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APPLE COMPUTER’S second company-owned store in the region opened last weekend in Seattle’s rapidly upscaling University Village shopping center.
As was the case with Apple’s Bellevue Square opening earlier this year, a line snaked out over the mall grounds on opening night. By the time the first customers were let in at six, guys (and it was almost all guys) at the end of the line would have more than an hour’s wait.
The new Apple Store, built from scratch on the onetime site of an A&P supermarket (remember those, anyone?), is much bigger than the Bellevue store, which had to be squeezed into an ex-Hallmark shop site. Thus, it more fully expresses the company’s aim of providing a real-world equivalent to the Mac OS’s clean, uncluttered, dignified aesthetic of cyberspace.
Live entertainment was provided on Friday by a subset of the UW Marching Band (above), and on Saturday with a 15-minute free set by Euro power-poppers the Raveonettes (below).
(Incidentally, the Apple Store’s free Wi-Fi signal reaches next door to the Ram sports bar, but just barely.)
Meanwhile, other businesses in the neighborhood have gotten into the cyber-craze, as seen in this exploitation of an already-tired Internet catch phrase.
I could add that I walked from the Village uphill to the University District late Saturday night, past the Greek Row where rowdy frat boys rioted after midnight. I left before that happened, but could sense a tension in the air, an angry and ornery sound of “fun” emanating from many of the fraternities and rental houses on the first Saturday night of the school year.
…to the memory of Cynthia Doyon, host and creative genius behind KUOW’s The Swing Years And Then Some. She’d been at the UW’s other station at the time, KCMU (now KEXP), a couple of years before I was. She moved on to the UW’s “pro” station, KUOW, in 1979, just as public radio was really taking off as a national institution. Her Saturday-night show became a local institution for 24 years, honoring a 30-year era of music that created much of American pop culture’s most timeless classics. She deftly programmed a show that was neither rigidly “historical” (just about anything from the 78-rpm era could find its way into the show) nor timidly nostalgic (she took care, in her selections and her introductions, to make the music come alive for contemporary listeners).
But Doyon was only employed part-time at KUOW, and couldn’t find enough outside work to pay the bills. Apparently despondent over her personal finances during the Great Depression II, she allegedly shot herself on the UW campus, on what Billie Holiday once referred to as a “Gloomy Monday.”
…but largely irrelevant news stories, it’s hard to find a better topic than a sports coach getting fired over a scandal that has little or nothing to do with his/her job performance.
Such was the case last month with ex-WSU football coach Mike Price, who was hired by Alabama then promptly fired after he spent a lost weekend with a Florida exotic dancer.
Such is also the case with now-ex-UW football coach Rick Neuheisel, canned this week after four years on the job. The UW didn’t dump him when word got out about recruiting irregularities at his former employer, Colorado. The UW didn’t dump him when he tried to get hired by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and didn’t bother telling his current employers. The UW initially didn’t dump him when somebody snitched that he’d been betting on (non-UW) college basketball games. But athletic director Barbara Hedges later changed her mind, presumably after consulting with some of the big-money boosters whose donations help keep the Huskies among the sport’s most prominent programs.
(The above link also includes a further link to a .pdf graphic showing all the UW football coaches since 1908!)
…during my enforced absence from Broadband Nation (not in chronological order):
Attended the informal outdoor wedding of print MISC contributor Michael Thomas and Sherry Wooten, with their precocious li’l one expressing approval of the whole proceeding.
Attended the Edmonds Waterfront Festival, a simple and unpretentious small-town fair with all the standard carny rides, craft booths, fast-food fads, beer gardens, and generic “blooze” bands.
Witnessed some of the commotion at the Convention Center on the day of Oprah WInfrey’s big $180-a-seat self-help seminar. The few other males on the scene included the crew of long-running cable access show Music Inner City, complete with “Oprah for President” stickers.
…to Raymond “Ras Bongo” Lindsay, the Lake City music-store owner and longtime staple of the local roots-music circuit, who was slain in an apparent domestic dispute. I’d only met Bongo offstage once, at his store (see above), but instantly sensed him as a gentle man of a centered sensibility.
TO AVE AND AVE NOT DEPT.: Last weekend’s University District Street Fair was supposed to have been the coming-out party for the completely rebuilt University Way. But, in traditional best-laid-plans fashion, the Ave’s northernmost big block (47th to 50th) remained closed and unpaved.
Ergo, the fair was shrunk to about 70 percent of its normal size. The audience’s size, and energy level, seemed even further reduced, despite decent weather. This may have befitted a neighborhood that was already stuck in the retail doldrums even before the totally traffic-closing construction scheme made it worse.
Some UW design students had a big display in the former Tower Records storefront, full of schemes to redo the Ave’s storefronts so they’d look all fresh and Euro-modern, not the funky/rundown amalgamation of low-rise architectures we all know and love.
Still, there’s something to be said for a reinvent-the-Ave campaign that comes out of a sense of creativity, that asks young adults (rather than corporate consulting firms) what a young-adult shopping street should look like, and that imagines plenty of spaces for independent businesses instead of the same ol’ dorky chains.
LET THIS BE THE FIRST CORNER to express sympathy and support for Mike Price, the former Washington State football coach who scored the prestigious U of Alabama head-coaching gig, then got fired before his first game after he spent one orgiastic weekend in Pensacola FL with strippers and/or hookers.
That’s just the sort of behavior adored by the guyz on The Best Damn Sports Show Period (and by student-athletes themselves), but so heavily loathed by the powers-that-be in Bama. You know, the state that still flies a variant on the Confederate battle flag, and in which dildos are still illegal.
Far from being vilified for his victimless transgressions, Price should be lauded as a freedom fighter against conservative hypocrisy.
WE’RE NOT REALLY POETRY PEOPLE HERE, but can’t help admire UW prof Richard Kenny’s versified thoughts about the “timorous Congress” acceding to war-fever.
As we’ve seen many times, the City of Seattle’s favorite answer to everything is a construction project. Especially a construction project that’s really a subsidized incentive for upscale gentrification. That’s what’s starting this week along University Way. Bureaucrats are even admitting the whole street-beautification scheme’s intended to bring in, as a UW prof describes it, “a higher-end residential and commercial base.” In other words, the removal of anything afforable and/or nonbland.
THERE ARE ODD TV COMMERCIALS, then there are the truly, utterly strange, quasi-surreal spots that make you wonder what the ad agency people were drinking; or, in this next case, eating.
The spot I describe aired on various network daytime shows in early January. It opens with a business-suited yes man addressing “Governor Kempthorne.” The scene opens up to reveal a replica of the Idaho governor’s office, with the real governor seated at the desk. The aide continues, “Good news. There’s only one person more popular than you–Spuddy Buddy.”
A poorly drawn cartoon potato suddenly pops up on screen. He dances and sings the praises of baked potatoes, mashed potatoes, fries, and assorted other ways you can devour his tuber brethern. The half-minute closes with the governor telling the potato toon, “I hope you’re not running for office anytime soon.”
The Spuddy Buddy character was created by the state’s potato commission two or three years back, at least partly as an icon for children’s merchandising. A major PR agency spent untold bucks and person-hours researching ways to get consumers to demand Idaho spuds instead of whatever’s cheapest, and apparently decided a lovable spokescritter would be a great teach-’em-while-they’re-young concept.
The cartoon spud, however awkward looking, does have enough fans to generate at least one fan-fiction story of a sort, to be mentioned as a prop in other net-fiction, and the subject of speculators’ attempts to create a new Beanie Baby-style collecting fad.
But the figure has a different meaning for me. He reminds me of my lonely-college-boy days in the UW School of Communications. The advertising majors loved to scoff at us editorial-journalism majors, boasting that they were sure to get high-paying careers and we weren’t.
Then, one day in a Communications Building classroom, I saw the image that made me decide once and for all to follow my dream and avoid the suckup world of bigtime corporate advertising. As you might be guessing, it was a storyboard for a mock TV commercial featuring a singing, dancing cartoon potato.
I’m thinking I ought to send out for the Spuddy Buddy plush doll, as a reminder of the ol’ road-not-taken thang.
WHEN I FIRST READ that my beloved KCMU radio was being effectively taken over by Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project people, moved off of the UW campus, and renamed KEXP, I half-thought the announcement had to be an April Fool’s prank–even though I’d heard and read rumors about such a move for over a year, ever since the station won its hard-fought operating independence from KUOW, the UW’s money- and demographics-obsessed NPR station.
It just couldn’t be happening. Not really.
Like many loyal listeners to one of America’s finest “college radio” (whatever that means anymore) stations, I’ve invested a lot of time and memories in KCMU.
But I’ve also got a degree of pseudo-proprietary interest in it, having been one of the first new-music DJs on the station in 1980-81 (when it ceased to be a UW student-lab operation and became the valuable community resource it’s been all these years).
As I aged from nerdy college-radio new waver into dorky near-middle-aged progressive-pop fan, the station followed my (and my peer group’s) aging. It laid off from much of the hard-punk material (alas) and inserted a whole variety of fun and/or progressive genres all mixed up (yay!).
But KUOW management gradually asserted more control over KCMU in the early ’90s (at the height of the Seattle Music Scene hype KCMU had helped jump-start). I joined in with the C.U.R.S.E. (“Censorship Undermines Radio Station Ethics”) gang that had launched a boycott, eventually forcing management to back down on its programming-gentrification plans (although the station’s top-notch progressive-news programming remained excised, and today exists only in a Sunday-morning timeslot ghetto.)
This past year KCMU’s been about the best it’s been. The now full-time staff has got the “variety format” down pat, relentlessly mixing everything from power pop and emocore to delta blues and Italian soundtrack tunes.
So when the Big Change got closer, and more likely to be oh-so real, I almost feared setting my clock radio for Monday morning.
As it turned out, nothing seemed to have audibly changed. Yet.
But diligence is necessary.
We don’t want Allen’s minions turning KCMU (I still can’t type “KEXP” without trepidation, let alone say it) into some bland boomer-nostalgia station, or (almost as bad) the type of defanged, Paul-Simonized station the KUOW guys already tried to turn it into.
P.S.: If any of you have tapes of any of the now no-longer-to-be-heard KCMU promo spots, I’d love a copy.)
NEXT: Mulling more possible changes to the site. (I know, again….)
IN OTHER NEWS: It’s darned hard to think of Frisco Net-boors as folk needing or deserving our “support,” as postulated by the organizers of today’s “Back the Net Day.”
ELSEWHERE:
AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.
It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.
I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.
Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.
Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.
I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.
He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.
At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).
It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.
Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.
Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.
It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.
And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.
He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.
Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.
But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?
TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?
THE NATIONAL ‘ALTERNATIVE’ MEDIA, true to its Frisco-centric ways, has been treating the attempted upscaling of a Berkeley, Calif. community radio station as a story of national import.
That kind of deadening air’s nothing new to folks up here.
KRAB, a Seattle station of similar vintage and format to that Calif. station, was the subject of an attempted gentrification attempt in the ’80s. The operation was a success–the patient died. The frequency’s now used by none other than KNDD, the local outlet for all your next-Beasties and next-Korn wannabe acts.
In the mid-’90s, KCMU, the Univ. of Washington student station that had given just about all your “Seattle Scene” superstars their first airplay (and where I’d DJ’d for a year), was the subject of a sort of palace coup by UW administrators.
The station was placed under Wayne Roth, the bureaucrat who ran KUOW, the UW’s NPR affiliate. He tried to rein in KCMU’s eclectic programming, eliminating what a management memo called “harsh and abrasive music” in favor of baby-boomer-friendly world beat and blues; all in hopes of attracting a demographic market segment favorable to corporate “underwriters.”
After listener boycotts and DJ resignations and some heavy-handed PR against the moves, Roth and the UW compromised. KCMU would henceforth be run by a paid staff instead of volunteers; its on-air delivery would be slicked up. But indie rock (though not hard-punk), avant-jazz, and difficult-listening music would remain in the mix.
Now all that may be changing again.
While details are still sketchy, the rumor mill and the local news media have been awash in speculation about KCMU’s future. Seems the UW’s top brass has been talking among itself about transferring the station out from under Roth and KUOW and to the university’s “computing and communications” unit.
Roth, who maneuvered to get KCMU onto his turf, isn’t letting it go without a spat. He’s spoken publicly about his worries that the move would put the station’s programming under the thumb of potential big donors, and named Paul Allen’s Experience Music Project museum as just such a possible donor/influence-peddler.
Of course, that’s not really all that different from what Roth wanted to do with KCMU in ’93-’94.
Except Roth would be on the outside of the dealin’, and on the inside would be folks (like the heavy-hittin’ musicologists and rock historians staffing E.M.P.) who just might want to make it into a more professionally-run version of the serious-music-lover’s station the pre-Roth KCMU had been.
Anyhow, the station’s future has yet to be officially announced. Even if it does go under new management, KCMU might change in ways longtime fans such as myself might not necessarily like. (It could become an all-oldies station for rock historians, for instance.)
But if the potential new regime plays its cards right, it could become an experiment in community radio’s rebirth.
Tune in and find out.
IN OTHER NEWS: This just might be the best news story of the year….
TOMORROW: Art-film nostalgia.
“If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler By Italo Calvino, Ultra-Condensed by Thomas Deeny: You think you’re reading a condensation of If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler, but you’re not.”
MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED to see Seattle music legend Scott McCaughey’s lovely mug in a huge USA Today article on Friday about the seventh or eighth supposed Death of Rock Music–but the caption identified McCaughey as his frequent bandmate, Peter Buck of R.E.M./Crocodile Cafe fame.
UPDATE #1: The Big Book of Misc. moves ever-forward to its scheduled release party the second week in June. Preorders will be taken here at Misc. World, perhaps as early as next week. Stay tuned.
UPDATE #2: Last week, I announced I’d be contributing full-length essays to the soon-to-be-very-different Seattle magazine. This week, that’s in flux. The magazine’s been sold, and the new bosses may or may not choose to revamp it again. The future of anyone and anything in it is yet to be determined.
AD VERBS: The use of retro-pop hits in commercials has gone full circle, with Target stores using Petula Clark’s “It’s a Sign of the Times.” That tune originally was a commercial jingle, for B.F. Goodrich tires circa 1969. In the commercial, a clueless suit-and-tie businessman’s afternoon commute is interrupted when a 50-foot-tall model in a green miniskirt picks up his car, plucks off its ordinary tires, and deftly (considering the length of her fingernails) slips on the new steel-belted radials. The original lyrics went something like: “It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich brings to you a brand new tire/It’s the Radial Age/B.F. Goodrich boosts your mileage so much higher/New tire from B.F.G./The Radial Nine-Nine-Oh/This tire will set you free/And take you so much farther than you used to go-O.” I originally saw the spot at a tender age, when the image of the huge ultra-mod model was powerful enough to sear permanently into my memories. (The spot is included in at least one of those classic-commercials videocassettes out there, but I don’t know which one.)
ANARCHY IN THE UW?: A UW Daily front-pager a couple weeks back discussed radical/anarchist political factions at the U of Oregon, and asked why there wasn’t more visible activity of that sort around the U of Washington. A member of one of the email lists I’m on gave the perfect answer: You shouldn’t expect too many upper- and upper-middle class kids, preparing for professional careers, to seriously advocate the sort of sociopolitical revolution that would do away with their own caste privileges.
If you think about it, that one student protest movement everybody remembers peaked when college boys were afraid of getting drafted, and faded when the draft passed its peak. Most of the more active student movements since then have involved either issues directly affecting the students involved (women’s and gays’ rights, affirmative action) or more specific topics (nuclear power, South Africa, animal rights) that didn’t directly question U.S. society’s essential structures. Thanks to almost 20 years of financial-aid cuts, tuition hikes, enrollment quotas, and (now) affirmative-action backlashes, the student bodies at many of America’s big colleges are richer and whiter than they’ve been since before the G.I. Bill helped democratize higher education in the ’50s. Any real radical movement would address this elitism, and hence would be less than attractive to many of that elitism’s beneficiaries. (Though one could imagine certain civic-planning students and intellectuals agitating for the kind of revolution that would lead to a society completely controlled by civic planners and intellectuals.)
GOOD TO GO: I’ve now ordered two sets of grocery deliveries from HomeGrocer.com. Except for a couple of products that turned out to be larger-sized than I’d expected (descriptions on the website are terser than they ought to be), everything arrived on time and in good condition. My only beef: The 12,000 items in the company’s Bellevue warehouse don’t include enough of my personal favorites (more about that later in this item).
Grocery deliveries were a staple service in most U.S. cities earlier in this century, before the squeezed profit margins of the postwar supermarket era. Now, the advent of online ordering’s brought it back in Seattle and a few other towns. (In some of these places, like here, Internet food shopping’s run by an independent startup company; in others, it’s run by established chains like Albertsons and Kroger.)
The P-I’s recent story about HomeGrocer.com noted that it tries to target middle-class families with two wage-earners plus kids, instead of “young singles.” I think they’re missing an opportunity. It’s those young singles who’re more likely to stock up on packaged convenience food products (just the sort of stuff HomeGrocer.com can most efficiently distribute), rather than perishables. If they’re worried that the childless might not buy enough stuff at once (the company demands you spend $75 from them at a time to avoid a $10 delivery charge), someone (and it might as well be me) should inform ’em about that housemate-house ritual known as The Costco Run, in which roomies take whatever car’s available and load up on a month or two’s worth of household products, frozen entrees, canned chili, cereal, coffee, rice, beans, ice cream, and just about anything else that’s likely to be eaten or drank before spoiling. HomeGrocer.com (or some other enterprising outfit) could easily snatch away that business by offering the conveniences of delivery and itemized online ordering (much easier to figure out which household members bought what and owe what). So get on the bean, HomeGrocer! Start adding more of the stuff to your warehouse that single young adults love to buy–Count Chocula, ramen, 50-lb. sacks of rice, Michelina’s microwave entrees, Totino’s Party Pizzas, enchania tablets, Jolt cola, and White Castle mini-cheeseburgers!
CINERAMA-LAMA-DING-DONG: Like most U.S. cities, Seattle’s lost many of its grand old movie palaces. So why was the only downtown cinema preserved and restored as a single-screen movie house the one with the uglist exterior (comparable to the back side of a Kmart)? Because it was up for sale when Paul Allen was ready to buy; because it represented boomer-generation memories of space-age futurism; and because the original Cinerama process was historically important to many hardcore fans of modern-day “roller coaster ride” spectacle movies.
Indeed, the first main scene in the first Cinerama feature, the 1952 travelogue This Is Cinerama (narrated by Lowell Thomas, the voice on those old newsreels shown on the Fox News Channel) was a scene inside a moving roller coaster.
Unfortunately, even Allen’s millions couldn’t get a restored three-projector, first-generation Cinerama system built by opening night, so the mostly-invited audience (including Allen’s ex-partner Bill Gates and the usual component of other “local celebrities”) had to sit through the truly mediocre art-heist caper movie Entrapment. It was halfway appropriate, though, that the first film at the restored Cinerama was a 20th Century-Fox release. In the ’50s it was Fox’s Cinemascope, a wide-screen process that could be shown in regular theaters with just a new projector lens and maybe a couple of stereo speakers, that provided the real death knell for the much-more-complicated Cinerama process (which required three separate and fully-staffed projection booths, a sound technician, and a master-control operator who tried to keep the three projectors in sync and at equally-lit).
Original Cinerama died after the release of the seventh feature in the process, the John Wayne epic How the West Was Won (with its ironic modern-day epilogue depicting a clogged freeway interchange as the ultimate image of human progress). Through the early ’70s, the big studios shot a handful of big-budget films (from Song of Norway to 2001) in a one-camera 70mm system but intended for the curved Cinerama screen. The original Cinerama Releasing Corp. faded into a distributor of low-budget horror and softcore-sex films, and by 1978 withered away.
While Cinerama screens were closed, abandoned, or remodeled for the new age of multiplexes, the Seattle Cinerama continued as a single-screen showcase theater, though its ’90s stewardship under the aegis of Cineplex Odeon (a.k.a. “Cineplex Oedipus, the motherfuckers”) saw deteriorating seats and an ever-dingier screen surface. Allen’s megabucks have given the joint an all-new retro-cool interior with cool purple curtains and all the state-O-the-art tech (digital stereo, descriptive devices for the deaf or blind, a concert-hall-quality acoustical ceiling). He’s even installed twinkling fiber-optic lights (and an LCD-video “active poster”) along the otherwise still-bland outside walls. (Allen’s also promised the place will be ready for digital hi-def video projection, whenever that new process fully exists.)
It’s great to have the old joint back and lovelier than ever. But I’m looking forward to the time, sometime in ’00, when Allen’s folks promise to bring the original Cinerama movies to life again. Imax (a one-projector 70mm process, using sideways film (a la Paramount’s old VistaVision) for a maximum exposure area) gives modern audiences the documentary-spectacle experience offered by the first non-narrative Cinerama films, the few stills and descriptions I’ve seen of the old Cineramas indicate they may have been a helluva lot more fun.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, work for peace and/or justice, have lunch at the new Ditto Tavern, and ponder these words from Eli Khamarov: “The difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats don’t feel empowered even if they are in that position.”
MISC. CONTINUES to be haunted by the Winter Olympics opening-ceremony theme song, “When Children Rule the World.” Sometimes it seems they do now, only in grownup bodies…
SHADES OF PALE: The Times reported this month that Kenny G’s one of the most respected white musicians among black jazz purists. My theory: G represents a stereotype of whiteness corresponding almost perfectly to the stereotypes of blackness profitably portrayed for years by some white people’s favorite black acts.
DELIVERING INFLUENCE: A recent Wall St. Journal told how United Parcel Service tried to pay the Univ. of Wash. to lend its institutional credibility onto pro-corporate research. The formerly locally-owned UPS offered $2.5 million to the UW med school in ’95. But instead of directing its gift toward general areas of study, UPS insisted the money go toward the work of UW orthopedic surgeon Stanley J. Bigos. The WSJ claimed UPS liked Bigos because “his research has suggested that workers’ back-injury claims may relate more to poor attitudes than ergonomic factors on the job.” The company’s fighting proposed tougher worker-safety laws, and wanted to support its claims with “independent” studies from a bigtime university that happenned to need the money. Negotiations with UW brass dragged on for two years, then collapsed. Bigos insists he wouldn’t have let UPS influence his work if he’d gotten its cash. But if companies can pick and choose profs already disposed to tell ’em what they wanna hear, “academic independence” becomes a bigger joke than it already is.
THE DESTRUCTION CONTINUES: Steve’s Broiler has lost its lease and closed. The 37-year-old downtown restaurant/ lounge was beloved by seniors, sailors, and punks for dishing out ample portions of good unpretentious grub and drinks, in a classic paneling-and-chrome-railing setting. (It was also the setting for Susan Catherine’s ’80s comic Overheard at America’s Lunch Counters.) The owners might restart if they can find another spot. It was the last tenant in the former Osborn & Ulland building, which will now be refitted for the typical “exciting new retail” blah blah blah…. Remember Jamie Hook’s Stranger piece last year about the Apple Theater, one of America’s last all-film porno houses? If you want to witness this landmark of archaic sleaze, better hurry. The Apple’s being razed soon for an affordable-housing complex incorporating the apartment building next door where the Pike St. Cinema was, and where the rock club Uncle Rocky’s is now. Rocky’s will close when the remodeling starts, and won’t be invited back (the housing people don’t like late-night loudness beneath residences).
MORE, MORE, MORE!: A recent Business Week cover story calls it “The Entertainment Glut.” I call it a desperate attempt by Big Media to keep control of a cultural landscape dividing and blossoming to a greater extent than I’d ever hoped. BW sez the giants (Disney, Murdoch, Time Warner, Viacom, et al.) are trying to maintain market share by invading one another’s genre turfs and cranking out more would-be blockbusters and bestsellers than ever before, to the point that none of them can expect anything like past profit margins. (Indeed, many of these “synergistic” media combos are losing wads of dough, losses even creative accounting can no longer hide.) It gets worse: Instead of adapting to the new realities of a million subcultures, the giants are redoubling their push after an increasingly-elusive mass audience. Murdoch’s HarperCollins book company scrapped over 100 planned “mid-list” titles to make up for losses on costly big-celeb books. BW claims the giants’ movie divisions are similarly “spending lavishly” on intended Next Titanics and trying “to stop producing modestly budgeted fare.” Their record divisions are dropping acts after one album, while ardently pushing the retro rockstar-ism of Britpop. The longer the giants try to keep their untenable business plans going, the better the opportunities for true indies in all formats–if the indies can survive the giants’ ongoing efforts to crowd ’em out of the marketplace.
(If Jean Godden can make personal appearances at coffee shops, so can I. I’ll be “guest barista” the evening of March 10 at Habitat Espresso, on Broadway near John. Mark your calendars.)
HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.
CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.
UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.
SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”
UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”
A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.
EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.
PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
