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AN IDES-OF-FEBRUARY GREETING from Misc., the online column that just couldn’t make up anything stranger than the image of Stevie Wonder driving a car during a Super Bowl halftime show sponsored by a car-insurance company. (And using James Brown music for a commercial during the game, against images of aging white businessmen playing golf, all in order to sell an obscure business-to-business service firm? Dumber than dumb.)
THE OCCASION WE KNOW as Valentine’s Day has little, as some of you may know, with the martyred Catholic figure of that name. Rather, it was one of those Catholic co-opting ploys to take over what had been a Euro-pagan holiday–which, as you might expect, originally had a lot to do with celebrating mid-February (which in post-Roman days was closer to early spring) as a time of hope and renewal. Yet this year, at this time, we’ve several things to mourn in our own local community:
LOSS #1: Red and Black Books. The nearly 20-year-old, collectively-run lefty-lit outlet (which used to give out matchbooks embossed, in bright red, “Capitalism Is Organized Crime”) is probably, after a long battle, gonna go the way of many other general-interest indie booksellers of less-ideological bent, unable to compete against the big-box consolidators.
LOSS #2: The Bathhouse Theater. Just as at one time Seattleites were expected to attend first-run films playing only at Northgate or Lake City, so were we once accustomed to attending live theater beyond the downtown-Queen Anne-Capitol Hill triangle. The current Empty Space in Fremont and Hokum Hall in West Seattle are among the few remaining exceptions to a trend that’s seen the inward relocation of Seattle Children’s Theater, On the Boards, and the Group Theater (which didn’t survive the transplant). The feisty Bathhouse Theater at Green Lake, born of the ’70s arts-funding boom, had had its recent money problems like several other troupes (the Group, Alice B) that were too big to depend on volunteer labor, too small to get a lot of those government grants and corporate endowments whose donors prefer to support “major producing organizations” (preferably in the form of construction projects).
The Bathhouse tried to make more of its own way by staging one or more surefire cash-cow projects every year, most infamously its cycle of boomer-nostalgia oriented Shakespeare-gone-doo-wop musicals. But those projects didn’t always succeed; and when they did, they didn’t always succeed enough to fund the company’s more “serious” productions; and even when they didn’t, they gave the Bathhouse a quasi-commercial reputation that may have ultimately hurt its fundraising efforts. The Bathhouse’s last hope was to host that ritzy, commercial tent-cabaret show, Teatro ZinZanni. But a few Green Lake area residents expressed fear that erecting the circus tent by the lake would set a dangerous “privatization” precedent, and threatened enough citizen action that the cabaret’s producers instead pitched their stakes at the ex-Moose Lodge block on lower Queen Anne where the symphony once expected to move. ZinZanni became a commercial hit, but the Bathhouse didn’t get its planned piece of it. It’s canceled the rest of its ’99 season and probably won’t be back.
LOSS #3: The Speakeasy Cafe. The Speakeasy organization’s Internet services division, which provides server facilities for this site, will continue. But with that becoming an ever-more competitive endeavor, they didn’t wanna use those earnings to keep supporting an ever-less-profitable cafe and performance space, and announced they’ll close it in May. For the past four years, the Speakeasy’s been one of those odd ducks that still manages to waddle around. It’s a coffeehouse, a beer-and-wine hall, a computer-rental space, a gallery, a community meeting center, and a performance center whose two rooms have hosted assorted music shows (acoustic, electric, DJ), films, plays, political rallies, and corporate-promo gatherings.
But the Liquor Board said last year they couldn’t have all-ages music shows in the same big front room as their beer taps (even though apparently no minor ever got served there); they claim cafe revenues dropped by half when they had to go 21-and-over on music nights. Besides that, their landlord’s been passing on complaints from the 211 Billiard Club upstairs, whose serious-pool-playin’ customers felt distracted by some of the louder concerts. Faced with the decline and possible total loss of what had become the space’s chief profit center, they’ve decided to throw in the towel.
Like pop-music genres, pop-music venues often have natural life spans. By becoming dependent on its music shows, the Speakeasy space fell prey to this principle. As a cafe, it sometimes felt too big and understaffed. As an Internet cafe, it was only useful before the evening loudness (and cover charges) commenced around 9 pm.
The solution, for either current Speakeasy management or any parties who might wish to take over the space, would be to remodel it into something more workable. Turn the back room into a better-soundproofed, booze-free listening zone (like the OK Hotel had for a while). Perhaps carve the big front room into two spaces; one where eating and latte-drinking and chatting and Web browsing can quietly go on all evening, one where meetings and readings and less all-attention-commanding performances might occur. It could work. Whether the Speakeasy crew, or anyone else, has the cash-and-sweat to try and make it work is another question.
LOSS #4: The portending death, sometime next year or so, of the afternoon Seattle Times. That’d end its status as the last evening paper to be #1 in a two-paper city, and the second-biggest remaining PM paper in America altogether (after the Detroit News, which like the Times is part of a Joint Operating Agreement, wherein two papers share all non-journalistic aspects of their business).
I’ll miss the notion of newspapers coming out all day, with the possibility of something new and exciting coming out in midafternoon. The Times (which used to use the slogan “Today’s News Today”) used to take pride in its ability to hit the streets with headlines from this morning (or this afternoon back east). It even published a street extra when the Gulf War started, which will now probably be the last true “extra” in Seattle newspaper history. Of course, we’ve got TV, radio, and now the Web for breaking news. Certainly, the Web has obliviated the need for a paper with same-day stock prices, one of the Times’ prime selling points. Indeed, one reason the P-I agreed to revise the JOA to let the Times go AM was so the P-I could post all its news content on the Web, something the Times had previously sought to prevent under a JOA written back in the pre-Web days of ’83.
After the change, then what? The Times will likely continue to emphasize “value-added” journalism, downplaying the headlines in favor of meandering long features, mealy-mouthed analysis, public-opinion polls, and lifestyle pieces aimed at nice affluent suburban families; while the junior partner in the JOA, the Hearst-owned P-I. will remain the newsier newspaper. Times management would like to so fully overtake the P-I in morning circulation that Hearst would eventually be persuaded to shut down, in return for a piece of all future Times profits. But I don’t see it happening. In the 15 and a half years of the JOA, the two papers have established clear identities and market segments. The Times is for the fat and unsassy, for the lawyers and Chamber of Commerce members and subdivision dwellers. The P-I is for go-getter entrepreneurs, smart-mouthed sports fans, active people, DINK couples, and condo dwellers. It’s the latter set of groups advertisers crave these days. But by the 2010s, will all those AARP-age boomers come to prefer a more sedate news source? Only time will tell.
GAIN #1: For every major loss, though, there’s at least one attempt going on to add something to our sociocultural landscape. An ex-MS exec’s starting the first real, legal Internet pharmacy, with offices in Seattle and in Ohio (near the private airports of big overnight-shipping companies) and using the name Soma Corp. Brave New World readers know “Soma” as the name of a mood-altering and mind-numbing drug, which in Aldous Huxley’s classic dystopian-future novel was, among other uses, dosed out to lower-caste people in order to keep them pacified yet productive. Is the name a comment on some of the prescription mood-alterers the firm will likely dispense to attitude-challenged businesspeople? Or, perhaps, could it refer to the glassy-eyed state in which one might find oneself after too many hours spent online?
WE STILL SEEK your favorite beautiful “ugly” building. Name your pick by email or at our fantabulous Misc. Talk discussion boards. Until then, then, try to make it through the last few weeks of a rather miserable winter with these cheery thoughts from Rita Mae Brown: “The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they’re okay, then it’s you.”
UPDATE: On the day last week’s Stranger Misc. column went to the printer, with its call for the P-I to bring back Zippy the Pinhead, the paper announced it would indeed reinstate Bill Griffith’s exquisitely-drawn, smartly off-kilter comic. Nice to see the paper’s editors know what’s good for the publication as a whole, even if it’s not what scores highest in market research. Speaking of publications in tune with their readers…
I AM JOE’S LUMBAGO: The oh-so-venerable Reader’s Digest is having some financial woes. Executives are resigning, the stock price’s going down, circulation’s flat (though still 15 million, comparable to the whole population of English-speaking Canada). It’s easy to see why Wall Street doesn’t like the magazine or the company that makes it. At a time when Deadheads are joining AARP, RD‘s Lawrence Welk image isn’t what many advertisers want. More importantly, the clean-cut, hyper-respectable brand of conservatism RD‘s championed doesn’t fit with today’s go-go, business-above-all mentality.
It hadn’t always been this way, of course. In the ’20s, RD founders DeWitt and Lila Wallace forged a niche product, taking existing articles from other magazines and rewriting them for fast, easy reading by people on the move. (For decades, its only ads were endorsements for itself by corporate hotshots and movie stars). By the ’50s, the Wallaces had turned their little reprint mag into a global brand, aimed squarely (pun intended, natch) at the most straitlaced of mass audiences. By championing cultural as well as political conservatism, it built a loyal subscriber base (a handy market for RD‘s mail-order books and records). But by defining itself and its audience as off to oneside from the social zeitgeist‘s twists-‘n’-turns, it now risks being left behind. Can RD avoid offending its easily-offended reader base while reaching out beyond it? As “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power” might say, “Dubitable.” Speaking of shifting zeitgeists…
SPANKING NEW: If you think S/M fetishes around here have gotten as mainstreamed as they could get, you haven’t seen NYC’s new restaurant La Nouvelle Justine (named for the de Sade novel). An AP dispatch claims the three-month-old eatery supplmenents its French-inspired cuisine with “a birthday paddling, boot cleaning, or the chance to eat from a dog bowl at the feet of a whip-wielding mistress,” plus “Masochist” and “Necrophiliac” cocktails. Dimly-lit walls are etched with medieval fetish scenes. There’s a fake prison cell, an oversized high chair, and leather wrist cuffs. Waitresses and waiters are dressed as “dominants,” busboys as slaves. The story claims the place “draws more giggling voyeurs than hard-core afficionados of the master,” quoting one serious fetishist as saying it “could be a spot for bus tourists.” Speaking of fads gone too far…
OFF THE RACK: The Spice Girls, that singing group (Sporty Spice, Sexy Spice, Strong Spice, Scary Spice, Posh Spice) that claims in interviews to not be the shallow studio-manufactured image machine it really is, has proven so popular it’s spawned knockoff quintets throughout Britain. Here’s my idea for my own “Misc. Spice Melange”:
(Speaking of musical fads, we’ve already received plenty of entries in our search for formerly-popular music genres that haven’t been subjected to recent “hip” revival attempts. You’ve still time to send your suggestions to clark@speakeasy.org. Results here next week.)
Following are the results of Misc.’s quest for the best grocery stores in Seattle, by weight class. While these are my personal views, thanks for all your suggestions. These listings leave out organic co-ops and gourmet delis — I wouldn’t know how to judge such places. (For the record, Central Co-op got more votes than any other hippie store.) I also wasn’t looking for wine stores with vestigial food departments (sorry, Louie’s on the Pike). Oddly, only one letter recommended anything in the Pike Place Market (DeLaurenti’s Italian deli, with its wall of capers).
CONVENIENCE STORE: Seattle has many above-average store-lets in a genre with a pretty low average, but a particular hat tip goes to the Hillcrest Deli-Mart on Capitol Hill. A former pre-supermarket-era Safeway built in the 1920s, it’s still got a complete-enough selection of packaged goods, enough fresh stuff to bide you over until your next supermarket run, and either the best or second-best fried chicken in town; all at prices that don’t excessively punish you for avoiding supermarket crowds.
SMALL SUPERMARKET: When supermarkets first appeared as a Depression-era cost-cutting novelty, they were still small enough to fit neighborhood main streets. Every neighborhood should have one, especially if it doesn’t have a larger store (Belltown, Cascade, Georgetown, etc.). Stores like Marketime in Fremont and Red Apple in Madison Park provide everything you need (unless you’re on a special diet). Or you can stock up on staple goods at a monster store and use a store like this for perishables and restocks.
The two Ken’s (Greenwood and west Queen Anne) win overall. Lori Smith writes about the Greenwood Ken’s, “Despite its garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store, where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.” Honorable mention goes to the First Hill Shop-Rite (home of my current-fave generic cereal brand, the imitation Crispix simply called Flavorite Crispy Hexagons!).
REGULAR SUPERMARKET: Getting into the realm of the major chains, there’s still something to be said for independent spirits like Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant. Robert C. Mills calls it “the center of the known universe.” Situated in the foot-traffic heart of its area, with most of its parking spaces in a side-street auxiliary lot instead of out front, it combines the meet-n’-greet ambience of a small neighborhood store with the selection and prices of a big park-n’-gorge outlet. It’s also got a hypnotic neon sign that has a different sector on the fritz every night.
SUPERSTORE: Larry’s has its spots (the wall of cereal, all the imported South American soda pops). But there’s nothing quite like Art’s Family Center on Holman Road. On a site abandoned by Fred Meyer as too small, Art’s has built an extremely site-specific collection of perimeter departments around the brightest, boldest food selection anywhere.
Elsewhere, Ann Allen recommended Stock Market on Rainier Ave., a “warehouse look” store with a cafe section occupied by just ordinary folk. (“It’s not yuppie. It’s not bland and sterile. It’s what you want a neighborhood store to be.”) Steve Rohde recommended the ineligible Monroe Fred Meyer, but the venerable hypermarket chain has a new monster outlet in Lake City. And of course nothing can compare to the Price Costco experience (where shopping may be a baffling ordeal, but it’s great for larger households, cheap party catering, and especially for free samples).
ETHNIC: Uwajimaya is the name to beat in Asian foodstuffs, but some prefer the recently-grown cluster of Vietnamese stores at 12th and Jackson. One store there, Hop Thanh, has an in-store butcher presiding over the biggest all-pork meat dept. you ever saw. In more assimilated immigrant delights, smart consumers like Leanne Beach know the discount Italian goodies at Big John’s Pacific Food Importers, open daytime hours only on 6th Ave. S. near the INS office. Beach also likes how “They write out your bill by hand, just like an old-fashioned market!”
As promised in the Stranger, here are some of the original letters full-length:
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 17:22:21 PDT
From: THAT_GUY@eor.com (THAT GUY)
Organization: The Emerald OnRamp
Subject: Food Stores
To: clark@cyberspace.com
Favorite Ethnic Food Store: DeLaurenti (featuring a wall of capers, even!)
Favorite Superstore: The new Monroe Fred Meyer (Hate the town, but store is
great for stocking up for an Eastbound road trip.)
Favorite Mid-size Supermarket: First Hill ShopRite (I feel like I’m back in
New York when I’m in that dump.)
Favorite Checker: ‘Debbie’ at the Broadway QFC (She’s quirky yet perky.)
-Steve Rohde
aka that_guy@eor.com
Date: Thu, 17 Aug 95 13:43:10 -0700
From: Hollis Nelson <hollis@speakeasy.org>
To: clark@cyberspace.com, hollis@eve.speakeasy.org
Subject: PLENTY – the coolest, most beautiful, euphoric gourmet/organic store
There is an oasis of a gourmet food store in undiscovered Madrona called
Plenty. I must admit, I am a wine purveyor at this store, (thus the wine
selection is impeccable) but I find myself drawn this store on a daily basis. I
also happen to deliver the Stranger to them because someone in distribution at
your fine publication doesn’t “do Madrona” – but that’s a whole other tangent.
First of all, this small store is aesthetically beautiful – PCC meets
Metropolitan Home. This is due in large part to one of the owners, Rolf. Also,
not only do they have an amazing selection of specialty organic and gourmet
items, but they have Jim (former chef at Cafe Flora). He whips up the most
flavorful, dare I say yummy, unique and completely healthy meals, snacks etc.
daily. Lastly, not only do they have a beautiful enviroment, amazing selection,
and yummy food, but they have some of the nicest people due in large part to
the last of the “mod squad” owners Loree. Plenty is a must try experience – a
thousand apologies for my long windedness, but I love this place.
your biggest fan,
Hollis A. Nelson
Date: Fri, 18 Aug 1995 10:53:04 -0700
To: Clark@cyberspace.com
From: dsackett@newsdata.com (Daniel Sackett)
Subject: grocery markets
Upon reading your call for suggestions for the best grocery stores I felt
compelled to copy down your web site address and immediately began to
conceptualize how I could possibly communicate the sublime and gross
pleasures of shopping at Central Co-op. I once saw a documentary on Frank
Sinatra’s reign as a teen idol–the image of one panting fan saying “He’s
just so…sincere” comes to mind when I think of Central. Sure both Central
and Sinatra are sincere, but the experience is so much more. From a REAL
committment to putting out a wide, fresh and reasonably priced organic
produce selection (thanks ol’ Tom the wacky, art-crazed produce manager) to
a cornucopia of treats and staples that commercial stores pass over (yea
Rhondi!), to a staff that upon hearing the words “vegan” or “organic”
actually helps instead of staring blankly from the hollowness of their
bourgeois, status quo enslaved souls, to aesthetically soothing indirect
lighting, to cool check-out folk (Alex and the piscean guy with the wry
smile), to the occassional kitty-cat rendition of Old King Wenceslaus on the
PA, man, Central is IT. Besides, I like spending my money in a co-op instead
of feathering Joe Albertson’s corporate schemes. I believe I am what I
eat–including the experience of gathering food–and I’ve had many happy
moments shopping Central Co-op.
Date: Sat, 19 Aug 95 13:28:00 -0700
From: robert_c mills <rcmills@cac.washington.edu>
Message-Id: <9508192028.AA05447@burlap2.cac.washington.edu>
Subject: Misc. Misc. miscellany
Food Giant – Wallingford = Center of the known universe
Non-surfing web use term = “sponging”
Date: Wed, 23 Aug 95 13:16:40 -0700
From: Lisa Roosen-Runge <lrr@discovery.ca>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Windows; I; 16bit)
Mime-Version: 1.0
Subject: supermarket
Here’s a suggestion – Uwajimaya (hope I spelled it correctly)
I think it should be just a supermarket, but it may fall into the ethnic
category.
It is a lot of fun – there’s a cafe, books upstairs, excellent junk food
and neat kitchen implements.
I went to the one in the “International District”, but I guess they have
other outlets as well.
I have been checking in here fairly regularly, I really appreciate you
posting your columns on the Web.
p.s. I am looking forward to the final version of your book.
From lesmith@netmedia.co.il Tue Aug 29 19:31:42 1995
Message-Id: <199508300233.CAA05166@chava.netmedia.co.il>
Date: Wed, 30 Aug 95 02:37:34 -0300
From: “Lori E. Smith” <lesmith@jer1.co.il>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 1.1N (Macintosh; I; 68K)
Clark,
Re your grocery store search, I’m going to nominate Ken’s, the grocery
store at the corner of 73rd & Greenwood in that neighborhood that’s not
quite Phinney Ridge, not quite Greenwood or Greenlake and not really
Ballard either. When my family moved there in the 70s (I’m also one of
those rare Seattlites who actually have _roots_ in the city, my
great-grandfather went to the UW) Ken’s was quiet and pokey, like the
neighborhood. As it has gone uptown and yuppy so has Ken’s and you can
now get packaged sushi and all the comforts of home. But despite it’s
garish exterior and the number of people there who look they read the
Weekly, it remains the classic example of a good neighborhood store,
where they know your name, help you find stuff and don’t overcharge.
Thanks for going on-line and helping to keep Seattle’s alternative
tradition alive. (One of the things I like about Seattle is that despite
the attempts of various establishments to promote Seattle’s various
environmental and civic amenities it’s the “other” side of Seattle that
always gets national press, cf the prostitutes of the boom era, the
general strike of 1919 and more recently the assorted group of drifters
from out of town who became “grunge”.)
And by the way, I like the Macintosh a lot too.
5/91 Misc. Newsletter
GOOD THING DANNY PARTRIDGE HAS
A SISTER WHO’S A LAWYER NOW
A hearty welcome to Misc., where we’re perfectly willing to pay a little more for our hydro power and our agribusiness-raised produce in order to save the dam-threatened Columbia River salmon. You’ve gotta love a creature who’ll go upstream a thousand miles or so just to squirt onto some eggs.
WHAT’S YOUR SIGN?: The North Broadway 76 station was demolished, ending an era when the street began and ended with turning 76 balls. I’ll never get to live in the second-floor apartment on 10th Ave. E. that directly overlooked that sign, its bright orange globe turning outside like a postmodern successor to the blinking neon signs outside every seedy film noir hotel room.
STRUNG OUT: Palm Springs, Calif. mayor Sonny Bono tried to ban string bikinis. Now we know why his wife left him….
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Generation X, Tales for an Accelerated Culture is a neat disjointed narrative by Vancouver’s Douglas Coupland about three young nihilist-ettes trading fanciful stories of rootlessness and sexlessness in between their no-future “McJobs.” St. Martin’s Press did a too-cute job on the design and illustrations, but the text itself is one of the first to treat people born since 1960 as having brains.
OPEN LETTER TO ANDREW WARD: Not all of us Northwest natives are “xenophobic” hicks as implied in your book of sentimental essays, Out Here. We just don’t like smug yuppies from the East coming here and expecting us to kneel to their alleged intellectual/aesthetic superiority. And this region is not the chichéd billowy paradise you imagine. It’s a real place, with real people and real problems. Wake up!
CATHODE CORNER: In Living Color, normally the most astute sketch show on TV, ran an “Iraqi fashion show” segment with women totally draped in black, including their faces. The catch is that Iraq had been one of the secular Arab states, eager to round up all political opposition but ambivalent towards modern clothes. It’s our friends in Saudi Arabia and our once-and-future friends in Iran who jail women for showing their faces….The Comedy Channel and Ha!, two cable comedy networks not carried locally, have merged to become CTV. The name is a takeoff on MTV (whose parent company partly owns the new venture). But there’s already a CTV in Canada (unofficially standing for Commercial TV, as opposed to the public but ad-bearing CBC). On Seattle cable until 1987, it mainly carried Hollywood shows with Canadian commercials. Its mandated quota of (really cheap) domestic programs included a lot of the schlock shows directly parodied on SCTV.
BUT DID HE EVER INJECT HIM WITH WINDOW CLEANER?: Merv Griffin, pal of the Reagans and rival of Donald Trump, was sued for $1 million in “palimony” by a male ex-driver who claims to also be his ex-lover. But what does this mean about lovable late sidekickArthur Treacher?
THE DIRT: The City of Seattle used to sell cedar-shingle composting bins at the subsidized price of $8 for the first box, $26 thereafter. Now the city’s distributing bins made of recycled plastic, and selling the wood bins for $49.50 through Smith & Hawken, the garden-supply catalog for rich snobs who’ll gladly pay twice what something’s worth just so they don’t have to be seen entering Sears.
MORE DIRT: A minor cause celébre occurred during the closing of seven Seattle artists’ joint installation Earthly Delights at the Bellevue Art Museum in Bellevue Square. During the month the exhibit was up, visitors were asked to fill out questionnaires about themselves, their biggest fears, the things they liked most about the mall, and their opinions on compost and whether a wink was better than a handshake. They were then to tear off one sheet of the carbonless forms on which the questionnaires were printed, and to fold that copy into a paper airplane. But on the day before the closing, mall management canceled the scheduled launching of the 1,300 collected planes from the museum’s mezzanine into the main mall space. The official notice stated “there will be no artist presence in the mall.” Instead, organizers invited the 50 or so people at the closing party to take a folded questionnaire home as long as they treated it respectfully, “like a fine sculpture.” In order to exit through the mall without danger, partygoers were given stickers boldly stating NOT AN ARTIST. The six-part installation utilized video monitors, displays of old household goods, compost, trash bags, weaved-together plastic spoons, a glass-encased array of rotting food items in the arrangement of an American flag, and a Terry Amadei sculpture of a face-down child figure surrounded by moss. It was a pointed comment on how suburbanites delude themselves into believing they’ve moved to a “natural, country” lifestyle when they’ve really isolated themselves (perhaps due to fear of biological reality) with their cars, parking lots, malls, tract houses, and glassed-in buildings.
OPUS TWO: Everybody’s favorite living political-funny-animal cartoonist Berkeley Breathed is now living on Vashon Island, where he draws the weekly best-of-Bloom-County strip he still calls Outland, and works on an animated TV script for Steven Spielberg.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Mikakuto Pudding Candy is little caramel custard-flavor drops with a maple-flavored liquid center. It’s sold only at little Japanese convenience stores in the International District (where you can also sometimes get Felix the Cat Mystery Candy, whose pieces have different fruit flavors but are all colored black)… Vegi Snax are little poly bags of carrot and celery sticks selling for 69 cents, from a company called FreshWorld, described by the Weekly as a joint venture of Du Pont and something called DNA Plant Technology Corp.
OPENING THE AMERICAN MIND: Multicultural education is NOT a force for intolerance, as a coordinated right-wing push of articles in Time, the New Republic, the Atlantic and elsewhere suggests. Just the opposite: it recognizes the white-Euro “canon” of literature as the philosophy of our country’s dominant culture to date, but insists that the cultures of the rest of the world must also be studied, because we must live with those other lands and because America is becoming a “majority of minorities”. It’s the guys trying to keep non-white lit out of the classroom who are the real “new McCarthyites”. I wished I’d had more ethnic studies when I was in college. In grade school and junior high we did get to hear/read a lot of stories about Harlem, Korea, and Africa. (But, except for the works of Portland’s Beverly Cleary (Ramona, et al.), we never read a single story set in the Northwest. More about that in the June Wire.)
(latter-day note: The referenced article is `Jet City Lit,’ available from my essays index.)
OUTSIDE DIAMANDA GALAS: Some people at her show were moved to tears; others were bored to them. The screeches and moans she sang in her AIDS/Biblical-metaphor performance piece reminded some of actual cries of AIDS patients; others in the audience told me they thought she was just loud and pretentious. But nobody I spoke with or overheard after the show, save one, mentioned her topless evening gown. Any woman who performs solo (her music was recorded) while revealing her body, yet drawing all attention away from it, has a rare control over her audience indeed.
THE MALL OF FAITH: ABC ran a fascinating item on mega-churches, huge suburban facilities (the early ones were evangelical; most now are nondenominational) with arena-sized sanctuaries, complete lifestyle facilities (including bowling lanes and soft-rock concerts), few crosses or other childhood-church reminders, and noncontroversial doctrines designed to please as many boomer families as possible. One Colorado institution transformed itself from a Full Gospel Church/Assembly of God into “The Happy Church” (complete with happy face signs).
ONLY IN NYC: Several boxes containing severed human heads were stolen from a dissection-class instructor’s car. The crooks dumped their loot about a block away; an alert nearby cab driver picked up the parts and kept them in his cab until the doctor returned.
ONLY IN AUBURN: A 21-year-old was asked by a 17-year-old in a restaurant parking lot, “Where’s the party?” The young man told the stranger, “You’re not invited.” According to the Tacoma News Tribune, the teen slugged and threatened to kill the man, and engaged other nearby youths in the assault.
ONLY IN FEDERAL WAY: Someone has been randomly shooting at cats in house windows, killing five. Stuffed decoy cats have been placed in houses in the so-far futile hope of catching the sniper.
FROM THE LAND THAT TRIED TO BAN 2 LIVE CREW: The AP reports that a former aide to a Florida legislator charges that he regularly insulted and harassed her, and at a 1983 staff party tore the front of her dress off of her “in front of dozens of people.”
AD VERBS: Ivar’s first “Dances With Clams” commercial was withdrawn at the demand of Orion Pictures. What do you expect from a studio owned by a guy named Kluge (a computer term for an awkward, clumsily-designed system)?…Here’s one rock song you never expected in a commercial: The Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” (without the title line) for Bud Light.
THAT EXPLAINS HIS LAPSES IN MEMORY: Biographer Kitty Kelley romantically linked Nancy Reagan with the subject of her last book, Sinatra. More startingly, Kelly claims the Reagans once smoked pot while Ron was the staunchly anti-hippie Calif. governor. If true, it disproves a famous assertion in the ’60s book The Greening of America: “If a `straight’ college athlete, with little interest in politics, tries marijuana, it will inevitably lead him to social and political concerns.”
FERRY TALES: Talk of a new Everett-Seattle walk-on ferry brings back memories of growing up in the vicinity of that sad little city, and also the memory of my first writing teachers at North Seattle Community College, all ex-hippies (in 1976) who all responded to learning of my origin with variations on the phrase, “But every-body hates Everett.” It was my first discovery that hippies, despite claims to being the apex of intellectual/moral superiority, were no more immune to bigotry than anybody.
DID YOU KNOW?: The New York Public Library Desk Reference lists a visual symbol for “Weapons Needed.” It’s virtually identical to the two-piece Chevron logo in use since 1974.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (NY Times correction, 4/12:) “A picture caption yesterday about a concert by the Pet Shop Boys misidentified the theater where it took place. It was Radio City Music Hall, not Carnegie Hall.”
SIGN OF THE MONTH (one one side of the tunnel-project clock at 5th and Pine): “Clock under repair. Meanwhile (options): Call 526-7777 (time). Consult your watch. See other side. Correlate the sun’s position with today’s date. OR, slow down and relax.” Runner-up (Puget Sound American Atheists’ billboard in Central Area): “Atheism: It’s Not What You Believe.”
TEACHER’S FRET: The statewide teachers’ strike came during National Education Week, with all the sitcoms showing reruns of learning-related episodes and with all sorts of public service spots along the lines of “Don’t be a dope. Stay in school.” One teachers’-union lobbying ad on KING came right after an ad for college loans by Pacific First Federal with the slogan “We Fund Reality.”
‘TIL OUR GLORIOUS 5TH ANNIVERSARY issue in June, be sure to watch The ’90s Sun. nights on KCTS, check out the Bible Adventures cartridge for Nintendo, and learn Amy Denio’s new word “Spoot,” meaning her concept of spontaneity and of music as a shared experience of player and listener.
PASSAGE
From W. Somerset Maugham’s introduction to The Razor’s Edge (1944): “I have a little story to tell and I end neither with a death nor a marriage. Death ends all things and so is the comprehensive conclusion of a story, but marriage finishes it very properly too and the sophisticated are ill-advised to sneer at what is by convention termed a happy ending. It is a sound instinct of the common people which persuades them that with this all that needs to be said is said. When male and female, after whatever vicissitudes you like, are at last brought together they have fulfilled their biological function and interest passes to the generation that is to come.”
REPORT
The fifth anniversary of Misc. will be celebrated next month with a special reading, to be held the second week in June (after the Film Fest). For details on that or on ads in Misc., leave a message at 524-1967.
Misc. received a “Publisher’s Choice” citation from the small-press review mag Factsheet Five. “A fine observer of the cultural scene, with comment and quote to amuse and provoke,” sez FF’s Mike Gundelroy. “His commentary is light and witty, though he can get serious when the matter warrants.”
WORD-O-MONTH
“Badinage”
7/90 Misc. Newsletter
LITHUANIA, LATVIA, NOW QUEBEC.
WHO SAYS THE DIVORCE RATE’S DOWN?
Welcome to the July edition of Misc., not the official cultural newsletter of anything, where we’re still trying to figure out why the pay-TV channels save all their worst movies for the free-preview weekends.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Subtext, a handsomely-made tabloid collecting syndicated articles about third world issues not widely seen in other media. Fresh, new info, not pre-digested “analysis” of the same information base in the regular papers and on TV.
OFFENSIVE RUSH: First, Ken Behring buys the Seahawks and becomes an instant “community leader.” Now he shows his true colors, quickly buying up much of the last big tracts of rural (or, as he mistakenly calls them, “underdeveloped”) land left in King County for massive-scale development. Block this.… Am also reminded of a horror-movie fan writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who often called himself “the Ackermonster.” Could there be somebody here in town who deserves the name more? Could there?
IN THE BUY AND BUY: A discount “supermall” is planned for Auburn (known to local ’60s TV viewers as Little Detroit of the West), with 175 stores, an entertainment complex, a day-care center, and four entrances with different “Northwest themes” (just to let people imagine there’s a real place left after all the paving and malling is done). Also planned: a kiddie miniature train ride past miniature Northwest landmarks, including an erupting Mt. St. Helens replica.
ONLY 177 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT: We used to report the date of each year’s first Xmas displays in stores. This Misc. tradition has been rendered useless by the opening of the Christmas Shop in the Market, open year-round for your own Xmas in July party. (No live trees.)
THE FINE PRINT (sign on a cigarette machine at an International House of Pancakes): “No refunds. Use at your own risk.”
SIGN AT LAST EXIT: “Effective Monday, under 17 please go elsewhere.” I’ve seen a lot of aging ’60s hippie-radical types grow increasingly intolerant of other people’s lifestyles, but I always had this image of the Last Exit coffeehouse as a haven for diversity, where the only unthinkable attitude was that of blanket discrimination. With this new bigoted policy, I apparently was wrong.
UPDATES: There are still more official Goodwill Games services than we mentioned last time. Diamond Parking, for example, is the official parking consultant; Pay Less, the official drugstore….The real-life Tina Chopp really was a Bellingham student who broke the heart of a graffiti-crazed musician. Or so report three separate sources, all of whom heard it from that urban-legend staple, a “friend of a friend.”
AD OF THE MONTH (slogan on a banner for a beer sale at Plaid Pantry): “When you need it bad, get it at Plaid”…Don’t blame John Fogerty for the Olympic Stain ad with a Creedence song (retitled “We’ll Stop the Rain”). The band lost all rights to its old songs in an investment scam run by its label, Fantasy Records. When Fogerty finally re-entered the music biz, Fantasy sued him for allegedly basing one of his new songs on one of his old ones.
O NO CANADA!: As the world’s third largest nation (in area) threatens to break up, it also disappears from our TV screens. The CBC, a model for public-service broadcasting with popular appeal, has been on local cable systems long before today’s fancy cable networks existed. But no more, at least on TCI. No more Coronation Street, the UK soap with those ingratiating Manchester accents. No more of the unique CBC perspective on the news (you mean there are things to say about countries besides how they affect U.S. business interests?). No more Canadian sports (hockey, five-pin bowling, 110-yard football, and my personal #1 all-time fave,curling). No more David Suzuki nature shows. No more Switchback, the (still superior) model for Nickelodeon’s live-audience kids’ shows. B.C. cable systems will still carry all Seattle-Tacoma channels (KCPQ was the “hometown station” for the Vancouver crews of21 Jump Street and Booker). The cable people can go ahead and take off KVOS, which went totally downhill after a Seattle basketball owner took it over.
CATHODE CORNER: KIRO is finally airing CBS’ Rude Dog and the Dweebs, the first Saturday-morning cartoon series based on locally-created characters (owned by David Sabey’s T-shirt company). It began nationally last fall, and has already been cancelled. One look and you can see why….Gloria Monty, best known as producer of General Hospital, promises to build a world-class video studio in the suburbs of Portland, if she can get a zoning waiver and other “incentives.” She vows to make all her non-GH productions there (including three as-yet unsold series pilots).
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (from the Oregonian, 6/17): “Most new jobs will pay better than average.”
ORGAN-IC DECAY: We must say goodbye this season to the Pizza and Pipes chain. The Bellevue restaurant is closing; the Greenwood location has already become a Blockbuster Video store, where children now sit quietly in the Children’s Video Lounge instead of dancing around the bubble machine. I don’t know what will become of the mighty Wurlitzer organs.
WOODSY OWL DIED FOR YOUR SINS: The Feds take their halfway-courageous environmental stance in a decade and take more heat than a forest fire. I’m amazed at how successfully timber-company management, whose automated logging and robotized mills are responsible for most industry layoffs, have gotten workers to blame “enviro-snobs” for tough times in mill towns.
GONE FISSION: With the potential collapse of the nuclear-weapons business, the electricity side of the atom biz tries to restore past momentum with a hilariously ironic PR push — that nukes somehow are the most environmentally benign energy source. It started with “Every day is Earth Day with nuclear energy” newspaper ads, followed by a hype-laden article in Forbes that claimed “It is hypocritical to claim to be in favor of clean air and water but against nuclear power.” Nuclear power uses radioactive materials (strip-mined and expensively processed) to boil water to turn turbines. The only “clean” aspect of nuclear power is that its waste products aren’t pumped out of smokestacks; they’re stored for future burial someplace where, it’s hoped, the radiation won’t leak out for the next few centuries. There are much better ways to spin some turbines around, including the wind. There are other ways to generate electricity, including solar cells (yes, work continues on those things, though research capital has been slow during the current temporary oil glut).
SPEAKING OF FORBES, its Egg magazine just did a two-page puff piece on what to see in Seattle (Ballard, Uwajimaya, the Dog House). It follows a similar piece in a Coke-sponsored ad section within Rolling Stone (publicizing the Two Bells Tavern and the OK Hotel, among other spots). Both were written by Weekly staffers. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Elizabeth Perkins on her treat at attending the Seattle Intl. Film Festival and being delighted to shower with “Seattle’s fresh, clean water” instead of the substandard, scarce LA H2O.
ANY PURPLE ONES YET?: Genetically engineered cows are now here, designed to lactate as no cow has ever lactated before. Maybe soon we’ll really get the brown cow that gives chocolate milk, or the cow that grazes on Astro-Turf and gives non-dairy creamer….Naturally fermented milk with 2 percent alcohol is planned for the Australian market. The idea is to appeal to the legendary “Australian macho men” who disdain anything widely considered to be 1) for children and 2) healthy.
HOT, WELL, YOU KNOW: CNN told of an Electric Incinerator Toilet, invented for US long-range bomber crews, now adapted for use on Japanese high-rise construction sites. Plug it in and it burns its deposits, preferably after the user has stood up from it.
DRAMATIC LICENSING: The Marriott Corp. is starting a chain of Cheers bars. Planned for 46 cities, the first is to open in November at the Minn./St. Paul Airport. “We’ll try to hire people who look like Woody and Sam Malone and the different characters,” says Marriott spokesman Richard Sneed. The company is also working on robotic replicas of Norm and Cliff to sit at the end of the bar and chat with customers. It’s the biggest TV-themed hospitality chain since the Johnny Carson-licensed Here’s Johnny’s restaurants folded. A Chicago chain has eateries with the licensed names of Oprah Winfrey and Cubs TV announcer Harry Carey. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is tentatively planning a Star Trek opera. Can they compose music that re-creates the off-rhythm cadence of Wm. Shatner’s speech patterns?
SCHOOL DOZE: The Province of Ontario, home of Marshall McLuhan, requires media literacy as part of all high-school English curricula. Somebody should do that here. But first, they’ll have to sell the need for this to school administrators and especially teachers. If the schools are like they were when I worked for them in ’83, there are too many ex-hippie teachers out there who sneer in class at students who admit to watching TV or to liking any recent music.
KULTURE KORNER: The NY Times ran a piece on artworks stolen by Nazis, kept in E. Germany, and maybe finally getting returned to their previous owners. The paper illustrated it with a reproduction of a Baroque male nude, the sort of image King County didn’t want gallery patrons to see. I think a lot of the macho attitudes and fear/loathing of such would be reduced if we were all reminded a little more often of just how silly looking most men’s bodies really are.
OMMM, SWEET OMMM: A “TM City of Immortals” is tentatively planned for somewhere in Pierce County (as if having TV’s two most famous male chefs living there isn’t enough of a claim to fame). The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to start building in ’94, according to KSTW; Transcendental Meditation devotees would probably get first crack at home ownership. What many don’t know is that the TM university in Iowa has been host to several real-estate schemes, including the now-disgraced Ed Beckley, who sold his Millionaire Maker cassette tapes (on how to get rich in real estate for no money down) via a corps of young, clean-cut, fiercely loyal, TM-practicing salespeople.
CHARLES “UPCHUCK” GARRISH, R.I.P.: He was in one of Seattle’s very first true punk bands (the Fags); but he was no black-clad nihilist. He was inspired by the glitter of Bowie, the glamour of Roxy Music. He believed that lighthearted pop music didn’t have to be mindless, that it could celebrate pride and personal liberation. He made a pass at me, at a time when I was falsely rumored to be gay; I turned him down as politely as I could. I couldn’t help him then, and I couldn’t help him when he came back from New York to spend his last months among friends.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, read Doug Nufer’s 1990 Guide to Northwest Minor League Baseball, avoid the “Velvet Ghetto” (a phrase used inUSA Today to describe career women sidetracked into such “feminine” departments as community relations or personnel), and visit a Portland art group’s 24-Hour Church of Elvis (coin-op weddings just $1).
Gore Vidal, quoted in the underground newspaper East Village Other (10/68): “Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.”
Changing my day job has gotten me to thinking about how to make this a more potentially solvent venture. Later this year, you might start seeing ads in the giveaway copies of Misc. (subscribers’ copies would still be ad-free). I’d love to hear your suggestions.
WORD OF THE MONTH
“Plectrum”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH SPECIAL EDITION
The new Cost Plus Imports on Western Ave.
features a fascinating array of regional “gourmet” products
(junk food for people with too much money).
Some highlights:
* Chocolate relief moldings of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier (with a white-chocolate icecap) by the Topographic Chocolate Co. of Edmonds
* Paradigm golden orange and oatmeal-currant scone mix (Lake Oswego, Ore.)
* Pasta Mama’s flavored fettucine, in chocolate, café Irish cream, blueberry, and cinnamon-nutmeg (Richland)
* Heidi’s Original cottage cheese pancake mix (Spokane)
* Chukar dried bing cherries, with the disclaimer “An occasional pit may be found” (Prosser)
* Walla Walla brand jarred, pickled green beans and asparagus spears (a brand once known for value-priced canned veggies)
10/89 Misc. Newsletter
(the first self-contained newsletter edition)
Welcome one and all to the never-say-die return of Misc., the only column in town that wonders why “original flavor” toothpaste doesn’t taste like “original flavor” bubble gum.
This is a successor to a column that ran monthly in ArtsFocus magazine for three years. For those who weren’t with us before our summer hiatus, this is a compendium of things that usually aren’t official art events, but are still part of the world in which we and our arts live. Much of this edition happens to consist of corporate mating and decompsing rituals; other months have dealt with politics, books, religion, music, mass behavior, fine food and wine.
WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation (far more important than the 20th anniv. of Woodstock) by meditating on the “herald of impeachment” still displayed at the Comet Tavern and reminiscing about those pre-Reagan days, when fewer people mistook corruption for a virtue. I finished a novel, to be put out somewhere within the next year. Saw the opening of the first segment of the bus tunnel, a slick brown shopping-mall-of-transit designed to make suburban commuters feel at home. Also saw the construction of the Outlet Mall, now open with complete designer stores by Liz Claiborne, Evan Piccone and others, right on the Burlington exit to the north Sound’s Calif.-colony “getaways.” The annual Popllama Records Picnic was censored by anti-rock forces in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Dept., but promoter Conrad Uno may have kept happy by pretending he was the guy all this summer’s headlines from Japan were about. This second greenhouse-effect summer ended on a stunning autumnal equinox day (even to me, not a weather person). The Ave’s venerable Cafe Allegro was closed for the wedding of two longtime employees (the reception there, the alternative ceremony at the U’s Medicinal Herb Garden). Later that night, Broadway’s Gravity Bar stayed open all night for performances and tarot readings.
DENTAL FLOSS TYCOONS: According to a Wall St. Journal piece, two guys in a New York jail spent months quietly trading cigarettes for dental floss, then hand-weaving the nylon thread into a sturdy rope. They used it one night to carefully climb down from their fourth-floor window. They were still seen by a passerby and got caught.
THE EMPEROR’S NUE CLOTHES: Robert Campeau was forced to turn over control of his dept. store empire to bankers. For a clue to his possible mismanagement, note Campeau’s Bon Marché and its slogan, “The Nue Hits for Back to School.” You’d think a Quebeçois would know better than to sell clothes via the French feminine word for “nude.” (Of course, it’d fit if the promotion includedGuess? jeans.)… Nordstrom might buy Marshall Field of Chicago, which owned Frederick & Nelson for over 50 years. If so, then Frederick’s will be paying Nordy’s for the right to make Frangos (Frederick’s invented them, but Field’s kept the copyright when it sold Frederick’s).
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 8/12): “Incarceration for man called too short.” Runner-up (P-I, 8/30): “Margo St. James wants to see a prostitute for president” (haven’t most of them been?).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Frosty Paws are imitation ice cream treats for dogs, made with no harmful lactose. “Not harmful to humans, but made for dogs.” For humans, meanwhile, there are the new Trix Pops, by General Mills subsidiary Vroman Foods, in the three classic Trix colors (including Orange Orange!)…. Ralston Purina’s new Barbie cereal is the same recipe as its Nintendo cereal; only the shapes and boxes are different. If boys and girls can’t be taught to play with the same toys, at least they can eat the same sugar puffs.
DIRTY DANCING ON MY GRAVE: Just a few months after Vestron Pictures flayed itself all over the Seattle International Film Festival, it went under. Still undetermined: the fate of Vestron’s unreleased products like the fake-DePalma ripoff Paint It Black and of Dan Ireland, whose onetime beloved Egyptian Theater was, at time of Vestron’s first layoffs, showing a cultured, sophisticated James Bond shoot-em-up…. Meanwhile, thanks to Sony’s buyouts, Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records are finally owned by the same company; while Disney’s acquisition of the Jim Henson organization was probably inevitable. Henson’s recent shows have gotten mired in the worst Disneyesque cutesy-wootsies.
WHOLE LOTTO BLUES: A Portland man killed himself in early Sept., thinking he’d lost a $3 million lottery ticket. In fact, he never had it, since the lottery computer registered no winner in that drawing. Undaunted by the bad PR, Ore. still plans to start legal football betting.
HOW WE DOIN’ ON TIME?: David Letterman turns out to be a shareholder and board member of one of the companies buying baseball’s own stupid human trick, the Mariners. He’s said how much he loves Seattle during segments with ex-locals George Miller and Lynda Barry, but that alone wouldn’t stop the majority owners from moving the team. We’ll know their intentions the next time they have to choose whether to keep a star player (Argyros got rid of anybody who got good enough to become expensive).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: National Boycott News. Far from the amateur rabble sheet depicted in a recent Lacitis column, it’s a very long, well-researched compendium on who in corporate America is doing what and why we should care. Editor Todd Putnam keeps revising his listings to reflect changes in commercial behavior or new information, leading to fascinating sagas about the evolving notions of “good business.”
END OF THE ’80S ( #1): David Horsey’s Boomer’s Song, proclaimed “the worst comic strip in the papers” by our first Misc. column in ’86, has gone out with a whimper. No big Gary Larson/Berke Breathed sendoff; the P-I buried the strip’s discontinuation in a notice about the return of Andy Capp (formerly in the Times).
END OF THE ’80S (#2): That American institution, the convenience store, is in deep trouble. Circle K tried to make up for disappointing national sales by raising prices, a counterproductive move. Plaid Pantry is in bankruptcy, after trying to strike an alliance with Arco. Even the mighty 7-Eleven is reeling in debt from a buyout, and is raising short-term cash by turning company-owned outlets into franchises.
END OF THE `80S (#3): Cuisinarts Inc. declared bankruptcy. Only major asset: unsalable inventory. Has it been so long since its food processors were so scarce, you could only buy a certificate for one?
NO MORE MEAN GREEN?: The gov’t’s thinking of redesigning our money, officially to make cash transactions more traceable. They’d be the first changes since the exchange-for-silver guarantee was dropped. They could change the colors or even print Universal Product Codes with each serial number! This society sorely needs to de-mystify money; turning it into just another ugly official document might help.
’90S PREDICTION #1: The “drug war” is replacing the cold war as the official excuse to stage military adventures abroad. By strange coincidence, the only countries to be targeted will just happen to be countries where U.S. business interests seek more control over the local governments.
NORTHERN BYTES: If you haven’t been to Vancouver lately, you haven’t seen a city “go big time” and do it right, with some big exceptions. The downtown East End, a collection of residential hotels and pubs that some feared would be eradicated with Expo 86, has been preserved as a neighborhood and as a film site. It’s the unnamed city in 21 Jump Street; the downtown-underground portion of the light-rail system (above-ground elsewhere) was a murder site in the last Friday the 13th film. Expo itself is now a vacant concrete slab winding along the waterfront, except for three buildings: the Science World museum (check out the “Music Machines” room, sounds just like Throbbing Gristle playing Charles Ives); the 86 Street disco (where any slam dancing is punished with a thorough beating by the most fascistic bouncers in the west); and the floating McDonald’s. The BC gov’t sold the the rest to Hong Kong developers, whose predatory developments elsewhere in town have led to unfortunate racial attacks against the established Chinese-Canadian community. But the best sight in today’s Vancouver is a stencil-painted graffito downtown, “Jesus Saves,” modified by the spray-painted addition, “Gretzky scores on the rebound.”
YES, THERE WILL be another of these reports, and it will feature our own ’80s nostalgia review (get your nominations in now for what’s worth remembering and what’s lest-we-forget). `Til then, read the haunting comic book Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, listen to Car Talk on KPLU, and heed these words of the immortal Irving Berlin: “You’re not sick. You’re just in love.”
Published monthly. Subscriptions: $6 per year by check to Clark Humphrey, 1630 Boylston #203, Seattle 98122. Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS. (c) 1989 Fait Divers Enterprises.
7/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
(published 10/89, after ArtsFocus took a hiatus
prior to shutting down completely)
WHAT TIMES READERS THOUGHT
OF PLAN TO CANCEL JUMBLE :
‘HORDROSPESS’
Here at Misc., your only totally Batman-free column, we’ve seen the bids for Time Inc. and intend to beat them. Paying back those junk bonds would be easy: cancel the skin-cancer insurance on the Sports Illustrated swimsuit models, sell commercials with cuss words during HBO comedy specials. Then, the Misc./Time empire will be a force to be reckoned with. We’ll drop the last 80 or so of the Fortune 500 (who cares about Allegheny Industries, anyway?). We’ll merge Money’s investment advice with Time-Life Books’ psychics. We’ll make up cooler facts for Time than they make up now. And no Dynasty or thirtysomething star will be on the cover ofPeople ever again!
The Drug Bug: A poster for the new Harley Davidson cigarette shows a baby-boomer couple riding a cycle without helmets. However, they look like their heads contain sufficient air to cushion any accidental impact…. Fawn Hall admitted cocaine use, simply proving she was a loyal customer of her beloved Contras.
Dead Air: The deal to sell KZOK to KOMO fell through. The current owners (from the same Tampa Bay suburb as Scientology’s world HQ) demanded such a high price that they may have permanently pushed up the price of all local stations, meaning we may never get a non-yuppie station again.
Tale Behind the Tune: Phranc, who bills herself as an “average Jewish lesbian folk singer,” released a bouncy cover of Rogers and Hammerstein’s “I Enjoy Being A Girl.” Thirty years ago, Seattle actress Pat Suzuki sang it in the original Broadway cast of Flower Drum Song. It was the peak of her career; she didn’t get to be in the film version, and there were few other roles open to Asian-American musical-comedy performers. She had a nightclub act for many years, then was in a short-lived sitcom with Pat Morita in the ’70s. I don’t know what she thinks of Phranc.
For the Record: With media attention focused totally on the losing Lakers, some of you might not have learned who won the NBA championship. It was the Detroit Pistons.
Against the Record: Capitol, we sadly report, is dropping oldies 45s and will release some new “singles” on tape only, while MCA’s skipping vinyl versions of some new country and rock albums.
Stages of Life: The Empty Space is moving into the historic Showbox, its fourth home. It’s a relief to all who wanted that great space preserved from being chopped up into shops. I hope they configure it so it can still be used for concerts in the theater’s off-season.
(latter-day note: The Empty Space Theater balked at moving into the old Showbox ballroom after finding asbestos in the walls. It moved into one of the old Pioneer Square Theater spaces, then from there to a former Masonic lodge in Fremont.)
Junk Food of the Month: The much-hyped Ken Griffey Jr. candy bar is just a costly slab of chocolate, but it may be the first bar named after a ballplayer (Baby Ruth, as all good sports fans know, was really named after Grover Cleveland’s daughter)…. Archer Daniels Midland Co. (David Brinkley’s TV sponsor) has patented a new biodegradable plastic made from corn starch. Soon you may get your Big Mac in an edible (and probably more nutritious) box.
(latter-day note: I’d forgotten about the Reggie! bar.)
Repo Men Revisited: Six months into that kinder-gentler thing, the GOP’s apparently trying to prove it’s as sleazy as ever. They launched a literally flag-waving cry to cut free speech from the Constitution, daring anyone to be “un-American” enough to oppose it. They’ve advocated censoring and financially gutting the National Endowment for the Arts. Their “campaign reform” bill’s devised to stifle activist groups and small contributions while letting the ultra-rich spend even more in elections than now. HUD’s Jack Kemp uses his predecessors’ shameless graft to justify cutting low-income housing even further. Then, the Supreme Court OK’d seizing personal and business assets associated with alleged crimes. Your favorite book or record shop could be effectively put out of business for selling anything that a judge might label “obscene,” and would be unable to afford an appeal. Beware of any “new weapon in the war on drugs;” it could be fired on you.
Cathode Corner: Rainier Beer owner Alan Bond’s in big trouble back home. The Australian government proclaimed him “not fit” to keep that country’s biggest TV network. At issue: a large, mostly under-the-table settlement in a defamation suit brought against the network by a politician. He may have also directed unfavorable news coverage against a competitor to one of his companies.
Naked Gun II: Fans at a recent Tacoma Tigers game were startled by gunfire coming from a high-school roof next to Cheney Stadium. Players dove into the dugouts. KTAC announcer Bob Robertson pleaded for listeners to call 911. It turned out to be the Tacoma Police SWAT Team, with blank ammunition, training for security duty at the Goodwill Games.
Concrete Poetry: The literary quality of local graffiti has risen dramatically. Since April, a romantic monologue (or possibly dialogue) has been written with wide-tip markers on walls and electrical units within a five-block radius of Frederick’s. Some salient entries: “You love me. I know. I love you too, as if you were/are the world and the truth for me. That’s our tragedy”… “Yes, it’s your one and only babe; I have chosen you as my #1 wall lover”… “Join me for a coffee? We’ll talk about art and poetry, as we prepare to run away.”
Local Publication of the Month: An/Other, distributed as a supplement to Reflex, is an art/philosophy tabloid that believes feminism should challenge old stereotypes, not just exchange them for new ones. Its performance-artsy attitude just adds some fun to its issues of individualism in a society that pretends to be less conformist than it is…. The Christian Science Monitor’s been lavishing tasteful praise about the Seattle arts scene, in five installments to date. Rush to your local Reading Room to catch up.
‘Til next time, wish Royer lotsa bigwig-schmoozing at Harvard, grab some of the 1950 Canadian pennies being circulated in town (with George VI’s face), and read this by ex-Frisco radio personality Scoop Nisker: “If you don’t like the news, make some of your own.”
1/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
WHAT’S MORE PATHETIC:
JAMES BROWN IN JAIL
OR LITTLE RICHARD ON HOLLYWOOD SQUARES?
Welcome to the first `89 edition of Misc., the column that celebrates the end of the eight-year Age of Reagan and awaits the end of the 13-year Age of Cocaine. That’s about how long American attitudes and behavior have reflected those of coke users (aggressive euphoria, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money). In what drug experts call “co-dependency,” these traits have spread to non-users, even to many who officially oppose the drug itself. It’s clearly shaped the power madness of much of the Reagan Administration. Reagan himself is a coke-addicted filmmaker’s stereotype of a statesman, a “high concept” hero. As violent as today’s coke gangs are, the big damage done by the drug is that done to our economy, culture and social fabric by business and government leaders who, often unknowingly, take the coke rush as their model for success.
This derangement is most visible in the obsessive speculation that’s captivated big business, exemplified by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Besides its recent gobbling of RJR Nabisco, KKR now controls Safeway and Fred Meyer (for a near-monopoly of the Oregon grocery biz), plus Dillingham-Foss Tug, Red Lion Inns, Motel 6, Playtex, and the onetime icon of corporate appetites, Beatrice.
International House Style: The next phase of drug-inspired behavior may be a return from effrontery to withdrawn introspection. Seattle’s Happy Face symbol and Seattle’s big sweatshirts are keystones of the Acid House style now popular in UK discos. The fad, which also involves Chicago-invented dance music and Swiss-invented LSD (or at least visuals inspired by it), should reach these shores in toned-down form this year. By then the Brits’ll be into something else.
Brought to You by the Letter “X”: Roscoe Orman, the kindly Gordon on Sesame Street, has celebrated the show’s 20th year by settling on child support for a viewer he helped create in Oregon in 1985. Some who grew up with the show may gasp at the thought of Orman and his therapist lover singing “Which of These Things Belong Together,” but I knew there was another side to him since the time he challenged the “exclusive” terms of his contract by moonlighting as a pimp on All My Children.
From Pawn to Queen: This was the first American Xmas for Elena Akhmilovskaya, now settled in Seattle after suddenly marrying US National Team captain John Donaldson. You’ll find our fair city far different from Moscow. Here, jeans are plentiful and chess players rare. And please go to more restaurants than just the Last Exit.
Cathode Corner: Filming PBS’Â Ramona in Toronto destroys the thing I loved most as a kid about Beverly Cleary’s books: that unlike anything else in kid-lit, they took place in a land I’d actually been to (Oregon)…. The new baseball TV deal means more $$ to the owners, fewer games to the viewers (12 instead of 30). More games’ll be on cable, but at what price? At least we might have to see fewer racist Joe Piscopo commercials.
Stamp Act: The US Postal Service is retouching a stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, removing a bare nipple from the goddess of Liberty. Maybe we could use a revolution of our own.
Local Publications of the Month: ‘Twas a big season for local nonfiction (Boz, Knox, Robert Fulgham). I was more impressed by a well-made if kitschy fantasy, Frederick & Nelson’s Freddy Bear’s Favorite Christmas, a combined book-music box with text by our ol’ buddy Gretchen Lauber… Portland’s Northwest Computer News has started a Washington edition to compete with Puget Sound Computer User. The first News is full of cracks at User for reprinting a lot of material from its Minnesota parent paper…. The Real Comet Press plans to start a quarterly anthology of local comix, to be sold nationally.
Update: Last Jan., I told of changes in my hometown of Marysville. Now it’s a whole different place. Half the downtown’s been razed for a mall. The north side of town has two huge discount stores and a full compliment of middlebrow chain stores. Running between the two retail areas is a bus made up to look like a trolley (talk about a Neighborhood of Make-Believe). The countryside’s almost all gone from farming to tract houses. There’s even an indoor movie house (all we had was the Thunderbird Drive-In, still there). Still, some aspects of the old mill-town lifestyle remain: the video stores have such titles as Cut Your Own Deer At Home.
`Til our fab Feb. edition, visit the CT&T Gift Shop in Wallingford, admire the McDonald’s-sponsored hologram cover on National Geographic’s centennial edition (an issue all about our threatened Earth, not discussing the danger from foam boxes or razing forests for beef grazing), and ponder whether Shelley was predicting oldies radio when he wrote, “The world is weary of the past/Oh, might it die or rest at last.”
INS & OUTS FOR ’89
As always, this list might not reflect what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the year. This is not a substitute for professional tarot reading.
4/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
Despite All Attempts to Preserve the War,
Peace Still Threatens to Break Out
At Misc., the column that says what it means and means what it says, we’re getting awfully bored by America’s glut of lame parody. It’s in movies (Dan Aykroyd’s Dragnet), TV (Moonlighting, public-access cable), music (Buster Poindexter), and now billboards. The car-dealer sign telling us to “Surrender to the Germans” treats WWII as a mere cliché taken from old movies (as did Aykroyd’s 1941). If we’re offended by the sign we’re dismissed as old fogeys, not the cool young dudes of the dealer’s target audience.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts newsletter. With the oversupply of parodic works mentioned above has come a complementary supply of lawsuits. Craig C. Beles’s piece on “Parody as Fair Use; or When Can Minnie and Mickey Be Placed in a Compromising Situation?” drolly covers the cases of Disney v. Air Pirates Comics, Pillsbury v. Screw Magazine, and Dr Pepper v. Sambo’s. For your copy send a small donation to WVLA, 600 1st Ave., #203, Seattle 98104.
FINDING MR. WRIGHT: A major exhibit of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is coming to the Bellevue Art Museum. Talk about going where you’re needed most. Sure, Bellevue could use the inspiration of someone who believed in spaces to enhance human life. But these days, so could Seattle. To call the Disney Co. plan fir Seattle Center “Mickey Mouse” isn’t enough. Our chief public gathering place is not a theme park and should not be controlled by theme-park people. It should not be a sterile, slick monument, but a living world for living people. It should embody the joy and hope of the World’s Fair that created it — just as the waterfront, also targeted for what a citizen-advocate calls “tacky yuppification,” should stay a working dockside, not a Friscoid tourist trap.
CLARIFICATION: You may have been misinformed about the recent flap at UW Women Studies. Activists there aren’t trying to get rid of a guy student because he’s a guy, but because they believe he’s a right-wing troublemaker, out to disrupt the class via heckling. If true, then he’s simply following the Jerry Rubin school of politics, wherein anyone who felt righteous enough was free to act like a jerk, since he was above the behavioral rules of square people. It’s the same method by which egotistical liberals become admired by (or become) egotistical conservatives.
BOOZE NOOZE: The Big Restaurant Protection Committee, a.k.a. the Washington State Liquor Control Board, is lowering the food-to-drink sales ratio that an eatery needs to keep a drink license. Think it’ll lead to saner liquor laws overall? Ha! This unelected body never works for increased competition or live entertainment except grudgingly, years too late.
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The lights on Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge suddenly started flashing on and off on the night of 3/11. A resident detected that the lights were going off in Morse code, which he translated as “UBC Engineers Do It Again.”
SEZ WHO?: Will someone please tell me where these “reports of a Nicaraguan incursion” that led to the latest Reagan pro-war charade came from? How do we know the CIA didn’t just make it up? None of the interminable analyses on the affair mention this, or if they did I fell asleep before I found it.
SHAME: Masters & Johnson almost seem to want the hetero AIDS epidemic that still hasn’t happened but which they promise any time now. (Masters holds experimental-vaccine patents, and might profit if lower-risk groups thought they were more vulnerable.) If so, they join the soaps and other media trying to exploit it while ignoring anything really controversial like the existence of gay people. It’s worse in Europe, where magazines use AIDS as an excuse to put forlorn, nude straight women on their covers. All this does is heighten fear about the disease without raising sympathy or help for those who do have it.
CATHODE CORNER: Ed Beckley, the self-titled “Millionaire Maker,” is in bankruptcy. Victims of Beckley, who promised viewers they could get rich buying real estate for no money down, are working with other creditors to keep his show on the air. It’s the only way he can pay off everyone demanding refunds from his expensive courses…. Merv Griffin wants to buy Resorts International in Atlantic City. I know I’d pay $20 for a spectacular floor show starring Charo, Prof. Irwin Corey and Helen Gurley Brown.
UPDATES: The Wonder Years is just as awful as I’d feared. The ’68 junior-high clothes are accurate, though…. The plan to re-color Metro buses seems to have been just a stunt, with a phony-looking “groundswell of support” for keeping the blecchy browns.
THE BYTE BIZ: Apple Computer’s suing Redmond’s Microsoft, claiming MS Windows (a key program in the next generation of IBM software) rips off the Macintosh’s “look and feel.” Can Apple, which has always avoided fighting MS, expect to beat what the Wall St. Journal calls “the real controlling firm in computing”?… The hype over an Aldus program being inadvertently “infected” with a hidden world-peace message bears the marks of an orchestrated rabble-rousing by those who’d use “data integrity” to deny public access to major data bases.
HAPPINESS IS A BIGGER SPACE: Peanuts has suddenly switched from four small panels a day to three larger ones. It’s the first major structural change ever to Charles Schulz’s comic. Four square panels every day, six days a week, was a perfect metaphor for the chilling purgatory of characters stuck at the same presexual age for 38 years. (To see Schulz on adolescence, look for his rare ’60s paperback “Teen-Ager” Is Not A Disease. All the kitsch of Peanuts, none of the charm.)
CLOSE: ‘Til May, see the Seattle Filmhouse’s French New Wave series at MOHAI, catch the Weekly piece on local cartoonists, take lotsa pix of the Pine St. hole while you can, and remember the words of Sydney Smith: “I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.”
7/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Time again for Misc., the column that didn’t enter the contest to replace Ann Landers, co-won by a Wall St. Journal writer who entered just to do a story about it. Of course, the Chicago Sun-Times might not appreciate the sort of advice we’d give: “Protect yourselves, but go for it. You’re both only going to be 17 once, you know.”
It’s summer, and Seattle is like a bombed-out ruin as the tunnel goes down and all the towers go up. It’s great! Central downtown has finally become a place of excitement and activity. The Westlake Mall controversy has brought public activism back into city planning (the ’70s live again!). And the best part is Pine St. at the Roosevelt Hotel, reopened just in time to give a great view of the biggest current street hole. For future scholars, the old mid-downtown wasn’t a great place. A few islands of human energy (the 211 Club, the Turf Restaurant) were isolated among block after block of dull 5- to 10-story brick buildings, whose only character came as they were allowed to deteriorate before they were torn down. The cheap new buildings will age much faster. Since they’re so “contemporary” in design, they’ll also look really odd to future generations.
On May 1, Frederick & Nelson ran full-page ads with a special offer to new charge customers: charge $50 or more during May, June, July or August and get a $25 credit. The ad didn’t say the store didn’t mean the real months but its in-house billing cycles. Depending on the first letter of your last name, that could end as soon as the first week. Many customers were surprised to get undiscounted $49 bills in mid-May. Adjustments have been promised but, as of this writing, have not all been delivered.
TROUBLE AT THE MALLS: Southcenter’s new owners promptly, sharply raised rents, a move seen by some as a ploy to drive out the last local, independent stores…. University Village kicked out the troubled, formerly-locally-owned Pay n’ Save chain after getting a better offer from the thriving, still-local Bartell Drug. Mall mgmt. then wouldn’t let Pn’S move into part of sister-chain Lamonts’ space, causing legal disputes that may be resolved when you read this. The new Bartell’s, meanwhile, is several times larger than any of their other stores. From its look, they seem perplexed on now to fill all that space.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The Space Needle chocolate bar on a stick. It’s made by an entrepreneur in Bozeman, Mont., under the name Space Needle Phantasies. His number’s on the wrapper, in case you’d like to share Space Needle obsessions. At Ruby Montana’s, near 1st on Cherry — one of this column’s all-time fave stores.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The 100th Boyfriend, one of the rare “women’s books” that treats men as human beings with complex emotions, not mere plot devices. Its vignettes (all purported as true to compilers Janet Skeels and Bridget Daly) are being excerpted in at least two national magazines.
No “rap riot” occurred at the Run DMC/Beastie Boys concerts, in a major disappointment to cops, KOMO-TV and other reactionary forces. The youth of Seattle have proven themselves unworthy of the disrespect they’ve gotten. The city should apologize for this bad rap by repealing the teen-dance prohibition law NOW…. Meanwhile, what extremely popular Black performer, with no earlier ties to this city, is building a digital recording studio in Seattle?
(latter-day note: I forget who this was supposed to have been about.)
In world news, the guy who flew his private plane into Moscow’s Red Square may get off lighter than the guy who parachuted into New York’s Shea Stadium…. A clue to the Korean crisis may be found in a recent Sharper Image Catalog, boasting of great values to US consumers made possible by Korea’s near-slave wages.
Bantam Books is promoting the paperback release of His Way, Kitty Kelly’s shattering Sinatra bio, with a Sinatra CD giveaway. Hear the songs of love, read the stories of backbiting and sleaze, all in the comfort of your own home.
PHILM PHUN: The Witches of Eastwick contains a major plot flaw: Real witches don’t worship Satan. To believe in the Devil, you have to believe in the Christian God first. Witchcraft is a tradition completely separate from (and older than) Christianity…. Variety sez sex is the hottest marketing ploy in independent films, proving not only that America has respectfully declined the “new Puritanism,” but that highly personal subjects are best handled outside the Hollywood bureaucracy….
NEW CARTOONS to anticipate include a Garbage Pail Kids TV show and The Brave Little Toaster, a feature about kitchen appliances on a quest to find their missing owner.
The Harry and the Hendersons crew discovered the new Pacific Northwest Studio isn’t soundproof. Important takes were ruined by freight trains on the Fremont spur track or even rain on the ex-warehouse’s roof.
Nice to hear Bill Reid back on KJET, but won’t they ever trash or fix that tape system so we actually hear the same songs the DJs introduce?…
Other congrats from this corner to UW grad and ex-colleague Mike Lukovich, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoons.
CATHODE CORNER: Lifetime now has Our Group, a daily, fictional group therapy session with a real shrink and actors as patients. It’s almost as entertaining as the cable channel’s “medical-ed” shows for doctors with slick prescription-drug ads…. As the Telephone Auction Shopping Program deservedly goes under, another firm is staring Love and Shopping, a soap opera/shopping combo with characters shown using products that are then offered to viewers. It’s a change from the traditional soap universe, where characters put away groceries with white tape stuck all over the brand names…. Using John Lennon music to sell sneakers is no worse than Gershwin for Toyota or Sondheim for stuffing mix.
Cabaret chanteuse Julie Cascioppo is back from NYC gigs with the Mark Morris dancers. “Tommy Tune said I was wonderful, and Mikhail Barishnikov asked me to hold court with him; it was great,” says the world-traveling vegetarian from a family of Ballard butchers. Her shows (ranging from romantic standards to “The Woody Woodpecker Song”) continue Wednesdays at the Pink Door in the Pike Place Market.
Finally, Maxwell House wants people to write songs about their hometowns to the tune of their current jingle. Winners from Seattle and other participating cities will compete in LA for big prizes. “It’s the way we burn up restaurants / It’s the way we tear up Pine / It’s the clocks at 4th and Pike / Telling you three different times.” No, don’t think we’ll enter this one either.
‘Til September, be cool, avoid the flu goin’ around, see Greeks at the Pioneer Square Theater, don’t pay $21 to see Madonna at the Dome, and live for love. Toodeloo.
10/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome, art lovers, to the fourth profundity-packed installment of Misc., the pop-culture column recommended by women who used to use powders.
So how ’bout that Moore sculpture in front of the old Seafirst building? Nobody knows who bought it, nobody knows who sold it, nobody knows who owns it now, and on the day it was to have disappeared, its creator did instead. It will be very fitting if the business leaders responsible for selling Seattle’s most famous privately-owned artwork get to remove it; for the absence of “Vertebrae” will show just how spineless they are.
In other news of public spaces without public input, Seattle Center director Ewen Dingwall recently tried to get members of the City Council to give the Disney theme-park people $250,000 to study Center re-development, without such pesky details as open bidding or public hearings — and to sign away to Disney first-refusal rights to any building projects its own study might recommend. Just because Florida gave Disney its own political fiefdom, it doesn’t mean they should expect us to.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Neat Stuff. How could a cartoonist living here in Mellow City come up with such searing commentaries on American sleaze as the hopelessly gauche Bradley family and the definitively bad attitude of Girly-Girl? Perhaps Peter Bagge’s mind was affected for life from formerly living in New Jersey; more likely, though, is that it was affected for life from formerly living in Redmond. Available at all better comic book shops.
LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Imitation crab meat. Take some useless bottomfish, some potato paste, some “natural crab flavor,” flaking-and-shaping machines and good ol’ Northwest entrepreneurial spirit, and you’ve got an artificial delicacy worthy of an artificial king. Good with salads, pizza, burgers, Ritz crackers, or just as finger food.
My own hometown, Marysville, already the bingo capital of western Washington, may soon become its garbage capital too. There are two proposed sites for a garbage-burning plant on Tulalip reservation property — exempt from state environmental laws. By the way, my folks have this house that’s for sale….
Another gambling mecca, that cardroom and punchboard capital Vancouver USA, is now without its most famous industrial site and tourist attraction. The General Brewing Co. plant, home of Lucky and generic beer, has been closed and the equipment shipped to China. Wonder how those bottle-cap rebuses look in Cantonese….
The latest annual Erotic Art Show at Ballard’s Salty Dog Studio was a fine collection of over 50 2- and 3-D works, expressing the glories of human animals through witty, folksy points of view. Let’s just hope there’ll be more shows of its type. We need more of these intelligent, healthy rebuttals to the modern-day Anti-Sex Leagues.
Metro’s continuing, unannounced bus stop closures have spawned the latest excuse by cheatin’ lovers and undedicated employees. “I didn’t want to be late, but when I got to the old stop the bus went right by, and by the time I finally found a stop that was working the next bus had gone.”
FALL TV SEASON: Best new show, by far, is Pee-wee’s Playhouse…. USA Today reported that many of this year’s contestants onThe New Dating Game appeared last year on The New Newlywed Game (“the honeymoons didn’t last long”)…. With Cosmos now in syndication, Carl Sagan’s exquisite warnings against nuclear insanity are co-sponsored by Army recruiting.
HOME VIDEO TIP: Beany & Cecil. Eleven tapes of the late Bob Clampett’s early ’60s TV cartoons are now available, and the miracle is that RCA/Columbia Video didn’t run out of good segments in the early volumes. They’re all stunningly innovative, with great stories, characters, dialogue, animation and music (though the theme song repeats Clampett’s name as gratingly often as you may remember). They look especially great compared to the Hanna-Barbera shorts of the period (now on the USA Network), which Clampett savages on Volume 9 with a gangster character named Stogie Bear.
Spin magazine columnist Andrea ‘Enthal has a list of 1,000 Best/Worst Band Names available for a SASE from Box 4904, Panorama City, CA 91412. Local rock groups that made the list include the New Age Urban Squirrels, Prudence Dredge, Napalm Beach, Body Falling Downstairs, No Cheese Please, Nation of Milk, Alien Nation, and Lapses In Grammar (Afforded to Avoid Sexism). Not included: Danger Bunny, Idiot Culture, the Fartz, Springfield Flute, Color Twigs, Limp Richerds.
Finally, we are still looking for the ultimate Helga lookalike. Send a photo or drawing of a pose reminiscent of Andrew Wyeth’s mystery model to Misc., c/o Lincoln Arts, P.O. Box 31693, Seattle 98103-1693 by Oct. 17. The winning model and artist will receive University Cinema tickets. As with Elvis impersonators, the right attitude and grooming count more than physical resemblance.
7/86 ArtsFocus Misc.
Welcome back, cult following, to the second installment of Misc., the column that explores popular culture in and out of Seattle. (Unlike that national “arbiter of popular culture” Ian Shoales, I’m not a fictional character created by a comedian. To the best of my knowledge, I really exist.) The opinions herein are not necessarily those of the Lincoln Arts Association or anyone affiliated with it. This column is appointed to be read in churches.
A professional person recently asked me, “How would you define a positive attitude?” A reasonable question, deserving a reasonable answer. Increasingly, the phrase “positive attitude” is used in our society to encourage the worst sorts of behavior. To me, artificial perkiness is not a positive attitude. Conformity is not a positive attitude. Masochism is not a positive attitude. Blind, unquestioning loyalty to your company or your country is not a positive attitude. To be truly positive is to see the things that need changing and to commit to helping change them. It’s easier than it sounds; it just starts with a commitment to be a professional person.
The immediate vicinity of Lincoln Arts now has its own positive-thinking honorary mayor. Ann Nofsinger, actress-writer-Two Bells Tavern waitress, was the narrow victor in a week-long campaign which became far more serious than many people had expected, especially considering that the first Mayor of Belltown was a drag queen named Dominic. This time, the three candidates had official-sounding slogans and platforms on real issues. Suffice it to say not all the debate/balloting audience at the Two Bells was as serious as the candidates.
Interest is now bound to increase in Nofsinger’s acting role in “White Elephants,” a 20-minute video play by Debla Kaminsky and Kurt Geissel. Originally devised to accompany a gallery show of “white paintings,” the play includes over 90 visual and verbal references to the all-reflective color, ranging in obscurity from a sack of flour and a man named Clifford Dover to the patron saint of virginity. It’s all served up within a story of feisty-innocent Nofsinger trading innuendoes with braggart Earl Brooks as they’re painting her apartment all in – you guessed it.
Not to be in Belltown much longer is Display and Costume Supply, the wonderful store where slumming normal people stood outside in line every Oct. 30 to get Halloween office party costumes. The latest victim of the real estate boom is going out with a public auction July 22, when loyal customers can stock up on Conehead wigs, mirror balls, sequins, vampire teeth, party favors, trophies, styrofoam Statue of Liberty torches, lamé fabrics, and plastic hot dogs, croissants, and lobsters. It’ll all still be available, but you’ll have to go north of Northgate to get it.
Also joining the ranks of the disappeared is WorkShop Printers, home of high-quality, low-cost printing for posters, newsletters, flyers, etc. by cultural and political groups. WorkShop products have bee so pervasive in these circles that I always thought they’d been around forever, or at least since the late ’60s, when in fact it has only been in business since 1980.
The new Display and Costume Supply is in the same general area as the Oak Tree Cinemas, the state-of-the-art sixplex everybody’s raving about. I’ll give a full review of the place as soon as it shows something worth seeing or at least something better than Top Gun,that two-hour commercial for the Pentagon budget. The willingness of Rolling Stone to hype that film is the final proof that the magazine no longer cares about anything and probably never did.
AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH: “Silo, Where People Have Fun With Electricity.”
LICENSE PLATE HOLDER OF THE MONTH: Seen on Capitol Hill, this white-on-black custom job with the middle blacked out with masking tape, DAVE ‘N’ 4-EVER.
FOOD FAD OF THE MONTH: Teriyaki fast food. Once the monopoly of the former Toshi’s stands at Queen Anne and Green Lake, they’re now popping up all over town, from Beacon Hill to a resurrected Toshi’s on Aurora. You can eat huge helpings of calrose rice, crisp greens and your choice of beef, pork or a half chicken, usually for under $3. It’s the Pacific Rim-inspired alternative for non-vegetarians who really like to eat.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Wiggansnatch. James Leland Moore has been making this incredibly handsome “Alternative Realities Literary Magazine” for three years now, overseeing its growth into one of the Northwest’s most original, contemporary media of fiction and art. Faced with rising losses, he’s cut back on size and scope with the latest issue, dropping the astute news-briefs column and returning Wiggansnatch to its roots in stories based on pagan and mystic traditions. It’s still great reading for your $2 at Left Bank Books and other select spaces.
The Interstate 90 landscaping in the Rainier Valley has, with the hot weather, bloomed tall grasses along rolling slopes. It’s as if the unfinished freeway has already started making Eastern Washington closer to Seattle.
A Lincoln Arts tenant, the Youth Defense Campaign, has a page in the California-based punk magazine Maximum Rock n’ Roll. YCC’s David Stubbs writes about the group’s efforts to stop the official suppression of independent underage entertainment. The July issue also has the shocking story of LA police arresting and indicting Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys, America’s premier political-punk band, on trumped-up charges of “distributing pornographic materials” — an explicit painting by Academy Award-winning graphic designer H.R. Geiger, printed on the fold-out inside cover to an album with a warning sticker on the front. To quote a DKs song. “California Uber Alles” indeed. It’s time to take a true positive attitude and, to quote Biafra’s girlfriend Suzanne Stefanac in the article, “defend your right to deviant behavior.”
That’s it for now. Don’t get overdrawn on your Linda Farris Gallery custom credit card before we meet again.
