-wannabe who spends more time on unfunny gags than on the games. Still, it’s intriguing to hear about economic conditions in Spokane (lousy) and last month’s Oregon Senate race (wacky). I remember the semipro beginnings of CNN and ESPN, so I’ll let NWCN grow into its role. Others, like TCI customers who lost CBC for NWCN, might not be as charitable. I do sorta like how they insist on spelling “NorthWest” with software-marketing style “intercaps;” it’s a way of proclaiming your media market as a virtual nation, like when the Chicago Tribune coined the term “Chicagoland.” Speaking of media institutions…

FALLLING FLAT: The most inadvertantly fascinating part of last month’s PBS Fight Over Citizen Kane documentary was Wm. Randolph Hearst’s creaky newsreel sermon against FDR’s increases to upper-bracket income taxes. It reminded me a lot of Steve Forbes’s flat tax nonsense. Both publishers’ tactics use populist rhetoric to promote the self-interests of the wealthy, particularly those with significant inherited wealth such as themselves. The comparisons go beyond there. Forbes and Hearst are/ were party-lovin’ men-about-town known to hobnob with movie stars. Hearst’s papers provided a self-contained information system, in which no voice too far from his own worldview got heard or respected. Forbes’s magazines haven’t gone that far, but the right-media universe of talk radio, televangelists and opinion magazines (whose support the GOP candidates are courting) fulfill Hearst’s formula better than the old man could have imagined.

(If anyone saved a copy of Forbes’s short-lived entertainment-fashion mag Egg, I’d love to borrow it. It could potentially be a hoot.)

THE MATS: Once the media consolidation bill (the one Net censorship was tacked onto) was signed, the Disney/ ABC and Time Warner/ Turner Broadcasting merger plans went “on” again. The latter deal was protested in an NY Times ad: “Attention TBS Stockholders: Does Ted Turner have a personal vendetta against the World Wrestling Federation? Time Warner Beware!” Turner’s properties happen to include a rival faux-sport circuit, World Championship Wrestling. WCW scored a coup a couple years back when it signed Hulk Hogan, formerly WWF’s #1 star. I’m foggy on the details, but I believe there was tangled legal wrangling before Hogan was freed to use his stage name (which WWF had trademarked) on WCW shows. Methinks the WWF guys take their stage bombast too seriously.

ROOM AT THE TOP?: The gentrification of upper Queen Anne has gone into overdrive. On one block alone a hobby shop, a café, a bakery, a state liquor store, and a pharmacy have perished to make room for as many as seven espresso emporia and two bagel stands. And you know a neighborhood’s gone out of our hands when San Franciscans open ridiculously sublime restaurant/ nightclubs there (Paragon). Queen Anne News writer Robin Hamilton’s taking it in stride. Writing about a co-marketing arrangement between Starbucks and its new QA neighbor Noah’s Bagels, Hamilton shows her knowledge of Jewish lore in explaining how “Noah’s will play Ruth to Starbucks’ Naomi.”

PLAYING MONOPOLY: A fight for the hearts and minds of America’s youth ended with Mattel withdrawing its $5.2 billion hostile-takeover bid for Hasbro (which went on its own acquisition spree a few years back and owns Playskool, Romper Room, Selchow & Righter, and Milton Bradley). Re-create the excitement at home with your handy Barbie vs. GI Joe land war playset… Meanwhile, Hasbro’s lawyers keep upping demands for reparations against a Seattle-based adult website for using the name “candyland.com,” claiming it could be confused with the Candy Land game. If I wanted a porno-pun on a board game, it wouldn’t be that. Maybe Chutes & Ladders, or Go to the Head of the Class…

MISC.’S GOTTA HAND IT to a guy we usually like to discredit, Ollie Stone. Imagine–getting accused of tarnishing the memory of Richard Nixon!

GAME THEORY: Like other segments of fantasy/ fanboy culture, video games have either failed to attract a significant female following or never tried too hard. Some would see say it proves girls are too smart for such idiocy; others would rant about inequity and girls being prevented from growing up to become fighter pilots. Still others see an opportunity, like American Laser Games, a shoot-’em-up game firm now expanding with the Her Interactive line.

Dunno, ‘tho, about Her’s first title, McKenzie & Co. In it, according to a Variety review, you take the role of one of two “practically-perfect teenage girls,” a gymnast/ cheerleader or an aspiring actress. (“McKenzie” is the nickname of the Geo Tracker the girls take to The Mall.) Your task: “Try to get cozy with one of four dreamy guys when you’re not shopping, gossiping, trying on tons of new clothes, or putting on makeup.” In one segment, your character tries to arrange a prom date but faces turmoil “when your dream date asks you to go out with him at the same time you promised to help your grandmother do volunteer work at a hospital.” You also have to deal with “non-beautiful people like Wenda Wencke, a fish-rights activist who declares `Free the Fish’ and carries a dead carp which she hugs like a teddy bear.” It comes on five CD-ROMs (one for the main game, one for each of four dream dates) and also includes an audio CD, a mini-lipstick, and a discount coupon for two more dreamy-guy disks.

I’ve never claimed anything was wrong with beauty, or with safe fantasy outlets for nascent heterosexual stirrings. But this game glorifies the very type of “popular girl” everybody in my high school loathed. I may not have ever been “dreamy” but I’d have rather hung out with the fish girl than one of these stuck-ups.

VIRGINIA’S DARE: Belltown’s venerable Virginia Inn has evolved from a workingman’s bar in the ’70s to an art bar in the ’80s to a lawyers’ bar in the ’90s, adding deli sandwiches and going smoke-free along the way. Last month it evolved again, becoming probably Washington’s first free-standing full cocktail lounge since Prohibition. It’s all thanks to a little-publicized liberalization of the state liquor laws last summer. Full-liquor-service joints still have to offer food under the revised law, but they don’t have to maintain separate restaurant rooms or uphold the old minimum ratio of food to booze sales.

The old law was installed at the behest of big steak-house operators with major political connections (one of whom, Al Rosellini, became a two-term Democratic governor). It served to stifle creative nightlife as well as smaller restaurants. But changing tastes toward lighter eats and lighter drinks reduced the sirloin-and-Scotch lobby’s power. The new law comes just in time for nightspots to try and exploit the Cocktail Nation craze. It’s already allowed places like Moe’s, the Off Ramp, and the Easy concentrate on music and beverages instead of striving to push up food volume. I just hope the VI continues to use beer glasses in its annual glass-painting benefit for the Pike Place Market Foundation. It’s harder to get elaborate designs on a shot glass.

DROP THAT METAPHOR DEPT. (Bastyr Naturopathic Univ. trustee Merrily Manthey, quoted in that big 1/3 NY Times story on the King County Council’s project to start a subsidized alternative-health center): “This clinic we’re trying to set up here will be the Starbucks of the health care world.” Will it offer red-and-black designer colostomy bags, or Holiday Blend prescriptions? Will it dispense spitcups in regular and grande sizes? (I know it won’t serve lattes; the standard naturopathic diet forbids dairy products, along with meat and wheat.) More seriously, will it become a brand name known for adequate but unexceptional work within standardized bland surroundings?

Could be worse, metaphorwise. I recall the unfortunate street-poster slogan used in the mid-’80s by Capitol Hill’s otherwise admirable Aradia Women’s Health Center: “Are you tired of the sterile environment of a doctor’s office?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

11/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

To comply with the water shortage, your favorite column, Misc., has made its wit even drier this month.

Earlier this year, I predicted a ’70s revival. While wide ties, brown polyester and dope jokes aren’t back, we have seen the return of some of the decade’s worst musical acts (Boston, Fleetwood Mac), plus video games, environmental activism, whale-mania, and economic stag-flation. And with water supplies so low, electricity cutbacks can’t be far off.

One great thing from the ’70s we’re losing is the classic Starbucks Coffee mermaid. The chain’s new logo, previewed in flyers for its first out-of-state store (in Chicago), not only covers up the mermaid’s bust but makes her look like the “international-style” symbol of some Swiss bank or Danish tractor company.

Meanwhile, that late-’70s relic John Lydon and his latest incarnation of Public Image Ltd. have a very slick song called “Seattle,” full of lines about barricades and how “What goes up/Must come down/On unfamiliar/Playing ground.” The video, full of shots of fish and construction cranes, was all shot in London; I’ve played it 10 times and still can’t fully discern what inspired Lydon about Seattle, which he last visited two PiL lineups ago. Still, no local angle can hide the fact that Lydon, who’s now as old as the hippies were when he was slagging them as a Sex Pistol, is becoming the sort of rock dinosaur he’d denounced.

The prospects for the ’70s revival, however, may be dimmed by another decade seemingly anxious to come back — the ’30s. We’ve already got homeless legions and a plunging stock market; now comes a new twist on that nutty ’30s sport of flagpole sitting. Actor William Weir plans to continue living in a tiny room built onto a Millstone Coffee billboard at 45th and Roosevelt until Nov. 12, for a total of 32 days. “I feel like a Woodland Park Zoo exhibit,” he told the UW Daily. A Northwest Harvest collection truck is parked under the billboard…. In other ads, Alaska Airlines had two Gold Lion awards in the Cannes Goods commercials festival recently seen at the Neptune…. Joanne Woodward’s appearing, but not speaking, in Audi ads. Here’s what she might say: “My husband Paul puts his life on the line when he gets in his race car. Now I can experience that same thrill every day.”

The most telling moment at The Transit Project performance piece came at the end. I stayed at the start-finish bus stop, waiting for a real bus to take me home. The rest of the audience all left by car. For all I know, perhaps nobody at any of the performances had ever ridden a Metro bus before. They’re missing a lot of real-life drama, much more interesting than the Yuppie angst of The Transit Project, though not as well choreographed.

Local publication of the month: An anonymous flyer posted on light poles around town. For a title, it has a graphic symbol that looks like computer-punchcard lettering in Arabic. #6 has an essay on “The Freedom to Give Away Freedom,” a chart comparing gorilla and human cranial cavities, an Einstein quote, four brief poems, drawings of goddesses and half a dozen other items — all on one legal-size page.

Pioneer Square’s bicycle police unit’s gained major press attention lately. Nobody’s mentioned that Seattle didn’t have the idea first. On an early Letterman show, Harry Shearer did a skit showing still photos he claimed were from a pilot for a bicycle-cop TV show. Shearer on his bike was shown aiming a gun at some bad guys, “but of course we can’t shoot them because we’d fall off the bikes from the recoil.”

An independent convenience store in town recently displayed a life-size cardboard stand-up display of a slickly made-up woman in a low-cut evening gown. Anyone with real taste, she asserts, will treat her to a bottle of Thunderbird — one of the horrible fortified wines the county may soon ban. The idea that any Thunderbird drinker could still have enough self-control left to accurately put on eyebrow pencil is just its most obvious improbability.

Imagine the gall of the developers who announced a 150-acre theme park (similar to California’s Knott’s Berry Farm) to be built near LaConner, perhaps the only place in the state besides Port Townsend where a promoter of such a thing’s likely to get thrown into an acid-filled hot tub.

Philm Phun: William Arnold said the Union St. locations used for House of Games should be declared an historic landmark. He’s a bit late; the buildings are all slated for demolition or fatal remodeling…. Have you ever met anybody in Seattle who talks like the people inA Year in the Life?…. Vital film series to attend include Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern at SAM, A (Samuel) Fuller Frenzy at the Phinney Neighborhood Center, and 911’s Open Screening of local films and videos the second Monday night of each month at the New City Theater.

As you ponder the mixed messages of the Honda Spree scooter seen on Queen Anne with a “no-55” sticker (it can’t go faster than 30), be sure to watch Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures Sat. morns (the first consistently good thing Ralph Bakshi’s ever made), see The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle at the Seattle Children’s Theater, don’t buy cheap stocks just because the certificates make elegant wallpaper, and return here next time.