HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

SPACES IN THE HEART: While watching this year’s fifth annual Belltown Inside Out, a “community” festival originally sponsored by condo developers and now increasingly run by local Scientologists, an acquaintance told me the newly-widened 2nd Ave. sidewalks were an omen that the whole neighborhood was doomed to become “another Rodeo Drive.” Dunno ’bout that; the Nordstroms, who have de facto control of retail zoning in Seattle, are getting all the new costly stores situated next to them. Indeed, the movie megaplexes planned for the Pike/ Pine corridor (30 total screens) are helping end Belltown’s mini movie row. The King has closed for probably the last time. And now it’s been announced the ugly-outside-gorgeous-inside Cinerama will close when or before the mega-cinemas open. The Cinerama was the first Seattle movie house I went to (for the minor musical Song of Norway). Only the UA’s two screens remain, as discount houses… Similarly, a belated goodbye goes to Village Lanes, closed for redevelopment into an Office Depot just as bowling becomes the hip sport of the ’90s (many of your fave Seattle musical performers are also keglers). Speaking of things hip-n’-now…

BUZZ BIN TO BARGAIN BIN?: We’ve written recently about the continued flow of big money into the book biz, disproving the common notion that nobody reads anymore. Now there’s MTV Books, out to disprove the notion that no young’ns read anymore. It’s an imprint of MTV’s fellow Viacom unit Simon & Schuster, launching with such tie-in titles as The Real Real World and Aeon Flux: The Dossier.

Underlying all this is Viacom’s mistaken notion that there’s a generation out there that loves its MTV and will eat up anything bearing its name (in the trade mag Advertising Age, MTV claims to be sponsors’ gateway to “32.1 million impressionable young minds”). What there really is, as known to everyone except Viacom, is a generation that reluctantly turns to MTV for a few specialty shows and the flips to it when there’s nothing else on, but doesn’t think of it as anything more than a corporate-media compromise.

You could really see it if you were on America Online during the recent MTV Online promotion. The channel solicited comments from AOL users, some of which were retransmitted on a censor-delayed basis across the bottom of the MTV screen during select video segments. There was quite a bit of MTV bashing, in various degrees of maturity and intelligibility, in the messages posted on AOL that didn’t make the censor’s cut. What made the MTV cablewaves was generally limited to the likes of “Eddie Vedder Roolz.” Speaking of online revelations…

THEATRICS: Hope you’re not tired of Courtneymania ‘cuz it’s spreading to the theatrical world. Love in the Void (alt.fan.c-love), a one-woman play by Elyse Singer based on Love’s uncopyrighted Internet newsgroup messages, just ended a three-week run at NYC’s HERE performance space. Carolyn Baeumler gave what by all accounts was a dead-on impersonation of Love, writhing about the stage while reciting online posts about everything from rock-star sexism to life with and after Cobain to a recollection of the first record she ever owned (Marlo Thomas’s ode to non-gender-specific child rearing, Free to Be You and Me). She’s accompanied by a lone guitarist, offstage voices playing her online correspondents, and slides and videos of her career and life trials. A positive review comes in the online zine Addicted to Noise from Carol Mariconda, Love’s personal volunteer liaison with the newsgroupalt.fan.courtney-love. Mariconda writes, “Courtney’s intelligence, biting humor, and weary worldliness, from having experienced more psychic agony than she should ever have had to in her relatively short existence, is captured by Baeumler in a powerful portrayal.”

PLUGS OF THE SHAMELESS VARIETY: My huge book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, is now at the printer and should be in stores by the start of October. A release party’s tentatively set for Sun., Oct. 15; details to follow… Still looking for your favorite local grocery store, in the convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic categories. Details on theMisc. website.

Pike St. Cinema Says Adieu:

The Last Rewind

Essay for the Stranger, 8/9/95

Adventurous filmgoers have another month or so to visit the Pike Street Cinema, Seattle’s smallest and most curious film space. In mid-September Pike Street proprietor Dennis Nyback will take his projectors, his old-time movie posters and memorabilia, and his 2,000-reel collection of film oddities to New York, where he’s certain he’ll be better appreciated. The closure marks the end of three and a half years of what Nyback boasts of as “unfunded, unadvertised, and unrepentant” exhibition.

The origins of the Pike Street actually go back to mid-1988, when Nick Vroman and Geof Spencer began the Belltown Film Festival in the Jewel Box Theater of the Rendezvous Restaurant. Vroman and Spencer rented the grand old space on Second Avenue, originally a screening room used by major film distributors, to show the kinds of movies they liked and couldn’t see anywhere else — things like obscure foreign dramas, prewar German dada shorts, and ’80s New York underground films. Despite the special-event implications of the “Festival” name, they had the space one night a week on an ongoing basis. When they began to run short of available, affordable films in their favorite genres, they opened up the Belltown Film Festival to local filmmakers, show-and-tell nights, and other concepts.

To fill other schedule holes, and to help prop up the operations side of their venture, they turned to Nyback, who’d run the Rose Bud Movie Palace in Pioneer Square from 1979 to 1981. Nyback had developed a part-time business as a mail-order dealer in old movie reels and mystery novels, supplemented by various day jobs (including at least one stint as a porno-theater projectionist). Nyback not only owned his own collection of rare prints, he corresponded with similar collectors around the country who had their own peculiarities. He also owned his own 16mm and 35mm projectors, and knew enough amateur carpentry to rebuild the Rendezvous projection room into a workable facility.

In 1989-90, Nyback gradually took more responsibility over the Belltown Film Festival. By early 1991 he was running it by himself. The festival’s programming evolved away from French and Japanese features toward programming built around Nyback’s collection — prewar jazz shorts, cartoons, and comedies; ’50s and ’60s TV commercials and movie trailers; educational and industrial shorts; ’60s music shorts originally made for Scopitone film jukeboxes; and pre-1970 stag films.

Nyback, who admits to preferring total control over his ventures instead of partnerships, broke with the Rendezvous’s owners in September 1991. He held screenings at a couple of other Belltown spaces that fall. Then at the start of 1992 he leased a storefront on the ground floor of a somewhat notorious transients’ apartment building at Pike and Boren, an area of Capitol Hill only now starting to get “upscaled.” He put his book operation, Spade and Archer (named for the Maltese Falcon detective agency) in the front room, separated by a sliding bookcase from the 50-seat screening room in back. For $600 and donated materials he created a funky yet elegant space, complete with old-time theater seats and curtains.

In retropsect, it might not have been the best possible site. People often got lost confusing address, 1108 Pike, with 1108 East Pike; either that or they confused the name “Pike Street Cinema” with the former Pike Place Cinema in the Pike Place Market. And in his first few months at the space, he didn’t even have a sign above his tiny storefront big enough to be seen by drivers heading up from downtown — just a small sandwich board outside and some posters in the window.

Additionally, Nyback had trouble drawing suburban baby boomers, many of whom told him they thought were afraid to venture into Seattle after dark: “People used to say, ‘Go to the Pike Street Cinema and get mugged.'” Nyback admits to the presence of lowlife types in the apartments above the theater and in the tavern next door, but insists none of his audience members were ever hassled by them.

But the space was cheap enough that Nyback broke even for three and a half years on an average attendance of 125 people per week.

Some of the Pike Street’s better attended programs have included a Charles Bukowski bioflick, a show of Frederick Wiseman documentaries, the underground farces of San Francisco director George Kuchar, a package of ’70s Mormon Church instructional films, a festival of old softcore sex films curated by Something Weird Video, the Seattle-made 1970 porno feature The Last Bath, Craig Baldwin’s recent Negativland profile Sonic Outlaws, and Bad Bugs Bunny (a collection of Warner Bros. cartoons no longer shown on TV due to racial caricatures).

Still, Nyback wasn’t earning a living wage from the theater. It didn’t help that “I didn’t charge enough to the people who rented out the space on off nights” for other film programs and cabaret parties. He also couldn’t afford paid advertising and didn’t want it if he could afford it, preferring low-key promotion through flyers and posters.

Yet Nyback isn’t worried about his chances in the New York entertainment scene, a scene even more reliant on high-profile promotion than Seattle’s. “New York just seems like more of a real city, where there’s word-of-mouth, where people my age (he’s in his early 40s) still go out at night.” He’s got friends back east scouting for potential sites, and hopes to be back in business before the end of the year.

Meanwhile, Seattle experimental filmmaker Jon Behrens hopes to open a new screening room elsewhere in town with a similar schedule. In the past, Behrens has screened his films at the Pike Street and at 911 Media Arts (including a program held on July 29). But he says he wants to break away from what he perceives as an increasingly institutionalized atmosphere at 911, and to keep the anything-goes indie spirit of the Pike Street Cinema alive in Seattle.

UPDATE: The Weathered Wall’s new owners are now gonna keep live music there Thurs. and Fri., and maybe add it on other weeknights later on. Anxious bands can contact the club’s new in-house booking agent, Julie Wynn (728-9398).

DEAD AIR RE-REVISITED: One issue in the three-year KCMU Kontroversey was the ongoing drive to turn the station into an adjunct of KUOW. That’s become official, now that KUOW’s taking over KCMU’s administrative and fundraising operations. They’re not changing KCMU’s programming, like they tried during the World Cafe era, but the move sets up a chain of command that would allow it. They fail to understand that KCMU succeeded in the past because it was perceived as a grass-roots operation of people who loved music, not a professional institution out to draw well-heeled donors with bland “upscale” fare. It’ll be up to the next UW prez to sort it out. Let’s hope s/he understands it’s in both stations’ best interests to be separate operations with separate missions.

WISH I’D SAID THAT DEPT.: I don’t normally comment on other things in the Stranger (what do you think this is, the Vill. Voice?). But now and again there’s a piece I get additional thoughts about. Here are some recent ones:

Die Hard w/a Vengeance review (4 * 34): Don’t think it’s been mentioned in the media, but the Seattle Symphony recorded some of the background music for the film. Of course, they also did the theme to KIRO’s old News Outside the Box…

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black preview (4 * 34) The V.H. of K.B. singer is like Madonna’s good twin: lo-fi and funky, but still an image-based performance artist who only uses songs as a means to an end, and who as such can be recommended as a live (or home-video) act only. Audio-only documentation of her work is superfluous.

Bathhouses (4 * 33): I know I’m not the only lonely straight guy who’s been jealous of gays for having such an industry . Imagine, going to a place alone and getting laid on the spot, and not by a paid worker but by someone who wants it just as bad as you–the male zipless-fuck fantasy, unencumbered by feminine propriety.

Savage Love (4 * 33): What the letter writer calls “insanity” could also be interpreted as discovering his new lover’s “real” self, not her sociable front persona. If he’s having trouble finding a woman who always keeps the illusion of “sanity” most of us maintain in public, maybe he should resign himself to shallow affairs with married women who want to “bring romance back to their lives.”

The Information book review (4 * 33): Lots of people who think they have talent are jealous of the success of people they think have less talent. Almost every highbrow author-wannabe I’ve met has tried at one time to write a commercially successful work just by making something “bad enough to sell,” without knowing the formulae and disciplines involved in genre lit.

Theater calendar comment (4 * 32): Ah, “risk” in theater. The Empty Space, Bathhouse, Pioneer Square Theater (RIP) et al. have for decades boasted of their daring programming while mounting boomer-friendly wink-wink-nudge-nudge parody revues. AHA! merely follows in this venerable tradition.

COCA feature (4 * 29): Greg implied but didn’t state that bad-boy art might have seemed rebellious and “alternative” enough in the ’80s; but in the Newt era, when the John Carlsons of America drive Harleys and call themselves “rebels,” a different aesthetic may be more appropriate.

Cut & Run (4 * 29): The usual rad-feminist response to an author like ex-Portland punk singer Rene Denfield is to first accuse her of backsliding from the orthodox view of what All Women are or should be. S.P. instead accuses Denfield of the same gross overgeneralizing Denfield accuses Robin Morgan and Andrea Dworkin of. There’s no such thing as All Women, and certainly no such thing as All Feminists. A movement for individual self-realization can’t be (or become) a monolith.

LAST PLUG: Our ninth-anniversary reading/ performance/ video shindig, Fun With Misc., happens this Thurs., 7:30 p.m.-whenever, at the Metropolis Contemporary Art Gallery, downtown on University between 1st and 2nd. BYOB; clothing optional.

Here at Misc. we love the idea of the recent McDonald’s All-American Gymnastics Tourney. You probably always think of Quarter Pounders with Super Size fries when you see lithe toned athletes bulging out of their tights. It’s the weirdest corporate sponsorship since Yuban coffee sponsored the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, a story that takes place while its heroine’s asleep.

CONSUMER TIP OF THE WEEK: Dave’s cigarettes are really made by those Jesse Helms lovers at Philip Morris USA. The pseudo-small-business ad campaign is just a crock, like all the “family” winemakers in the late ’70s that were really owned by Gallo. As if a one-tractor, 20-acre tobacco farm run by one guy “who works for nobody but himself” could afford all those fancy ads, billboards and point-of-sale displays.

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Alternative X is an online journal curated by a literary essayist using the (allegedly real) name Mark Amerika. Its main attraction is “In Memoriam to Postmodernism,” a book-length package of essays on “avant pop” fiction (defined here as everybody from Kathy Acker to Mark Leyner) and other topics. Included in the package are:

* “Strategies of Disappearance, or Why I Love Dean Martin” by Stranger interviewee Steve Shaviro (praising the eternally-indifferent “Zen Master of the Rat Pack”);

* “A Mysterious Manifesto” by Don Webb, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a mainstream science-fiction fan (because commercial SF/ fantasy denies any real sense of mystery and wonder in favor of “grey” formula predictability); and

* “An Essay-Simulacrum on Avant-Pop” by Curt White, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a “radical” (because they haven’t “advanced any description of a social organization beyond capitalism more invigorating than the oft-used and dusty phrase `true participatory democracy'”).

Also on the site is “Toward the New Degenerate Narrative,” a “literary manifesto” by Bruce Benderson that starts with a cute rant against bureaucratically-edited school textbooks and goes on to expose the classist assumptions behind the “progressive” fantasy of a utopian small-town society where everybody’s “nice” and soft-spoken–the same fantasy behind the “Northwest Lifestyle” rhetoric. Benderson notes that much of the post-hippie left’s politics “have been loaded with the psychic markers of a certain lifestyle: polite euphemisms, nostalgia for rural space, emphasis on Victorian ideas of child protection, reliance on grievance committees and other forms of surveillance, and an unacknowledged squeamishness about The Other.” He also disses the slogan “Hate Is Not A Family Value,” asserting that “hate and resentment keep the family’s incestuous urges tensely leashed.”

THE FINE PRINT (on a tub of Dannon Light ‘N Crunchy Low Fat Yogurt with Aspartame Sweetener and Crunchies): “Contains one-third fewer calories than the leading brand of sugar-sweetened yogurt with crunchies.”

HEY SAILOR!: As some of you know, I live in the general vicinity of the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall in Belltown. So when chartreuse-haired guys n’ gals started lining up in front of the place on the evening of 3/3, some neighbors and neighborhood people shuddered out loud that they were gonna be kept awake by another of the all-night raves that had been held there over the past year. I reassured them this was different: Live bands (no incessant disco beats), in an all-ages show that’d be over before midnight.

Inside, the scene was a flashback to a time when today’s underage punks were in diapers. By the time the amazing Team Dresch played a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover, the time warp was complete. With one big difference (bigger than the gig’s total on-stage ratio of eight females to three males)–unlike the old rental-hall punk shows, where drinking, drugging, fighting and hall-trashing were constant presences or threats, this crowd grew up under the burden of the Teen Dance Ordinance, knew an all-ages show was something precious, and behaved accordingly. Part of the credit goes to promoter Lori LaFavor (a partner in the old local music tabloid Hype). She booked some of the biggest names in indie music, who also happened to share a belief that music should be more than a mere excuse for partying but a means toward communication and community.

As has been our practice since 1988, this year’s list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not necessarily what’s big now. If you believe everything already big will just keep getting bigger forever, we’ve got some Northern Exposure and Barney merchandise to sell you.

11/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

BUSCH BUYS STAKE IN REDHOOK:

LOOK FOR THE ‘BALLARD BITTER GIRLS’

IN PIONEER SQUARE THIS FRIDAY

Welcome again to Misc., the pop-culture corner that has one question about the Varsity’s recent documentary Dream Girls: If an all-male Japanese theater is called Noh, is an all-female Japanese theater a Yesh?

AW, SHOOT: We begin with condolences to those who went to the Extrafest fiasco, billed as a free concert but more accurately a way for filmmakers to get crowd shots without paying people. The producers’ inexperience in live events showed throughout the evening. Some bands only got to play as few as three songs. There were long impatient waits during lighting setups. The director’s opening remarks treated the audience as idiots, asking them to be nice kids and not mosh. That only got audience members to mosh at their first opportunity; they were met by harsh security, who grabbed some folks by the neck, dragged them into the hallway, and made them stand for Polaroids for some reason. Three kids tackled a particularly nasty guard. Two-thirds of the audience walked out long before the end.

UPDATE: Looks like Nalley’s Fine Foods won’t be sold to archrival Hormel after all. The farmers’ co-op that holds a big stake in Nalley’s current parent company don’t want to lose the big processor-manufacturer as a captive market for their products.

GIMME A BRAKE: The Times recently reported that UW athletic director Barbara Hedges, since her appointment to the job, had been parking her Beemer in a campus space signed “Handicapped Parking/By Permit Only.” The UW Daily reported it, causing a temporary minor ruckus. The university administration resolved the matter by having the signs at Hedge’s space changed.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: The Seahawks want to make the beleaguered Kingdome a truly beautiful place at last: Real exterior surfaces, bigger and better concourses, a slick green-glass entrance with shops and banquet rooms, a permanent exhibition pavilion on part of the current parking areas, landscaping around the remaining lots, even more bathrooms. The problem, natch, is the price tag: $120 million. The team doesn’t have that kind of dough and the county surely doesn’t, especially right after spending almost as much to fix the Dome than it originally spent to build it. The Mariners, meanwhile, say they don’t want to sign another long-term Dome lease no matter what’s done to the place–they want their own space, preferably with a mega-costly Toronto Skydome sunroof, for something in the $250 million range.

This has always been a town whose dreams far exceeded its pocket contents. For over 30 years we’ve planned and/ or built an array of “world class” structures on the limited wealth of a regional shipping and resources economy. The result: A handful of refitted older buildings, another handful of decaying newer buildings, and one truly world-class structure (the Space Needle, built with all private money). These days, we’re besieged with blueprints or ideas for one all-new stadium and one revamped one, a square mile of condos and token green space, a new concert hall, a big new library, an addition to the convention center, a new airport nobody except bureaucrats wants, a new city hall and/ or police HQ, and three or four different potential regional transit systems.

Just ‘cuz there’s some Microsoft millionaires out buying Benzos on the Eastside, it doesn’t mean Seattle’s become a town of unlimited fiscal resources. Of course, the politicians (most of whom never met a construction project they didn’t like) will support as many of these schemes as they think they can get away with, rather than bother with comparatively mundane initiatives like health care and low-income housing that don’t lead to campaign contributions from big contractors and construction unions.

However, let it be known that I like the Dome, for all its faults. It’s a great place for monster-truck rallies, boat shows, and the temporary neighborhood built each year for the Manufactured Housing Expo. No matter what happens to the sports teams, the Dome should be maintained at least for these uses.

GOTH-AM CITY: Saw a public-access tape made at the Weathered Wall’s Sun. nite “Sklave” gothic-fetish disco event. It accurately represented the spirit of the event, which I’ve been to and liked. But I took issue with one long segment where some young dancers in pale faces and black clothes whined that “Seattle is just SO behind the times.” This death-dance stuff’s almost as old as punk, and I can assure you it’s had local consumers all that time. But being new or hot isn’t the important thing anymore. What’s important is doing your own thing, which just might be the Bauhaus/ Nick Cave revival thing. Speaking of the beauty of death…

HOW I LEARNED TO LIKE HALLOWEEN: For a long time I was bummed out by the grownup Halloween. It was one of the three or four nights a year when people who never go out invaded my favorite spots, acting oh-so-precious in their identical trendy role-playing costumes and their stuck-up suburban attitudes. But this year I began to understand a bit about the need for people to let their dark sides out to play. I was reminded of this very indirectly by, of all things, Tower Books’ display of Northwest writers. There were all these guys who’d moved here and apparently couldn’t believe anybody here could have the kind of angst or conflicts needed for good storytelling. These writers seemed to think that just ‘cuz we might have some pretty scenery, nothing untoward could ever happen here. It’s horror writers and filmmakers (especially in recent years) who understand that some of the worst evils are dressed in alluring physical beauty. If a simple-minded drinking holiday can help people understand this principle, so be it.

THE ROAR OF THE GREASEPAINT, THE SMELL OF THE CROWD: A glowing Times story claimed there were approximately 1 million seats sold in each of the past two years to Seattle’s top 12 nonprofit theater companies and the for-profit touring shows at the 5th Ave. Theater. (The story waited till far inside the jump page to say that attendance at some of the biggies, especially the Rep, is actually down a bit.) Even then, more seats are sold each year to the major theater companies than to any local sports enterprise except (in a good year) the Mariners. If you add the smaller, often more creative drama and performance producers, the total might surpass the Mariners’ more popular years. (All the big sports teams together still draw more than all the big theaters together.)

Maybe Seattle really is the cultured community civic boosters sometimes claim it to be. Or maybe we’re a town of passive receivers who like to have stories shown to us, whether in person or on a screen, instead of creating more of our own (our big theaters aren’t big on local playwrights, even as some of them get into the business of developing scripts to be marketed to out-of-town producers).

THE FINE PRINT (inner-groove etchings on Monster Truck Driver’s new EP): “We don’t want to change your oil…”, “…We just want to drink your beer.”

BEAUTIFUL SONS: There’s still no real Cobain memorial in Seattle, but there’s one of sorts in Minneapolis. The paper City Pagessez Twin Cities Nirvana fan Bruce Blake (who’s also organizing Nirvana stuff for Cleveland’s Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame) has started a Kurt Cobain Memorial Program at the Minneapolis Children’s Medical Center. It’s a fundraising campaign to provide art supplies and toys to hospitalized kids. Donations can be sent to Carol Jordan at the hospital, 2525 Chicago Ave. S., Minneapolis 55404.

BUTTING IN: The New York City government’s proposed laws against smoking in most public places, similar to Washington state’s tough new law. In response, Phillip Morris threatens to move its corporate HQ out of NYC, and also (in a move that would more directly affect politicians’ lifestyles), canceling its support for NYC arts groups. Some of these groups are lobbying the state to give in to PM’s demands. Think of it as a warning to anybody who still thinks artistic expression can stay independent of its Medicis. This might be what conservatives wanted when they slashed govt. arts support, driving producers into the influence of corporate patrons.

The issue of the arts and cancer-stick money is working out far differently in Canada. In that paternalistic land-without-a-First-Amendment, the government banned all cigarette advertising (even in print) five years ago. But they left a loophole: Cig makers could still sponsor arts and sports events, under their corporate names. The feeling at the time was that it might help a few museums and in any event, the Big Two Canuck cancer-stick makers, Imperial Tobacco and RJR MacDonald, didn’t put their corporate names on cig brands. Instead, the companies formed paper subsidiaries with the names of all their main brands (Craven A Ltd., Benson & Hedges Inc.) These false-front companies exist only to sponsor and advertise sports, entertainment and some arts events (the Players Ltd. IndyCar race, the Matinee Ltd. women’s tennis tourney), using the same logos as their parent firms’ no-longer-advertised cigs.

FOREIGN ADVENTURES: The non-invasion of Haiti just might signal a revised definition of “America’s Strategic Interests.” In the past, we warred and invaded over material resources like oil to feed US domestic industry. Now, we’re taking charge of a country whose main asset is cheap labor for multinational corporations. It’s certainly feasible to think of this as the first military occupation of the NAFTA/ GATT era.

TUBEHEADS: Seeing the KCTS “Then and Now” promos with those old kinescoped clips of live, local, studio-bound educational shows, I sure miss those things (I’m just old enough to remember old shows like Builder’s Showcase and Dixy Lee Ray‘s nature lessons). There is something special about live TV that you just can’t get in edited location videotape; the lack of commercials makes the discipline even tougher. Studio TV is the electronic incarnation of Aristotle’s rules of dramatic unity: one place, one time, one linear sequence of events. Now I love shows like Bill Nye, but there’s something to be said for the surviving studio-bound shows likeThe Magic of Oil Painting. And the sheer volume of local programs on KCTS in the pre-Sesame St. years made it the closest thing to community TV before cable access. To see such examples of Pure TV compared negatively to the likes of Ghost Writer is like those talk-show beauty makeovers that turn perfectly fine-looking individuals into selfless style clones.

PVC BVDS: The Times, 10/14, reports a New Hampshire co.’s making thermal underwear (available thru the Land’s End catalog) from recycled plastic items including pop bottles. Just the thing to wear under your vinyl outerwear when it’s too cold to wait in line outside on Fetish Night. Alas, they only come in navy blue or green, not black. (Other non-fetish plasticwear’s available at Patagoniain Belltown.)

MEAT THE PRESS: Green Giant’s moving in on that health-food-store staple, the meatless burger patty. Ordinarily, this would be just another case of a corporation muscling in on a product developed by little guys. What’s different is that Green Giant’s owned by the same Brit conglomerate that owns Burger King, causing a potential conflict-O-interest in its slogans for the veggieburger, promising, a la ice beer, “more of what you want in a burger, less of what you don’t.”

THE CLAPPER: Spielberg, ex-Disney exec Jeff Katzenberg, and Courtney Love’s boss David Geffen want to start their own global movie/ music/ multimedia studio empire. What’s more, Bill Gates is rumored to be investing in it. I thought Gates had more sense. The last guy in his tax bracket with no media experience who tried to buy into the movies, John Kluge, is still pouring cash down the fiscal black hole of Orion Pictures.

KEEP ON YOU-KNOW-WHAT DEPT.: This year, it’s Seattle’s turn to get acknowledged on a nameplate with the Olds Aurora. Next year, according to automotive trade mags, there’ll be a light-duty pickup called the Toyota Tacoma! Besides falling trippingly off the tongue, the name implies a tuff, no-nonsense truck for a tuff, no-nonsense town. My suggested options: Super Big Gulp-size cupholders, Tasmanian Devil mudflaps, half-disconnected mufflers. My suggested color: Rust.

GETTING CRAFTY: Regular Misc. readers know I write lots about the aesthetic of community life, about how architecture, urban planning and the “everyday” arts affect life and health. These things have been thought about for a long time. One proof of this was the NW Arts & Crafts Expo, a collection of sales- and info-display booths earlier this month at the Scottish Rite Temple. This wasn’t street fair art, but work of the early-20th-century Arts & Crafts Movement. At its widest definition, this movement ranged from back-to-simplicity purists like Thoreau and UK philosopher William Morris to unabashed capitalists like author-entrepreneur Elbert Hubbardand furniture manufacturer Gustave Stickley. They believed an aesthetically pleasing environment enhanced life, and such an environment should be available to of all income brackets.

The movement’s influenced peaked between 1900 and 1930–the years of Seattle’s chief residential development. It’s no coincidence that the lo-density “single family neighborhoods” Seattle patricians strive to defend are largely built around the lo-rise bungalow, the A&C people’s favorite housing style. The movement died out with the postwar obsession for the cheap and/ or big–for the world of freeways, malls, office parks, domed stadia, subdivisions and condos. Our allegedly-feminist modern era disdained many traditionally feminine arts, including home design and furnishing. The beats and hippies knew the fabric of daily life had gone dreadfully wrong but couldn’t implement enough wide-ranging solutions. You don’t have to follow all the A&C movement’s specific styles to appreciate its sensibility. We haven’t just been killing the natural environment but also the human-made environment. As shown by the Kingdome and other collapsing new buildings (Seattle’s real-life Einzürzende Neubauten), many of these sprawling brutalities aren’t forever. The next generation of artistic people will have the task of replacing the sprawl with real abodes, real streets, real neighborhoods, and (yes) real ballparks.

ANOTHER YR. OLDER DEPT.: The Stranger, the local arts and whatever tabloid I do some writing for, recently finished its third year. (Misc. didn’t show up in the Stranger ’til Vol. 1 No. 9 in November ’91.)

I was reminded how far the local weekly of choice had come when the public access channel reran a Bongo Corral variety show from early ’92, featuring an interview with the paper’s first editor and future Bald Spokesmodel At Sea Matt Cook, talking of big plans for it to become the best real alternative rag this town’s seen. Big boasts for a paper that then was a raggedy 12-page collection of cartoons, entertainment listings, essays, satire and Savage Love. Now it’s a substantial assemblage of info, fun and ads with over 36,000 copies picked up each week (twice the highest figure of the local ’60s paper Helix, three times the peak of the ’70s Seattle Sun, and as of this month higher than the Weekly if you don’t count its Eastside edition).

The Stranger‘s still a tightly-budgeted operation, with an overworked/ underpaid staff and too few phone lines, but it’s paying its way. It’s become a forum for great cartooning, unabashed arts criticism, investigative reporting, and essays on matters great and small. And while never claiming to be anybody’s “voice,” it’s become a popular reading choice among post-boomers, the people the print-media business long ago wrote off as unworthy of anything but snide condescension.

It’s no big secret how the Stranger did it. It prints things it thinks curious members of the urban community would like to read. It doesn’t treat its readers as idiots or as market-research statistics. It’s been damned w/faint praise as “trendy” and superficial by publications that run cover stories about romantic getaways and Euro bistros. It’s slight on the fancy graphics and doesn’t do many clever white-space layouts. It runs long articles in small type with small headlines and small pictures. In an age of homogenized hype and celebrity fluff, it publishes interesting things about people who say and do interesting things whether they be bestselling authors or crumpet toasters. The closest it gets to consumer-oriented “service publishing” is the Quarterly Film Guide. In keeping with a generation desperate for a sense of historical continuity, its covers comprise a modern revival of the great humor-magazine cover art of the past. In a media universe saturated with shrill self-promotion, it’s a paper of content.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, look up Earl Emerson’s new thriller The Portland Laugher (probably the first novel ever titled after a regular crank caller on the old Larry King radio show), check out the McDonald’s Barbie play set (at last, she’s got a job most kids can expect to get in real life!), and note these words Mike Mailway found in the writings of Wm. Burroughs: “A functioning police state needs no police.”

PASSAGE

Computer visionary Ted Nelson (inventor of the term “hypertext”) in New Media magazine: “Power corrupts; obsolete power corrupts obsoletely.”

REPORT

You might like to look up some small excerpts of my collaborative fiction in the new book Invisible Rendezvous by Rob Wittig (Wesleyan U. Press), and a small excerpt from my forthcoming Seattle-music book in issue #2 of Mark Campos’s comic Places That Are Gone (Aeon/MU Press).

Copies of Misc. #92 (May) are sold out; as are proof copies of my Seattle music-history book. The trade paperback edition of the book will be out next spring (still looking for pictures and reminiscences).

With subs dwindling, I’m having to consider whether to discontinue the newsletter and concentrate on my Stranger writing and my book. Your advice would be most welcome. If I do end the newsletter (which wouldn’t happen until after issue #100), current subscribers will receive alternate collections of my work.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Oogonium”

10/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

OLD SEMIOTICIANS NEVER DIE, THEY JUST DECONSTRUCT

Welcome back to Misc., the pop-culture column that thinks maybe we should get environmental artist Christo to cover the Kingdome with giant Attends garments. At its best, it would make the place look more like the billowy top of B.C. Place. In any case, it couldn’t make the joint look any worse.

WHERE NO REP ACTOR HAS GONE BEFORE: We offer a hearty hat tip to ex-Seattle Rep regular Kate Mulgrew, contracted to play the lead on the new Star Trek: Voyager. At least now she won’t just be a footnote to TV trivia for having left the original cast of Ryan’s Hope to star of the almost universally disdained Mrs. Columbo, whose reputation she hid from by working in Seattle after its demise.

WE ARE DRIVEN: Want more proof that Seattle’s “arrived” in the national consciousness? In previous decades, every little place in Southern California got a car named after it–even Catalina, an island where (I believe) private cars are banned. But you know we’ve become the new focus of America’s attention when GM names its most heavily promoted new ’95 car after Seattle’s most famous car-oriented street! Alas, there isn’t an Olds dealer in the Seattle city limits so you can’t buy an Aurora on Aurora, unless you go to Lynnwood where it isn’t officially called Aurora anymore. (‘Tho you can get the Buick version of the car, the new Riviera, on Aurora at Westlund Buick-GMC.)

WON’T YOU GUESS MY NAME DEPT.: As remote-happy fools, we couldn’t help but notice at the time Mick Jagger was on the MTV awards, A&E’s Biography was profiling John D. Rockefeller. On one channel you get a wrinkly old rich monopoly-capitalist famous for putting his assets in trusts and tax shelters, and on the other you get an oilman.

BANGIN’ THAT GONG AROUND: We need to demystify the recent Newsweek item about the supposed new Seattle fad for “Victorian drugs” (unrefined opium, absinthe, et al.). With the magazine’s “group journalism,” more people were probably involved in writing the article than are involved in the trend the article discussed.

JUNK FOOD UPDATE: The publicized demise of Lay’s Salt and Vinegar potato chips has apparently been exaggerated. Not only that, but Tim’s Cascade has introduced its own S&V flavor. (Now if we could only get that Canadian delicacy, ketchup-flavored chips.) Alas, we must say goodbye to the Nalley’s chip division, the spud-n’-grease brand the Northwest grew up on. The competition from the big guys in the regular-chip market was too much for the spunky locals to bear. The brand may survive, licensed to (and made by) a Utah outfit.

RE-STRIPPED: The P-I‘s brought back Mallard Fillmore, the worst comic strip in years, after running it for two months and bouncing it. It’s relegated to the want ads, back with They’ll Do It Every Time and Billy Graham. You may be asking, “If you’re such a left-winger, why do you dis a strip that purports to champion rightist views but really depicts its `hero’ as an obnoxious boor who doesn’t know he’s not funny? Don’t you want folks to see conservatives that way?” I do, but even in propaganda-art I have aesthetic standards, and Mallard’s far short of ’em.

NO CONCEALED WEAPONS: A team of from 8 to 15 teenage boys showed up naked at a Renton convenience store two weeks ago, then during the commotion walked away with two cases of Coke. I’m surprised the kids got into the store. Besides violating any “no shirt-no shoes-no service” policy, they obviously were carrying neither cash nor charge cards.

THE FINE PRINT (beneath the “As Seen On Oprah!” display sign at Crown Books): “The books below are not to be construed as an endorsement or sponsorship by Oprah Winfrey, but simply as a showing of the books as discussed on the Oprah Winfrey television show!”

CORPORATESPEAK AT WORK: The once-beloved National Cash Register Co., which evolved into a computer and business-systems firm that merged with AT&T‘s stumbling computer division, is now officially called “AT&T Global Information Solutions.” I don’t want my information diluted, I want it full strength!

BUMMERSHOOT: Somehow, the annual Labor Day weekend rite of face painting, face stuffing and line shoving in the name of “The Arts” seemed even older and tireder this time. Bookings in most departments were almost fatally safe, from the tribute to the city’s bland public art collection to the parade of washed-up soft rock all-stars. (Some exceptions: Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Joan Jett, authors Slavenka Drakulic and Sherman Alexie, the local bands in the Bumberclub, and the St. Petersburg Ballet.) You know something’s amiss when your most vivid memories were of the pathetically small audience for the $10-extra X show in Memorial Stadium (more people came for the band’s “surprise” set at the Crocodile later that night) and the endless free samples of Cheerios Snack Mix (fun hint: spool the Cheerios pieces on the pretzel sticks).

The weekend wasn’t a total loss, tho’; also went to the Super Sale, an amazing bazaar of close-out car stereos and surplus athletic shoes held in two big tents in the Kingdome parking lot. Entering the site from the north, I caught a glimpse into the dome disaster area, truly an alternate-reality sight out of a dystopian SF movie.

Luckily, I missed the quasi-riot after the !Tchkung! gig in the Bumberclub (Flag Pavilion). Even while the set was going on, some 20 cops had amassed outside. When some fans and members of the band’s extended family tried to start an informal drum circle after the show’s scheduled end. When the house lights came on, the audience was gruffly ordered to disperse. They went outside but apparently didn’t disperse enough for the cops’ taste. Isolated shouting matches escalated — one guy smashed a pane of a glass door; another kid was put into a headlock by a cop; two male fans allegedly stripped to show their defiance of authority. One fan was arrested; several were maced outside.

I still don’t know why the cops apparently overreacted; perhaps it was a dress rehearsal for the overreaction the following Saturday night, when 200 homeless teens staged a sit-in in the middle of Broadway to protest the anti-sitting law and past police brutality (including arrests without charges). Again, things got out of hand, to the point that random passersby got maced and-or manhandled by cops. And the media wonder why young people these days don’t worship authority. Speaking of which…

X-PLOITATION FILM: Age of Despair, KOMO’s youth-suicide documentary, was the station’s closest thing to an intelligent moment in years. Interesting, though, that the first segment (about those strange young rockers and their bewildering followers) was in “artsy” black and white with fake-Cinemascope borders, while the second segment (about the suicide of a supposedly “normal” high-school football star) was in color, as if the producers felt more comfortable being around a suburban-square milieu. Similarly, interviews with teens and young-adults were monochrome film while over-40s were shot in full RGB video. Also interestingly, the narration was aimed at pleading for parents to communicate with their kids more, but the show made no attempt to speak directly to any younger viewers — a symptom of the same societal dehumanization some of the younger interviewees complained about.

THROWIN’ THE BOOK AT ‘EM: The city has forced me to choose between aspects of my belief system: Do I encourage you to support libraries or oppose yuppification? The bureaucrats, who truly never met a construction project they didn’t like, are using the promise of a spiffy huge new library as an excuse to raze what’s left of the glorious temple of hard knocks that once was 1st & Pike — including Fantasy (un)Ltd., Time Travelers, Street Outreach Services, and the former second-floor-walkup space of punk palace Danceland USA. (At least one place I like, M. Coy Books, is in one of the two buildings on the block that’d be left). Once again, the political/ media establishment is out to remake Seattle into a plastic yuppietown, where if you’re not an upscale boomer you’re not supposed to exist. I believe in libraries as the original Info Hi-Ways, as resources for growth and empowerment and weird discoveries. I also believe that cities need to be real places for real people. That’s the same belief held by the activists who “saved” the Pike Place Market, only to see it teeter closer every year toward becoming a tourist simulacra of a market. Some of the blocks just outside the Market have retained their enlivening mix of high, middle and lowlife; I’d be the first to admit that some personally destructive and/ or unsightly activities can take place there. But to pretend to deal with poverty or crime by removing places where lower-caste people gather is worse than corrupt. It’s an act of stupidity, something libraries are supposed to fight against.

EYE TRANSPLANT: The day Bonneville International said it’d sell KIRO-TV, KCTS had a pledge-drive retrospective of J.P. Patches, whose classic kiddie show was the first local telecast on KIRO’s first day in 1958 and continued on the station ’til ’81. During J.P.’s heyday, straitlaced parents complained that he pre-empted half of Captain Kangaroo. Now he’s revered as a key influence on Northwest humor and pop culture, a figure who represented the best of local TV. KIRO’s sale, and its loss of CBS programming toKSTW, represent corporate maneuvers that ignore the needs of local stations or viewers.

But first, a history of Seattle TV. KING (originally KSRC) signed on in 1948, showing kinescope films of shows from every network. Shortly after, the FCC imposed a three-year freeze on new stations. (When Eastern authors praise the “Golden Age of TV,” they mean when there weren’t many stations beyond the Northeast and networks appealed to “sophisticated” Eastern tastes.) KOMO, KCTS, and KSTW (then KTNT) all signed on in ’54, after the freeze ended. KTNT got CBS; KOMO got NBC; KING was left with ABC, then a Fox-like distant competitor. In ’58 KIRO came on and took CBS; KING snatched NBC; KOMO got stuck with ABC, which wouldn’t reach parity with the other nets ’til the ’70s.

Nowadays, big multi-station groups are negotiating with the nets, shutting out smaller players like Bonneville (owners of only one TV station besides KIRO). Gaylord, the group that owns KSTW (as well as the Nashville Network and Opryland) wants to swing new CBS deals for its stations, including KSTW. When Gaylord took over KSTW in ’74, it tried to grab CBS away from KIRO, which had relatively weak ratings and revenues for a big-city network station. KIRO now is a stronger entity than KSTW; it; but local logic isn’t at work here. So Bonneville’s selling KIRO-TV (but not KIRO radio) to A.H. Belo Corp., the southern media conglomerate that formed a newspaper monopoly in its hometown of Dallas by maneuvering to weaken, then buying and folding, the only competitor to itsMorning News.

So sometime around April Fool’s Day, KIRO will lose four shows it’s run since its first week on the air in ’58 (the Evening News, Face the Nation, As the World Turns, Guiding Light) and several others that have run for 10 or 20 years (Murder She Wrote, 60 Minutes, Price Is Right, Young & Restless). I guess it also means Letterman won’t be doing any field segments at the office-supply store two blocks south of KIRO on 2nd, The Home Office.

Besides the KIRO staff, the losers in this shift might include the broadcast community in Tacoma. KSTW might decide that having become a big-network station, it needs a high-profile headquarters in Seattle (currently, it’s got a sales office, news bureau and transmitter in Seatown while keeping main offices and studio in T-Town). KCPQ has leased a building in downtown Seattle and will move all its operations there next year. All that might be left of T-Town TV could be a secondary PBS station, best known for running British shows that KCTS passes on.

DEAD AIR: I know, another radio-sucks item and aren’t you tired of it by now? Still, the passing of KING-AM must be noted. As I wrote back when midday host Jim Althoff abandoned the sinking KING ship, the station was (except during the fiasco of G. Gordon Liddy‘s syndicated sleazefest) an island of sanity and occasional intelligence amidst the 24-hour-a-day version of 1984‘s “two-minutes hate” that is modern talk radio. The Bullitt sisters, whose patronage (subsidized by their other former broadcast properties) kept the station alive through over a decade of various money-eating news-talk and talk-news formats, have been disposing of their stations; they decided they couldn’t keep KING-AM going with their more profitable divisions gone. They fired the talk hosts, and now just run AP satellite news with local-news inserts. KIRO radio (no longer to be connected with KIRO-TV) is in the process of buying the station but hasn’t taken over yet; write ’em (2807 3rd Ave., 98121) to say you want the KING talkers back.

Possible bad omen: KIRO radio had a promo booth at the Preparedness Expo, a commercial bazaar for fear- and hate-mongers from the far right to the extreme right (one vendor offered Janet Reno bull’s-eye decals to put in your toilet; another offered poison darts that could allegedly penetrate Kevlar bulletproof vests). This was at Seattle Center the same day as the AIDS walk and KNDD’s Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit concert. I don’t know whether Courtney Love, co-headlining the concert in her first local appearance since her widowhood, got to confront any pro-gun people on the sidewalk between the events.

ARTISTIC LICENSE: The Artists for a Hate-Free America show at the Arena was great, and its cause is greater: combating hate crimes, anti-gay initiatives and all-around bigotry. But its PR packet is wrong when it recounts examples of hate at work, then asserts “This Is Not America.” Alas, it is. America was and is, to a great extent, a country run on fear and greed, on conquest and demonization. But some of us like to think it doesn’t have to stay that way. And the group’s planned rural outreach program is one sorely needed step.

The Artists started in response to professional demagogue Lon Mabon’s drive to make homophobia into official Oregon state and local govt. policy; one of the towns he won initiatives in was Springfield, sister city to the living PC-Ville that is Eugene. The Bible warns against hiding your talents under a bushel; as I’ve repeatedly ranted here, so must we stop cooping up our values and ideals within our comfy boho refuges and college towns. The time’s past due to walk our walk on “diversity,” to not just demand tolerance from others but express it to others, even to people different from us. We’ve gotta build support for progressivism everywhere we can.

FOUL TIP: Ken Burns’s Baseball miniseries had lots of intriguing historical info, but it suffered in just the ways I expected it to suffer: from the deadening gentility to which so-called “public” broadcasting oft falls prey, married to the neoconservative baseball-as-religion pieties that help turn so many contemporary Americans off from the game. A game rooted in sandlots and spitballs, played by ex-farm boys and immigrant steelworkers, tied in irrevocably (as the show’s narration revealed) with gambling, drinking, cussing, spitting and racism, was treated in the filmmaking process as that ugliest kind of Americana, the nostalgia for what never was. Besides, they didn’t even mention the greatest footnote to sports history, the 1969-only Seattle Pilots. Speaking of celebrations of the human physique…

BARELY UNDERSTANDING: The fad for increasingly graphic female nudity in print ads selling clothes to women continues, from the highest-circulation fashion mags to lowly rags such as this–including ads placed by female-run firms. (That’s female #1(the merchant or maker) showing a picture of female #2 (the model) without clothes, to sell clothes to female #3 (the customer)). This whole pomo phenomenon of selling clothes by showing people not wearing any is something I’ve tried hard to understand.

Maybe it’s selling “body image” like the feminist analysts claim all fashion ads do. Maybe it’s selling the fantasy of not needing the product, like the Infiniti ads that showed perfect natural landscapes bereft of the destructive effects of automobiles. Maybe the ads should say something like, “Don’t be ashamed that you have a body; be ashamed it doesn’t look like this. Wear our clothes all the time and nobody will know you don’t have this body.” Or: “The law says you can’t go around clothes-free in public, so if you have to wear clothes you might as well wear ours.”

Then again, after seeing the stupid designer clothes on VH-1’s Fashion Television Weekend, I can understand how the industry would want its customers to pretend they were naked. It’d be less embarrassing to be starkers in public than to be seen wearing a lot of that overpriced silliness.

DISCREDITED: It was bad enough that the TV networks wanted their show producers to get rid of opening theme songs. Now, NBC’s trashed closing credits, sticking them in tiny type along the right side of the screen (in the same ugly typeface for every show!) next to Leno promos and the like. And they stick the studio logos before the credits, not after like they belong. Would the Mary Tyler MooreShow have been such a perfect ritual if the MTM kitty had meowed before Asner’s credit shot? The networks are destroying the carefully-crafted viewing experience, in hopes of tricking a few viewers not to zap away.

SPEAKING OF SPORTS: I want you all to catch Prime Sports Northwest’s 10/9 (5 pm) tape-delayed coverage of the football game between USC and one of my alma mamas, Oregon State. This is the occasion to take part in Pac-10 football’s most risqué drinking game. Take a glug when the announcer mentions either team name. Finish off your drink when the announcer uses any variation on the phrase, “The Trojans are deep in Beaver territory.”

‘TIL NEXT YOUR EYES FOCUS UPON THESE PAGES, be sure to order Intellimation’s catalog of utterly cool educational software including frog-dissection simulations, “idea generators” for creative writers, and the pattern-drawing program Escher-Sketch (1-800-346-8355); and ponder these words of the great dead French guy Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it.”

PASSAGE

As one more needed antidote to PBS-style baseball nostalgia, the fondly-remembered advice of Joe Schultz, manager of the hapless Seattle Pilots:

“It’s a round ball and a round bat and you’ve got to hit it square.”

REPORT

As the Stranger‘s free weekly circulation goes over the 35,000 mark, there’s even less of a reason for me to haul free newsletters around town. Therefore, there will only be free newsletters at a few places each month that have specifically requested them, and I won’t promise that they won’t run out by the middle of the month. If you really like this four-page package of verbiage, subscribe. We need approximately 200 more paid subscriptions to make this a profitable going part-time concern.

Advance photocopy drafts of Here We Are Now: The Real Seattle Music Story are no longer available to the general public. Wait, if you can, for the real book, to be published in March by Feral House of Portland (curators of COCA’s “Cult Rapture” show, on now).

There were no entries in the last Misc. contest, in which I asked you to give the least-likely scenario for a movie based on a TV show. There probably won’t be any more such contests for a while.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Algolagnia”

MY DAY: Yesterday afternoon I visited the Red Hook housing project in Brooklyn, N.Y., and enjoyed seeing the various apartments and having the opportunity to talk with some of the people living there. Of course, the ultimate object of any housing project is to have satisfied tenants.

Our first visit was to an apartment with two bedrooms, kitchen, sitting room and bath. The young couple had two children and the wife’s mother with them. The man is a longshoreman with only intermittent days of work. The girl seemed proud and happy and she had acquired many possessions which she showed me with pride. Her mother brought out a plate of little cakes and some little glasses and poured out some homemade wine which she offered to us all. We drank to their health and happiness and we wished for them the steady job on which so much depends. Little enough to ask of life and yet often impossible to attain.

Our next family was in a larger three bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath apartment. They had four children and the man was on WPA.

Our last apartment was one of the very small one bedroom, sitting room, kitchen and bath type. The young couple who lived there had had the sad experience of losing their first baby, but the young woman’s mother, who was visiting her, told me what a change this new apartment made in her life.

These apartments seemed to me very well planned. All of them have eliminated unnecessary doors. The kitchen, for instance, has no door, neither has the living room. The bedroom, bathroom and one closet have doors. The other closets are recessed with curtains. The landscaping around the houses is attractive, and scattered around the project are eight small playgrounds for children. I hope that some day everyone can live in quarters which are as pleasant as this, if for no other reason than that it will cost the taxpayers less and that the next generation will be healthier.

On Friday we went to Boston to see my new grandchild. He is a sweet baby with a nicely shaped head and ears that lie flat against his head. His hair is so fair that it hardly shows. He refused to open his eyes for me, so I don’t know their color, but I surmise it’s blue. I was only allowed to see him through a glass window, so I am looking forward to seeing him next in his own home and knowing more about him. I am sure he is going to be a real person very soon.

On the whole, our family works and plays hard, but there is one member who takes his job so seriously that not even the advent of a baby curtails his working hours. Don’t think John lost one hour. I am glad of this, for there is a real obligation on every one of us these days to do our job, whatever it may be, a little better than we have done it before.

If the need comes for any of us to do a different kind of work from what we are doing at present, the call will be unmistakable. But the fact that we do our daily jobs well will make it easier for anyone who has to take our place and will make us more efficient in anything else we have to take up. Besides going on with the daily routine, keeps our feet on the ground and that is sorely needed in times like these.

Two extremes have come to me in the last few days. One was a young man who announced to me that all talk of a “fifth column” was ridiculous and that there was no such thing in the United States. This, just because he and his friends and those with whom he talked, did not happen to touch any “fifth column” activities.

On the other hand, a woman suggested that we all go out and learn to shoot and sleep with a gun beside our beds in preparation for parachute troops or riots in our neighborhoods.

Both of these attitudes are obviously silly. We want to take proper precautions but, in other ways, we want to go on with our daily life and our daily job in calm security.

RADICALS AND THE ARTS: Miss Dorothy Day, a former rough and tumble radical who became a Catholic, has written a book calledFrom Union Square to Rome, in which she asks herself if the old desire to be with the poor and mean and abandoned was not mixed with a desire to be with the dissipated.

The question has arisen in other lands, prompted by the conduct and language and the studied physical and moral frowsiness of individuals who have identified themselves with radical movements.

The arts also have served as an excuse for a dirty way of life, and some artists of this type, being incompetent painters and writers, easily persuade themselves that they could command high prices if they would compromise with their principles. They become radical painters and writers to excuse their failure to themselves and disguise it to their friends.

Greenwich Village 20 years ago was a haunt of sloppy fakers who said they desired to live their lives in their own way, unfettered by middle-class conventions — which was another way of saying that they wanted to engage in some promiscuous sleeping-around and didn’t like soap. They had read about the art and independent thinking in a dirty quarter of Paris, and for a time maintained a similar artistic and intellectual slum in New York, most of whose inhabitants overdrank and produced punk poetry and short stories and incompetent smears on canvas.

There were quite a few young corn-fed frauds of both sexes from the Middle West, putting into effect ideas of conduct and morality which they had heard talked up on the campus, but the colony in New York, as well as the one in Paris, also in included unsightly females of considerable age with small private incomes who liked to sit around nasty little joints listening to the talk and reading of the unwashed literati and squinting at distorted pictures and imagine themselves to be of the arts.

In summer groups of such people move to places in the far suburbs to go around half-naked, if not altogether nude, and the town of Westport, Conn., which did have a colony of legitimate artists, suffered from the presence of carousing counterfeits. The neighbors got an impression that art meant free love, personal filth and drunkenness, and that most writers and artists were Communists, because the incompetents are likely to condemn a system which refuses to appreciate their talents.

It was not any scientific curiosity that prompted the fad of Viennese mind-probing, but an appetite for horribly foul sex stuff and the hope of dirty people that some head-feeler would tell them that they could cure their nervousness only by spending a week-end in a cabin off somewhere away from it all with some other man’s girl or some other woman’s gentleman friend. Medical necessity might just justify conduct which otherwise would be difficult to explain, and when both members of a domestic combination were similarly troubled the doctor’s orders were likely to be regarded as law.

Radical thought and belief does not truly express itself in filthy attire and dirty fingernails, for radicals purport to be intelligent, and it is only the ignorant who have an excuse for dirt when soap and water are almost free and whiskbrooms are a dime. Nevertheless, affected frowsiness has come to be offered as evidence of advanced thought, and profane and obscene speech is sometimes offered by women as proof that they are fighting mad at the condition of the poor or the sufferings of the Spanish Communists and don’t give a damn for the opinion of the complacent respectables who wash their smug and stupid faces.

Probably it is not so much the radical ideas but offensive personalities, and on warm days an odor as of something not quite fresh, which have made most Americans suspicious of radicalism. There is also a deterrent in the apparent, though not real, requirement that to sympathise with radical ideas one must give up hygiene, become personally filthy and, as between husband and wife, each agree that the other may jump the fence whenever he or she is troubled by a dream.

YOUTH AT `DEAD END,’ WHAT’S THE CURE?: Young people — mobs of them! Laughing squads of lovely girls, husky boys, lining up for the annual graduation parade. Studies over, school days at an end, off they go. Into what? Into a world which yesterday petted and encouraged them, but is now suddenly indifferent to their need, hostile to their demands. Into an enforced idleness that wrecks their pride and enthusiasm, destroys their ambition and illusions…turns dreams into doubt, determination into despair and patriotism into an embittered sneer.

“Scarehead stuff”? No! The tragic and shameful truth. Yearly, 2,000,000 — TWO MILLION, COUNT ‘EM! — young Americans, cream of the crop in brain and brawn, leave our schools and step down and out to join the ranks of the unemployed.

Timber lands, oil wells, scenic beauty, fruit trees, livestock — cows, apples, pigs, peaches – all these precious “natural resources” the nation fights strenuously to protect and conserve — spending, willingly, billions in that struggle. Yet each year, two million young graduates and uncounted thousands of uneducated youngsters — more precious to America than all her other “natural resources” combined — are junked!

For, remember, unemployment means more than an empty pocket. It means an empty spirit… an empty spirit which breeds maggots as surely as dead flesh.

Have you seen the play Dead End? There’s as shocking a sermon-in-the-flesh as a nation ever faced. Hush…darkness…the curtain rises on such a scene, such a problem as you may find in any American city today. An east side’s “dead end” terminal at the river’s edge. Rotting tenements…crumbling warehouses…cluttered with filth, riddled with hideouts. Above the brawling, blowsy, fly-blown hell juts the hanging garden of a millionaire. Below — scuttling through the stinking darkness like a pack of rats, goes The Gang.

The Gang! All children — some of them mere babes — they paw the garbage for food, pounce like beasts on anyone they hate — anything they desire. Snickering — without a flicker of conscience — they inflict incredible torture, retail absolute depravity. Why not? Unwanted, unloved, not one of them has ever known decent pride or joy. Cut off from all life’s honorable trails, they seek adventure in the “Dead End” slime.

Are the young people themselves to blame? Have they become spoiled by the easy luxury of this Machine Age…are they “too choosey” to accept jobs which their fathers took gladly?

Or is society responsible? Should the Government, regardless of party, conserve and protect youth as it now conserves and protects its timber land, scenic beauty, livestock? Is not youth the most precious of all “natural resources” and should it not be treated accordingly?

Do you remember Henley’s magnificent rallying cry, “I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul”? In those lines the fighting human spirit hurls its defiance at adversity. Time and again that spirit – blazing in the heart of the Youth — has swept America out of its “Dead End,” ON TO VICTORY!

I, `SPY’: Shirley was not especially astonished to learn that following a press breakfast with some of the girls from the cast of Minsky Follies that I was helping them find new lodging… Cheryl Taylor was the young lady in question and I picked up facts I hadn’t known about, like she ordinarily sings, but had to be a “Show Girl” because she had her jaw broken in an automobile accident some months back. A show girl, I find, is one who walks around “with” clothes. A Minsky “model,” on the other hand, has most of her clothes artfully removed. Glamorous Lili St. Cyr, however, is one of the “stars” along with comedian Pinky Lee… And she doesn’t exactly wear a “Mother Hubbard.” At the Orpheum.

Annie will be getting out her gun at the Aqua Theater at the behest of Greater Seattle Inc., starting July 2. Vivacious Gisele McKenzie will play the part of Annie and I might mention she’s doing one of my favorite musical comedies – Annie Get Your Gun!

The new Tiki Shop down at Leschi along Lake Washington is one to really flip over, the girls tell me. Betty Minor Evans, an old school friend of mine, and her partner have, to my knowledge, the only Seattle sop specializing in Hawaiian clothes for men and women. They went to Hawaii (how’s that for tough work?) and had things made up to their own specifications. Not the loud Aloha shirt bit, but elegant casual and cock-fashions, displayed in a tasty shop along with rare black coral and other types of jewelry and fine handmade wooden ware for the table. Betty’s off to Hawaii again this week, and I must say this sure beats doing your buying in the 7th Ave. Garment District in New York.

The Seahorse, that wonderful restaurant at Mukilteo, begs to report that it now can up the population of Mukilteo by 70 per cent every day without discommoding anyone. They’ve doubled the capacity of the restaurant and now there are two lines to the groaning smorgasbord tables. Mukilteo population — 1,000. Usual Wed. smorgasbord and dinner, at the Seahorse, about 700.

WHAT’S NUDE AT THE MOVIES?: Gamercy, Madison & Broadway. World premiere The Immoral West & How It Was Lost by producers of Erotica and Mr. Teas. Nudes & Dudes. Color, ample parking, free coffee… Guild 45th Street, 2115 N. 45th Street. Surftide 77. Hilarious parody of TV “whodunits.” Detective Bernard Bingbang seeks beauteous babe with birthmark. $500,000 color production.

FOR YOU PHOTOGRAPHERS: Hollywood Studios, 111 Stewart St., has comely models like the above posing 1-10 pm daily. Technical aid, lighting provided; camera rentals; individual or group sessions. MA 2-5555.

AND NOW ABOUT LIQUOR: Never on Sunday. Bootleggers are hard to find and expensive. If you don’t have a friend with a well-stocked liquor cabinet, you’ll be dry on Sunday if you don’t stock up. Some liquor stores open from 11 am to 11 pm. Check phone book… Beer taverns can be walked in on off the street & ladies can sit at bar, but they can’t call it a bar… Cocktail lounges are tucked away behind food. You can’t let children see liquor prepared so teen agers have to eat & or dance concealed from the bar. Women can’t sit at bar, but can sit at piano, which is why we have so many “piano” bars. Liquor hours: ‘Till 2 am except Saturday, when it’s midnight. Sit still when you’re doing your drinking. I don’t think it’s the law, but it certainly is the custom not to carry your drinks in a cocktail lounge. The waitress will call you on it if you do.

SHIRLEY’S COLUMN: One of the most often-asked questions by visitors to the fair is, “where can I order good salmon?” One of the best answers to that question is “The Viceroy.” We were there for lunch the other day and were delighted to find that Henk Straatmann not only is their Maitre d’ now, but served us salmon with his practiced continental flourish. It was poached, juicy — with his wonderful Hollandaise – and a bottle of Wente Bros. Riesling. An elegantly satisfying place to dine in style — The Viceroy.

We’ll be partying about the HMS Bounty (of MGM movie fame) as this issue comes out. It’s arriving 9 days late on account of storms. No wonder they used to sail to Seattle via Honolulu in the old days! She’ll be at Shilshole Marina for a week or so for the public to sample.

Our Mr. Fecker, Mayor of Pioneer Square and one of the partners in Louie’s and the Blue Banjo, reports that attendance at Louie’s has doubled since they put the entrance on the alley, complete with peephole for doorman, “Wolfgang.” You can depart by the backdoor of the Blue Banjo, step down the dark alley to Louie’s. It all gives you a wicked “prohibition era” type feeling.

•

(LATTER-DAY NOTE: Former Stranger editor S.P. Miskowski had the novel idea of turning one entire issue of the paper into a collection of “found texts,” cut and pasted together with no overt acknowledgment of their true origins. My entry combined Eleanor Roosevelt, conservative Hearst Newspapers columnist Westbrook Pegler, some Depression-era activist whose name I’ve since forgotten, and Seattle Guide editor and Underground Tour founder Bill Speidel.)

5/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating five Stranger columns)

Here at Misc. we can’t wait for the longtime local label K Records to start a joint venture with the new local label Y Records. The connection between the two would undoubtedly go very smoothly.

THE MAILBAG: Thanx to all the Aldus people who E-mailed words of reassurance after the piece here about the software giant last time. One guy said not to worry about Aldus’s future, that the firm’s forthcoming merger with Adobe Systems would be more like a “marriage” than a corporate takeover. (I think we’ve all seen marriages that were like corporate takeovers, but that’s beside the point…)

FOR LOVE OR $$ DEPT.: For shameless audience manipulation, nothing could compare to KCTS‘s weekend marathon of Getting The Love You Want, a home-video marriage counseling series. The facilitator picks a couple from the audience, has them reveal their issues and conflicts, then leads them in working out their differences. He closes the segment by getting the couple to hug and avow their continued empathy. This moment of tenderness and generosity closes, and then we see another pledge break.

THE NEW LITTER: The P-I reports that the much-hyped closure of the legendary Dog House restaurant was just a ploy by its owners to get out from its lease and its union contract. But it backfired; the eatery’s landlord decided not to sign a new lease with the Dog House people, but instead to let the owners of that other legendary 24-hour hash house, Beth’s Cafe, take over the space. The newly-christened Hurricane Cafe doesn’t have a bar, organ player, murals (its walls are newly painted in the same plum color as Linda’s Tavern on E. Pine), or such old-time menu items as liver and onions, but it does have big food at reasonable prices at all hours. The Dog House folks are reportedly looking for a new downtown site to open a non-union cafe, which may or may not have any of the old Dog House iconography.

FOUL TIP: The Mariners opened another season amidst new hype about the team actually maybe winning a division this year (a new mini-Western Division shorn of the powerhouse White Sox). And as usual, a new season brings out the usual media hype of “Whither Baseball?” Here’s what I think’s wrong with the game: 1) a new TV contract worse than hockey’s, with half the national cable games, no network games until July, and regional-only playoff telecasts — a setup that won’t help promote the game to new fans; and 2) its reputation as the sport of writers and other dullards, who blather on about such esoterica as the dimensions of the field (I’ve never seen ponderous essays on how a basketball court’s 96 feet long, a multiple of the sacred numbers 8 and 12). When they’re not doing that, writers use baseball to conjure up images of that Bygone Innocent America, that nice all-white-middle-class wonderland that never was. Face it: a game marketed to exploit grandpa’s selective memories isn’t gonna attract enough kids to maintain a decent supply of players, let alone a decent supply of fans.

PUFF PIECES: The King County Council may vote this month on a plan, drafted by the county health department, to ban smoking in restaurants. If approved, the ban would first take effect in the suburbs, then spread to Seattle in ’95 when the county takes over Seattle’s restaurant regulation. You could still smoke in taverns, lounges, and in restaurants that were willing to serve adults only, at least until they pass a broader ban. I think smoking is a wretched habit; but everybody I meet these days smokes, especially the vegetarians. This is Big Brother-ism at its most persnickity.

INK STAINS: Fourteen months ago, some dudes in Lynnwood started Face II Face, a free monthly newsprint magazine with equal emphasis on fashion, art, music and fiction. The Face II Face team split up un-amicably last November, with several members relocating to Seattle and re-starting under the name Month (though the cover flag said “November,” “December,” etc.). That crew just had another falling out. Jim and Jodi Madigan continued to publish Month, unveiling a slightly revised graphic design in their April issue, while their ex-colleagues Bill Maner, Tom Schmitt and Roger LeBlanc just put out something called Monthly, whose premiere April issue is billed as “Vol. 1 No. 6” and looks just like the first five issues of Month except it’s not stapled. To add to the confusion, neither publication mentions the family feud in its pages. We’ll see if they start up fistfights over press credentials to runway shows.

WANKING ON PARADE: That professional egotist and artistic has-been John Lydon, in town on a book tour, was scheduled to appear on The Spud Goodman Show. Goodman had outlined half an episode to the Lydon interview, the most he’d ever alloted to a single guest. KNDD’s Norman Batley, who’d took on a volunteer producer position on the Goodman show, was in charge of bringing Lydon from his hotel room to the studio. But somebody, either on the local PR team handling the tour stop or one of the print-media reporters keeping him busy, dissuaded him from going, charging “that’s not even a real TV station.” Goodman and his normally scripted cast had to improvise a new show on the spot, shuffling in segments written for other episodes and making introductions for location segments that don’t exist yet, that will have to be shot and edited into the episode before it airs.

THE MARGINAL WAY: There’s been a big media blitz over the county’s plan to revive the beautifully rusty Industrial District between the Kingdome and Tukwila. The stories quoted officials claiming that unless We Act Now, the zone could become a “rust belt” a la the abandoned factories of Michigan and Ohio. The top paragraphs of the stories mentioned all-well-n’-good stuff like fixing roads and cleaning up toxic waste. But if you read further you find out that there really aren’t many vacant sites in the area, that it’s well-occupied by small and medium businesses. Most of the horror stories cited in the articles about companies leaving the ID turn out to be about firms that wanted bigger tracts than they could get.

It doesn’t take much between-line reading to wonder whether the politicians are really seeking an excuse to condemn and consolidate tracts down there, evict some of the little guys, and turn the area over to bigger operations by bigger companies — the sort of companies that employ proportionately fewer people, but make bigger campaign contributions.

MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “race-blind casting” as the courageous risk of daring theatrical directors to award all major roles, no matter what ethnicity the characters may be, to white actors.

THE LAST WORD ON GANGSTA RAP: When hiphop was ruled from NY, it was an explosion of creativity with a social conscience. Then the Hollywood showbiz weasels took charge and, as usual, ruined everything. If I believed power, money, intimidation, sexism and egotism were the answers to everything, I would’ve become a Republican.

LITERAMA: Clever people across the country are discovering a real use for the Apple Newton Messagepad, that overpriced electronic Rolodex that’s supposed to read your handwriting but usually can’t. It may not be able to make an exact digital version of what you write on it, but it can turn it into computer-assisted cut-up poetry! Yes, you can make your own faux-Burroughs without having to shoot anybody or get addicted to anything. In my own experimental-fiction days, I used to be in a group that played the “writing games” devised by the French Oulipo group (Raymond Quaneau, Georges Perec, Harry Mathews, et al.). One of them was “n + 7”: take an existing passage and replace each common noun with the noun seven dictionary entries past it. Similar discoveries await when you Newtonize a familiar saying. Here’s some vintage “Abe Newton” as posted on the Net: “Foyer scrota and severe heavers ago our flashovers brought force on thy cosmetician a new notion conceives in lubricate and deducted to the prosecution that all men are crated quail.”

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Thomas Kemper Weizen-Berry might be America’s first raspberry-flavored beer. I wouldn’t say it was particularly good, but it might qualify as an experience in learning just how bizarre foreign-inspired food-and-drink recipes can really be…. Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls is the first basketball-shaped cereal! They’re wheat/corn puffs, sorta like oversize Kix with alternating pink and brown basketball seams dyed onto them and an odd brown-sugar taste. Better still is the hype on the side: “Hey Mom & Dad! Tired of putting on the full-court press to get your kids to eat a wholesome breakfast? Introducing new Dunk-A-Balls, the one-of-a-kind breakfast cereal that will have your kids fast breaking for the breakfast bowl. Dunk-A-Balls is the perfect tip-off to the whole day…. Score a slam dunk with your kids, sky-hook them a bowl of Wheaties Dunk-A-Balls now, before the buzzer sounds on this limited time offering!”

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: My Spokane is Evergreen student Jon Snyder‘s oversize photo-essay book on the sights, sounds and dreams of his beloved Inland Empire hometown (though he does complain in an insert that he couldn’t find an Eastern Washington printer willing to run it, due to a chapter on adolescent sex fantasies). Of special interest to west-side readers is his ode to the Spokane Dick’s Drive-In, a completely separate enterprise from the Seattle Dick’s chain (and servers of superior flesh-n’-grease products, or so he claims). $7.50 at Fallout Records or from 214 S. Coeur D’Alene St., Spokane 99204….

Sell Yourself to Science is, at first glance, just another Loompanics Unlimited tome of quasi-demimonde self-help access; in this case, about how to make small sums of money by participating in medical experiments or by selling your blood, semen or other bodily products. What sets it above the Loompanics norm is the oft-hilarious writing, by local kid Jim Hogshire; especially when he asserts that you should be allowed to sell post-death rights to your organs to the highest bidder. Even better is the collected set of Hogshire’s zine Pills A-Go-Go, which studies pharmaceuticals (legal and otherwise) the way Spin studies music (available at Pistil Books on E. Pike, that handy place to go mag-shopping on a Fri. night while avoiding an opening act at Moe).

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT?: You don’t have to be in Ulster to get harsh treatment at an Irish cultural event. A couple of bouncers at the Moore were overheard vowing to “get” some kids at the Pogues show a few weeks back. And they did, grabbing people (particularly the small and/or female) from the pit, forcibly removing them. One frustrated attendee tried to leave voluntarily, only to get grabbed and tossed outside herself; she reports still having sore limbs and muscles. The bouncers in question are reportedly no longer at the theater; its new owners were already planning to hire new security.

BOOZE NOOZE: Dewar’s Scotch, whose youth-appeal magazine ads we’ve discussed, isn’t the only distilled liquor trying to capture a younger generation weaned on cheap beer. The trade mag Market Watch: Market Intelligence on the Wine, Spirits and Beer Business just had a special issue about it. The opening note from the publisher, pictured as a plump moustached old guy, declared, “They’re diverse. They’re young. And they have decidedly different attitudes about alcoholic beverages than do baby boomers. Just who are these new consumers, you asked? Generation X, that’s who.” Inside, we learn the market strategies aimed at pushing spirits, extra-sweet chardonnays, ice beer, and mass-produced pseudo-microbrews to under-30s. But the most telling parts of the issue are the ads, boasting to retailers of the youth-market atrategies of Southern Comfort (“One small age group buys enough spirits to empty your store every hour”) and Black & White Scotch (“They’re passive-aggressive vidiots who grew up too fast and have no faith in the system and think holes in jeans are cool and that party is a verb and will never buy anything in your store anyway. Congratulations. They’re your new Scotch customers”)….

Meanwhile, that new desperate-to-be-hip malt beverage Zima has reportedly been casting locally for commercials, seeking out models who are 25 or older but look younger. Encouraging underage drinking, you say? Heavens no! Just looking hip and urbane! Speaking of which…

SNOWED UNDER: I’d hoped that springtime would bring a seasonal end to articles about snowboarding, full of all the requisite MTV Sports-style hyperbole, neon-drenched graphics, “unfocused” typefaces, and Prince-esque spellings (“D Place 4 U 2 B”). But instead there are now at least six year-round snowboard magazines, all more or less drenched in “grafique XS.” The art aside, there’s a bigger issue at work: the case of a countryside athletic activity attracting an urbane-hip mystique. I’m meeting intelligent, club-going, artistically-minded young adults who play the sport, who either don’t mind the hype about it or like it.

To many old-line punkers and wavers like myself, athleticism was the suspect domain of the Evil Jock Mentality, or of anti-intellectual adults (cf. “Get High On Sports Not Drugs” programs in school, which posited that the only alternative to being a mindless junkie was to be a hopeless jock). Artistically-aware people weren’t into sports; they were more likely to be beaten up by the guys who were into sports. But in recent years, some free-thinking youths have begun to accept that the human body might be useful for activities besides dancing, fighting, fucking, and dressing (cf. Vedder‘s surfer-dude acrobatics). Speaking of sports…

FROZEN IN TIME?: The New Times, that monthly new-age broadsheet, offers a specialist perspective on recent events: “Tonya and Nancy: An ECKist’s View.” That’s Eckankar, “The Ancient Science of Soul Travel.” Author Robin Adams McBride claims Harding’s misdeeds and/or lapses in judgment resulted from her personal development over successive reincarnations over the centuries, “as the soul sets up its scenarios for learning and then forgets that it had anything to do with planning her experiences….Tonya Harding can experience the ultimate transformation of an evolved Scorpio personality if she responds to this wake-up call positively. The phoenix arising from the ashes of personal humiliation and defeat can replace the scorpion which stings its enemies to gain advantage.”

THE FINE PRINT (from promo copies of the Sister Psychic CD Surrender, You Freak!): “Advance CD — Instore-airplay promo only. Will explode if sold.”

MISC.’S LOOPY LEXICON defines “classic rock” as the work of radio station managers wistfully looking back to a more innocent age, before the radio was controlled by people like them. Speaking of which…

LIVE AIR: Here’s all I know about Free Radio Seattle, the new pirate station advertised on flyers around Capitol Hill this past month. It was scheduled to go on the air at midnight 4/30 for a 90-minute broadcast, transmitting somewhere in the vicinity of 88 on the FM dial. Further broadcasts are tentatively scheduled on a weekly basis. Content will include community news and commentary, club listings, and freeform music (“like what KCMU used to be,” according to an anonymous communique sent to me). Because this whole thing’s somewhat illegal, the broadcasts will be recorded at one undisclosed site and transmitted from another; to avoid (or at least delay) FCC detection, the portable transmitter will be set up at a different place each time. If these guys are putting their butts on the line to do this (and there’s a strong chance they’ll get caught before long), they’d better have a good reason, like having something important to say.

CATHODE CORNER: A recent wire service item placed Married… With Children as one of the top 10 TV shows among African American audiences. (The only white-cast show with more black viewers is Blossom, which until recently shared a time block with the black-starring Fresh Prince of Bel Air.) My theory: Married‘s black co-creator, Michael Moye, clearly set out to devise a family that would affirm the stereotypes some hard-striving black middle-class families have about lazy, privileged white trash. It’s either that, or the utter failure of Bud Bundy’s attempt to play-act as “Street Rapper Grandmaster B.”

BAN, ROLL ON: Yes, the Washington legislature tried again to revive the Erotic Music Bill, a misguided attempt to shore up the morals of Those Kids Today by restricting selected rock records (Gov. Lowry vetoed the “anti-porn” package of proposals that included the music bill). In the short term, control-freak schemes like this can be dangerous to free expression and personal privacy, and must be fought vigorously. But in the long term, the tide is starting to turn against the forces of cultural suppression, because it’s bad for capitalism.

In the pre-industrial age, censorship was a tool of economic as well as social control. When only the upper classes were taught to read, the number of potential rivals for prestige positions was kept within means. The class system was kept in place by restricted information.

In the industrial age, supporting censorship was a convenient way for big business interests to forge convenient political alliances with more populist right-wing elements (note Michael Milkin, Jesse Helmes, et al.). The Republicans of the rural west proved particularly adept at using the religious right to help elect politicians whose real loyalty wasn’t to churches but to big ranchers, miners and real estate developers. Censorship was also a convenient way for the corporate power structure to deny responsibility for some of the social upheavals its own machinations had caused. Corporate America could say: “We’re losing our technological edge to Japan? Don’t blame us; all we did was encourage slashes in education spending so the government could reduce business taxes. Blame the decadent liberals — yeah, that’s the ticket! Sexual permissiveness did it! That, and the devil’s rock music, and those naughty TV shows!” Or: “Urban crime? We didn’t cause it; all we did was move all our jobs to the suburbs! Blame the homosexuals, or the immigrants, or the lack of family values!” Or: “Child abuse? Don’t look at us; we merely promoted a culture where selfish aggression was treated as a virtue. No, just get rid of those magazines with the pictures of bad women in them. That’ll solve everything!”

But in the Information Age (which spread into the realm of politics about 18 to 24 months ago), censorship is a threat to what is becoming big business’s most prized asset — intellectual property. Free expression is the new frontier of post-industrial capitalism. The Viacom-Paramounts and the Time-Warners will begin to fight against the principle of censorship in the same way the timber industry has fought designated wilderness areas, or the way GM has fought pollution controls. A key connection of the old Reagan coalition has been severed, perhaps for keeps. The religious right, having outlived its usefulness to much of the business community, just might find itself sent back into the shadows due to a slow drying up of big-money support, destined to become just another of the many isolated subcultures in today’s fragmented society.

But it won’t go away quietly. There will be more kooky drives like the Erotic Music Bill and that initiative to legalize anti-gay discrimination. These campaigns will become blunter, shriller and more divisive, as their instigators strive to hold on to their own core support base.

UNTIL NEXT TIME, root for the Sonics and for single-payer health care, and ponder this sign outside Catholic Community Services on 2nd: “Depression Support Group, 8:30 a.m. Wednesdays.” If you can get up that early, do you really need to go there?

PASSAGE

Words of love from the animated, syndicated, underrated 2 Stupid Dogs: “The world is our pancake house, and you’re my flapjack stack with a scoop of butter and maple syrup and a side of hash browns and some toast and a large orange juice.”

REPORT

A small publisher of cult-appeal books has expressed serious interest in my book, The Real Seattle Music Story. Once I sign a contract, I probably won’t be able to sell any more printout copies of the text. So if you want a Preview Edition, you’d better order it now.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phylloxera”

LET YOUR KIDS SEE ANY MOVIE THEY WANT. JUST DON’T LET `EM NEAR THE POPCORN

2/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’

MEANT WARREN G.?

Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.

THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.

CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.

EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.

GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.

SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!

SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!

CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.

CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”

DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)

MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.

CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.

REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.

YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it: Deluxe.

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.

THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”

THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”

DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.

NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.

PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”

DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).

A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.

She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.

Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”

PASSAGE

Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”

REPORT

My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Amphistylar”

1/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

TO OUR OUT-OF-TOWN READERS:

THERE ARE OTHER SEATTLE ARTISTS

BESIDES CHIHULY

Here at Misc. (your source for hot news in a cold climate) we were bemused by KING’s week-long series on filmmaking in the Seattle area: Five long reports promoting Hollywood location shoots, nothing about supporting indigenous filmmakers. Of course, that’s common thinking in this alleged “movie town.” Portland and Vancouver support real local films by homegrown directors; at the last Seattle International Film Festival, the top “regional film” award went to a feature filmed entirely in LA by an LA guy who’d moved to Mercer Island. It was an honorable film, but by no real means a Northwest one.

DUFF ME: We seldom talk about live shows, but had to remark on the Fastbacks gig at the Crocodile on 12/1. Joining Seattle’s longest-running alternative band for its encore was its 1981 drummer, Duff McKagan. He split nine years ago and joined Guns n’ Roses, the definitive example of what alternative rock is an alternative to. (Their album of old punk covers is the worst artist-repertoire match since Pat Boone covered Little Richard.) He’s reasserting his Seattle roots in interviews to promote his solo CD, and is rumored to be moving back. He had the prettiest hair and only silk scarf in the building.

CLEANING UP: Remember how the homeless children of Rio were swept from the streets just before the Earth Summit? Just before APEC, Seattle Police held a mass roundup of street people. Even before any economic pacts were signed, we were already becoming closer to official foreign mores.

HYPERHYPE: Perhaps more important than APEC was another convention in town, the fifth International Conference on Hypertext. Computer multimedia and hypermedia could spawn whole new art forms, new ways of looking at the world, empowering people whose stories have been ignored. But the convention was dominated by eastern university guys (especially from Brown) whose vision of on-screen reading simply moves genteel-white-guy fiction onto screens. The potential of cyber-lit could be better exploited by an aesthetic of exploration and connections, rather than the centrist worldview of the academic aristocracy. A computerized story about a colonial-era farm could let users click and read about the different jobs on the farm, the growing cycles, the lives of the working families. With all that, who needs to bother with the drawing-room angst of manor lords?

INTER-ACTIVITY: Similar corporate scrambling and punditry surrounds the promised big cable TV/phone/computer hookups. This really could profoundly improve the world — if our “leaders” don’t ruin it. Every new media technology has had political implications. Phones and telegraph developed under corrupt administrations that, fat with railroad payoffs, looked the other way on monopolies. Radio and talkies arose in the Coolidge-Hoover era, friendly to consolidation of power into four commercial networks, seven studios and five big theater chains. Truman tried to maintain the media status quo by holding up new TV stations; once Ike came in, big-sponsor-controlled TV was allowed to essentially run free. (KOMO and KSTW had their 40th birthdays last year; until ’53, there was only one station in Seattle and none in Portland.) The Nixon crew developed PBS precisely to be a bureaucratic farce in submission to corporate money. The Reaganites revoked commercial TV’s few remaining requirements for public service and journalistic fairness. Meanwhile, two by-products of Cold War military investment, the microprocessor and the Internet, helped create a new aesthetic of direct communicating, without the compromises or corruption of Hollywood and Madison Ave. The 500-channel future could give just lots of pay-per-view blockbuster violence movies. Or we could have universal two-way access, where anyone can transmit anything to anyone. This wouldn’t mean the end of pop culture but its fullest blossoming. Just as the best “pop” music of the past decade has been outside the Top 40, the best “pop” video of the next decade will be made by small troupes who love their work. The information superhighway” is currently more hype than policy; the danger is that it’ll become a policy of profit above empowerment. Let the powers that be know you want “common carrier video,” or something that can be upgraded to it.

LOVELY PARTING GIFTS: Some of the new-media hypes involves proposed “interactive” versions of that most purely televisual of program forms, the game show — at a time when it’s nearly disappeared from broadcast channels. ABC hasn’t had any since the Ross Shafer Match Game revival. CBS has only the ancient Price Is Right; NBC has only the new Caeser’s Challenge and six-year-old Classic Concentration reruns (both to be canceled soon). The only syndicated games are Jeopardy!, Wheel of Fortune and Family Feud. The game show has no connection to real life. It exists in a studio universe of flashing lights and goofy sound effects. It’s a fantasy out of place among today’s “reality shows.” Cable’s keeping the chase-lights blinking with assorted shows on Lifetime and Nickelodeon, though the new shows with their corner-cutting budgets don’t quite have the joyous trash factor of the reruns on USA or the Family Channel, including amazing old Let’s Make a Deal shows where polyestered housewives go agog over winning a new AMC Hornet!

ART OF MUSIC: Great to see the distinctive illustrative style of Ed Fotheringham in ads for the 5th Avenue Theater’s Cinderella. Imagine: Rodgers & Hammerstein sold by the ex-singer for the Thrown Ups, who got famous painting Mudhoney and Flop record covers.

A COIN NAMED SUE: That scourge of late-’70s product design, the Susan B. Anthony dollar coin, is back. The Post Office refitted its vending machines to give back Anthonys from $5 bills. They’re showing up at stores, where most clerks don’t know what to do with ’em. One Fred Meyer clerk asked, “Is this a Canadian quarter or what?”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Movie Maker is a local film rag by Tim Rice (not the lyricist). The first issue’s largely reviews, but Rice promises to mainly cover indy filmmakers, particularly locals. It’ll be a great asset toward building the DIY film/video scene here (as opposed to the state film office’sP.O.V., mostly about Hollywood location work).

MALLED OVER:Three Christmases ago, Aurora Village‘s new managers vowed to revive the declining shopping center, half of whose spaces were boarded up. Two Christmases ago, Frederick & Nelson shut its AV store during its penultimate contraction. Last Christmas, only Nordstrom, a movie multiplex, and a few other stores remained. Earlier this year, Price-Costco bought the site. Big 5 Sporting Goods and Seafirst are the only buildings standing like Little Houses on the Prairie amidst the rubble of demolished stores and jackhammered parking. Go see it; it’s great-&-eerie. Just don’t buy a gun at one place to use robbing the other.

CONSUMER ALERT: While the sleeve doesn’t say so, one side of the C/Z Christmas record plays at 33, the other at 45. I’ll let you figure out which.

FAST FOOD OF THE MONTH: Had enough of generic foods? Hope not, ‘cuz a local company’s offering plain-label salmon at the ridiculously low price of $1.79 for a big can. Look for it at the Leschi Food Market and elsewhere.

GOT THE LOOK: Despite what I’ve said about fashion models, I don’t hate ’em. I’ve been fascinated by them as an institution. Supermodels exist because the media needs female celebrities, but Hollywood won’t develop enough star actresses. So editors and ad agencies created a type of celebrity who existed purely to sell products by selling her image. The supermodel presents a persona of leisure, of being rather than doing; yet she’s is a pivotal cog in the American consumer machine. Nineteenth-century literature was full of pale waifs beautifully “dying of consumption” (TB). Modern magazines are full of pale waifs exhorting you to consume. Old-time femininity was a moral stance that stood above crude and petty things like commerce. Postmodern femininity is an instrument of commerce, in the name of that tenuously-defined quality that is beauty. I don’t condemn that. Leftist males often denounce femininity and beauty as counterproductive to the great revolutionary toil. They promote an ideal world in which women would affirm the superiority of masculine behavior by emulating it. I don’t. As a suffragette anthem said, “Give us bread but give us roses.” We need aesthetic truths as much as political ones (maybe more). Whether the aesthetic of Elle is the one we need is another question.

WOOD YOU?: Tree Hugger Fire Logs are advertised as the first environmentally-correct fireplace logs, ’cause they use “no live trees, only wood waste.”All packaged fireplace logs since Weyerhaeuser’s original Prest-O-Log are made of mill ends and pressed sawdust. Sawdust logs also pollute the air just like natural logs.

THE FINE PRINT (from a counter display for Sugar Free Breath Savers): “Not a reduced calorie food. See back panel for details.”

SIGN OF THE MONTH (at Eyes Rite Optical on Aurora): “Contacts and Galsses, $49 a pair and up.” Hope they’ve sold a pair to the signmaker…

CLEARING OUT: The “clear products” craze never came. Example: Tab Clear, clearance-priced in some stores at 49cents a half gallon. Among its problems: the ad slogan, “It’s not what you think.” My mom told me that whenever I found her reading a paperback with a T&A cover. She never told me what it really was, or what she thought I thought it was. Neither did Tab.

CIVIL WRONGS: Black Diamond cops confiscated a guy’s pickup during a coke bust. The arrested guy’s dad sued to get the truck back, claiming the impounding was a civil-rights violation. A judge ruled in favor of the cops, and ordered the dad to pay $212,000 for defaming the officers’ character. Can you say “precedent for government intimidation against citizen complaints”?

LIFE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN: I used to give an annual It’s a Wonderful Life rerun count; it aired up to 33 times some Decembers. This year, it only ran nine times. It used to be a forgotten oldie that aired once or twice a year on the Saturday afternoon movie; then the movie’s original 28-year copyright expired in ’74 and wasn’t renewed; anybody could show or copy it, and many did. In 1975 it became the annual Christmas movie at the Grand Illusion. By the end of the decade every non-network station ran it, sometimes two or three times a season. As cable developed, every channel that ran movies ran it. But now, a company called Republic Pictures sez it controls the film’s original negative, its music, and the story on which it was based, and will enforce those rights against unauthorized showings. IAWL was made in ’46 by director Frank Capra’s own company and released by RKO. The firm now called Republic used to be NTA, a cut-rate TV distributor that bought lots of old movies in the ’50s (including IAWL and the library of the original Republic cowboy studio) and didn’t bother with copyright renewals. If this seems trivial, it isn’t. The new Republic is challenging the notion that once copyrights die, they stay dead. It could be a precedent for other movies. Under the 1978 copyright law, works owned by companies (instead of individuals) lose protection after 75 years. All the early talkies will start going public-domain in less than a decade — unless the law is revised, or owners find alternate means of protection.

IN OUR MIDST: Somebody was raped in the Colourbox women’s room, during a show by local metal band Forced Entry. The criminal was spotted by another patron, but eluded chasers out the back door. People I talked to about it presumed the creep was upscale suburban scum gone “slumming”, of the same class of overdressed goons who verbally fag-bashed Re-bar’s patrons after the Weekly “discovered” the place. The rationale ignores the possibility that the asshole might very well have been one of “our” group. I’ve blathered about people’s temptation to dehumanize people outside their own lifestyle. Take this delusion of superiority to its coldest extreme and you get the me-first mentality of an assailant. In any event, the drive by Pio. Square businesses to “clean up” the area by harassing street people won’t do shit for public safety when the real danger can come from these businesses’ own customers.

COMING DOWN: Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders proposed a rational drug policy. The president disavowed it, as anyone hoping for re-election naturally would, but it’s a start. I’ve seen many become slaves to drugs. Prohibition didn’t make or help them stop; it only put them in legal as well as physical peril. The War on Drugs has utterly failed at curtailing supply or demand; it’s succeeded at propping up dictators abroad and police harassment at home. Like alcohol prohibition 70 years ago, it’s created surreptitious enterprises whose antisocial behavior is directly due to their illegality. The best way to defuse gang warfare is to eliminate its only logical purpose: drug networks’ battles for sales turf. There are three drug crises: the drugs themselves, the thuggery of the drug industry, and the thuggery of the anti-drug industry (police, armies, urine tests). Regulated legalization will resolve crises #2 and #3, and make it easier to treat crisis #1. Imagine a world of such common sense; then work to build a political climate where it’s possible.

PASSAGE

From the eternal Frank Zappa: “In the fight between you and the world, back the world.”

REPORT

My book on the history of local music is nearly done, but still needs a little more info. I currently need:

* Photos of the outsides of old clubs, especially the Bird and WREX

* Suggestions of current club bands that ought to be mentioned

* Stories, wacky anecdotes

Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Alembic”

THE 8TH ANNUAL ONLY ACCURATE IN/OUT LIST

Last year’s list correctly foresaw the rise of

Dark Horse Comics, mass-appeal hiphop, Afrocentric art, and Letterman on CBS;

plus the fall of Ralph Lauren, Crystal Pepsi, mass-murdering movie “heroes,” and Arsenio.

Remember, this is a prediction of what will become hot in the coming year.

If you think everything that’s hot now will just keep getting hotter,

then I’ve got some Last Action Hero merchandise to sell you.

12/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.

WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA

This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).

REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.

Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.

COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.

ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?

COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.

RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.

POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?

THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.

DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”

TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.

PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.

BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”

SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.

PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.

THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.

ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.

XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.

FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”

PASSAGE

Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”

REPORT

My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?

Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Phenocryst”

10/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

`HAMMERING MAN’ ISN’T ART. THE BALL-AND-CHAIN IS.

Return now to Misc., the column that wished the new local fringe-drama outfit Theater Schmeater was related to the former local fringe art-outfit Gallery Schmallery.

WHAT WE DID THIS SUMMER: Couldn’t help but be amused by the preprinted Sizzler kids’-meal coupons in the Sunday funnies the week of the chain’s e. coli crisis. Thought KIRO-TV’s retreat back to the anchor desk should’ve been accompanied by Alice in Chains‘s “I’m the Man in the Box.” Noted that the station that banned two Picket Fences shows clearly showed the slogan on a new pro-Huskies T-shirt, “Puck the Fac-10.”

BOWING DOWN: For years, the Huskies struggled in the LA powerhouses’ shadows, even though the UW was far bigger than any single California campus. But in the ’80s the team grew toward three straight Rose Bowls and one of those “mythical national championships.” We now know these achievements partly came by cheating on the vague regulations that let college ball pretend to be an amateur sport. Husky players had pathetic graduation rates, despite simplified classes and elaborate tutoring. There were allegations of drug dealing in the team dorm. Some players got cushy jobs and cushier cash, arranged by rich boosters.

Now, the Pac-10 Conference saddled the team with recruiting restrictions, a two-year ban from bowl games, and other penalties. Coach Don James (who wasn’t implicated in the charges) quit. The violations had to have been known by authorities.

How could they excuse the overzealousness? I think it’s ‘cuz the UW itself has become a big-money grant factory that relegated teaching to a very low priority. It’s partly the legacy of our late Sens. Jackson and Magnuson, who funneled tons of federal research pork our way. The campus got obsessed with being “a world class research institution,” regardless of how well it serviced the state’s kids.

We’ve discussed the yuppification of KCMU in the context of the UW corporate culture. The administration thought the station could raise more donations with tamer programming; they’d funnel that into enough salaried staff positions to qualify the station for public-broadcasting grants. The men who turned KCMU into the New Coke of radio weren’t malicious; they just behaved like good UW administrators (including manager Chris Knab, who resigned after his pay got cut in half due to sagging donations). They saw no purpose higher than organizational growth.

Similarly, the football program was allowed or encouraged to grow by any means available. While tuitions skyrocketed and academic budgets stagnated, the team generated big cash surpluses. But little football money went up to the main campus.

If rich alums want to pay for football, let ’em, within limits at least as strict as those set by the Pac-10. But funnel part of that income, and a portion of Husky merchandising money, into academic scholarships. And go further with a professed priority of new athletic director Barbara Hedges: getting the players an education. As a kid who used to get beat up by jocks, I’m not intrinsically sympathetic to their plight. But they are risking permanent injury for the slim chance of a brief NFL career. If they can’t get under-the-table cash, they oughta get a degree that might help ’em earn some bucks in the future.

KICKS: The Seahawks used to have a 5,000-name waiting list for tickets. But after last year’s spectacular flop, they’re running commercials pleading for walk-in traffic. Between that and the Huskies’ debacle, Seattle’s football “Wave” may finally crash.

MISC.’S INDEX: Number of local bands profiled/reviewed in the Rocket since June 1992 that are described as “not a typical Seattle band”: All of them.

WHERE FRIENDS MET FRIENDS: It’s time for concerned citizens to again rally behind a preservatory call: Save the Dog House! Not only is it one of the few things in the world that my father and I both like, not only is it one of the last old-time roadhouse diners, it’s a remnant of everything that used to be cool and unpretentious about pre-Yup Seattle. We need a sympathetic investment group to take over the place under two directives. (a) Don’t “restore” it into some plastic imitation of itself. Keep the signs, keep the menu designs, keep organist Dick Dickerson, keep the low drink prices, keep the dogs-playing-poker prints. (b) Revise the food only as much as you have to. Many people love the Dog House’s murals but not its meals; the new owners will have to provide some new things to attract them, and make careful changes to existing items without imposing that gentrified faux-diner cuisine seen in some newer places.

FOR MEAT LOVERS ONLY: One local chow-down institution still going strong, Dick’s Drive-Ins will celebrate its 40th anniversary by publishing a “Memory Book” early next year. They’re asking for people’s stories and photos of life at Seattle’s classic burger emporia (top prize: $100). I know a guy from Vancouver who makes a point when he’s in town to visit all five locations (even the obscure Holman Road outlet, the Dick’s That Time Forgot). In the mid-’80s the Broadway Dick’s was the teen cruising hangout, until the parking lots were closed by the powers that be. It was the setting of Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Posse on Broadway,” the first proof that an artist could reach a national audience without pretending not to be from Seattle. One important memory is gone: they stopped selling their orange T-shirts (“Dick’s, where TASTE is the difference!”) to the public, and now outfit their staff in new blue designer jobs (not available to civilians). The new shirts betray Dick’s heritage as a place that didn’t follow trends, but just made the greatest grease and sugar products anywhere.

ELECTORAL COLLAGE: Rice, Sidrin and other politicians sometimes loathed in these and other pages are up for re-election this year but are either unopposed or have only token rivals. For all the boasts people around town give me about how “political” they are, there’s damn too little real organizing going on to provide a truly progressive influence on (or alternative to) Seattle’s Democratic machine politics. To really be “political” doesn’t mean to stand around and proclaim how morally superior you are. It means to form alliances with other people (yes, even with squares, meat eaters and TV viewers) to forge a popular consensus toward rebuilding our frayed social fabric.

BE “R” GUEST: The Stouffer Madison Hotel not only stamps its logo into all the ashtrays every day, it replaces its elevator carpets daily: “Have A Pleasant THURSDAY.” An excessive service perhaps, but it is useful to business travelers who need to be reminded where they momentarily stand in the time-space continuum.

GOO: The UW alum mag Columns reports that researcher Patricia Kuhl’s got some big govt. grant to try and decode baby talk, believing it holds the key to language learning. Why doesn’t she just read some Sugar & Spike comic books or watch Rugrats?

COLOR ME BEMUSED: Why’s any sweatshirt or trinket boutique that screechingly claims to be “Seattle Style” invariably drenched in California-airhead pastels that have nothing to do with how light and color look here? A real “Seattle Style” would start with the misty hues of the Northwest School painters, then add the muted tones of bark brown, pine-needle green, and the steely gray of a lake on an overcast day. No pink, no “sky blue,” no saturated brightness, no neon violet, no harsh contrasts.

CLEANING UP: Sit & Spin, the new cafe/laundromat on 4th, apparently stands on the ex-site of Vic’s, a jazz club run in the early ’30s by local big-band leader Vic Meyers. I’ve told you about Meyers: In ’32 he ran for lieutenant governor as a publicity stunt, won in the FDR landslide, and stayed in office 20 years. S&S promises to open up a back room for performances later. One current local band would be perfect for its opening: Laundry. Past bands that oughta consider re-forming to play there: Red Dress, Skinny Ties, Green Pajamas, and Ironing Pants Definitely. They could cover songs from Nirvana’s album Bleach.

FROM FLY II SHAI: A year ago I predicted that by 2002 there’d be upscale rap festivals in tourist towns, where nouveau riche couples would listen to perky Vassar grads perform a cross between scat singing and Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs. Since then, new (arrested) developments made that obsolete. We’ve already seen the (PM) dawn of soft hip-hop, and it’s different from my prediction (never trust sci-fi stories that think every present trend will keep going forever). You could see it at last month’s KUBE Summer Jam: two dozen acts (most with recorded backing tracks), who had rap names but sounded like neo-Commodores or neo-Pointer Sisters. These groups celebrate the only recent black music hip white guys haven’t muscled in on: “quiet storm” love songs of the ’70s and early ’80s. The new R&B eschews the white-hipster image of blacks as lust-crazed savages. Mall rats are still appropriating gangsta rap’s romanticized violence, selfishness and sexism (in both directions); while the neo-doo-wop aesthetic finds sexiness galore in solid black-middle-class values: good grooming, hard work, mutual support. Since the black music of today usually becomes the white music of tomorrow, those white hiphop shows of the early 21st century are now more likely to have Boyz II Men cover bands, and today’s preteen daughters of Bellevue lawyers may someday go to their first bars awkwardly crammed into En Vogue dresses.

BUDDY LOVE LOST: The French may still love Jerry Lewis but his ex-wife doesn’t, according to her soon-to-be-published memoir that lists his extramarital escapades over the years. It may be painful for some of you to imagine Lewis having sex, but I can envision him afterwards, looking the lady in the eye, pointing a finger at her face and declaring, “Did you know that this is one of the greatest humanitarians this business has ever known? Give her a big hand!”

DEAD AIR: The ex-KJET went soft again. The Z-Rock network dropped its AM affiliates, so KZOK-AM quit the Hard Rawk to simulcast KZOK-FM’s tired oldies. The sign-off brought the end of the station’s local afternoon shift, facilitated by Jeff Gilbert. For the first time in 35 years, nobody’s playing new rock records on Seattle AM radio.

`IT’S,’ A CRIME (graphic during an ad for HBO on ABC): “Has Saturday Night Lost It’s Magic?” No, but apparently HBO has lost its ability to spell.

MIXED ICONS DEPT.: The Times ran an article comparing home mortgage rates today with those during the 1960s. It was festooned with all the cliché images of hippie nostalgia: a peace sign, a VW bus, et al.; all in tie-dye-ish colors. They should’ve used images appropriate to the kinds of folks who were buying houses back then: plastic-smiled suburbanites in green pantsuits and Sta-Prest slacks holding barbecues with delightful recipes from Sunset magazine.

STAN RIDGWAY REVISITED: The greatest channel on cable these days, without peer, is Univision. Everything on that channel is utterly cool: Variety shows with sensational female performers; outrageous game shows; goofy (and obviously censored) sex-farce movies; dubbed kung fu movies; and best of all the novelas, semi-lavish tearjerker dramas of sin and betrayal that run to 50 or more episodes and then stop. In a way it’s even more fun if you don’t know Spanish; you can just absorb the energetic performers, the great clothes and the cool-camp graphics without worrying whether the dialogue makes any sense. If that’s too much trouble for you, one of the channel’s greatest stars, the utterly remarkable children’s entertainer Xuxa, now has an Anglophone show at 3 pm weekdays on KTZZ. Who else would get cabaret singer/gay activist Michael Feinstein as the first guest on her US show — a show bankrolled by Pat Robertson? No wonder Forbes listed her as the second-wealthiest entertainer based in the non-English-speaking world (after Julio Iglesias).

ACTIVE CULTURES: In a Stranger article a few months ago I called for the death of Hollywood. Now, the decentralization of American culture looks unstoppable. New means of production and distribution are bypassing (or influencing) media monarchies. With Hi-8 camcorders people can make pro video for less than the annual cost of many prescriptions. The music video format has freed a generation of moving-image makers from the tyrannies of linear narrative and feature length. With DTP and quick-printing, the last financial barrier to self-publishing is the cost of binding to bookstore specs. The revolution is here, it is being televised (at least on odd cable channels), and it’s gonna be rough. You’ll see a lot of unlistenable indie records, unwatchable direct-to-video movies, unreadable desktop-published books, and unbearable fringe-theater plays. It’s the natural stumblings of people learning painfully to make their own culture, instead of merely choosing which prepackaged NY/LA/SF/UK worldview to adopt.

GE WANTS TO BUY BOEING, according to a Wall St. Journal rumor: If this column had editorial cartoons, it’d show a pilot’s seat occupied by a six-foot weasel.

SCENE STEALING: As late as 1990, there were only a couple dinky places to hear original rock bands in Seattle. Those times may return. The Times published a map showing the Seattle Commons proponents’ plans for east downtown. You know they want a long park from Denny Way to Lake Union. That’s the sugar-coating for their real scheme: thousands of condos and apts., mostly upper-income. The Times map showed all the blocks the Commons advocates plan to demolish. The Off Ramp, RKCNDY, and Lake Union Pub are all slated for removal. (The neo-folk Eastlake Cafe and the 911 film-video center would be allowed to live; Re-Bar might also be spared.) If I were paranoid, I’d call this another plot in the 15-year official conspiracy to crush local music. But my more understanding nature believes the rich suburbanites behind the plan are disinterested in live music and don’t care whether bands have a place to play. In the ’70s, citizens saved Pioneer Square and the Pike Place Market from smaller redevelopments; those areas are now tourist traps. The powers that be don’t get that the music scene is Seattle’s new major tourist attraction. This summer, you could hardly walk downtown without spotting Euro and Japanese young adults in the finest flannel, poring over maps and Strangers. (On a recent Fox TV magazine show, Ron Reagan Jr. had to tell Mayor Rice who Mudhoney was!)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, go look at Seattle’s first color TV camera (now on display at Olympic Lincoln-Mercury on Aurora), tape theamazing early talkies at 2 a.m. on KTZZ, and worry about your favorite waterfront businesses getting “discovered” and ruined after the Weekly moves there.

PASSAGE

Bonnie Morino on the Vicki Lawrence show, telling how excited she was to be hired as a Playboy model: “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that doesn’t happen very often in one’s life.”

REPORT

Still working on my new book. Still nowhere near selling it.

Will the person in Calif. who left a message about participating in one of my publishing projects please call again? The number given me doesn’t seem to work. Thanx.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Audile”

5/93 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating four Stranger columns)

THE STATE PASSES A HEALTH CARE PLAN;

THE MARINERS CAN HARDLY WAIT…

Misc. (one of the few local entertainment thangs John Corbett hasn’t tried to muscle in on yet) is moderately disturbed that no review of the Empty Space‘s new Illuminati play even mentioned the Space’s old Illuminatus! play, a 1980 three-part circus of by-the-numbers blasphemy and political conspiracy theories based on the Robert Anton Wilson/Robert Shea comic novels; it was one of the theatre’s biggest hits at the time.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MARK WORTH, Wash. Free Press: I’ve been trying to sell out for years; it’s just that nobody’s been buying.

IT’S BEEN A WACKY couple-O-weeks here in Misc. Country USA. The Weekly “discovered” a “New Art Scene” centered around the Galleria Potatohead folks, a year after that space closed. The Cyclops Cafe storefront got stuck into an AT&T ad inviting Americans to call up their ol’ Seattle grunge pals. Had a mixed time at the Crocodile’s Stumpy Joe goodbye party: great sloppy bands, but unwisely cranked up to inner-ear-pain level; at that distortion point, even the Young Fresh Fellows sounded like a fast Tad. I found an old Artforum review of Nirvana’s “In Bloom” video, where the guys prance around and act silly in dresses like Bugs Bunny; the reviewer somehow called it a profound anti-homophobic statement. And, while cable-cruising one midnight, I heard a bad instrumental of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” accompanying a Male Best Body Contest.

NUMBERS RACKET DEPT.: Sorry, I can’t believe there are only approx. 1 million adult gay men in the USA, as implied in that national sex survey by our Laurelhurst friends at the Battelle Memorial Research Institute. The national gay mags claim more than that many readers (including paid circulation and the industry-standard estimates of “pass-along” copies). I’ve met guys who claim to have had more than that many guys. If there are that few gay guys, then who’s buying all the non-Nutcracker ballet tix and Judy Garland laser disks?

SUMMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL: We’re amused that Clinton and Yeltsin‘s prearranged walking path led to Vancouver’sWreck Beach, known in warmer months as the Northwest’s largest nude beach. Hope it inspired ’em toward shedding outmoded political put-ons and attaining fuller disclosure.

TUNED OUT: The Supreme Court’s using 2 Live Crew‘s Roy Orbison takeoff “Big Hairy Woman” to decide if copyright holders can ban song parodies. It won’t affect MAD (which prints only its original lyrics “to the tune of” extant songs) or Al Yancovic (who always gets OKs from the original artists). It would inhibit satirists from commenting on copyrighted or trademarked material. Imagine the Squirrels pleading for permission to trash Frampton songs!

THE MAILBAG: Stacey Levine writes, “A friend whose judgment I trust thinks Clinton is a true radical, more than he let on during the campaign. The Nation says he’s middle; another friend professes that Clinton is not at all interested in real change, backed as he was by the major oil corps.” Good question. He made his name with national party brass as part of the Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the Reagan years to defend the party’s institutions (if not its ideals). Some members wrote books suggesting that Reaganism was irreversible, that the Dems could survive as an organization only by embracing GOP policies. Clinton wasn’t quite like that; he’s more in the tradition of Washington’s late Sen. Warren Magnuson, a master deal-cutter who believed in social progress thru government paternalism and economic progress thru industrial policy. Clinton’s a well-meaning compromiser who’ll only go as far as he thinks he can go. He won’t lead us out of our assorted messes; but, unlike the previous couple of guys, we might be able to lead him.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME: The Etiquette of the Underclass exhibit at 2nd & Pike was the sort of “social concern” experience my old Methodist youth group would’ve gone to. You walked past real street people (studiously kept outside) to enter a cleaned-up simulation of street life. You wandered thru a maze of tight corridors, small rooms, and plywood cutouts of muggers, drug dealers, johns, cops and bureaucrats; all to a Walkman soundtrack of interviews with street people (by a Calif. art troupe), tightly edited to shock suburban innocents with near-romanticized images of urban squalor. It worked as a thrill ride, but didn’t communicate how tedious and numbing that life can be.

BIRD GOTTA FRY: The Legislature’s reclassified flightless birds (ostriches, emus, rheas) as poultry, so they can be raised for food. The AP quotes breeders as saying they “taste just like beef.” It’s appropriate that Washington starts an industry in birds that run along the ground, since one of the state’s top poultry firms is named Acme.

ON THE WALLS: Art cafés are the apparent Next Big Thing in town. By serving espresso and pastries to gawkers, Offbeat Cafe (in the old Art/Not Terminal on Westlake) hopes for a steadier income than art sales alone could give, showing artists who can’t yet carry a whole gallery themselves. Offbeat also has some live-music and DJ parties. CyberCity, a similar place in the old Arthur Murray studio and Perot campaign office on Terry, closed almost before it opened. Most ambitious of the lot: Entros, in the old Van de Kamp’s bakery near South Lake Union, a huge space with several interactive and hi-tech exhibits — and a $15 first-time cover charge. The northern Californians (natch) running the place seem to think alternative-art lovers in this town have money (hah!).

ON THE AIR: KTZZ was put into involuntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy by three big syndicators. It’s over debts by the station’s ex-owners, who bought some high-profile reruns and sold few ads. The current (since ’90) owners say they’re on schedule for paying back the old debts. This debt service is why the station’s even cheaper now than it was before: less off-air promotion, more televangelists and infomercials. It gets those “Prime Time Talk” shows for free (the distributor keeps some of the ad slots)….KOMO wants to buy KVI, under new FCC regulations allowing it to have two AMs in the same town again. In the Golden Age of Radio, KOMO was sister stations with KJR, broadcasting from the Terminal Sales Bldg. (now home of the Weekly and Sub Pop) and affiliated with NBC’s Red and Blue networks respectively. From the ’50s to the ’70s, the tightly-formatted KOMO and the personality-driven KVI were arch rivals for the adult-pop audience. The Ike Republicans who run KOMO will likely interfere with KVI’s current talk format (despite current contrary assurances). They might be too patrician to keep the Agnewish rants of Rush Limbaugh, KVI’s top-rated show. And they’ll surely drop KVI’s use of news from KING-TV (now corporately divorced from KING radio).

PLAYING WITH YOUR FOOD: Tucci Benucch, a new restaurant in Westlake Center, is the first local outpost of Lettuce Entertain You, Ron Melman’s Chicago outfit that revolutionized food service as entertainment. Its eateries have distinctive poppy decor and decent food at almost-decent prices. Its Chi-town flagship, Ed Debevick’s, launched the fake-diner fad. It uses young actors and comics as “character” waiters and buspeople, haranguing and cutting up the willing clientele. The acts are even more intense at the LA Ed’s, where every server’s a would-be star and every customer’s a possible casting agent. Melman also has Chicago spots bearing the licensed names of local celebs (Oprah, Cubs announcer Harry Carey), and sponsored that contest where a guy won $1 million for shooting a basket from opposite court during a Bulls game. Alas, none of that action’s slated for Westlake. All we’re getting is “rustic Italian food in a country atmosphere.”

WHAT’S REALLY WRONG WITH LA: LA Riots II: The Sequel failed to make its scheduled premiere, gravely inconveniencing the original producers (police) and distributors (news media). Back when Repo Man came out, one of my gothic-punk acquaintances described for me what was so different about it. His first sentence: “It was made in LA.” He meant that this film used the parts of LA that other LA films didn’t (and mostly still don’t). A few weeks ago, I found myself in the company of a semi-retired Hollywood bigshot. He talked about how he’s looking to move here, how “everybody (in the business) wants to get out of LA.” The LA people scattering across the western states are just re-creating the La La Land mentality in an exile made possible by faxes and FedEx. The airheads are leaving Hollywood so they can keep their worthless Hollywood culture alive, so they can stay unbothered by the issues of people other than themselves. They symbolize America’s withdrawal from social community into private hedonism. Beverly Hills is the reason South Central exists. The “Northwest Lifestyle” described in newspaper “Living” sections is usually defined according to misplaced LA priorities, as a narcissistic life of private pleasures. The yuppie dream of “Moving to the Country” (without depending on a rural economy) is just an upscale version of the suburban dream/nightmare. It reflects the abandonment of neighborhoods, cities, social services, education, health, infrastructure, etc.; all as guided by a politics that purported to celebrate the Rugged Individual but really just gave more power to the already-powerful. Reagan was the Spielberg president — and not just because both shared a nostalgia for a nonexistent past. Just as Spielberg turned the genres of sleazy fringe movies into the foundation of the modern film biz, so Reagan turned the hatemongering and quick-buck tactics of the west’s right-fringe political circles into the foundation of national government policy. Both camps trafficked in contrived sentimentality, not in real social intimacy. It’s way past time for this to end. Don’t move to the country. Stop running from your problems, America! Stay in town! Fight to make it better!

STAGES: The biggest thing to me about Ramona Quimby, now at the Moore Theatre (one of umpteen spaces Seattle Children’s Theatre’s using ’til its new building gets done) is that Beverly Cleary wrote and set the original stories in Portland. As a kid, I found that amazing. Cleary was the only author given me who wrote about a place I had been. Everyone else either wrote about a mythical Mayfield USA, the streets of NYC, or war orphans in Korea. From Cleary, I learned the importance of thinking globally/writing locally.

DEAD AIR: Manager Chris Knab still insists that his new KCMU-Lite will eventually be popular ‘cuz it’s more “professional” than Classic KCMU, even without most of the station’s experienced DJs. One volunteer who stayed, Marty Michaels, got rewarded for his loyalty by getting to host weekend public-affairs shows. In early April, after a taped segment on Jewish Holocaust survivors, Michaels told listeners they’d heard “one personal opinions about the alleged Holocaust.” He told irate callers (off the air) there was no proof that millions of Jews ever died in Nazi camps. Knab persuaded Michaels to resign; it would’ve been hypocritical to fire people for mentioning CURSE and keep Michaels. Also, anti-Semitism is one of the few offenses the UW Regents (who’ll ultimately decide KCMU’s fate) don’t easily forgive.

SKIN DEEP: Playboy had model recruiters at the UW recently. The Daily ran a series of columns and letters reiterating all the 25-year-old complaints about the mag. Most anti-Playboy arguments are as trite as the pictures themselves. Here’s some fresher criticism: There’s nothing intrinsically bad about the het-male sex drive, or about entertainments that exploit it. But the best erotic art is about passion, about the mysteries and compulsions that drive disparate humans together. Most Playboy pix, especially the centerfolds, are bland works of commercial ad-art. The models portray soulless, unlustful characters, overly “dressed” in hyperrealistic lighting and Charlie’s Angels hair, their flesh digitally retouched to look unlike any real-world biological entity. The models aren’t “degraded” in the sense most critics invoke; they’re “honored” with the same perverse reverence given to The Brand in magazine ads. These “Playmates” are made to look incapable of having any real fun. I want better.

THE OUTLAW LOOK: The Oregon Dept. of Corrections (sez Media Inc.) is doing brisk biz in felon-made jeans, Prison Blues. They’ve got no known Seattle outlet; Nordstrom had ’em for a while but stopped.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Nabisco SnackWells Devil’s Food Snack Cakes are the hit of the year, regularly selling out to diet-conscious snackers. They don’t have fewer calories than regular cookies, but they are fat-free, and in many current fad diets that’s what counts. The chocolate-covered cakes are big and chocolatey, if dry (halfway between a microwave brownie and a shrunk Ho-Ho).

`SELF’ INTEREST: I’ve heard from people who want more “personality” in the column. Some even suggested that I oughta try to be more like Hunter Thompson and make myself my own #1 topic. I never figured you cared who I was. So far it’s been a self-fulfilling assumption; when I tell people at parties or in bars that I do stuff for The Stranger, they only want to know one thing: “What’s Dan Savage really like?” I don’t do narcissism in print because I hate it when others do it. I review new novels in one of my other freelance gigs; I can usually tell when a story’s autobiographical because the dullest character gets the biggest part. I’ve seen too many young journalist-wannabes fancy themselves the next Hunter Thompson and turn every story into a rehash of their personal experiences — even if they have no such experiences worth reading about, even if they’re 25 and still living with their parents. Ya wanna know how long it’s been since I got laid? Didn’t think so. Gonzo journalism belongs to the unstructured narcissism of the late hippie era. I harken back not to “gonzo” but to the precision writing of pre-’50 newspapers, back when papers were more populist (and popular), when a columnist was someone with something specific to say and who seemed anxious to say it.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW? DEPT.: Gladhanding comic Ross Shafer, who started Almost Live on KING-TV in ’84 as a straight talk show with current host John Keister as a sidekick, then left in ’88 to be the final host of the Fox Late Show, has joined the nadir of has-beens, never-weres, and Cher: an infomercial for a VCR remote. (Ah, modern commercials, that take 30 minutes to describe a car wax and 30 seconds to describe a car.)

‘TIL NEXT TIME, see Marsha Burns‘s exquisite photos of alternately-beautiful people at the Bellevue Art Museum thru 5/16, and heed the words of surrealist Francis Picabia: “Beliefs are ideas going bald.”

MISSION CONTROL: Everybody’s got a mission statement these days — construction projects, gas stations, even porno mags. My mission: To challenge your mind. To awaken your imagination. And to stop talking right now.

PASSAGE

James Darren in a pseudo-profound moment in Venus in Furs (1970): “When you don’t know where you’re at, man I tell you time is like the ocean. You can’t hold onto it.”

REPORT

Still working on the big history of the Seattle scene. Thanx to those who’ve contacted me thus far. The rest of you, if you’ve got stories or mementos, write to me.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Matutinal”