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…aka “Galloping Gertie,” places #4 on an ESPN.com list of “Worst Group Efforts.”
PRIOR TO OUR RECENT BOUT WITH CAMERALESSNESS, we visited the fabulous Tacoma museum district. We’ll go back again soon for the Museum of Glass’s new exhibit of Japanese anime artifacts.
What was around to see that day were two slick yet cool exhibits at the Washington State History Museum.
First, the permanent exhibits about the first century and a half of Caucasian settlement in the Great NW, including a re-creation of the “Hooverville” homeless camp (at the modern-day site of Safeco Field) and a “tree” displaying some of the many valuable products made from local wood.
Upstairs in the same building is 1001 Curious Things, taken from the vast collections of Seattle’s historically vital tourist-trinket stand, Ye Old Curiosity Shop. The shop used to commission Alaska tribes to make authentic totem poles and scrimshaws, and also bought, stuffed, and mounted selected freaks of the animal kingdom (below).
The state museum’s a huge, grand place that’s got its act fully together. It doesn’t just show cool stuff; it mounts entertaining narrative exhibitions with storylines worthy of any Discovery Channel documentary. Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry, scheduled to move into the temporary downtown-library space on Pike Street late next year, will have to do a lot to reach the state museum’s level of attractiveness and intrigue.
…honoring the early arrival of the dog days-O-summer.
…that hasn’t already been said and will continue to be said, ad infinitum, about the local mainstream media’s current favorite tabloid-sleaze saga, the tragic case of the wife-abusing Tacoma police chief who fatally shot his estranged spouse and then himself.
Except this: Above-the-law misbehavior, control freakishness, and delusions of omnipotence among the law’s supposed protectors should come as no surprise.
…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.
If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.
As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.
One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.
I’ve been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library’s main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).
They’re running one of those “everybody in town reads the same book” promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The panel I’ll be at will discuss Bradbury’s premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.
This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.
I’ve written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.
The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).
And kids’ attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I’ve written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.
Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.
Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early ’50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)
And no, The Word isn’t in decline. We’re more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.
And those words aren’t always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that’s become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.
Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.
The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we’re being given. That’s what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.
TWO AND A HALF WEEKS AGO, we briefly mentioned the launch of Sound Transit’s commuter-rail service from Tacoma to Seattle. What I didn’t include was a direct review of the service itself.
We’ll do that now.
As I wrote then, to take Sounder from Seattle during the train’s initial shakedown-cruise period means you go to Tacoma in the evening, then either stay the night there or take a bus back. Because the Tacoma-Seattle express bus runs on I-5, such a round trip provides an immediate comparison between the two travel modes.
It turns out the Sounder track parallels the freeway on the last couple of miles heading into Tacoma. But it’s a completely different scene. The train tracks are below I-5’s elevated little bluff. You can’t see the freeway from the train, nor the train tracks from the freeway. On the train, you go past what’s left of the Puyallup Valley farm belt (this time of year, you pass the now-harvested daffodil fields at that golden pre-sunset “magic hour”) and head right into the beautifully rusty Port of Tacoma district near sea level, offering great views of the water and the cool old warehouses. On the freeway, you’re up among other vehicles, seeing mostly billboards and car lots and chain-motel signs.
Indeed, the whole Sounder run (and intercity passenger train travel in general) offers a glimpse of an alternate America. An America that used to be; or rather a different way modern-day America might have evolved.
From the train, you’re less likely to view the everywhere-nowhere world of malls, strip malls, gas stations, parking lots, used-car lots, subdivisions, and cloverleaf interchanges. You’re more likely to see farms, factories, block-grid residential districts, and main streets.
The Sounder begins in King Street Station–or rather, on King Street’s stretch of track. You can’t go through the station’s lobby to get to Sounder; you’ve gotta use one of two separate entrances, each of which involves many stairs down. I prefer the southern entrance, descending from the little skybridge connecting Fourth Avenue to the future new Seahawk stadium.
(The skybridge is labeled “South Weller Street;” but longtime MISCmedia readers know I’m lobbying to have it renamed “South Long Street,” so the football team will have an official address at Fourth and Long.)
It takes you through the real-town parts of Kent, Sumner, Auburn, and Puyallup, to the true urban beauty that is Tacoma’s old industrial district. A brisk shuttle bus takes you from there, past the new UW-Tacoma campus, down Pacific Avenue’s long strip of great old warehouse buildings (some being revamped into restaurants and futon stores) into the long-dormant downtown, still bereft of major retail chains (other than coffee shops) but now in the process of being artified with galleries, studios, live theaters, bistros, and antique shops.
Toward the northern end of this little strip lies the gorgeous Club Silverstone, a perfectly-preserved old time eatery and bar with an elegant little dance hall to one side. It’s now run mainly as a gay bar (helping closeted Ft. Lewis personnel relieve their loneliness); but the utter perfection of the room makes it a must for any City-O-Destiny trip. (The only other elegant hashhouse I’ve seen this well maintained is the Spar in Olympia).
A historical note: Tacoma was born when the Northern Pacific Railroad wanted its own company town to be the rail line’s western terminus. (Eventually, after years’ worth of prodding, the railroad acceded to extend its tracks to Seattle.)
Central Tacoma’s decline came from the freeway, which bypassed downtown in 1965 and sent shoppers straight to the newly-built Tacoma Mall.
Thirty-five years later, a train revival could help spur the town’s fledgling comeback.
TOMORROW: Could any band other than the Grateful Dead make a living without intellectual-property enforcement?
ELSEWHERE:
ONE WEEK AGO, Sound Transit started running morning and evening commuter trains between Seattle and Tacoma (to far fewer than expected riders). Later this winter, a daily Seattle-Everett run will commence.
It marks the real start of the regional transit authority’s operations. (It’s already been running some commuter bus routes, including a few formerly operated by Pierce Transit.)
For at least the first six months, and perhaps another year thereafter, the trains will only run into Seattle in the morning and back out in the evening.
Those of us who reside here in Seatown can’t use the trains to get to the hi-tech jobs being lured to the south and north; but we can enjoy the scenic sunset rides through sprawl and small towns and the yet-unsprawled spots of countryside, into those two economically-bereft yet beautiful industrial cities. (The Everett run also includes lotsa Puget Sound views.) Then, to get back into Seattle you’ll have to ride the ST Express bus down dull old I-5.
The assumption that riders only want to go in one spoke-to-hub direction, or can be made to want to go that way by the machinations of civic planning, is a common mistake among transit bureaucrats. This dream of a Singapore- or Sim City-style ordered-from-above urban community is only one thing the Sound Transit brass has gotten wrong.
They’re also stuck in a similar rut of engineering and systems design. It could be due to the lobbying and salesmanship by the light-rail industry; or it could just be the natural tendancy of timid officials to “play it safe” with off-the-shelf technologies, whether they’re appropriate for this particular area’s needs or not.
Thusly, we get a light-rail technology that can’t climb Seattle’s hills, being put through deep subway tunnels under Capitol Hill and on a neighborhood-bisecting surface route down the Rainier Valley; along a Northgate-to-airport route which, like the commuter-rail route (running with regular passenger cars on, for now, existing Burlington Northern Santa Fe tracks), only goes north-south.
As for the exploding growth of travel to and within the Eastside, ST plans only a few more commuter bus routes and some park-and-ride lots.
And as for getting around within Seattle, they offer only the same ol’ Metro buses on the same ol’ clogged surface streets.
And the whole thing’ll cost much, much more than it ought to. Not only because of all the tunnelling and surface construction, but because potential ridership (and hence potential farebox revenue) will inherently be limited to those who need to go only between the light-rail and commuter-rail systems’ limited destinations.
I supported Sound Transit when it came up for a vote back in ’96, flawed as it was. Any alternative to auto-dependence these days is a good thing.
It’s just that it could be a better thing.
What ex-Seattle Weekly publisher David Brewster would like: Putting all the light-rail money into more commuter-hour bus routes, then cutting bus fares, eventually to zero.
What I’d like: The original Monorail Initiative’s cross-city plan, extended south to the airport (and eventually to Tacoma), north to Lynnwood (and eventually to Everett), east along additions to the floating bridges, and with an additional Eastside loop roughly parallelling I-405.
Can this be done? Physically, yes. Fiscally, yes–if there’s the will to see it through.
I don’t mean the “civic will” the daily papers and the politicians talk about–the voters and the populace getting up the guts to do what the politicians ask them to.
It’s the will to lead, so as to eventually get our “leaders” to follow.
TOMORROW: Some non-retail downtown buildings.
TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to Murray Morgan, the Sage of Tacoma and perhaps the finest historian and raconteur this region has ever had or will ever have.
LAST FRIDAY, we started fantasizing about what life might be like in a high-tech town such as this one should Internet-company stock prices collapse like some observers predict or even hope they do.
Today, a few more such ponderings.
Thousands of unemployed software developers and business-plan drafters are going to have to find new work at something actually useful, such as designing better bicycles or sewing underwear.
The affordable-housing shortage will be solved by (1) converting office-park buildings into artist live-work spaces (creating the new ‘art-cubicle’ aesthetic), (2) converting monster SUVs into mobile homes, and (3) converting suburban monster houses into apartments and rooming houses.
Thrift stores, once cleaned out by would-be eBay sellers, are again filled, this time with “shabby chic” furniture and now-worthless Beanie Baby collections.
The expensively-sold but cheaply-built condo buildings with those non-watertight fake stucco exteriors will become the new slums; while affluent families in non-Net professions (doctors, shipping brokers, janitors) will have snapped up every urban residential structure built before 1960–or even before 1980.
This means cities and towns with “real” streets, sidewalks, and houses will become more valuable to the affluent than suburbs and exurbs. The old parts of Tacoma and Everett could see higher average house prices than the new parts of Issaquah and Redmond.
Reality, as opposed to “virtual reality,” will be the next age’s entertainment craze. Live, in-person entertainment will be the upscale class’s preference, instead of distanced, “intermediated” experiences–and not just computer-based ones. The “cultured” and the intellectuals will disdain books, movies, radio, recorded music, and all other prepackaged arts even more than they currently disdain television.
One aspect of e-biz that will continue to thrive is that aspect which promises to help companies cut costs and fire workers. This means U.S. corporate annual reports will most proudly emphasize not how much money was made but how many workers were sacked (like the annual reports of British companies in the Thatcher era did).
This also means more just-in-time shipping and fewer goods sitting in warehouses.
Abandoned warehouses, then, will still become available for rave parties (with all-live performers) and art-colonizing. It’s just that they won’t be classic city brick buildings but suburban industrial-park windowless concrete boxes.
Of course, few or even none of these things might happen, or they might not happen quickly. Tech stocks (at least those not principally focused on dot-com business models) could take a gentle summer swoon (as they seem to be doing now), giving investors plenty of time to put their dough into real companies that make real things.
And some other, post-dot-com fad might begin to employ less-than-competent CEOs and an otherwise-surplus white-collar workforce, at least long enough to cushion the transition into whatever next-next-next-big-thing finally shows up.
TOMORROW: Some buildings that have been colonized by the dot-commers.
SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with that other monopolistic operation Paul Allen used to partly own.
IF I WERE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, which I’m still not, I’d ponder the following scenario with a furrowed brow:
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly. 2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold. 3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly.
2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold.
3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.
ELSEWHERE IN CONSOLIDATION-LAND, the Feds apparently believe the big media conglomerates still aren’t big enough. They want to let big broadcasting chains control even more TV/radio stations and networks. This latest proposed deregulation was entered into Congress on behalf of Viacom, which wants to buy CBS but keep the (practically worthless to any other potential buyer) UPN network.
MORE RAPSTERMANIA!: One of those media-consolidators, Seagram/Universal boss Edgar Bronfman, comes from a family that originally got rich smuggling booze across the Canada/U.S. border during the U.S. Prohibition era.
Now, he’s quoted as saying MP3 bootlegging represents such a major threat to the intellectual-property trust that he wants massive, Big Brother-esque legal maneuvers to stop it–even at the expense of online anonymity and privacy.
Meanwhile, the whole Net-based-home-taping controversy has caused Courtney Love to finally say some things I agree with, for once. She’s suing to get out of what she considers a crummy contract with one of Bronfman’s record labels. As such, Love (formerly one of the harshest critics of the Olympia-style anti-major-label ideology) has suddenly turned into an even harsher critic of major-label machinations and corruption:
“I’m leaving the major-label system. It’s … a really revolutionary time (for musicians), and I believe revolutions are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway. So we might as well get with it and get in the game.”
RE-TALES: Downtown Seattle’s Warner Bros. Studio Store has shuttered its doors. Apparently the location, across from the ex-Nordstrom in the middle of the Fifth-Pine-Pike block, isn’t the hi-traffic retail site big touristy chain stores like. (An omen for Urban Outfitters, now also in that stretch of the block?)
In more positive out-of-state retail-invasion news, you no longer have to go to Tacoma to buy your chains at a chain store. Seattle’s now got its own branch of Castle Superstores, “America’s Safer Sex Superstore.” It sells teddies, mild S/M gear, condoms, vibes, XXX videos, naughty party games, edible body paints, and related novelties. It’s in an accessible but low-foot-traffic location on Fairview Ave., right between the Seattle Times and Hooters.
TOMORROW: Some differences between the real world and the world of the movies.
Stadium Blackmail, Tacoma-Style
by guest columnist Doug Nufer
(YESTERDAY, our guest columnist wrote about Safeco Field, that tax-subsidized sports palace where the most expensive seats can be among the worst. Today, he contrasts that with the supposedly more populist ideal of the minor leagues.)
RATHER THAN BROOD like a nowhere man, I try to be a good citizen of the contemporary sports utopia.
But then, I’ve always been a sucker for outdoor baseball.
A cloudy forecast sent me to Tacoma the weekend the Yankees were in Seattle, because I’d rather spend hours in the rain than any time sitting inside a domed stadium because of a mere threat of rain.
Unfortunately, but predictably, Triple-A baseball in Tacoma is threatened by a series of factors, some of which are all wet. The Tacoma Rainiers, owned by chicken mogul George Foster of northern California, demanded $22 million from the city last winter for stadium improvements (i.e., luxury boxes).
Then, as if to facilitate an exit strategy for the 40-year-old franchise, the Pacific Coast League gave them more weekend games in April and May than in August (one weekend series).
Since Foster bought the team from a Tacoma group put together by ex-GM Stan Naccarato, he had taken some drastic and initially effective measures to deal with the utopian math of minor league attendance figures, where giveaways inflate totals but, nonetheless, fill the park with thirsty and hungry fans. He cut back on freebies and created an “on-deck club,” doling out special perks to the country-club set.
But how do you sell luxury boxes in a town that’s 35 miles away from a stadium that, except for the luxury boxes, exudes luxury? Tacoma big shots might rather spend a few thousand bucks on a season ticket plan in Seattle.
And why spend $5 to get into Cheney Stadium when that’ll get you into a Mariner game? Last year the Rainiers appeared to fall back into the Tacoma Tiger policy of having a lot of free ticket promotions. Beer is cheaper in Cheney ($4.75 for a big Grants vs. about that much for a 12-oz. Bud in the bigs), but smuggling food is legal in Seattle’s taxpayer park and allegedly illegal in Tacoma’s.
Other than that, there’s Tightwad Hill, looming over the right field wall, offering the ultimate utopia for the outdoor baseball fan, a place to smoke cigars and drink cheap beer for free.
Ballparks age, die, and get razed or imploded. Somebody has to pay for all of this destruction. Why shouldn’t it be you?
If Paul Allen buys a special election to build one football stadium on the contingency of annihilating of another one, rather than denounce this as a travesty of democracy, maybe we should appreciate the civics lesson.
It doesn’t matter that he spent more money than anyone ever did on an election, or that the people in Seattle voted against his scheme. He won.
And in the utopia of sports, winning is everything.
MONDAY: For May Day, a piece on the Way-New Left.
SOMETIME LATE LAST YEAR, erstwhile Stranger music writer Everett True called for a “Campaign for Real Rock” (inspired by the British beer-lovers’ lobby, the Campaign for Real Ale).
True’s premise: Just as the great British brewing traditions were being threatened by callous cost-cutting measures at big corporate breweries, so was classic American hard rock n’ roll threatened by the commercial-pop acts manufactured by the major record labels.
True’s gone back to the U.K.; but without him, real rock (or, as Backfire zine editor Dawn Anderson calls it, “Rawk”) is back. Alas.
Lost in most mainstream-media coverage of rape and pillaging at Woodstock 99 was the fact that the festival bore only a trademark connection with the ’69 original. This festival was not a corporate exploitation of “Peace and Music” but a showcase for harder, louder, more aggressive acts, especially on its last night.
Now there’s a radio station devoted entirely to the likes of Limp Bizkit, KORN (the group which relegated BR-549 to being only the second most popular band with a Hee Haw-derived name), Eminem, Kid Rock, etc. etc.
It’s called “The Funky Monkey,” though its official call letters are KKBY. It had been a fairly progressive, Tacoma-based R&B station, but hadn’t turned a profit with that format; so it’s now going straight for the white-gangsta-wannabe market.
The contrast between the station’s new and old formats couldn’t be much more stark.
The old KKBY had played music by and for African-Americans who’d long ago gotten weary of gangsta rap, that “authentic ghetto voice” concocted or at least pushed by Hollywood promoters eager to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages.
The new KKBY plays mostly white artists who’ve taken the gangsta acts’ “Xtreme” hiphop (via such crossover pioneers as the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction) and removed all blackness except for a thin veneer of supposed street-credibility. White artists “admiring” their black gangsta forebearers for fostering an image of doped-up, violent, woman-hating jerks with a finely-tuned fashion sense.
In other words, “Angry White Rappers.”
A mostly-white continuation of former black-music trends many black listeners had rejected. (Which is nothing new. Black audiences have long rushed to the Star-Off Machine after a black-music subgenre had been infiltrated, then taken over, by white acts, from big-band to doo-wop.)
This new white-rock-rap genre (KKBY calls it “the new heavies”) is at least as stoopid as most other Rawk waves over the past three decades. What’s different is the level of personal aggression–a rage often not against the machine but against one’s peers and the opp. sex. Rock n’ roll used to be about trying to seduce, to woo, to attract sex. The “new heavies” are often boasting to other males about their sexual prowess, while snarling at females to shut up and take it.
I’m really trying not to sound here like an old fogey–or worse, an old rock critic. There are too many parallels in what I’ve written above to the ’50s critics who loved authentic black R&B but loathed that commercialized white teenybopper corruption of it known as rock n’ roll.
And, there are some signs of non-idiocy within the genre. Eminem, at times, approaches the electro-laconic wit of, say, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. And those old-school new-heavies, the Beastie Boys, know the ultimate idiocy of the “Wigger” stance (and also shouldn’t be blamed too much for having some of the same retro-fetishes as Quentin Tarantino).
But compare these SK8-rappers to the best real hiphop and a wide creative chasm remains. Even the most corporate of fin-de-siecle R&B product-suppliers, such as Missy Elliott or Sean Combs, has a sense of the complex potentials of their music you can’t find in Insane Clown Posse, and certainly not in white doodz who wish they were Insane Clown Posse.
TOMORROW (in person):Get everyone you know, plus any strangers you might run into, to get to the big promo event and reading for The Big Book of MISC. tomorrow night, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.
TOMORROW (on the site): The beauty that is The Imp.
IN OTHER NEWS: The good news is Seattle’s public-access cable channel’s getting a massive infusion of new studio equipment. The bad news is the whole studio will be out of commission for at least two months during the renovation, so everything on Channel 29 (probably starting in October) will be pre-taped on location, or a rerun of an older studio show.
ELSEWHERE: This new learning-tools site for schoolkids features some of the dumbest adult-writers-trying-to-sound-young slang ever attempted–even in the plot summaries of major books!… Speaking of learning tools, will Microsoft’s new print dictionary include nonstandard definitions for “monopoly,” “coercion,” or “protection racket”?… Now, for a limited time only, you can make up your own Netcolumn. The professionally-constructed ones you find here at Misc. World, of course, will still be better….
Local Bands On Parade
Record review roundup, 11/18/98
GIRL TROUBLE Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays (Wig Out) ****After 15 years years of high-test garage shows, and five years after the group’s last recording, Tacoma’s own masters of fun-time three-chord power finally have another record out, even if the members did have to release it themselves (with distribution help from Estrus). It’s loud, it’s fast, it’s smart-alecky, it’s smart, it’s their best ever. My fave part’s singer K.P. Kendall’s sax solo on “Strother Martin,” but it’s all great. Kendall’s vocal snarls blend perfectly with Kahuna’s guitar, Dale Phillips’ bass, and Bon Von Wheelie’s drums (yes, the only girl in Girl Trouble’s the stick-slammer). This disc firmly establishes Girl Trouble as the true successors to the T-Town hard-pop tradition of the Wailers and the Sonics. Get it. Now.
VARIOUS ARTISTS Designer Drug Volume Two (Estate) **
Estate entrepreneur Wallace Hargrave had been out of action for much of the four years since his first Designer Drug collection. The story why (the death of a bandmate and his own near-death) is very briefly touched upon in the liner notes. When combined with the online memoir of Hargrave’s ’80s punk-scene existence, it’s is one of the all-time hard-luck tales, as powerful as anything on his second compilation of his and his friends’ bands.
Like most indie-label promo compilations, it’s an uneven batch (that’s what programmable CD players are for). Among the several highlights: Primate Five’s almost dangerously aggressive garage stompin’; Pretty Mary Sunshine’s mix of ethereal vocals and art-damage guitar; Iron Beef’s sprightly power-pop ode to Sumo wrestling; and, completely out of place yet the best thing here, Michael Rook’s ultra-ultra-fast composition for a computer-controlled acoustic piano. There’s also some old-school metal, acoustic-metal, and metal-punk hybrid cuts (there used to be a word for that latter genre; darned if Ican’t remember what it was).
SLUGGER Back to Our Roots (Swizzle) **
That brief early-’90s subgenre, the three-girls-and-a-boy-drummer band, returns via this snappy suite of harsh yet cheery hard heartbreak tunes. If you like Goodness or remember the likes of Maxi Badd, you could get into Slugger.
XING Worldwide (Laundry Room) **
You could wait for your favorite ’80s new wave stars to show up on reunion tours at the Fenix or Ballard Firehouse. Or you could listen to the Portland combo Xing, which recaptures the expansive synthpop stylings of Gary Numan, A Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, Missing Persons, et al., without directly aping any one of them. A pleasant little trip back to yesterday’s sound of tomorrow.
17 REASONS WHY The Dark Years (Laundry Room) **
It says here 17 Reasons Why won Musician magazine’s 1998 “Best Unsigned Band Competition.” It’s easy to hear at least a few reasons why: Slickly written and produced singer-songwriter ballads with standard neo-soft-rock band arrangements backing Sattie Clark’s nice, unthreatening vocalizings. It’s nice, it’s laid back, it’s mellow. I hate laid back and mellow. I prefer something distinctive–even distinctive mediocrity–over the merely well-made.
LOSER s/t (self-released) **
Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow produces the first two tracks, which would make a dandy little cynical-pop 45. They don’t have the lyrical bite of Stringfellow’s own work, but they could otherwise pass for a Posies cover band. Then we get to the group’s own production work, which sounds more like Revolver-era Beatles. They do a fully competent job at it (at least as good as the Rutles did), but the Beatles’ own material is already widely available on CD. This three-man Tacoma combo oughta work some more on getting its own sound together.
MISC. was quite amused by the reader who spotted seeing a billboard in Barcelona for something called “Tacoma Jeans” (but was a wee bit offended by her follow-up remark, “Does that mean they smell bad and you can’t have any fun in them?”).
THE KALAKALA IS HERE NOW, and that’s apparently good news to the folks back in Kodiak, Alaska. According to a Kodiak couple I met who are wintering in Seattle, nobody there could stand the dead-fish smell that stank up the whole harbor during the three decades the ex-ferry spent stuck in the mud up there as a non-floating fish processing plant. The better news is the boat no longer reeks, even though it currently looks a ways from its former glory. Most of the dead-fish smell apparently came from the dead fish themselves while they were on the boat; what was left got cleaned away when the restoration crew prepared the classic ferry for its tow back to Seattle.
THE MAILBAG: A kind reader recently called to my mind a strangely prescient plot point in the otherwise snoozerific Sly Stallone flick Demolition Man (1993). Cop Stallone and crook Wesley Snipes wake up after decades of cryogenic “sleep,” to find themselves in a relentlessly pacified future–where every restaurant was a Taco Bell. Does this mean that chihuahua dog will have actually won his ‘Gorditas revolution’?
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Quisp is back in Seattle! Yes, QFC has stocked Quaker Oats’ original “Quazy Energy Cereal,” made famous in a series of classic Jay Ward/Bill Scott TV commercials starting in 1964 (in which the cute l’il spaceman with the built-in propeller on his head battled the macho tuff guy Quake, who also had his own cereal). Quake cereal disappeared in the early ’70s but Quisp hung on, though in recent years it was only distributed under that name in a few regions of the country. The rest of us had to settle for “Sweet Crunch,” the same “little golden flying saucers” packaged in a cello bag as part of Quaker’s bargain line. But now the cute spacedude’s face once again graces local shelves, on boxes that even offer your own $16.95 collectible Quisp wristwatch. I’m happy.
WATCH THIS SPACE: Denny’s is planning to go into the ex-Pizza Haven #1 building on University Way (most recently a dollar store). ‘Bout time the Ave had another 24-hour inside-dining place again (I love the IHOP, mind you, but sometimes you need something else at 4:20 a.m.).
EXCESS (IN) BAGGAGE?: In the late ’80s, during a cyclical height of fears concerning foreign terrorist attacks, a local performance artist actually got a gallery commission to travel around the world wearing a giant badge reading “AMERICAN TOURIST.” For this year, Perry Ellis has come out with a whole line of designer luggage bearing the name “AMERICA” as a brand logo. Does this mean Americans are no longer afraid to proclaim their nationality when traveling abroad, or that said nationality can probably already be inferred from their loud ties and uncouth attitudes?
MAGAZINE OF THE WEEK: Mode doesn’t complain about skinny women in fashion pictures. It proactively depicts wider ladies as perfectly attractive in their own right. I know guys who are into the pix in Mode and I can see why. It depicts women who love themselves, feel comfortable in their world and in their bodies, and would probably be lotsa fun to be around. Still elsewhere on the stands…
A DISTURBING TREND: Recent Cosmo and Playboy sex surveys claimed collegians aren’t doing it as much as their ’80s predecessors. Something clearly must be done to reverse this. Maybe part of the problem’s in the mags themselves, and the rest of the corporate media. For decades, humans have been commercially urged to sublimate their natural erotic cravings, into the care and feeding of the consumer economy instead of their own and their lovers’ bodies. Men are old that “women leave you” but a Toyota pickup won’t; and that “it’s a widely held belief” that men who wear a certain brand of shirts “are widely held.” Women are told it’s less important to have sex than to merely look sexy, which can only be accomplished via the purchase and use of assorted garments and products. Then there’s the postcard ad showing a perfect-preppy couple clutching in their undies with the slogan “Things get fresh when you unwrap it,” advertising “the gum that goes squirt.”
Maybe instead of using sex to sell products, we in the alterna-press, zine, and website communities could re-appropriate the language of advertising to promote more sex:
Speaking of public service sloganeering…
CATHODE CORNER: A current anti-drunk-driving public service ad and a current motor-oil commercial are both using ultrasound fetus imagery. The former spot shows what the titles claim are in vitro images of a baby who was “killed by a drunk driver on her way to being born.” The latter shows an animated baby who repositions himself from the classic fetal position to a stance approximating the driver’s seat of a race car, and who then pretends to grab a steering wheel and roar away (tagline: “You can always tell the guys who use Valvoline“). Wonder if the second baby will grow up into someone who’ll run over someone like the first baby.
THOUGHTS ON TWIN PEAKS VIDEO NIGHTS AT SHORTY’S: This might strike some of you in the hard-2-believe dept., but next February will mark 10 years since David Lynch filmed a TV pilot film in North Bend and environs, and forever publicly linked Washington state with coffee, owls, and demonic serial killers. At the time the series ended in the spring of 1991, I was semi-distraught that something this beautiful, this perfect evocation of everything I found funny and evil and odd and fetishistically square about my home state could die. (Nobody knew the “Seattle Scene” music mania would reiterate many of these themes on a global stage by the end of that year.) Then, while watching the episodes on the Bravo cable channel a couple years ago, I realized the series couldn’t have gone on much longer anyway. Lynch was and is a filmmaker, not a TV maker; by breaking so many of the rules of episodic television and mass-market entertainment (among the transgressions: treating the victim in a murder-mystery plotline as a human, tragic figure instead of a mere puzzle piece) he and co-producer Mark Frost essentially doomed TP to a short, intense span on the air. The large cast, now dispersed to such other projects as LA Doctors and Rude Awakenings and Stargate SG-1, means we’re not likely to see any more reunion movies–except in written form, thanks to the sci-fi-born institution known as fan fiction. (Shorty’s, 2222 2nd Ave., screens episodes at 7 and 10 p.m. Tuesdays; 21 and over.)
THOUGHTS ON THE NEW RUBY MONTANA’S STORE: Even a cute knick-knack shop feels it has to grow up and become a retail-theater experience (albeit a mighty cool one, with elaborate hunting-lodge decor complete with a hand-carved fake fireplace). And since when did the daily papers start calling Montana’s new landlord, Ken Alhadeff, a civic leader and philanthropist? Doesn’t anybody remember this is the man who tore down the beloved Longacres horse-racing track for Boeing offices?
THOUGHTS ON THE BEATLES PHOTO-PRINT SHOW AT ANIMATION USA: Contrary to what dumb newspaper columnists like Tony Korsheimer still claim, Those Kids Today do not know the Beatles only as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” Folks who’ve come of age in the late ’80s and ’90s have been inundated with Beatles nostalgia all their lives, but have never heard of Wings (except for poor Linda, who preached a healthy lifestyle and got cancer anyway).
ANOTHER PERSONAL TRAGEDY: Just learned about the death of an ol’ pal from lung cancer. I didn’t hear about it until weeks later (apparently everybody who knew about it just assumed everybody else who knew her had also heard). She was one of the old-school punx. She got her kid, now nine, what might have been the first all-black baby wardrobe in Seattle. Now the kid will go off to live with other relatives, and I’m left with images of her smoking outside the office where we both worked in the ’80s. Like many smokers, she talked about quitting a lot, and actually attempted it several times. I’m also stuck with images of the many hipster kids who’ve come after her, many of whom actually believe smoking’s rebellious (yeah, becoming physically dependent on the products of Jesse Helms’s corporate buddies is like so anti-establishment) or it’s OK if it’s that smaller brand the kids mistakenly think is made by native Americans (it really isn’t).
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, don’t smoke anymore please but go ahead–have some sex. You’re worth it.
(Got any more slogans to help get the kids off the streets and into each other? Suggest them at clark@speakeasy.org.)
EARLY PROJECTIONS: This paper’s previously chided the Cineplex Odeon Meridian Cinemas, mainly over its lack of union projectionists. But the Pike St. multiplex has one good thing going for it: This past Thanksgiving week, it showed movies as early as 10 in the morning. Morning movies are a tradition in towns with costlier downtown real estate, where theaters have to maximize their assets; they also make “nightlife” not just for the nighttime. Let’s get it and other theaters to open early on a regular basis, at least on weekends. Instead of dinner and a movie, I say why not breakfast and a movie? See a show before heading off on weekend errands or shopping trips. And there’s nothing like a little drama before that dreary job. In other entertainment news…
PASTA PARTICIPLES: One of the fun things about following rock bands is the fun n’ confusion when different outfits take the same names. In my years I’ve heard of two different bands called the Cunninghams, two sets of Feelies, two Screams, two Clubber Langs, three sets of Mutants, and as many as three Nirvanas besides the famous one. Even individuals in the biz can be confused for one another; i.e. the musician/ producer Tim Kerr who has nothing to do with the founder of Tim/Kerr Records. Most recently, Kramden’s Bar and Grill way up on Aurora has advertised an R&B cover band called Eddie Spaghetti and the Meatballs–no apparent relation to the Eddie Spaghetti who’s fronted the cow-punk Supersuckers these past five-plus years. (On a similar note, Minus Five/ Young Fresh Fellow Scott McCaughey sez he’s no relation, as far as he knows, to Iowa’s young fresh McCaughey septuplets, even though both families pronounce it “McCoy.”) In still other entertainment news…
PANTS PARTICIPLES: Loved the notion of an all-female Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (by the new troupe Heads Up Gorgeous at Book-it’s stage). Shakespeare’s plays were originally executed by all-male casts; it’s only appropriate to have reverse-drag of sorts in Tom Stoppard’s sideways take on Hamlet. It also gives a chance for actresses to appear in strong roles that have little or nothing to do with sex or romance, something classic and even modern-classic theater hasn’t enough of. In other gender-related news…
BUYING CHAINS AT A CHAIN STORE: By now you’ve seen the ads for the Castle Superstore, the region’s newest and largest sex-toy shop. Is it worth going the 40 miles to Tacoma for? Probably not, at least not just for the merchandise; mostly the same stuff you can find in Seattle at Show World/ Fantasy Unlimited, Champ Arcade, the Crypt, and/or Toys in Babeland. What sets it apart is its highly female-friendly setting, in a suburban big-box store building (formerly Olympic Sports) right down Tacoma Mall Boulevard from the Discovery Zone and Chuck E. Cheese. Under bright fluorescents, along clean carpeted aisles, you’ve got stacks and stacks of X videos (straight and gay; buy or rent), lace teddies, handcuffs, condoms, body-part-shaped candies, Hustler magazine-brand vibrators, inflatable party dolls, hard- and softcore magazines (all shrink-wrapped), cat-fight paperback novels, oils, creams, perfumes, penis “desensitizing” gels, and more.
The day I was there it had a substantial and very coed clientele, all regular, Sears-clad folks out to make their private lives a bit less drab. There were no nervous giggles, no eyes darting away in shame–just apparently well-adjusted people comfortable with their bodies and with the sight of other people’s bodies. But the arrival of Castle (a Phoenix outfit trying to go national) doesn’t just represent the mainstreaming of the sex biz but the chaining of it. It proves there’s no retail niche too specialized or too outre for the consolidators.
SHOPPING DAYS may be winding down, but you’ve still time to send in your recommendations for the annual Misc. In/Out list. Send yours to clark@speakeasy.org. Remember, we seek people, places, and things that will become hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot now. If you think everything that’s presently big’s just gonna keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Macauley Culkin fan-club merchandise to sell you.
