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MISC., the column that likes to think it knew better than to plant delicate little outdoor plants just before last Saturday’s overnight near-freeze, is proud as heck that ex-Steelhead zine editor Alex Steffen has not only taken the helm of the once-moribund local advocacy group Allied Arts, but has, along with his colleagues in the agency’s new leadership, issued a strong call for Seattle to become a city that actually supports the arts and artists, instead of merely coasting on its decaying “liberal” reputation as an excuse to subsidize construction projects and rich people’s formula entertainments. Speaking of which…
BOARD GAMES: A few nay-sayers in the performance-art community have privately suggested that the board members of On the Boards fired artistic director Mark Murphy, who led the production and theater-management outfit to national prominence, because those board members supposedly wanted to turn OTB away from art-for-art’s-sake presentations and closer toward yupscale commercial crowd pleasers, whatever those might be in the realms of modern dance and post-jazz music. (Mellow acoustic folkies? Lord of the Dance clone acts?) Anyhoo, I don’t quite believe the story. I have no proof either way, but I can imagine the board firing Murphy out of little more than personal spite. It’s still a shameful situation that shouldn’t have happened. Murphy’s possibly the best arts promoter this town’s seen (outside of the rock and DJ-music realms) since COCA’s heyday. Part-time board members can come and go, but an artistic director like Murphy’s someone you oughta try to keep under most any circumstances.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. goes to press this week! Everything’s on schedule for the Tues., 6/8 release party, now tentatively scheduled for the new Ditto Tavern at 5th & Bell. Mail orders are now being accepted; online ordering’s still in the process of being set up. The updated version of my older book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, also continues apace, with that publication date still more-or-less set for late Sept. or early Oct. I still wanna know which 1995-99 local acts ought to be mentioned in it; make your nominations at our splendido Misc. Talk discussion boards.
UPDATE #2: Summit Cable has resumed transmitting the public access channel 29 after one week in which it claimed TCI had ceased feeding the channel to it and TCI claimed Summit was simply not receiving the feed properly due to an engineering glitch of some sort.
UPDATE #3: The Speakeasy Cafe will remain open! And, as I’d recommended (not that they deliberately followed my advice or anything), its post-June 1 format will reiterate its core identity as an Internet cafe and low-key Belltown neighborhood hangout joint. The money-losing food-service side of the operation (soups, salads, sandwiches, hummus) has already been cut back. Within three weeks, there’ll be no more cover-charge music shows in the front room (which, besides drawing negative attention from the Liquor Board and the pool hall upstairs, detracted from the drop-in atmosphere an Internet cafe needs). While some music events may continue in the Speakeasy’s back room, the end of front-room shows means the loss of what had become a premier venue for Seattle’s vibrant avant-improv scene. Elsewhere in clubland…
DANCING TO THE TUNE OF $$: 700 Club/Last Supper Club entrepreneur Bill Wheeler says he loves being the target of that hate poster some anonymous Judas has pasted all over Pioneer Square, headlined “The Last Supper Club: All Hype” and berating it as a cash-grubbing nouveau riche hangout, a traitor to the supposed “tribal” spirit of the dance-music community. Wheeler says he couldn’t have generated better publicity had he made the poster himself (which he insists he didn’t).
Wheeler’s also quite proud of the expensive, elitist reputation his new club has so far succeeded in creating, and which the poster-creator loathed: “Can you believe it? People are paying $50 to get into the place! This is what Seattle’s needed.” Well, loyal Misc. readers already know what I think about headstrong San Franciscans (which Wheeler would freely admit to being) unilaterally proclaiming what Seattle needs, so I won’t persue that remark any further. As for paying that kind of money as a cover charge for entree to DJ music and a no-host bar (and suffering, on heavy nights, from a disco-era “selective door” policy), I’m fairly confident true Seattle hipsters can discern whether it’s worthy of their bother and their $$ or not. If not, I’m sure the savvy Wheeler can keep the business going by remarketing it to certain cyber-wealthy squares who think they can buy their way into hipness. Speaking of dance-club goers and notions of what’s hip…
HET-SETTERS: Entrepreneurs in the Tampa-St. Petersburg, Fla. area (you know, home of the nation’s raunchiest strip-club scene and the region that tried to take away our baseball team) have launched a line of T-shirts and other logo apparel called “Str8 Wear,” purporting to announce heterosexual pride. Of course, that’s the sort of thing that stands to easily get misconstrued as gay-hatred. The designers insist in interviews and on their website that “We’re not anti-gay, we’re pro-heterosexual,” and merely want to offer “your chance to let everyone know you are proud of your sexuality,” via “an emblem that will identify you as a person who is available to the opposite sex.” It’s especially intended, the designers claim, for patrons of certain dance-music clubs and other urban-nightlife scenes where anyone who’s not gay might feel themselves branded as total out-of-it squares.
There are other problems with the Str8 Wear concept. It invites its wearers to see themselves as a tight li’l subculture via a term that merely indicates belonging to a vast, undifferentiated majority (except when referring to that punk-rock subsector, “str8 edge”). (But then again, merchandisers have long tried to persuade customers they’re expressing their invididuality by being just like most everybody else.)
A more positive, even more provocative, alternative might be the models at that T-shirt store on University Way, “I (heart) Men,” “I (heart) Women,” “I (heart) Cock,” and “I (heart) Pussy.” These come closer to provoking some of the anti-hetero biases that still exist in an urban-hipster culture where, too often, “sex positive attitudes” are permitted only to gay men, lesbians, and female-dominant fetishists.
In the square/conservative realm, sexually active straight men are often denounced as selfish rogues (or, more clinically, as “sex addicts”); and sexually active straight women are still often disdained as sluts (or, more clinically, as suffering from “self esteem issues”).
In the so-called “alternative” realm, straight men are often viciously stereotyped as misogynistic rapist-wannabes; and straight women are often condescendingly treated as either the passive victims of Evil Manhood or as really lesbians who just don’t know it yet.
As I’ve said from time to time, we need to rediscover a positive vision of heterosexuality, one that goes beyond the whitebread notion of “straight” and toward a more enthusiastic affirmation of one’s craving to connect with other-gendered bodies and souls. Hets don’t need to differentiate themselves from gays as much as they need to learn from them. To learn to take pride in one’s body and one’s desires, no matter what the pesky stereotypers say about you. Elsewhere in gender-identity-land…
BEATING AROUND THE BUSCH: The big beer companies, seeing the money to be made in gay bars, have for some time now tried to position themselves as at least tacit supporters of the gay-rights cause. Miller (owned by Jesse Helms’s pals at Phillip Morris) has cosponsored the Gay Pride Parade in Seattle for several years. Coors (owned by Orrin Hatch’s pal Pete Coors) has run ads in gay magazines claiming the company’s a lot queer-friendlier than popular rumor has sometimes alleged. And Anheuser-Busch has placed huge ad banners inside gay bars reviving (and repurposing) the Bud Light ad-tagline from a few years ago, “Yes, I Am.” Now, the company’s devised an ad for mainstream magazines depicting two men holding hands; quite possibly the first time this has been shown in any big company’s product ad (even the Chivas Regal ad from a few years ago had its gay couple maintaining proper distance while they jogged along a beach). The slogan: “Be yourself, and make it a Bud Light.” Apparently, the company’s got hundreds of homophobic phone callers denouncing the ad. If you want to show your support, you can dial the same number (1-800-DIAL-BUD). Remember, you can approve of this modest symbol of inclusiveness even if you never drink the beer.
‘TIL NEXT WEEK AT THIS SAME TIME (or whatever time you choose to read the column), pray for warmth, root for the Seattle-owned TrailBlazers in the basketball playoffs, and ponder these still-ahead-of-their-time words attributed to JFK: “I look forward to an America which will not be afraid of grace and beauty.”
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
MISC., the column that knew how to pronounce “Gonzaga” years before SportsCenter, has noticed a disturbing subtext in those Bud Light commercials. You’ve surely seen some of these spots, in which desperate guys will go through assorted humiliating, life-threatening, illegal, or icky experiences just to get a beer (or to prevent one’s roommate from having any of his own stash). Are these really intended as beer promotions or as AA recruitments?
THANX TO ALL who attended my reading last Sunday in the packed little space that is Pistil Books and News. Further previews of the new best-of-Misc. book will follow. Still no publication date yet; but faithful Misc. World readers will have the first opportunity to get a copy. As for the next edition of my old book, I’m waiting on getting back the original offset-printing film (it’d cost a lot to have to re-halftone those 800 or so pictures). More at the end of this report, and when info becomes available.
UPDATES: Looks like the Speakeasy Cafe will remain open for the time being, but without the live music shows that had provided the space’s chief source of income (while diminishing its utility as an Internet cafe and casual hangout spot, and getting it in hot water with the upstairs tenants and with the Liquor Board)… As if the loss of the Speakeasy to music promoters weren’t bad enough, the folks behind the Velvet Elvis Arts Lounge are (according to The Tentacle, that vital local creative-music newsletter) rumored to be near burnout point and ready to close. For the past two or three years, the VE’s most of the all-ages music events that mattered (along with RKCNDY, already slated for demolition sometime this year). Dunno yet why VE might be packing it in or what might happen to its space; ‘tho I suspect they might have become too dependent upon one show, the over-a-year-old production of the one-man musical Kerouac. Of course, the space’s previous tenant, the Pioneer Square Theater, also went kablooey in ’89 after it became too dependent upon one production (Angry Housewives). Anyhow, The Tentacle‘s asking its readers for input on helping resolve this sudden dearth of experimental-music-friendly venues. In similar subcultural news…
BOUND FOR GLORY?: The Beyond the Edge Cafe on E. Pike, where members of the Seattle fetish community used to hang out, quietly closed up a couple months back. But the fetish community’s not taking things lying down, as it were. Kink-niks are now looking to open their own “sex positive community center” somewhere in the greater downtown/Capitol Hill zone. Info’s at the “Seattle Fetish Gazette” site. It just goes to show what you can do when you base your entire emotional center around discipline. Speaking of discipline…
FORCING THE ISSUE: The Star Wars Episode One trailer is a bigger hit than just about any full-length movies this season. Maybe they should dump the film itself and just release more previews. For that matter, why not just make original short films in trailer form, without releasing a subsequent long-form version? We’ve all seen parody trailers for otherwise nonexistent films (Hardware Wars, et al.), but those were essentially spoofs of feature-film genres, done in short form to avoid stretching their gags too far. I’m talking about self-contained shorts made with the conventions of previews: Narration, chopped-up scenes and dialogue, intimations of a larger narrative arc without fully explaining the storyline, a buildup of excitement based on increasingly intense lines or visuals (rather than linear plot progression), and an ending that climaxes the visual/verbal spectacle without providing a plot resolution. This is close to shticks some experimental/independent filmmakers over the years have toyed with. But those films often lack (or deliberately reject) the oldtime showmanship-energy trailers have always employed in their selling function. It’s something all filmmakers should learn (and then choose whether or not to employ).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Special Rider Alert looks, on the cover, like a real Metro Transit pamphlet (except that it’s a b/w photocopy job). Inside, though, you won’t find route-change announcements but rather a short essay by one “Will N. Dowd” about the difficulties of existence as a bar-hopping bus rider who tries to drink in the far south end while living in the far north end or vice versa, or something like that; while observing “Shoreline High gangsters say `beyatch’ and `Mudda Fugga’ just like their MTV ghetto heroes.” Free with SASE from 9594 1st Ave. NE, #256, Seattle 98125.
OUR LAST SURVEY asked you to nominate your favorite building that you find beautiful but squaresville critics might find “ugly.” Some of your responses follow:
Actually, I’ve been in the “Live Ladybugs” shack on several occasions; the most recent just a couple of weeks ago. It’s the home-studio-office-warehouse of Buddy Foley, an unreconstructed hippie who’s been self-employed in umpteen simultaneous endeavors over the years. Besides selling math textbooks and ladybugs, he’s been a musician, recording engineer, illustrator, buyer-seller of musical instruments, and videomaker (most recently assembling footage of naked young neohippies at Nevada’s annual Burning Man festival).
As for some of the other buildings mentioned above, the nonprofit operators of the Grand Illusion have already done their remodeling of that space, but wisely emphasized better projection equipment rather than changing the look of the mini-auditorium. Preservationists are working to save the Hat n’ Boots. And the Hostess factory’s still churnin’ out its Sno-Balls, even though Interstate Brands is halving employment at its Wonder Bread plant on Yesler.
And as for some of my own favorite beautiful “ugly” buildings (at least those which haven’t been destroyed in Seattle’s rebuilding craze), I’ve a few nominations to give:
(I could also talk about the Experience Music Project, but that’s a tale for another time.)
OUR NEXT SURVEY has an ulterior motive. I want your suggestions on which recent (1986-99) Seattle musicians and bands should be mentioned in the forthcoming revised edition of my old book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story. Start naming names today, via email or at our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards. As always, organized letter-writing campaigns on behalf of yourself won’t get you any more attention.
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to enjoy the upcoming last half-season of Kingdome baseball games, but please don’t wallow in any of that George Will crap about the return of baseball symbolizing the sense of renewal in the American spirit.
MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”
MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)
Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).
All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.
It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.
In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)
WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.
This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)
(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)
The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:
(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)
OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?
‘I Was A Teenage Hacker’
Book review roundup, 12/23/98
EXTRA LIFE:
Coming of Age in Cyberspace
by David S. Bennahum
Basic Books ($23)
Bennahum’s is merely one of many stories that could be told about the teen and young-adult males who played a huge, under-documented role in the 1974-84 dawn of personal computers and online communication, back when the word “hacker” still meant a guy who got kicks from high-intensity programming, not from crime.
Bennahum (a Manhattan rich kid who got to learn programming in a prestigious private high school with its own DEC PDP mini-mainframe computer) isn’t the most typical early-’80s compu-teen. But his story’s close enough to the subculture’s norm for his memoir to reveal its era. As he sees it, it was an era marked by specific phases in technology, after the very first personal computers but before the Mac and Windows stuck the guts of computing behind user-friendly (but programmer-hostile) interfaces.
True hackers (of the old definition), like true auto mechanics, didn’t just want to make their machines go–they wanted to know every aspect of how they ran, from the hexadecimal codes to the 8-bit processor chips. Popular sentiment derides guys of such obsessions as geeks. But, as Bennahum’s tale shows, it’s just this kind of obsession that can change the world (or at least one’s own life).
REDHOOK, BEER PIONEER
by Peter J. Krebs
Four Walls Eight Windows ($22)
What’s a nice ultra-highbrow house like Four Walls Eight Windows doing with a lightweight business “success” story like this? (The Redhook book’s existence isn’t mentioned at its publisher’s website; often an omen.)
Not that the book’s a total puff piece. You will learn a lot about the ’80s-’90s microbrew phenomenon if you can get past the fawning portrayals of Redhook founders Gordon Bowker and Paul Shipman. Peter Krebs (author of Microsoft Press’s Building Microsoft Exchange Applications; not to be confused with the beloved singer-songwriter Pete Krebs) pours out every cliché from hokey business-magazine profile articles (the kind usually titled “The Rise and Rise Of…”).
Read how Shipman (previously an up-n’-coming exec at Chateau Ste. Michelle) and Bowker (also involved in the launches of Starbucks and Seattle Weekly), armed with the dream to do for American beer what Starbucks had done with American coffee, hit up all the available moneybags in town, barely collecting enough loot to install some used brewing equipment in a former Ballard transmission shop.
Share the pain as the original Redhook Ale’s released in 1982, to near-unanimous cries of “This tastes funny.”
Feel the struggle as the founders, abetted by original brewmaster Charles McElevey, kept fiddling with the original Redhook, only to abandon it as better-selling flavors (Blackhook, Ballard Bitter, Redhood ESB, Winterhook, Blonde Ale) come along.
Sense the pride as the Little Brewery That Could starts getting its wares out to such exotic outposts as Denver and Spokane; then shudder the dreaded word “Sellout” as Shipman abandons the “craft brewing” mystique in favor of state-of-the-art plants (one later chapter’s entitled “You Can’t Taste the Automation”) and distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch.
Cringe as the great microbeer glut of 1996-97 leaves Redhook badly overextended, causing the closing of the brew part of its Fremont brewpub.
If, after all this, you still think of Redhook as the quaint little upstart, just read Shipman’s closing words of encouragement, insisting his outfit will survive because of its “combination of distribution, quality control, brewery efficiency, and resources deep enough to survive the current shakeout.”
(For a different, slightly more craft-devoted, take on the dawn of microbeer, Redhook’s Yakima archrival Bert Grant’s got his own memoir just out, The Ale Master (Sasquatch, $19.95). Of course, Grant’s own company’s now owned by the snuff-tobacco people who also own Ste. Michelle.)
CIRCUS OF THE SCARS
by Jan T. Gregor with Tim Cridland;
illustrated and designed by Ashleigh Talbot
Brennan Dalsgard Publishers ($26)
First thing anyone will notice is what a beautiful, elegant tome this is; easily the best-looking thing to come from a Northwest indie publisher this year. It’s not just a document about high-profile show people, it is a work of showmanship.
Second thing you’ll find is how utterly long it is. It takes over 500 pages to tell about a little over two years in the lives of the first Jim Rose Circus Sideshow. At the risk of boring the supposed short-attention-span audience the sideshow lived for, ex-Rose roadie Gregor has tried to recreate the pace of life on the road, hour after hypnotic hour of driving somewhere punctuated by moments of onstage thrills and the occasional round of groupie sex and/or tourism. So far, it might seem like a rock band’s tale; appropriately, since the sideshow essentially toured as a rock n’ roll attraction that performed stunts instead of songs.
But venues notwithstanding, these particular freaks were and are very serious about seeing themselves as a revival of the old-time carny tradition. Long interludes compare the Rose troupe’s travels to the apparently fictional (but thoroughly research-based) life story of a turn-of-the-century carny performer.
Rose himself is depicted not so much as the bad-boy persona he offered in his own book Freak Like Me (cowritten by Melissa “Babs Babylon” Rossi) and more like a clever, energetic entrepreneur who put the show on the map, staged near-perfect publicity coups, then let go of performers like Tim Cridland (“Zamora the Torture King”) and Matt Crowley (“The Tube”) when he chose to move the act into a more mainstream direction.
Whatever lingering personal rancor Rose and his ex-troupers might have, they did and do follow in an honorable tradition of showmanship. They may see themselves as rebels, but they’ve eschewed the now-30-year-old “generation gap” schtick. We’ve always had freaks, geeks, and outrageous stage people. If the current and former Rose troupers have their way, we always will.
THE VOICE OF DESCENT: On this Pearl Harbor Day, let us remember not too many years ago, when “the Japanese threat” meant their high-flying companies were going to take over our economy. Now, there’s a new Japanese threat–that their troubled companies, and those of other structurally-shaky Asian economies, might stop buying America’s soybeans, wheat, and jet aircraft.
Once again, as it has several times over the past 30-odd years, Boeing’s given a lump of coal to the Puget Sound region’s collective Xmas stockings. After all the manic growth, all the stupid growth, all the countryside-clearing growth and all the urban-life-draining growth, part of me actually looks forward to the more sluggish economy 48,000 layoffs and unfilled job vacancies might bring. Yet another part of me still feels sorry for the young adults and newcomers who’ve known nothing here but constant economic expansion, and who might find it more difficult to land decent jobs or backing for their dream restaurants.
ALREADY WE’VE ONE major business closure due to changing economic conditions. As you might expect, the last week of KSTW’s local news (mandated by the station’s current owner, Viacom) played out as both personal desparation (clips of old cute-dog stories strung together by a staff obviously intent on assembling demo reels for its resumes) and light pathos (co-anchorman Don Porter holding up a “Will Anchor For Food” sign). The headline graphic for the top story on the final newscast (a story about a newly-found cache of dynamite in Puyallup): “TNT Destroyed.” KSTW’s former call letters, several owners ago, were KTNT (from its original owner, the Tacoma News Tribune). Also throughout the final broadcast, the station ran the logo from its old ownership by Gaylord Broadcasting–not the ugly “UPN 11” symbol Viacom management had imposed. The cancellation means 62 newsroom and studio layoffs, and turns what had been one of the strongest non-big-three-network stations in the country into just another mere outlet for reruns and forgettable semi-network shows (can you even name any UPN original production other than Star Trek Voyager?).
PULP FRICTION: A couple weeks back, I mildly dissed a Stranger article dissing the retro-swing revival. Now I’ve something I never expected I’d say: Seattle Weekly, once one of the few “alternative” weeklies to be more conservative than its town’s daily papers, has lately become darn near pinko with Geov Parrish publicly questioning the canonization of the late Seattle School District PR machine John Stanford and Mark Worth listing Seattle’s equivalent of the “50 families” that run everything in certain Latin American countries. This is one case of a publication becoming more progressive under chain ownership. When it was locally owned, the Weekly was tied heavily into this town’s business and political elites, far more so than many urban weeklies in other towns. Founder David Brewster was a defender (to this day) of ’70s-style notions of leadership by an enlightened intelligentsia; as applied in his pages, it meant individual politicians and political decisions could be criticized but not the larger priorities of our Pro-Business Democrat machine. But after Brewster retired and sold out to the Hartz Mountain chain of papers, the paper’s rather suddenly started growing something resembling a spine. (And I’m not just saying these things ‘cuz I’m trying to get a job with them. Honest.)
CATHODE CORNER: Finally saw digital cable over the holidays, and was immediately taken by the way each channel first appears on screen as a collage of small screen areas, taking as long as a second before all the rectangles fill in. How long do you think it’ll take before the effect appears as a deliberately-planned schtick in music videos? (It’s already been used in series, if you count the “puzzle piece” effects that used to lead into and out of commercials on Get Smart! and The Streets of San Francisco.)
SCREEN DEFENSE: The same week the mighty Scarecrow Video store celebrated 10 years of rough-and-tumble survival, Capitol Hill’s smaller but equally feisty Video Vertigo posted photocopied trade-magazine articles on its wall, claiming 400 indie video-rental shops are going out of business each week in the US due to predatory pricing by, and sweetheart deals offered by studios to, Blockbuster. While some of these individual stores and small chains probably won’t be missed (I’m thinking of those stores offering only the same creaky action-hits and moldy ’80s sitcom movies as the big chains), there are also plenty which deserve to stick around (with more, or different or better, selections than the corporate stores, and/or better rates or looser return policies). Wanna see a flick at home tonite? Go to one of those joints first.
THIS MONTH’S FIRST-THURSDAY HIGHLIGHTS:
1. Gloria DiArcangelis’s stunning neo-realist paintings at Myerson & Nowinski. Nobody else (on this continent anyway) can make contemporary faces and figures look so much like they belong in the Renaissance.
2. Meghan Trainor’s tiny wall shrines (made from “authentic Boeing aluminum” and what look like labels from ancient brands of produce) at the relocated Roq La Rue.
3. Parris Broderick’s “Sitting Duck” series at Zeitgeist Espresso. You’ve seen his murals, sandwich signs, etc. all over town; now see his loving post-expressionist touch applied to images of ducks (or are they decoys?).
4. The abstract-installation piece at Oculus, a study in geometric form and color created by gluing hundreds of Starburst Fruit Chews to the wall.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Emerald City Connections (“Seattle’s #1 Meeting Place”) purports to be a slick singles’ resource with personal ads, relationship advice, and related articles. But six of the first issue’s 24 pages comprise ads for escorts, phone-sex lines, and other “adult services”–as if the publishers were admitting the personal ads might not work. (Free at vending boxes around town, or from 1767 15th Ave. S., Seattle 98144.)
TWO FOR THE SHOW: At least one secret to understanding the eternal conflict of American culture can be found in the decades-old conflict of burlesque vs. vaudeville. Burlesque wasn’t just raw as in naked (or rather as naked as the law allowed or could be bribed into allowing). It was raucous; its dancers and skits and comic monologues celebrated the boistrous passions of turn-of-the-century urban immigrants. It also regularly barbed politicians, judges, bosses, and other authority figures. Vaudeville (as shown in a KCTS documentary late last year which still haunts my memory) was squeaky clean, celebrated “wholesome family entertainment,” and promoted a monocultural America of thorough white-middlebrow dominance (with just a few ethnic touches inserted for the mildest of spiciness).
Vaudeville led to the everywhere/nowhere America of Hollywood movies (several of the big studios trace their corporate history from vaudeville-theater chains), Lawrence Welk, Mickey Mouse, Reader’s Digest, Miss America, soft rock, light beer, weak coffee, and eventually to what The Nation and The Baffler call today’s global “culture trust.”
Burlesque, conversely, led to Milton Berle, Betty Boop, the prewar version of Esquire, drag-queen shows, the comedy-relief segments in early porn films, and (eventually and indirectly) to punk rock, S/M showmanship, and zine culture.
Despite its handful of often fondly-remembered burlesque “box house” theaters in and near today’s Pioneer Square, and our status as home to burlesque’s greatest star Gypsy Rose Lee (born into a vaudeville family), Seattle was a vaudeville town through and through. Seattle’s first corporate inroad on the national entertainment biz was the locally-founded Pantages vaudeville circuit.
The battle continues. Across the country, city governments are trying to banish strip clubs and adult video shops (slicker yet raunchier descendents of burlesque), sanitizing downtowns for the sake of Planet Hollywood and The Disney Store (dining and shopping as toned-down descendents of vaudeville).
At its best, the spirit of vaudeville represents precision, energy, showmanship, and a pleasant good time. And all those things are good. But at its worst, it represents cloying paternalism and sentimental “family entertainment” that bores kids and insults grownups’ intelligence. Burlesque’s descendents have their own downsides; particularly the recursive traps of parody and ironic detachment seen in so much pseudo-hip art, music, and advertising.
But we need more of burlesque’s assertive populism, its healthy skepticism about authority and its healthy affirmation of the life force. Somewhere between post-vaudeville’s mandatory naiveté and post-burlesque’s relentless cynicism lies the truth.
(Good, close re-creations of classic vaudeville can be found year-round at Hokum Hall in West Seattle. The best evocation of burlesque in town’s the “Fallen Women Follies,” held two or three times a year at Re-bar. You can also see the old days of burley-Q at the Exotic World museum out in the southwest.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, pray for snow, and be sure to enter your nominations for this year’s Misc. World In/Out List (the only worthwhile and accurate list of its type in the known world), either by email or in our lovely new >Misc. Talk discussion boards.
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia”
WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)
KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.
THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.
Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.
Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.
WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:
Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”
‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”
(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)
WELCOME BACK MY FRIENDS, TO THE SHOW THAT NEVER ENDS: Here it comes! No, not television’s most exciting hour of fantastic prizes, but the next phase in the 12.5 year history of the Misc. column. You can think of this as Misc. Version 4.0 if you like. The first version was a monthly column in the old Seattle tabloid ArtsFocus, from June 1986 thru July 1989. The second was the self-published monthly newsletter beginning later that summer, and continuing until January 1995. Third came the weekly installments in The Stranger, starting in November 1991 (concurrent with the newsletter version) and eventually reaching some 200,000 Seattle-area readers before the “alternative” tabloid’s bosses stopped running the column in October 1998.
THE NEW ONLINE COLUMN MIGHT BE more leisurely paced than the previous print versions, given that for the first time the column has no pre-set space limit. I may also experiment with different types of content, shuffling topics and departments in and out to test reader response. And new audience-building features might be added to the Misc. World website as well. More about that next week.
BUT FIRST, for those who came in late, a restatement of the column’s purposes and concepts. Under the classic “three-dot” newspaper column format, and within the meta-topic of “popular culture in Seattle and beyond,” Misc. World discusses the people, places, and things that combine to make up public life here at the edge of America and the end of the century. Some of the items in the column are as short as one sentence (or sentence fragment; some take up the whole space by themselves. Some of the subjects I write about are Seattle-specific; some are national (or have their equivalents in other towns across the country). Some involve big sociocultural trends such as stock-market fluctuations and downtown redevelopment schemes; others involve matters as small and specific as new junk foods and catch phrases. But they’re all parts of the cacophanous racket that is postmodern, pre-who-knows-what urban life, and as such they all have lessons to teach us about the cross-currents and cross-pollenizations of culture.
DISCLAIMERS: Misc. World contains no rain jokes, slug jokes, or coffee jokes. All statements of fact in Misc. World are, to the best they can be verified, true. The author will gladly retract all items proven false. All statements of opinion represent the author’s sincere beliefs; not spoofs. This column does not settle wagers.
COINCIDENCE OR, DOT-DOT-DOT?: The same week The Stranger pulled the plug on the newsprint version of Misc., the art-studio lofts at 66 Bell (where the first ArtsFocus Misc. was written a dozen years back) started getting vacated under orders from the building owner, who’s finally making good on his year-long threat to upscale the place out of artists’ price ranges.
BOARD-ING SCHOOL: At ARO.Space a month or two back there was this performance-art night hosted by an apparent New York snotface who, after each act, taunted the audience with condescending remarks like “This is something called performance art. Something nobody in this town has ever heard of.” I never learned whether this dork was being real or just playing a character. If he really was as parochial and obnoxious as he made himself out to be on stage, he could’ve learned a bit about Seattle’s love of the ol’ perf-art by following the growth and institutionalization of our main perf-art staging outfit.
For 20 years, the On the Boards organization staged dance, music, and mixed-performance events at Washington Hall in the Central District. For the past 10 of those years, OTB’s been trying to move to a bigger, newer facility. Finally, the opportunity arose when A Contemporary Theater abandoned the lower Queen Anne digs it had occupied since ’63, and moved into a fancy multi-million dollar remodel of the old Eagles Auditorium downtown.
OTB then raised its own big-donor bucks to remake the old ACT building for its own purposes. The results are quite impressive: A 350-seat, proscenium-style main auditorium with state-O-the-art sound and light gear, a 99-seat studio theater (still unfinished as of this writing), a library/video room, and all the other tech and support facilities a bigtime staging entity needs.
OTB had always had a reputation as one of the most “ground-level” of Seattle’s full-time arts organizations, as being open to new local talent (even in years when most of its major shows were touring imports) and in touch with the frontiers of live art and music (even in years when much of its fare rehashed the previous decade’s avant-garde).
The Brave New OTB, however, is a whole different animal. The new building, like most other new public buildings around here, bears the name of somebody who paid for the privilege (it’s “the Behnke Center for Contemporary Performance”). The group’s newsletter announcing the opening of the new building is full of plugs for various corporate sponsors and contributors, (including AT&T, US Bank, Boeing, and Microsoft), offers a “new and expanded Business Club” which “gives local companies of all sizes an opportunity to benefit from a great incentive package–while also supporting On the Boarts.” Only time (specifically forthcoming schedules) will tell how well local and smaller-scale creators will fit in the new OTB’s scheme-O-things.
SO THAT’S WHAT’S IN THE SECRET SAUCE: McDonald’s stores now sport Big Mac 30th anniversary posters, featuring pseudo-psychedelic graphics reminiscent of Starbucks’ 25th anniversary posters from two years ago. Hippies then and now, of course, have loved to invoke McDonald’s as a quintessential symbol of everything they hate about corporate America, suburban lifestyles, and meat consumption.
The mistrust was mutual. The company’s dress code back then, natch, frowned on excessive male hirsuteness. More importantly, the chain’s whole operation was (and is) built around the un-hippie values of uniformity, conformity, neatness, and efficiency. The Fifties (a Learning Channel cable documentary series based on David Halberstam’s book of the same name) featured a telling memo from McD’s top management, calling individualism a dangerous trait and asserting all managers, employees, and franchise owners will be broken into the organization’s proper spirit of total conformity. McD’s arch rival Burger King briefly used the ad slogan “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules;” Outback Steak Houses currently feature the slogan “No Rules, Just Right.” These are so false they’re not even preposterous: A restaurant chain, especially a fast-food franchise, is nothing but a set of rules. Without the standardized products, prices, and premises stipulated in a franchise agreement, there’s no reason for the national advertising or other brand-building techniques that make a chain franchise more valuable to a franchisee than simply starting his or her own indie restaurant concept. (Of course, even that’s no guarantee of success, as seen by the bankruptcy of the once-booming Boston Market circuit and the resulting sudden closure of all its Northwest outlets.)
OTHER VOICES (from KJR-FM DJ Norm Gregory): “The Washington State Liquor Control Board has a proposed new rule which would limit beer and alcohol sales at events when 25 percent of the fans are under age 21. This could end beer sales in the stands at the football and baseball games. Part of the thrill of going to the games for my kids was passing drinks down the row. I didn’t mind them handling alcohol–it was when they started the one-sip-per-drink rule.”
SURVEY SAYS: I’m asking your help for next week’s column. Seems the aforementioned changes in my publishing situation have triggered what self-help books used to call a “midlife crisis.” I don’t have a spouse to mercilessly cheat on or thinning hair to cover-up. I wouldn’t buy a monstrous SUV even if I had the money, and I’ve no desire to do the Green Acres thang (I grew up in the countryside and won’t go back). But that still leaves lots of new directions into which a gent could place one’s life. Please send any suggestions on how I should devote the next year or three (for cash income or otherwise) via email to clark@speakeasy.org. The best will appear in this virtual space next week.
‘TIL THEN, ponder these words attributed to one Louise Beal: “Love thy neighbor as thyself, but choose your neighborhood.”
AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)
I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:
street hockey, et al.).
cinematography, videography, Photoshop).
———————–
Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net To: clark@speakeasy.org
Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.
Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…
I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.
Thanks for hearing me out!
Erinn Kauer / eakamouse
P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.
MISC. STILL REMEMBERS overhearing two men at a 1991 party recommending the most profitable way to sell a Seattle house–advertise it only in the LA Times. Such subterfuge is probably no longer necessary; now most Angelenos can’t afford a house here either.
UPDATES: The cool-stuff store Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony will soon have a new home near 2nd and Stewart, escaping death-by-redevelopment at its old site…. The 66 Bell art studios will probably get redeveloped, despite a ruling that the building’s outside’s a city landmark. Negotiations to keep at least some of the artists’ spaces continue…. US West’s high-speed home Internet service, using ADSL technology, has been delayed by state regulators who want the phone co. to become more accepting toward local-service competition.
IN CLUBLAND: The Lava Lounge has a doorman whose name really is Carlton. If you get the coincidence, you’re probably old enough for him to let you in. (But bring picture ID anyway.)
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Glyph (“Monthly Tales of Highbrow Pulp”) is a well-put-together comix tabloid from Labor of Love Studios, described by editor Sarah Byam as “a sweat equity cooperative for working artists and writers.” The tab format’s perfect for elaborate layouts and visual storytelling, exemplified in the first issue by Byam and artist Ted Naifeh’s “Past Hope” (an ambitious, ironic four-page parable about “The woman who could not love and the man who loved too much”). (Free plus postage from 117 E. Louisa, #253, Seattle 98102.)
LI’L FOLKS: Seems everybody in the Seattle creative community’s getting preggers or getting somebody preggers these days. Some of the lucky mommies and daddies include: Our own art-crit Eric Fredericksen, arts-promotion vets Tracey Rowland and Larry Reid, Gourmondo Cafe co-proprietess Jennifer Clancy with antiquarian-book and punk-record collector Jeff Long, videomaker Debra Geissel, comedian/ singer Kathy Sorbo, and gallery owner Linda Cannon (she’ll close her exhibition space to concentrate on mommyhood, though she’ll still sell some art privately). Call it a massive coincidence; call it a release of long-suppressed maternal/ paternal urges at a time of relative prosperity. Just please don’t call it “something in the water.”
DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: Small bookstores might be a threatened species amid big-chain consolidations, but one that’s thankfully not going away any time soon is the U.S. Government Printing Office bookstore on the ground floor of the Federal Building (900 1st Ave.). It’s small, but chock full o’ stuff you can’t get anywhere else–Posters of old Air Force planes! Colorful field guides to the national parks! Statistical abstracts of the nation’s consumer-buying habits! NASA fact guides! A gazillion volumes of tax codes! Research studies on teen alcoholism! Helpful guidebooks with names like Whistleblower Appeals, World Class Courtesy, Aviation Weather, Building a Nation of Learners, A Safe Trip Abroad, and Your Guide to Women’s Health! And (even cooler) you get to go thru a metal detector on your way in! Kids’-book advocates always say reading’s like an adventure trip; but this is the only bookstore that’s like getting on an airliner.
FREAK OUT: A second book about the Jim Rose Circus Sideshow is coming out, and this one’s unauthorized. Circus of the Scars, from the married team of writer Jan Gregor and illustrator Ashleigh “Triangle Slash” Talbot, promises to be a lavish hardcover account of the troupe’s early years (much of it from the viewpoint of ex-member Tim “Torture King” Cridland). For now, it’s being sold only by mail-order (via Brennan Dalsgard Publishers, Box 85781, Seattle 98145) and online (at www.circusofthescars.com). I haven’t seen the volume yet, but its creators hint Rose might not like its portrayal of him. What–like he gives a darn about his reputation (except to make sure it’s a nasty one)? I could only imagine one way you could really damage Rose’s public image: Claim he’s a mild-mannered teetotaler who plays a gentlemanly golf game, never cusses offstage, cried during multiple viewings of Titanic, and loves nothing better than to mellow out to the soothing sounds of the Smooth Jazz station.
Ross Shafer Goes Inside the First Family
Record review for The Stranger, 8/6/98
Ross Shafer Goes Inside the First Family (Jerden/SoundWorks): Shafer’s becoming one of those sadly “inspirational” figures who never gives up in the face of repeated failures. The original host of KING’s Almost Live (which became a local institution after he left) continues to attempt different areas of comic entertainment, hoping for that big break. Here, he attempts to clone Vaughn Meader’s classic JFK-themed comedy LP The First Family, only with the Clintons as characters–and with the meanness and luridity required for airplay on Clinton-bashing talk-radio shows. The cast (including local voice-over vet Ken Boynton as Bill C.) tries its darnedest to bring Shafer’s mediocre scripts to life (the final big gag is Teresa Ganzel’s faux-fellatio sound FX). Even sadder: It’s produced and released by Seattle recording legend Jerry Dennon, who masterminded the Sonics and Wailers and Kingsmen back in what they call “the day.”
BEEN AWHILE SINCE MISC.’S “Local Publications of the Week” department appeared, so we’ve a healthy backlog of printed treats to review. (As this is the last week of a month, some periodicals listed here might be succeeded by newer editions by the time you read this.)
Pioneer Square Gazette. Issue #3 of this occasional business-booster tabloid is still out at some drop-off spots in the neighborhood, and includes a revealing essay by Bradley Scharf about what he considers “the wrong lessons” of neighborhood growth. Among the ideas Scharf considers to be myths in need of shattering: the notion that preserving artists’ lofts from condo-conversion is a good thing. (Free from the Pioneer Square Community Council, 157 Yesler Way, #410, Seattle 98104.)
Voltage. There’ve been industrial/goth/dark music zines here over the years, but this is easily the slickest. Issue #6 has an extensive local-music section, a review of local dystopian novelist Ron Dakron, and an extremely dark-yet-funny column of supposed suicide advice (such as picking the proper rope for your body weight). (Free plus postage from P.O. Box 4127, Seattle 98104-4127.)
Words & Pictures. Marvel’s bankruptcy aside, there’s still an audience for action-hero comic books (and related entertainments such as action-hero novels, movies, posters, etc.) and Eric Burris’s zine is this audience’s local voice. Issue #8 features a tribute to the late Fantastic Four co-creator Jack Kirby. (Free plus postage from P.O. Box 27784, Seattle 98125.)
Feedback. Paul Allen’s sold off of his companies this past year, so he’s got even more cash to spend on his Experience Music Project museum and this, its house organ. It’s grown from a li’l CD-sized pamphlet to a giant 24-pp. poster book, with nearly every page suitable for framing. Vol. 4 No. 1 includes pieces on Sleater-Kinney, Buck Owens’s local past, Seattle punksters the U-Men, and old punk posters. (Free from 110 110th Ave. NE, #400, Bellevue 98004-9990.)
Platform. “Edition D” of the occasional theater-insiders’ mag’s got a big feature on the art of costuming, a profile of stage photographer Chris Bennion, and a semiserious suggestion for an annual Seattle Theater Parade. (Send a big envelope and $.78 in stamps to 313 10th Ave. E. #1, Seattle 98102.)
Blackstockings. Editor Morgan Elene’s leaving the editor’s desk at this newsletter for strippers and other sex workers. Her last ish (Vol. 2 No. 8 ) is as outspoken as ever; with a semihumorous list of “The Pros and Cons of Being a Sex Worker” (more “Pros” than “Cons”) and a how-to piece on going to work for an escort service. (Free at Left Bank Books, Toys in Babeband, Pistil Books, Red & Black, and other outlets; or with postage from P.O. Box 18571, Seattle 98118.)
Black Sheep. A new leftist/ anarchist monthly with some thought behind its tirades. Issue #1 discusses Tibet, NAFTA, the Jobs With Justice campaign, Michael Moore’s film The Big One, local rallies in support of California farm workers (but with no mention of Washington farm workers), and an obscure 1919 state law (still on the books) banning anarchist or radical-labor assemblies. (Six issues for $8 from Singularity Press, 1016 NW 65th, Seattle 98117.)
Hotty. Local music promoters Julianne Anderson and Jenny Bendel’s new zine elaborates on an idea recently promoted in these pages by Kathleen Wilson–that it’s perfectly OK for a woman to enjoy rocker boys’ sex appeal. Each co-editor has control over her own half of the magazine, each presenting a sequence of four skinny doodz with well-coifed hair and snarly smiles (all photographed by Celeste Willinger). While Bendel insists the whole thing’s simply an excuse for her and Anderson to be “silly and self indulgent,” I’d say it means something more. Like the Sensitive Geek Boys Calendar discussed here in January, it dares to nonchanantly assert “sex positive” womanhood isn’t just for lesbians and dominatrices anymore. In its silly, self-indulgent way, Hotty proves it’s perfectly natural for a woman to actually like men. (Subscription info: P.O. Box 95765, Seattle 98145, or email Bfleckman@aol.com.)
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.
CLASS WARS: Amid the controversy regarding Ballard High’s students and staff being shunted from their reconstruction-impaired regular digs to the quite dilapidated Wallingford carcass of the closed-in-’81 Lincoln High, Showtime’s been running Class of 1999, a truly bad B-thriller filmed at Lincoln in 1989. Exec-produced by onetime SIFF co-boss Dan Ireland, this RoboCop ripoff starts with that #1 cliche of bad sci-fi, the present-day trend exaggerated into the future. Teen-gang violence gets so bad by ’99, the opening narration states, that high schools have become total-security compounds with armed robots disguised as teachers. Only some of the robots go schizo and start killing teens, causing the all-white gangstas to retaliate in a predictable orgy of blood and steel limbs. Anybody who saw it (or worked on the crew) could tell Lincoln was perfect as a fictional bombed-out shell of a school, hence a lousy site for a real school.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A kind reader, visiting a local dollar store, found and sent in a package of Smack Ramen, an Asian-style meal in a packet (as made in Costa Mesa, CA). While the name obviously derives from a Japanglish attempt to invoke lip-smackin’ goodness, there is (as is oft the case with Japanglish) an unfortunate double meaning. Is this also the cheapo-meal of choice for those who’ve spent all their money on a certain poppy-derived non-nutritive substance (also Asian-derived)?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The second “more-or-less quarterly” issue of Platform, Morgain Cole and Bret Fetzer’s ambitious local theater zine, is now at Seattle theaters and other free drop-off spots. It’s got timely ideas about the organization and financing of local drama troupes, plus a 1983 Richard Nelson essay about the precarious state of “Nonprofit Theater in America.” He said the theater movement was “nearing disaster,” ‘cuz it was “without an adequate sense of tradition or a sense of social responsibility.” The fact that most of Nelson’s arguments could be made today (and are being made today, as in a recent NEA staff report) proves (1) the theater movement’s done a good job of not dying, and (2) how little further than that it’s gotten. (No subscriptions, but info can be had from 313 10th Ave. E, #1, Seattle 98102.)
WORKIN’ IT: The Discover U catalog offered a course two weeks ago on the “Secrets for Making Love Work.” For those of you who couldn’t attend that day or didn’t have the $29 class fee, we hereby offer a few of our own secrets:
I WANNA KNOW: Last month, we asked who you thought had more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wasn’t one of our most popular surveys, but all four respondents agreed: Sabrina. Our next survey: What will ’90s nostalgia look like? Which sights, looks, sounds, and consumer goods will future movies and collectors deem as evoking those silly days of now as A Simpler Time? Submit your suggestions at our new email address, clark@speakeasy.org.
PASSAGE (from Topper author Thorne Smith): “Like life itself, my stories have no point and get absolutly nowhere. And, like life, they are a little mad and purposeless. They resemble those people who watch with placid concentration a steam shovel digging a large hole in the ground. They are almost as purposeless as a dignified commuter shaking an impotent fist after a train he has just missed. They are like the man who dashes madly through traffic only to linger aimlessly on the opposite corner watching a fountain pen being demonatrated in a shop window.”
Here at Misc., your officially not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is column, we’re intrigued by the recent New York magazine headline, “Can Estrogen Make You Smarter?” You can just bet all the natural-superiority-of-women advocates are smugly gloating over their faxed third-generation photocopies of the article in college faculty lounges across North America. If the claims of the researchers quoted in the piece get confirmed, it’d sure make an easier argument for fem-dom supporters than the now-traditional rants against testosterone (since the latter hormone actually exists in humans of all genders). And I’m sure birth-control pills would mix perfectly into those rave-dance “smart cocktails.” I just hope the theory doesn’t inspire phrenologists (those folks who claim they can measure intelligence via the size and shape of someone’s skull) to start testing a little lower on the body.
UPDATE: The Newmark Cinema, which I said last month oughta be appropriated for fringe-theater use, has since been temporarily used just for that purpose. The Brown Bag Theater had to temporarily vacate its space elsewhere in the building, and so used one of the recently abandoned movie spaces for its production Wanna Come Back To My Place And Justify My Existence?
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK: “Redhook. It’s not just a beer, it’s a companion.” Is that meant as a reassurance or as an AA recruiter’s threat?
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Another of Seattle’s ever-dwindling supply of classic American-style eateries, the Nitelite in the Moore Hotel, just reopened with a new look (all spackled-brown in that pretentiously “unpretentious” way) and a new menu (featuring chicken scarpariello, bistecca melange, and mixed-grill kabobs). At least the Nitelite’s truly lovely bar wasn’t altered a bit. The bar, in fact, stayed open all the weeks the restaurant part was closed for remodeling; something the Liquor Board wouldn’t have allowed just a few years back.
YOU MAKE THE CALL: Paul Allen’s established a company related to the new Seahawk stadium project, named 1st & Goal Enterprises. I wouldn’t be surprised if he sets that up as an address to the new stadium, making up a Goal Street as a short access road from 1st Ave. S. I was always hoping the city would name a side street on the 4th Ave. S. side of the Kingdome “South Long Street,” so the Hawks would have the more appropriate street address of 4th & Long.
DRAWING THE LINE: Earlier this year, the P-I ran what it called a week-long test run of eight new comic strips. Those which proved most popular with readers, the paper claimed, would be added to an expanded Coffee Break section. This month, the paper added all eight newcomers. It made room by shrinking some Coffee Break features and dropping others–including Bill Griffith’s up-from-the-underground classic Zippy the Pinhead. None of the new strips so far show any wit or style or reason for being (other than demographic target-marketing) Some of the new batch are almost amazingly amateurishly drawn. (Hint to editors: Dilbert‘s popular in spite of its boxed-in look, not because of it.) The closest thing to an exception is the competent if unspectacular gagstrip Zits, by veteran stripper Jerry Scott and editorial cartoonist Jim Borgman.
Zippy, however, is a masterpiece of exquisite draftsmanship, precision dialogue, and multi-layered humor. It treats its readers not as statistics but as intelligent fun-lovers. And it loves to eat a great corn dog. Zippy is in the domain of the P-I‘s fellow Hearst subsidiary King Features Syndicate, as are four of the paper’s new comics. Back in the day, William Randolph Hearst made his papers run George Harriman’s now-acknowledged classic Krazy Kat even though it scored low in popularity polls, because Harriman’s surrealistic shenanigans added that little touch of quality Hearst’s papers sorely needed. The folks running today’s P-I (Hearst’s second-largest remaining daily paper) ought to do what the old man would’ve done and bring the Pinhead back.
Update: The day after this was posted, the P-I announced it would resume the Pinhead’s misadventures begginning on Labor Day. Yay!
WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia.”
(We’re still asking the question: Can you think of any formerly popular musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? Make your recommendation at clark@speakeasy.org.)
