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MARILYN MONROE DIED in the summer of 1962, while the Seattle World’s Fair was open and celebrating the going-to-be-wonderful 21st Century. Her demise, undoubtedly (except to conspiracy theorists) by her own hand, said and still says a lot about 20th-Century celebrity and its downsides.
Lincoln Kirstein’s Nation obit said something about her that latter-day fetish-iconographers should remember: “Marilyn Monroe was supposed to be the Sex Goddess, but somehow no one, including, or indeed first of all, herself, ever believed it. Rather, she was a comedienne impersonating the American idea of the Sex Goddess…. Her performances indicated that while sex is certainly fun, and often funny, it is only one of many games. Others include the use of the intelligence.”
Nearly four decades later, Monroe’s films and still images still resonate. Marilyn fetishism, meanwhile, remains as icky as ever.
I maintain a revulsion to the continued exploitation of someone who’d fatally burned out on the stress that arose from just such exploitation. That’s why it took me until now to see the HBO movie Norma Jean & Marilyn. It turned out to be just as pathetically trashy as I’d expected.
Screenwriter Jill Isaacs was clearly trying to be sympathetic to her subject. But the stench of celeb soul-robbing is evident from the moment Issacs introduces her psychological-theory premise: that Monroe was a multiple-personality sufferer, torn by internal conflict between the invented sex-goddess persona and the “real” Norma Jean Baker. (I happen to have known real multiples, which makes this particular tabloidist premise even sicker to me.)
Monroe’s problem is much easier to explain, in a way that keeps some respect for her travails. She was simply a smart, aware person who tried to be in control of her own stardom (something Katherine Hepburn, among others, managed to succeed at in varying degrees). But she faltered under the intense pressures of being the locus of corporate entertainment’s impersonal, often cruel machinations.
Anyone who lived in Seattle six years ago can recognize this story.
Cobain also tried to keep his personal and artistic integrity amid intense industry hassles, and shattered from the contradictions.
He also named his daughter and a song on his last studio album after a previous showbiz stress victim, Frances Farmer.
Like Monroe (who showed up in Hollywood around the time Farmer disappeared from it), Farmer’s been the object of much latter-day theorizing and misplaced idolatry.
Many of the recent Farmer fetishists lionize her as a victim of male-oriented Hollywood; even though her involuntary institutionalization was arranged in the mid-’40s by her equally strong-willed mother, probably in a well-meaning effort to get her out of Hollywood.
The Mel Brooks-produced movie Frances (like most Hollywood biopics, full of fiction) spread the rumor that she’d been lobotomized while in Wash. state mental institutions; some who knew her in the hospital have since explained that she was instead probably hooked on severe, primitive psychoactive drugs. (Just about as debilitating as a lobotomy, but less sensationalistic as a film-plot device.)
(If Farmer’s mom really had put her daughter away just to keep her away from the boozing and drugging and smoking and screwing and general bad-living of Hollywood, it turns out she needn’t have bothered. Farmer, who outspokenly espoused left-of-center political causes, would certainly have been forced out of movies during the anti-Communist blacklistings of 1948-60.)
Farmer, Monroe, and Cobain share an object lesson in the relative inability of any individual of brains and integrity to hold onto one’s core values while afflicted with supestardom.
Such is the story of 20th-century corporate entertainment. Don’t become a superstar and you risk the chance to earn a living at your art. Become a superstar and you risk losing everything else.
MONDAY: Hollywood tries to stop the game-show revival by over-stoking it.
ELSEWHERE:
Tipton Bio Never Drags
Book feature for The Stranger, 6/25/98
Suits Me:
The Double Life of Billy Tipton
Diane Wood Middlebrook
(Houghton Mifflin) $25
You know the basic story. Billy Tipton, a nostalgic pop-jazz pianist and fixture of Spokane society for over three decades, died in 1989 and was revealed by doctors to have been a woman all along. Now here’s the long version.
Who was Billy Tipton really? At several points, Middlebrook (a onetime Spokanian herself) accepts the argument that Billy (born Dorothy Tipton in 1914) was a closeted lesbian who only dressed as a man to make it in the jazz business and/or because nobody in her world would accept A Strong Woman. Yet the details of Tipton’s life, which Middlebrook clearly spent much time and effort collecting, suggest otherwise. Instead of heading to NY or LA or Vegas, where lesbians and jazzy women would get as much acceptance as they would anywhere in those less enlightened decades, Tipton stayed in the Midwest and later the inland Northwest, where the potential career rewards were smaller but where the competition was also smaller. (Tipton only recorded two LPs, both of retro trad-jazz standards released in the ’50s on supermarket budget labels; his work, as described by Middlebrook, seems to have settled quickly into covers and, later, Lawrence Welkish nostalgia.)
I used “his” above for a reason. Despite Middlebrook’s psychoanalyses, her tale is clearly one of someone who saw himself as a man born with the wrong equipment, who wanted to be known exclusively as a man. There were plenty of strong women in Tipton’s dust-bowl Oklahoma upbringing; but their strength was in holding households and careers together, not in the letting-loose demimonde of jazz. By the ’40s, when female instrumentalists had started to emerge in jazz and pop (and young men not in the armed forces were often derided as unpatriotic), Tipton never took the opportunity to end his offstage “act.” Even when dying of untreated ulcers, Tipton refused the medical attention that might have revealed his secret.
No, the Tipton story isn’t a tale of tragedy but of triumph. Tipton wasn’t a jazz great and probably knew he’d never be one, but he died a success at becoming something, and someone, he wanted against all odds to become–and without benefit of surgeries, shots, or hormone pills.
Fun things in the book: The elegant design, the cover, the shadow-clef frontspiece logo, the descriptions of ’50s Spokane, some of Tipton’s creakily “naughty” onstage jokes about women and gays, the descriptions of Tipton’s cross-dressing details (strap-ons, chest-binding, elevator shoes, claims that sanitary pads were great for sopping up car-oil leaks).
•
The Crisis of Criticism
Edited by Maurice Berger
(New Press paperback) $17.95
Yes, there are readers who actually take arts reviews seriously. At least other reviewers do. When New Yorker writer Arlene Croce complained about the concept of “victim art” she accused a Bill T. Jones AIDS dance work of abetting (without Croce actually seeing the show), several members of the NYC-centric art-crit and lit-crit spheres fell into a tizzy.
This brief book compiles Croce’s un-review with eight other critics’ responses and ruminations on the value of criticism in today’s everybody’s-a-critic era. Granted, a lot of these pro critics and authors (especially bell hooks) are just sticking long words onto a desire for a world in which people such as themselves get more respect. But others argue, with varying degrees of success, for a new or reasserted role for their profession.
Some of the better pieces don’t address Croce’s beef at all, but instead explore other criticism-related matters. Particularly notable is Richard Martin’s “Addressing the Dress,” arguing for more serious and less hype-laden fashion journalism. With so much art, entertainment, etc. being churned out by the intellectual-property industries and their highbrow counterparts, the best of these essayists assert the importance of trying to make sense of it all, to sift the aesthetic diamonds from the aesthetic zirconia.
Searching for the NW In NW Lit:
We Are Here! (Aren’t We?)
Feature article by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 4/9/98
From a very early age I was instilled with the (probably unintended but unmistakable) message that real art, and by extension real life, were things that only happened in places far away from my rural Washington existence. The stories read to us in class, and later assigned for us to read, all happened in Harlem or Korea or mythical fairylands or mythical Anytowns–until we got to read Beverly Cleary. Her kids had real attitudes. Her grownups had real tics and quirks. And they lived in a real place (Portland) I’d really been to. Ever since, I’ve sought out the stories of my own place, the affirmations that, like Dr. Seuss’s Whos, “We Are Here.”
Eventually, I found some stories that tried to reveal the people and attitudes of the place. And I found other seekers.
Last December, I was involved in an exchange of emails on the topic of Northwest literature. The original question, posed by Raven Chronicles editor Matt Briggs: “Is there any ‘Northwest’ in Northwest Lit’?”
Some of the respondents said there wasn’t any–that Caucasian-dominant society here’s still too new, and too subservient to the national/ global society of airports and strip malls and stadiums. I disagreed. I felt there were indeed distinguishing characteristics in stuff from here, at least the better stuff from here.
Defining the Literary Northwest: Let’s define “here” as Washington, Oregon, Idaho, maybe Alaska, and just maybe Montana; excluding the sociopolitically different worlds of western Canada and northern California.
If that’s the literary Northwest, then Northwest literature could conceivably include anything set in this place, or written by someone who resides or once resided in this place. But that could conceivably include everything from Thomas Pynchon’s V. (partly written while he was a Boeing technical writer) to tales where people leave Seattle early on and never return (certain Jack London stories,Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs).
So for convenience’s sake, let’s classify the four faces, or sub-types, of Northwest lit, and the values and weaknesses of each.
Stuff written here but without “local” content. John Saul’s chillers, Robert Ferrigno’s thrillers, and August Wilson’s African American survival plays bear little or no relationship to their creators’ domiciles. Yet some of these manage to exploit a certain Northwest spirit. Stacey Levine’s Dra- and My Horse occur in surreal fantasy realms (the former in an all-indoor city); but Dra-‘s “drab and dreary world of utter dread” and My Horse‘s “painful psycho-logic” (as described on the cover blurbs) correspond internally to a sense of low-key resignation found in some more “realistic” works from here.
Locally-set genre novels. mysteries and romances with fill-in-the-blanks ‘local color’ (insert name of popular local nightspot here).
I haven’t the space nor the expertise to discuss romances, that last bastion of un-ironic genre fiction (and the only mass-fiction genre predicated on love instead of aggression). But the better whodunit-doers, here and elsewhere, go beyond place names to invoke the spirit of a region in the ways their characters commit and/ or solve crimes. Earl Emerson and K.K. Beck’s crime-solvers have a particularly Seattle kind of world-weariness; the crimes they investigate often invoke particularly local versions of ambition and desperation.
Land Lit. In college I was introduced to a whole “Northwest school” of writers and poets. Only their message, upon initial contact, seemed to be “We Are Not Here.” The poems usually consisted of minutely-detailed nature tableaux, devoid of human life save for the omniscient gaze of their narrators. The fiction viewed this countryside as verbal Cinemascope settings for noble women and stout-hearted men felling trees and fly fishing and behaving not at all like the all-too-human Norwesters I knew. None of those people, of course, lived in any city bigger than Port Townsend.
I now understand a little more about the formula’s pre-Beat-era origins. Concurrent with the Asian-inspired “Northwest School” painters and the spiritual-empowerment aspects of the Mountaineers movement, the first couple generations of nature poets (David Wagoner, Barry Lopez, Lake City kid Gary Snyder) sought a re-connection to the cyclical continuum of life. Even the “urban” writings of Richard Hugo are full of references to birds, streams, and native plants.
But the approach had its limitations, especially in the hands of ’70s-’80s imitators. What began as a quest for Zen tranquility eventually devolved into cloying sanctimony. Its nadir came in the ’80s with the NPR essays of Andrew Ward, who gushed reverently about the plants and birds surrounding his island “cabin” while acting like a landed-gentry snob toward his human neighbors.
Poet-editor Phoebe Bosche notes, “For a lot of folks/writers who have settled here, ‘urban’ (a word that needs to be in quotes) has a nasty connotation, versus the perceived ideal sense of how life should be lived. Urban = technology. These are the writers who don’t like the sound of a crow, many who are of the Poetry Northwest [magazine] school.”
Bosche also disagrees with my disparagement of nature writing: “To just dismiss ‘nature poetry/ writing’ is blind to the overriding presence of our surroundings here. There is the presence of nature in all the urban writing being created here. It is different than the open possibilities that infuse writing from southern California, my home. The cynicism here is also different from east-coast or L.A. cynicism. It is rooted in a denser feeling of our relationship with our surroundings, in the character of this city.”
The real thing. The rarest and dearest, the works that attempt to convey how people here behave, think, and relate. I’m not merely talking about highbrow-appeal, or even what appeals to me. (The annoyingly “lite” Tom Robbins certainly expresses the aesthetic of a certain ‘shroom-munchin’ caste of NW residents.) But I prefer works expressing the moods Robbins’s escapism is escaping from.
Timothy Egan called it “Northwest Noir.” Briggs calls it “the slippery sense of place and identity in the Pacific Northwest… a strange dislocation that sometimes expresses itself in deformed characters, like Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love; a reduction of realty into a heavily weighted and controlled narrative, like Raymond Carver’s short stories; or in the complete absence of family history and a sort of constant self-invention as in Denis Johnson’s Already Dead, or stories about isolated and small communities as in Peter Bacho.” To that roster I’d add Gus Van Sant’s philosophical down-and-outers, the Tobias and Geoffrey Wolff’s rambunctious yet worryful teens, Rebecca Brown’s obsessively intricate life scenes, Jesse Bernstein’s defiant celebrations of despair as a life force, Willie Smith’s dark fantasies, and the sublime desolation of Charles D’Ambrosio’s The Point.
“There is a common, nervous energy (like overcompensating for the overcast winter) to a lot of the writing that I think strikes me as particularly PNW,” Briggs adds. “This spirit I’m talking about is like your weird uncle,” Briggs adds. “Your characters are generally losers. They’re not heroic; they’re just odd.”
Even the humor in NW lit, and there’s a lot of it, is off-center (Gary Larson, Ellen Forney, Gregory Hischack’s beautiful zine Farm Pulp), self-deprecating (Spud Goodman’s TV skits, Scott McCaughey’s song lyrics), or concerned with the dichotomy between crudity and beauty (cartoonist Jim Woodring, Oregon historian Stewart Holbrook).
Which brings us to the here and now. At live readings, the nature poets have largely been succeeded by slam poets. The younger would-be literary writers I meet want to be Anais Nin or Charles Bukowski. The economics of publishing virtually dictate that a work with “alternative” appeal reach out to a national or global subculture, while a work with local or regional appeal must hew to a mainstream zeitgeist. And the local mainstream zeitgeist has been thoroughly gentrified beyond David Brewster’s wettest dreams. With all the material riches to be grabbed here now, detective writers can imagine higher-stakes crimes and romance heroines can enjoy more luxurious adventures.
But what place is there for the quirky, the depressive, the unparodic noir, in a social landscape dominated by hypercapitalistic monomania? Marty Kruse, small-press buyer at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, says he’s “really disappointed with the output from the Pacific Northwest (of late)…. There was a great deal more enthusiasm when we all had less to lose.”
But if the best NW lit’s about people who’ve left behind, or been left behind by, family and society, then there’ll be plenty of material to come about people who’ve been left behind by the boom. As Briggs points out, “This has been an industrial town and a seat for the labor movement and there are all of these people who were here before the 1980s (and even those who were there before them, all the way back to the original Salish tribes) milling around, working strange jobs, and who aren’t exactly jumping on the Boeing/ Microsoft bandwagon, largely because they can’t.”
MISC. BEGINS THE sorta brave-new post-Rice era of Seattle history with a rhetorical question: Whenever there’s a pesky e.coli outbreak, vegan activists use the tragedy as a reason to call for an end to meat consumption. Whenever somebody working in porn videos or a strip joint turns out to be facing a troubled or abuse-racked private life, rad-fems ‘n’ right-wing censors publicly exploit the situation to advocate further suppression of the sex biz. Yet the highly publicized mistreatment of sweatshop textile workers (domestically and across the Pacific) hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired members of The Naturist Society to issue PR blitzes asserting how there’d be fewer mistreated clothes-maikers if fewer people wore clothes.
WATCH THIS SPACE: Tasty Shows still plans to open a new club in the former Moe building. Sure they’re four months past their originally promised opening date, but these things almost always happen. (Current ETA: Late February.) Contrary to early reports, it’ll have live bands “about 40 percent of the time,” says a Tasty spokesperson, with DJs on the other nights. Among the work still to be done: Finding a name. They’d planned to call it The Mothership, but a hard-rock nostalgia bar in Federal Way just opened with that moniker.
A PRECIOUS GEM: Just as we get used to the Presidents’ untimely breakup, Seattle faces the potential loss of another institution of whimsy, thanks to the Samis Foundation’s ongoing Pioneer Square redevelopment scheme. Ruby Montana’s Pinto Pony lost the lease on its space on 2nd Ave. (Montana’s furniture annex across the street, which sold lovely old sofas and dinette sets, has already been evicted.) Ruby’s on 2nd will close in March. After that, everything’s iffy. Montana sez she might open a new store if she can find the right location, maybe with a revised concept (mixing her trademark knick-knacks, toys, and home furnishings with larger furniture items, antique cars, and/or RVs). If that doesn’t work out, she might open a “guest ranch” in the countryside somwehre, to be furnished in her inimitable comfy-campy style. While that’d undoubtedly be a fun getaway destination and retreat center, I’d rather still have Ruby’s to go to for my fix of wacky postcards, Krusty the Klown erasers, Chia-pubis pots, and historic ad art. With all the retail space being built and/or “restored” in the greater downtown, you’d think there’d be someplace for something this vital. Speaking of abundance…
DOUGH BOYS: A few weeks back, Times columnist Jean Godden claimed 59,000 millionaires now reside in western Washington. (She attributed the figure to unidentified speakers at a CityClub luncheon.) Thought #1: Now we know how these chichi restaurants with the menu items marked “Market Price” can stay open. Thought #2: With all that spare cash floating around, howcum we still can’t get decent funding for (insert your choice of non-sports-related causes)? Thought #3 (and a hunch about #2): Seattle’s old, small, reclusive upper class might not have staged a lot of fancy-dress balls or high teas, but by and large they made at least an occasional semblance of acknowledging their role in, and duty to, the larger community. But these days, here and across the country, there’s a new breed of becashed ones, some of whom revel in a “lone wolf” self-image. One of these moguls, Ted Turner, publicly called last year for his tax-bracket brethern (naming Gates as a specific example) to donate more moolah for bettering the world instead of just buying more luxury goods and building bigger “cabins” in the Rockies.
A nice sentiment, but there are problems with the ’80s-’90s wealth concentration trend that charitable alms alone won’t solve. Can America afford to keep turning over larger portions of its material resources to what’s still a small population segment, increasingly made of “self-made” wheeler-dealers who see social-benefit institutions (from environmental rules to progressive tax codes) as personal threats to their right to make and keep all they can? Perhaps the mark of a materially rich community isn’t the number of residents who’ve got more than they know what to do with, but the degree to which its other residents can at least semi-comfortably get by.
WELCOME BACK to your Ides-O-March Misc., the pop-culture column that amusedly notes the first wedding of the age of media mergers, in which the widow of the publisher of the Spokane Spokesman-Review married the retired publisher of the NY Times. Who said you can’t get far in the journalism biz these days?
UPDATE #1: The state legislature’s regular session expired with hundreds of conservative-social-agenda bills allowed to die. Among these was the Senate bill to drive strip clubs out of business via over-regulation, discussed here two weeks back. House members apparently felt the bill wouldn’t survive club operators’ lawsuits. Also gone, for this year at least, are bills to ban gay marriages, require parental consent for high-school HIV education, etc. Most of these proposals (except the anti-stripping bill) were introduced by Religious Right-friendly House Republicans but blocked by Senate Democrats. The Repo men hope to capture both chambers this November. You oughta work to try and stop that.
UPDATE #2: I asked you a few weeks back to suggest Disneyland character mascots for what might become the Anaheim Ex-Seahawks. Choices included Scrooge McDuck (natch), Jafar, and Cruella DeVil. My favorite was from the reader who, commenting on recent Seahawk seasons, recommended Sleepy.
COINCIDENCE OR…?: The guy who played Henry Blake on the M*A*S*H TV show and the guy who played Blake in the movie died within days of one another. Talk about becoming one with your role!
AD SLOGAN OF THE WEEK (seen in the Stranger for the Backstage, 3/6): “Maria McKee: A Punk Edith Piaf.” Don’t bait me here, guys. The real Piaf was punker than you, me, or McKee will ever be. Ever heard her version of Lieber & Stoller’s “Black Leather Trousers and Motorcycle Boots”? Didn’t think so.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The P!pe is a tabloid run by ex-International Examiner staffer Soyon Im, who sez he wants “to debunk the myth that anything cool with Asian Americans is happening down in San Francisco or L.A.” It also helps debunk the squaresville reputation of King County’s large Asian American community. Issue #1 packs eight pages with stuff about Indian dance music, Japanese power pop, Korean fashions, “Pan-Asian” restaurants, Chinese-American comix, Vietnamese travelogue photos, Taiwanese interracial relationships, and old Japanese erotic art. There’s even a sex-advice column (where’d they get that concept?) by “Soybean Milkchick,” assuring readers there’s nothing deficient about Asian-American manhood. (In other words, don’t feel bad if you don’t look like the guys in that old Japanese erotic art.) At Pistil Books and elsewhere.
ONE TOO MANY?: Cocktail Nation hype has hit overdrive, less than two years after the first Combustible Edison record (albeit 15 years after Throbbing Gristle did its homage to Martin Denny). A glance at the “Cocktail Mania” display at Borders Music shows how nearly every record label with old middle-of-the-road instrumentals in its vaults is repackaging that material as something hip n’ ironic. And a local indie TV producer’s currently trying to launch a weekly entertainment-talk show called Atomic Lounge. Don’t be surprised if reproduction smoking jackets show up this fall in the Tiger Shop.
PAT-APHYSICS: Buchanan’s proving to be more than just another lifetime DC political/ media insider pretending to be an “outsider.” His (momentary?) campaign success signals the first significant crack in the GOP’s 16-year ruling coalition of fundamentalists and corporations (something I’ve been predicting or at least desiring for some time). About a quarter of the things he says (the parts about the plight of the downsized and the ripoff that is “free” trade) make more sense than what the other Republicans say. It’s just the other three quarters of the things he says are so freakish (the tirades against gays, feminists, immigrants, pro-choice advocates, and other humans guilty only of not belonging to his target demographic). If there’s hope, it’s that Buchanan’s polls rose after he started downplaying the hatefest talk and emphasizing the anti-corporate talk. Why’s the only candidate to challenge the sanctity of big money also the biggest bigot and bully? Why don’t any national-level Democrats speak against the corporate power-grab like Pat does?
WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-culture column that still gets slightly disoriented when given a “Welcome to Fred Meyer” bag upon leaving the store.
SITE LINES: Adobe Systems is looking for new area digs for the Seattle software operation formerly known as Aldus, and possibly also for some of its currently Calif.-based divisions. I got just one piece-O-advice to the desktop publishing giant:Â keep it in town. You’re being tempted by developers to move to some soulless office park on some Eastside flood plain. But part of what made Aldus great was that it was in Pio. Square. The firm attracted people who liked walking to Ivar’s or to Mariner games. I believe this helped grow a corporate culture of creative, energetic people who could listen to others, including the people who used your warez; as opposed to the cult-like groupthink seen within certain office-park outfits.
ON A LONELY SATELLITE: Some of you can get 30 channels of DBX satellite music on your cable TV system. But what I want are the 60 extra channels the DBX company offers retailers and other clients via satellite dish. Instead of just mainstreamed selections like “Top Hits” and “R&B Oldies,” I could choose from polka, mariachi, Hawaiian, Danish, Greek, Brazilian, Indian, “Euro Pop,” “Canto Pop” (that’s Cantonese), “Traditional South African,” and that all-time fave “German Schlagers!”
AD VERBS #1: Denny’s sponsored the Harlem Globetrotters 70th Anniversary tour, which stopped in Seattle during African-American History Month. Let’s see, twelve Globetrotter players plus the sham-opposition team, trainers, and roadies… The restaurant chain instantly doubles its black employment!
AD VERBS #2: You may have been bemused by the Nike commercial with snippets of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (as remade by KRS-One) alongside images of street basketball players; defining “the revolution” as mere recreation and fashion. Now the hypocrisy deepens. Nike and its ad agency Weiden & Kennedy have hired Scott-Heron as a consultant for a planned Nike-owned cable channel. The channel has no name or launch date; but you can expect it to rival MTV in associating “rebel” youth culture with the purchase and use of apparel and other consumer products. You can also safely bet it’ll never promote any “revolutionary” thinking which might question companies that export all their manufacturing jobs to pennies-a-day Asian sweatshops and spend all the “saved” expenses on dorky ads.
SPACE CASES: The pitifully thin ranks of Seattle all-ages concert spaces briefly increased by one before shrinking again. The venerable Showbox got special dispensation from the Liquor Board to run all-ages shows under strict conditions. Ever-zealous authorities spotted a relatively minor violation of one of those conditions one night, and promptly decreed the joint 21-and-over for all further events. This was two days before the Throwing Muses gig; promoters had to refund 200 tickets from under-21ers. The onetime punk palace has since changed management (again), so don’t blame that fiasco on the guys there now. Instead, keep questioning why our Powers That Be keep making all-ages music so hard to get put on and so easy to get shut down.
MIKE TAKES A HIKE: It’s a rise-n’-fall tale almost Shakespearean if it weren’t so mundane: A politician who used his out-of-step appearance and social sense to symbolize his devotion to unfashionable policies; who did more things for more people (or tried to) than any Washingtonian since the Scoop-Maggie gravy train; whose downfall came not from opponents but from a trusted aide who’d had enough of his social manners or lack thereof, as expressed thru unwanted “bear hugs.”
We may not have seen the last of Gov. Lowry, but neither may we see anyone like him again soon. And that’s a shame. He lived both in the world of three-martini politicians and that of six-fingered sawmill workers. He used the means of mainstream politics to help those outside the mainstream, at a time when politicians prefer to work chiefly for the overprivileged. (He even dared oppose tax rollbacks for Sacred Business!) And at a time when even many coffeehouse “leftists” ignore class issues or even sneer at working-class people, we need Lowry’s progressive populism more than ever.
MISC.’S GOTTA HAND IT to a guy we usually like to discredit, Ollie Stone. Imagine–getting accused of tarnishing the memory of Richard Nixon!
GAME THEORY: Like other segments of fantasy/ fanboy culture, video games have either failed to attract a significant female following or never tried too hard. Some would see say it proves girls are too smart for such idiocy; others would rant about inequity and girls being prevented from growing up to become fighter pilots. Still others see an opportunity, like American Laser Games, a shoot-’em-up game firm now expanding with the Her Interactive line.
Dunno, ‘tho, about Her’s first title, McKenzie & Co. In it, according to a Variety review, you take the role of one of two “practically-perfect teenage girls,” a gymnast/ cheerleader or an aspiring actress. (“McKenzie” is the nickname of the Geo Tracker the girls take to The Mall.) Your task: “Try to get cozy with one of four dreamy guys when you’re not shopping, gossiping, trying on tons of new clothes, or putting on makeup.” In one segment, your character tries to arrange a prom date but faces turmoil “when your dream date asks you to go out with him at the same time you promised to help your grandmother do volunteer work at a hospital.” You also have to deal with “non-beautiful people like Wenda Wencke, a fish-rights activist who declares `Free the Fish’ and carries a dead carp which she hugs like a teddy bear.” It comes on five CD-ROMs (one for the main game, one for each of four dream dates) and also includes an audio CD, a mini-lipstick, and a discount coupon for two more dreamy-guy disks.
I’ve never claimed anything was wrong with beauty, or with safe fantasy outlets for nascent heterosexual stirrings. But this game glorifies the very type of “popular girl” everybody in my high school loathed. I may not have ever been “dreamy” but I’d have rather hung out with the fish girl than one of these stuck-ups.
VIRGINIA’S DARE: Belltown’s venerable Virginia Inn has evolved from a workingman’s bar in the ’70s to an art bar in the ’80s to a lawyers’ bar in the ’90s, adding deli sandwiches and going smoke-free along the way. Last month it evolved again, becoming probably Washington’s first free-standing full cocktail lounge since Prohibition. It’s all thanks to a little-publicized liberalization of the state liquor laws last summer. Full-liquor-service joints still have to offer food under the revised law, but they don’t have to maintain separate restaurant rooms or uphold the old minimum ratio of food to booze sales.
The old law was installed at the behest of big steak-house operators with major political connections (one of whom, Al Rosellini, became a two-term Democratic governor). It served to stifle creative nightlife as well as smaller restaurants. But changing tastes toward lighter eats and lighter drinks reduced the sirloin-and-Scotch lobby’s power. The new law comes just in time for nightspots to try and exploit the Cocktail Nation craze. It’s already allowed places like Moe’s, the Off Ramp, and the Easy concentrate on music and beverages instead of striving to push up food volume. I just hope the VI continues to use beer glasses in its annual glass-painting benefit for the Pike Place Market Foundation. It’s harder to get elaborate designs on a shot glass.
DROP THAT METAPHOR DEPT. (Bastyr Naturopathic Univ. trustee Merrily Manthey, quoted in that big 1/3 NY Times story on the King County Council’s project to start a subsidized alternative-health center): “This clinic we’re trying to set up here will be the Starbucks of the health care world.” Will it offer red-and-black designer colostomy bags, or Holiday Blend prescriptions? Will it dispense spitcups in regular and grande sizes? (I know it won’t serve lattes; the standard naturopathic diet forbids dairy products, along with meat and wheat.) More seriously, will it become a brand name known for adequate but unexceptional work within standardized bland surroundings?
Could be worse, metaphorwise. I recall the unfortunate street-poster slogan used in the mid-’80s by Capitol Hill’s otherwise admirable Aradia Women’s Health Center: “Are you tired of the sterile environment of a doctor’s office?”
THANKS FOR THE GENEROUS WORDS about my book in the past two Weeklys. In the holiday spirit I’ll forgive Fred Moody, who wrote one of the pieces, for misspelling my name.
E-MISSIVES #1: As you’ve seen, the paper’s staked out email addresses under the domain name “thestranger.com”. That’s ’cause “stranger.com” was already taken by a Calif. software firm. Still, it could be worse; the World Wide Web address <<www.therocket.com>> takes you to a porn site in Rhode Island.
E-MISSIVES #2: Kelly Humphries writes, “I work as a messenger in the Sea-Ev-Tac area and see a lot of odd things. Friday I saw Hal’s Meat-Seafood-Cheese on 140th and Lake City Way, the marquee offering `Dry Ice 95.’ Is this supposed to replace the outdated `Dry Ice 3.x’ product? If we wanted to take advantage of all the features found in `Dry Ice 95,’ would we have to upgrade all the frozen foods in our freezer?”
INFOTAINMENT WITHOUT THE TAINMENT: King Broadcasting’s new NW Cable News channel launches this week, tho’ some cable systems won’t see it right away. I got to tour the studio, on the top floor of KING’s building. It’s a set-up a videomaker would die for. It’s all run on Avid video decks for nonlinear digital editing, connected to a Silicon Graphics server computer storing 24 hours of footage online. With robot cameras and preprogrammed graphics, it takes only three people to handle the studio production. The channel will launch with only eight reporting teams; most of its 100 staffers will rewrite reports from KING and its Portland, Spokane and Boise sister stations into Headline News-type newscasts running all day. For big regional stories, it’ll turn into the All-Flood Channel or the All-Packwood Channel. They promise something I’ve longed for: a local (or at least regional) TV newscast where the info’s more important than celebrity fluff, sleazy murder trials, plugs for the station’s prime-time shows, snappy anchor-banter, or Mr. Food. (Next week: We complain about TCI Cable dropping the CBC for NWCN.)
KHOLERIK KORNER: Bruce Chapman, whom I’d always thought to be one of that increasingly-rare breed of respectable, thoughtful conservatives, wrote in a P-I op-ed column a few weeks back, “Is the conservative revolution running out of steam? No–not to hearJohn Carlson tell it on his KVI talk show. Indeed, the jovial Carlson, who infuriates liberals, is even more gleeful than usual these days.”… “I have enjoyed John’s company ever since he was a delightfully irreverent college student at the University of Washington, assaulting the choleric dogmas of the UW Daily.”
(1) As I’ve said before, if KVI said it was raining outside I’d still want it confirmed by a credible source.
(2) Carlson’s not so much “jovial” as snide, his snickers more like the sneers of a comic-book-movie villain or schoolyard bully.
(3) “Infuriating liberals” is a mark of laziness at the art of offense. It’s almost as easy as offending Christians.
(4) Carlson’s really quite reverent toward the three things in which he’s publicly demonstrated sincere beliefs–power, money, and ego.
(5) I was editor of the Daily when Carlson, then a member of the Board of Student Publications, tried to censure me for editing a “humor” piece by a friend of his about Ted Kennedy, similar to modern OJ “jokes.” If Chapman wants to call me “easily angered; bad tempered” (the Am. Heritage Dictionary definition of “choleric”), I can take it. If somebody called Carlson something like that, the rich pretty boy would probably whine about the Big Bad PC Thought Police trying to stifle his daring voice of rebellion. People who can raise out-of-state capital to start newspapers and think tanks are not helpless silenced voices. And people who suck up to the real centers of power in this society are not rebels, no matter how big their Harleys are.
AS WE DO EVERY TIME the sunset creeps up toward 4:15 p.m., we seek your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List (not to be confused with any other listing which may or may not appear in a newspaper such as this). Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email at the Misc. World HQ website (that URL once again: <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>).
UPDATES: The C-Space group is dead, but another group has risen to take its place providing education and advice to the leather community: SKIN (Seattle Kink Information Network). It meets at, and can be reached in care of, the Crossroads Learning Center… I’ve now tried RealAudio (the software for receiving sound files on the Internet in real time) and it’s great. Love the lo-fi sound (akin to an international call placed thru a no-name long distance company), complete with disconcerting jump cuts at random places in some files. The software’s developers promise improved quality in future releases (though any improvement is limited as long as the data comes to you on regular phone lines), but for now it’s a miracle.
THE REAL THREAT: I’m told cops are still trying to find “public safety” excuses to stop the all-ages shows at the Sailors Union hall. The SUP shows are probably the safest place to be in Belltown. The real safety problem lies on the three blocks just south of SUP. Late Fri. and Sat. nights, this is an iffy zone for single women, non-jock men, and anybody else rich bullies like to beat up on. Meanwhile, Capitol Hill continues to face gay-bashings, including a recent attack against two women outside Wildrose. Seattle is getting to be a less-safe place, and you can’t blame it on the homeless, non-whites or other “Others.” Increasingly, the threat to safe streets comes from middle- or upper-middle-class white kids, part of the “upscale” class local politicians and most local media bow down to. For the benefit of those of the suburban jock contingent who might be reading this while “slumming” in Belltown or on Broadway, a quick piece-O-advice: Despite what you might have been led to believe in recent years, intolerance, bigotry, rudeness and violence are not virtues. Bashing, harrassment and racist jokes don’t prove how daring or “politically incorrect” you are; they only prove how stupid you are. Assholes aren’t noble “rebels,” they’re just assholes. It’s not “cool” to be a creep.
INDUSTRY FOR SHOES: As you know, I love Seattle’s urban industrial areas. I love their empty streets, their old-style big low buildings, their ambience of honest hard work. I haven’t talked about one of my favorite such areas, south Ballard/Salmon Bay. The area from the Ship Canal to Leary Way is a low-key wonderland, from Mike’s Chili Tavern to the legendary recording studio (now known as John and Stu’s) where most of the early Sub Pop product was made. In between are boat shops, warehouses, lumber yards, paint factories, car-parts stores, and a couple of stray artists’ studios. But like anything real in this town, it’s targeted for “improvement.” Fred Meyer wants to build a big store near Leary & 8th NW. I like Freddy’s and would love one in Ballard, but not at the expense of an entire neighborhood. A group called SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land) wants commercial uses and their jobs preserved there; it’s asking the city to do more research on how Freddy’s would change the area. SOIL can be reached at 789-1010. Elsewhere in developmentland…
SACRIFICE: The Seattle daily papers were somewhat agog that the Legislature didn’t make the whole state subsidize a new Seattle baseball stadium. But it’s in non-King counties’ best interests not to support the Mariners. The team draws out-of-town residents’ entertainment dollars to Seattle, dollars that would otherwise be spent at home. So instead, the state will probably let the county raise an already regressive sales tax, pending a public vote, to help build a new arena whose retro architecture would bring back memories of a time when ballparks were human-scale facilities built with all-private funds. (To read arguments from new-stadium proponents, check out the unofficial Stay-dium WWW page (http://www.weber.u.washington.edu/~ayers/staydium/stayduim.html).
ONCE AGAIN, be sure to attend our next big Misc. anniversary party, Thurs., 6/8, 7:30 p.m., at the Metropolis Gallery on University between 1st and 2nd (across from the big black wind-up toy). For those planning to see SIFF’s second showing of The Year of My Japanese Cousin that night, come by afterwards.
Welcome back to Misc., the column that’s still had it with these expensive imports by local bands. When’s one of our newfangled Seattle music millionaires gonna start a label to release the Glitterhouse acts in North America where they belong?
THE FINE PRINT (back label of a Western Family Toilet Bowl Cleaner): “This product is safe for use around pets. However, it is always best that pets do not drink water from toilet.”
SUDSLESS: In the wake of some so-far successful shows at the Sailors Union hall on 1st, several other all-ages show sites are popping up, including Club 449 in Greenwood (the former G-Note tavern, now a “clean and sober” dance club that’s added rock Wed. nights in addition to its normal 12-stepper oriented adult DJ formats weekends) and The Black Citroen in Fremont (a beautifully rustic garage-turned-coffeehouse). The latter is only all-ages as a provisional format; it’s already applied for a liquor license. As a 21-plus venue it might pick up some of the north end live alt-music slack dropped when the University Sportsbar moved to “young country.” Elsewhere in 21-plusland, the Weathered Wall will have new owners as soon as the Liquor Board approves. The new guys plan to drop live shows in favor of something approximating the WW’s original all-DJ format.
MOTORCYCLE MAMMON: Remember when Harleys were associated with Hell’s Angels instead of Young Republicans? (Given a choice, I’d feel much safer among the Hell’s Angels.) Now there’s Harley Davidson Motorclothes on 4th, selling new leather gear and assorted licensed products, including cans of the official Harley Davidson coffee (but not Harley Heavy Beer or H-D cigarettes yet). The store has a not-for-sale motorcycle in the window, but the only motorcycling-related product it sells is motor oil.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: For two decades now, the ultimate perjorative for a showy, shallow hippie was “Granolahead.” The imagery behind the insult was perfect; granola can be a high-fat, high-calorie sweetened foodstuff that still bears the image of something “good for you.” But now, the false image of granola is being stripped away, revealing the chewy oatmeal-honey-brown sugar concoction as just another great American food ingulgence. This reimaging can be partly credited to RJR Nabisco and its new Oreo Granola Bars! They taste better than they sound or look. The oatmeal and glaze blend perfectly with the crumbled-and-solidified cookie crumbs and blotches of “Creme.”
NETTING: From time to time, I’ve advocated the ideal direction for the Info Hi-Way as “many-to-many” communication, not “one-to-many” monopolized media. The pivotal breakthrough in achieving this has been announced, and it’s from none other than one of the most monopolistically-minded companies in the media biz, TCI Cable. In partnership with a company run by one of the Hearst descendents, TCI says it’s gonna offer “@ Home,” a service connecting home PCs to its cable lines and from there to the Internet and commercial online services. It won’t be available anywhere until the end of the year, and might take years to get onto your local cable hookup. But if and when it does show (and if TCI doesn’t ruin it by only offering limited Net access), it’ll be the hi-bandwidth answer to anyone’s indie-networking wet dreams, ‘cuz TCI’s PR people promise transmission rates of a megabyte in three seconds. Imagine: live one-way near-broadcast-quality video, or live two-way CD ROM-quality video and other multimedia applications. Local bulletin board systems made available by Telnet software to anyone anywhere, without extra long-distance charges. CD-quality audio downloaded at twice playback speed. And all this with content choices decided not by a few big corporations but by anybody who can get their stuff together and can hook up a “server” computer (as a sometime acquaintance of hardware hackers, I know it to be a task that can be either cheap or easy but not both).
STATE HEALTH CARE REFORM `AMENDED’: The operation was a success. The patient died.
EARLY WARNING: This year’s annual column anniversary party, Fun with Misc., will be an all-ages gathering Thurs., 6/8 at the Metropolis Gallery (downtown on University between 1st and 2nd). Details forthcoming.
A non-foolish April greeting from Misc., the column that wishes it’d coined the slogan of the Mpls. zine Cake: “Copyright Infringement Is Your Best Entertainment Value.”
THE LOWRY FIASCO might not have caused our Gov. to reconsider his past actions, but it still offers the rest of us a lesson: There’s not a line between excess chumminess and harassment, there’s a continuum. A politician, whose success depends on making and keeping friendships, oughta know enough to err on the safe end of that continuum. If Lowry really was the kind of “traditional politician” conservatives denounce him as, he’d have known this. In the end it doesn’t matter that Lowry probably wasn’t trying to get those staff women into bed when he nudged or slapped them or whatever. But he should know in the world of politics, persuasion is everything. And in the world of persuasion, perception is everything.
NOT FADE AWAY AND RADIATE: I’ve dissed Wired magazine in the past, but must draw praise toward a one-page plug in its April ish all about Ed Grothus. He’s a junk collector in Los Alamos, NM. His Los Alamos Sales Co. shop buys and sells leftover artifacts (computer stuff, office stuff, construction stuff, scientific equipment) from the Los Alamos National Laboratory, birthplace of the atomic bomb and longtime recipient of Cold War spending waste. The piece doesn’t mention Ed’s son Tom, the Seattle writer-cartoonist who in the ’80s made a cute series of exquisitely droll mini-comics (Manzine, Errata, The Bermuda Love Triangle).
WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Better Faster Be$t$ellers (http://www.digimark.net/mful/bselcurr.htm) is a weekly fanciful satire of commercial literature that purports to be “entirely the result of algorithmically compressing (or compacting together) the less dense, slower titles of the current Publishers Weekly bestseller list.” It’s doubtful, tho, that a random-recombination program could come up with such mirthful titles as “Men are From the Hot Zone, Women Are From the Surface of Common Sense,” “The Celestine Bedtime Stories,” “Time to Correct the Warrior Treatment” (“by Seinfeld with Fyodor Dostoevsky”), or “Makes Me Wanna Do Ten Highly-Effective Stupid Things to 7 Driven People.” The same home page also contains Most Fucked Up Person Alive Tells All, an anonymously written pseudo-autobiography written in a cut-up nonsense style similar to that of Mark Leyner.
OF OXFORDS AND BIRKENSTOCKS: While I’ve admittedly not been Evergreen State’s biggest rah-rah booster (the world’s a lot more diverse than the world they teach at Evergreen, the mythical world of the New England/Upper Midwest “progressive” utopia), the state House’s plan to slash its budget and ratchet up its tuition strikes as pure censorship. Some GOP legislators admit it, using the word “liberal” as an all-purpose purjorative to justify their McCarthyite vindictiveness against the school. But the smear campaign against Evergreen goes beyond demonizing people who look or act different. There’s something about the very notion of a school that encourages (or at least claims to encourage) “free thought” that strikes a nerve among some who want to build a sociocultural system of naked fear, greed and obedience.
MISC.’S TOP 9:
MISC.’s BOTTOM 6:
2/94 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating four Stranger columns)
REMEMBER WHEN `HARDING SCANDAL’
MEANT WARREN G.?
Here at Misc., your laserdisc commentary track to life, we’ll be disappointed (but not shocked) if the Hollywood Hills get promptly rebuilt after the MLK Day Earthquake while South Central LA stays boarded up.
THE NEAR-START OF THE YEAR is a good time to reiterate some of the premises behind the column. Despite commonly-held beliefs to the contrary, I’m no cynic. The real cynics are the people who stopped caring: the old people ready to tell all their rad stories about the ’60s but haven’t done a thing since; the perpetrators of bland dull broadcasts like Hour Northwest and Evening Magazine. I have an undying enthusiasm for expressions of life and liveliness. I’m bored by “safe,” commercialized simulacra of real culture. I love a searing big-band classic, hot rod art, the Boat Show, a Weill song, a stunning haircut and a bright idea. I loathe easy-listening fusion, BMWs, Young Republican Harley meets, oldies radio, Nordstrom suits and all plug-and-play dogmatic systems.
CHIEF HOLIDAY MEMORY ’93: Working temp in a law office while all the regular workers exchanged gifts, listening to the firm’s Xmas carolers exult the season while the receptionist’s computer screen saver displayed MS Windows logos gently drifting thru a night sky.
EXPIRED TABS: The Times “Editors’ List” of ’93’s top news stories was chock full of those sleazy murder stories that increasingly dominate the local media. Its reader poll of top stories included none of that tabloid tedium. More evidence that what media consumers want is vastly different from what the industry thinks they want.
GOLDEN BLUNDERS DEPT.: The Posies show at Under the Rail was a mess: not so much because of the band (which did have its sloppy moments) but the audience, ruled by know-nothings who acted the way MTV told them rock audiences were supposed to act — as if the Posies were generic retro-boogie, not a harmony-driven combo delivering clever catharses. Frat types slam-danced and stage-dove even during the slowest, most lyrical songs. Co-leader Jon Auer taunted the tanked-up-on-costly-Buds crowd: “You know how they call those drinks without alcohol `smart drinks’? You must be on `dumb drinks.'” The not-getting-it guys cheered. Some guy pushed his drunk girlfriend onto the stage; she stood around not knowing what to do, and invoked a panic reaction in co-leader Ken Stringfellow — who spit on the front row during the last song. Auer smashed his guitar into the mic stand and broke the neck, then threw in on the stage and broke it in two, tore the bridge off and proceeded to swing it around by the strings when a fan took it. This was not a mark of triumph but of defeat. (The fan gave the guitar shard back later.) Auer ran to the door after the show shaking everyone’s hand and apologizing. There were no encores. I’ve since heard from the East Coast about clueless MTV viewers trying to slam dance at decidedly non-heavy Sebadoh and Velocity Girl gigs.
SIGN OF THE MONTH (from a flyer for a concert at Velvet Elvis): “No alcohol. No nihilists.” Gee, nihilists never get to have any fun!
SCARFING IT DOWN: Your obd’t correspondent isn’t upset that he wasn’t mentioned when Almost Live! and the P-I generously plugged The Stranger. But there’s gotta be way to stop mainstream media like the P-I from proclaiming everything by or for young adults as “The Voice of Generation X” — a name Vancouver novelist Douglas Coupland stole from Billy Idol‘s old band, which broke up when today’s 21-year-olds were nine. It’s even dumber than “twentysomething,” a name derived from a TV show about people who were in their 30s 10 years ago. Instead, MTV’s Tabitha Soren (that’s a great name — Kierkegaard meets the Bewitchedbaby!) wants us to call young adults “The Re-Generation.” Finally, something appropriate — a generation where sci-fi nerds rule, named with a term from Doctor Who!
CITY-O-DESTINY DEPT.: Pandemonium, that lovably Tacoma-centric rock zine, ran a big feature on the east coast band Machines of Loving Grace but neglected (probably out of ignorance) that the band’s name came from a poem by Tacoma’s own greatest literary scion, the late Richard Brautigan.
CORRECTION OF THE MONTH (XLR8R, 1/94): “In issue #7 the article on DJs by Courtney Reimer referred to DJ Quest‘s girlfriend as “fanatical.” This statement was not intended as an insult. The writer of the article and the staff of XLR8R have nothing but love and respect for Quest and his girlfriend.” The same ish of the techno-dance journal notes the arrival of “Rave brand cigarettes, `The Great American Blend.’ Cough.” Now that’s the opposite of a “smart drug.”
DUDS: In its endless drive to find old ideas to recycle, the fashion biz now plans to reissue a toned-down, commercialized version of classic punk clothes: just the look, shorn of any sociopolitical implications. Vogue dragged out the ol’ fart himself Malcolm McLarento assert that the time’s come for vinyl and dayglo hair again, to rebel against current styles that have people looking like “Seattle Oxfam girls in little flower dresses.” (Oxfam is a famine-relief group from Oxford that sells mismatched-pattern Central American cotton clothes at a chain of UK charity stores.)
MORE DUDS: One store where real Seattle apparel has interfaced with the faux-Seattle look, Basic, closed this month. But don’t fret for owner Linda Derschang. She’s abandoning the crushed-velvet dresses and Docs to start a tavern in the old Ali Baba restaurant on E. Pine, where freak-show performer Jim Rose gave his first local gigs. It’ll be a non-gender-preference-specific place with a “calm” atmosphere and no live performers.
CALIFORNICATION DEPT.: The most blatant piece of hip snobbery I’ve seen lately was a comic strip in the SF Weekly by “Derf” (syndicated from Cleveland) entitled “Things to Hate.” Its three panels: “Seattle Music” (an unkempt boy guitarist in flannel offered a sack of money by a “Record Company Suit” after said suit denounces said guitarist’s music as “derivative swill combining stolen riffs from Led Zeppelin and the Partridge Family”); “Seattle Fashion” (the same guitarist wearing underwear on his head, vowing it’s “the latest Seattle fashion”); and “Anything Seattle” (a bald guy in tattered clothes and boots drinking “the local Seattle beer favored by Soundgarden in their early, cool period” even though “I’d swear I was drinking my own urine”). The strip is part of a series entitledThe City — San Franciscans’ epithet for themselves, believing theirs to be the only real city in North America. The alleged Seattle things Derf vilifies are media stereotypes, but they have a vague basis in truth —the truth that in one American town people are making their own alternative culture without passively following the hip dictates from Frisco. And our beer’s damn good too.
REVOLTIN’ DEVELOPMENTS: We won’t know ’til May if they’ll move Nordstrom into the Frederick’s bldg. and cut up the current Nordy space for national chains. It wouldn’t be done ’til ’96 and nobody’s signed up for the Nordy bldg., but possibilities named include the Hard Rock Cafe. That’s the chain of gaudy eateries decorated with commodity fetishes of Music Industry music: Platinum Record plaques, silk jackets, gold-painted Harleys. Just the sort of money-grubbin’, idol-worshippin’, coke-snortin’, groupie-usin’, LA attitude to which Seattle rock was (at least officially) opposed. It’s nearly sacrilege to see stuff like that on the walls of the Improv comedy club — the ol’ Showbox where the local punk scene came of age. I wouldn’t wanna see local music memorabilia in some glitzy display case next to Elton John’s spectacles. A lot of local music people wouldn’t be associated with a Hard Rock anyway, ‘cuz it’ll serve meat.
YEAR-REELING-IN DEPT.: Playwright Terrence McNally spoke at a big opera convention in town. He advised opera promoters to seek (what he thinks is) the youth market: “We have to find potential bel canto lovers at the next Steely Dan concert.” Hate to tell ya, but SD broke up in 1980 and gave few live shows when they were together.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Dick’s Drive-Ins 40th Anniversary Memory Book. One word describes it:Â Deluxe.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Tootsie Surprise Pops have the standard inner Tootsie Roll wad and the standard pasty-tasting stem. What’s different is the outside, bearing such exotic artificial flavors as “Citrus Magic” and promising to “turn your mouth a surprise color!” Don’t worry — the label insists, “All colors used in Tootsie Roll Surprise Pops are listed as safe colors by the Food and Drug Administration”….Aunt Em’s Breakfast Cookies are baked, pressed-solid quarter-pound slabs of oatmeal, sugar, wheat germ, rice and either peanut butter or walnuts. $1.35 a pop, but more filling (and probably more nutritious) than a muffin or a $.99 Rice Krispie bar.
THE FINE PRINT (From a Kellogg’s Crispix box with Jay Leno‘s smug mug all over the back and three “Jay’s Jokes” on the side panel): “No Celebrity Endorsement Implied.”
THE NOT-SO-FINE PRINT: First the major record cos. turn former indie labels into indentured servants. Then they imitate that sacred institution of low-tech bombast, the indie zine. Ear to the Street is now at record stores. It’s got a crudely-drawn logo (with a lo-res scanned background); its type’s in that crudely-spaced Times Roman of early desktop publishing (complete with non-curly quotation marks). The first sign of betrayal is a tiny credit at the top: “Columbia Retail Marketing.” Then you see all the hype for Columbia artists, many of a less-than-alternative bent. The first item plugs Kate Bush, but the next endorses the Cool Runningssoundtrack (claiming the movie “captures the irresistible `Rocky’ spirit of the plucky team that stole the hearts of people around the world”). Even sillier, it claims street-cred for NKOTB (née New Kids on the Block), “five working class childhood friends who started singing rock and R&B a capella on the streets of South Boston.” It’s not the first time Columbia pathetically tried to be hip. Some historians date the Death of True Hippiedom at the label’s huge ad campaign for Moby Grape (a Frisco band with a couple of ex-Seattle musicians), under the slogan “Revolution Rock: The Man Can’t Bust Our Music.”
DEAD AIR: Last fall we noted the disappearance of new rock from local AM radio. Now we mark the passing of Top 40 radio in general. One of the last two pure-pop outlets in town, KPLZ, changed to soft-rock; the other, KXRX, reportedly will go to a “Young Country” format (even tho all the really cool country singers are old or deceased). That leaves local airplay fragmented into KUBE’s soft-soul, KISW’s hard-rock, KMTT’s boomer ballads, KNDD’s major-label “alternative,” et al. In its heyday, Top 40 was the wellspring for everything that rock developed into. On the old KJR or KOL you could hear Dylan, Stevie Wonder, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters and Sgt. Barry Sadler back-to-back, curated on the sole basis of popularity. Now everything has to fit one narrow format or another. Great songs that don’t fit a format just go unheard.
NEWER WAVES?: On a dare, I listened to the new KCMU again for a week. The year-old replacement DJs still sound over-scripted and under-rehearsed, but I can live with that. The alterna-rock selections seem more ambitious than they were a few months ago (more real-thing bands, fewer “adult acoustic” mellowheads). The world-beat rotation is still mismanaged: it interrupts high-energy sets with the American world-music industry’s tame product, curated as prosaic mood music for (yes) upscale boomers. It’s good to mix some non-rock into the regular format, but it oughta be the most vital, intruiging material of its type. What’s really missing is the station’s old sense of spontaneity, of DJs who knew and loved their work, who picked many of their own tunes. The pre-1992 KCMU thrived because it was (or was perceived as) a community service of direct communication, not something controlled by bureaucrats out to meet revenue growth rates. It’s got the latter reputation now, but I’ve heard from people there who are indignant at that reputation (a good sign). I criticize the station because I want it to be better, by reaffirming its past mission of great stuff without compromise.
PLAYING MONOPOLY: The planned Viacom/Blockbuster Video merger means the video chain that wouldn’t stock Henry and Junewill have the same owners as MTV, which wouldn’t play Madonna’s “Justify My Love.” It’d also create the planet’s biggest stockpile ofold TV reruns. In the ’70s, the Nixon guys (the only really anti-media administration) made the networks sell their syndication divisions. These units controlled many (though not all) of their parent networks’ old series, including hits like Bonanza and Perry Mason. (Clinton’s letting the nets back into that side of the business now.) CBS’s pre-1972 library became one of Viacom’s original assets. ABC’s syndie unit became Worldvision, which became Spelling Entertainment, which Blockbuster bought last year. NBC’s old shows were bought by NTA, which became the new Republic Pictures, which Blockbuster also absorbed. If Viacom succeeds in its bigger quest to buy Paramount, it’ll get Greg Brady and Capt. Picard in its trove alongside Lucy and the Cartwrights, ready (pending existing syndication contracts) to air on Viacom’s Nick at Nite and Comedy Central. Blockbuster’s original owner is a big donor to conservative politics, while certain Viacom divisions promote certain liberal causes that don’t inconvenience big business.
HEADLINE OF THE MONTH (Times, 1/13, on Tonya Harding): “She smokes, carries handguns, rebuilds car engines.”
DIXY LEE RAY, 1914-1994: Dr. Ray was a quintessential Northwest Strong Woman: individualistic and headstrong, refusing the rules society prescribed for her yet very willing to impose social rules on others, turning reactionary when confronted with ideas newer than hers. As a never-married female who climbed Mt. Rainier as a teenager and became a marine biologist, she didn’t reject the Boys’ Club as much as she fought her way into it. Her gruff schoolmarmish charm made her one of KCTS’s first stars, leading to her appointment to run the science exhibits at the 1962 World’s Fair. She championed the fair’s predictions of a “World of Tomorrow” to be fueled by cheap, safe atomic power (part of a giant federal hype campaign to bring civilian investment into Cold War technology).
A year after the Fair closed she became director of the exhibit’s permanent successor, the Pacific Science Center. There, she shooed hippies away from the reflecting pools with her self-described “bullhorn” voice, keeping the messy present from interfering with her pristine atomic future. In ’72 Nixon put her in charge of the Atomic Energy Commission, where she shilled for the nuke industry while snubbing the bureaucrats she worked beside.
She registered as a Democrat as a flag of convenience in the post-Watergate ’76 election, when her “outsider” image and insider connections helped her get elected governor. Like the Republicans in ’80 she ran as a valiant populist but became a suck-up to big business. During and after her single term (irate liberals blocked her re-nomination), she bashed environmentalists as know-nothing obstructionists meddling against the righteous path of growth.
Even in her final week, she scoffed at scandals over old US radiation tests on unknowing human subjects. She used her mastery of scientific jargon not toward “scientific method” but to advocate blind trust in authority. She was a true pioneer, stubbornly holding to the frontier mentality of relentless exploitation.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, order your valentine an anatomically correct chocolate heart from the PBS Signals catalog, and heed these words from the ’70s French film The Marvelous Visit: “America is always very distant from us. It’s the thing we dream about and cannot reach.”
PASSAGE
Camille Paglia in one of the few succinct (tho’ still obtuse) statements in her megatome Sexual Personae: “Narcissists receive callers without opening the door.”
REPORT
My book on the real history of the Seattle Scene is now drafted. Certain Eastern bigshots have it. If they reject it, I’ll form an entity to get it out. I’ll be asking for donations if that happens. Consider yourselves warned. Thinking also about a new expanded format for the newsletter, as a shameless excuse to raise the subscription price. If you’ve any content suggestions, let me know.
WORD-O-MONTH
“Amphistylar”
12/93 Misc. Newsletter
WITH NAFTA, OUR JOBS GO TO MEXICO.
WITHOUT IT, THEY GO TO KOREA
This month’s Misc. is humbly dedicated to Fellini (the lord of dreams), Price (the lord of nightmares), and Phoenix (the dude of “Whatever, wherever, have a nice day”).
REAGANISM REDUX: Initiative 602 went down to a decisive defeat, with the biggest margin of difference coming from the depressed timber towns of southwest Wash. that now depend on state social services. The less-immediately-devastating Init. 601 narrowly won; future public investment could be limited to little more than its current insufficient level.
Don’t think the election wasn’t important just ’cause it was only local, or ‘cuz the mayoral race pitted a golf-course gladhander with a businessman-turned-flake, neither of whom seemed very concerned for non-yups. Inits. 601 and 602 were being hyped like crazy by business interests and the talk-radio goon squad. They wanted to force big state budget cuts and restrain the state’s ability to raise future revenue. The audio demagogues used the tiresome anti-thought bombast about gettin’ tuff, kickin’ butt and “sending the politicians a message.” But the goal of the measures’ biggest backers, the liquor/tobacco lobbies and big employers, was to halt implementation of the new state health-care reform plan, which would be partly funded by liquor, tobacco and payroll taxes. The campaign’s been full of the usual lather about “government waste.” In real life it’s not that easy to spot real inefficiency, and the ones who do it best, department middle managers, are among the first to be fired in budget cuts. If the big boys get their way, they could end up demolishing education, environmental enforcement, the tattered social “safety net,” and our already pathetic arts support. This isn’t “cutting fat,” it’s chopping the public sector’s limbs, ensuring corporate veto power over Washington’s future. Do all you can to stop this.
COOKIN’: I just had a horrible thought that the Hollywood people who lost their hillside mansions will all move here. Calif. was settled by people who treated any problem by moving away from it. Things getting touchy in LA? Let’s move out to a “nicer” (i.e., whiter) area. Malibu turns out to be a firetrap? Look up the prices of beach property in the San Juans.
ARREARS: In one of its few astute passages, that wacky Time cover story on Pearl Jam asserted that pop fans had become annoyed by such music-industry nonsense as “MTV close-ups of George Michael’s butt.” As part of his big contract-breaking suit against Sony Music, Michael now claims it was a stunt butt, hired when Sony image experts decided his own moves weren’t hot enough. Michael, as you know, no longer appears at all in his videos (letting channel surfers imagine that the songs are really being performed by a black person or at least by someone less dorky looking).
COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #3: Nobody to my knowledge has tried to save the downtown Woolworth. Folks say they like my call to save the Dog House, but nobody wants to participate. But one preservation issue caught the city’s imagination like mad. Seven Gables Theaters moved the Neptune’s repertory movies around the corner to the Varsity. The Neptune will close until Dec. 17, then reopen for first-run films. Somebody sent a fax charging that the Neptune would be “gutted” and shorn of such “historic” accouterments as the fake stained-glass art and the ship’s-bow concession stand (both of which date back only to a 1982 remodel). Management claims the concession stand will stay, as will the padded interior doors with their portholes. The Plexiglas tableaux will stay, but might get curtained off. The place is being repainted (they haven’t picked the final colors), and will get new seats, carpets, projectors, curtains and speakers and a bigger screen. What remains to be seen is how the repertory shows and Rocky Horrorparties will fare in the Varsity’s less-funky confines; though it’ll be easier to fill the smaller space with “smaller” movies. But where’ll they put the “Celebrity Doghouse” bulletin board?
COOL PLACE DEATH WATCH #4: The Last Exit on Brooklyn, Seattle’s oldest extant coffeehouse (est. 1967), is closing any week now, thanks to UW development plans. Another restaurant with the same name, staff and menu will open on the north stretch of Univ. Way, by the University Sportsbar, but it won’t be the same without the cig-smoke-aged wallpaper, the big round tables, the convenient location at the campus’s edge where profs (not always male) wooed students (not always female), where grad students played all-night sessions of the Japanese board game Go, where pre-PC programmers from the nearby Academic Computing Center pored over their latest FORTRAN code, where umpteen bad folk singers attempted umpteen open mikes, where countless starving students had countless pots of coffee and cheap peanut butter-banana sandwiches.
RECLUSE DISREGARD (Times, 10/24): “Paul Allen is the shyest multibillionaire you’ll never meet.” Fact is, all our rich people are private souls. Ever since the foiled kidnapping plot against nine-year-old George Weyerhaeuser in ’36, our “prominent” families have been among the most reticent of any local elites in the country. While other towns’ tycoons hosted charity balls and funded symphonies and museums, our rich kids went home every night to their suburban estates and their car collections. It’s always been a bitch trying to get any high-culture or nightlife things started here, ‘cuz too many of our “civic leaders” wanted no part of social activity. Even now, attempts to start private clubs or entertainment concepts for rich kids usually fail, ‘cuz even young Microsoft stock millionaires will drive from Woodinville to Seattle only when they absolutely must.
POSITIVE STEPS?: The Bellevue Journal-American ran a front page piece attempting to allay middle-class Eastsiders’ stereotypes about Crossroads, the only part of Bellevue where immigrant families and blue-collar folk can afford to live. The foreign-language voices and non-liposuctioned physiques in the neighborhood have given it the reputation of “the bad part of town.” To ease this, the J-A brought out Bellevue’s police chief, who himself lives there (it’s also the only part of town where cops can afford to live). He insisted that in Crossroads it’s still “safe to walk the streets.” Who walks in Bellevue at all?
THE ‘MATS: Taco Bell restaurants have these wacky tray liners with a big “Underground” logo at the bottom of a display about “The A to Z of Alternative Culture.” It’s excerpted from an old issue of Spin, who stole the concept from the NY fashion/art mag Paper. Only 10 alphabet letters are included on the placemat, including A for Athens, Ga. (“the town that made `college rock’ a three-letter word: REM”), I for Industrial (“It’s harsh, aggressive, and, to the uninitiated, repetitive and monotonous. But that’s sort of the point — you have to be one of the initiated”), K for Karaoke (“…appeals to both the ironic and narcissistic sides of today’s hipsters”), L for Like (the word), S for Sequels (“all the movies that we go to see are the same as the movies we saw last year. That’s entertainment”), and Z for ‘Zines (“Technology has fallen into the wrong hands, and as a result, fanzines are everywhere — thousands of pointless, stapled pages of goo-goo-ga-ga, written for losers by losers”). First, this is obviously a piece of superficial pseudo-information, the very sort of corporate-media fluff that alternative culture tries to be an alternative to. Second, going to sequel movies in multiplexes and using “like” in every sentence is hardly underground stuff. Third, if you were really trying to join alternative culture, why would you be in a Taco Bell?
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Hidden Valley Ranch has a new line of flavored kiddie salad dressings — nacho, taco, and pizza! Not just for kiddies, they’re for everybody who wants (or has) to eat their greens, but can’t stand the holier-than-thou Birkenstock aesthetic currently surrounding them.
DUDS: If designer grunge seemed silly enough, just wait for designer riot grrrl. The NY Times described designer Nicole Miller‘s show with “girl gangs” roaming a cinder-block runway, “razor blades dangling from their ears, zippers slashing across the clothes” representing what Miller calls “this whole tough-girl kind of edge going on” as inspired by what she calls “all-girl bands” like Belly, theBreeders and the Juliana Hatfield Three — none of which are, in fact, all-girl. Ever wonder what the boy musicians in what clueless grownups call “all-girl bands” think? “Gee, thought I had one last time I looked.”
TRUE CRIME: Don’t tell anyone you read it here, but some weeks ago some lame copycat tried to imitate the ball-and-chain stunt on SAM’s Hammering Man art monstrosity. This lame copycat vandal’s idea: to spray-paint “socks” on the big iron guy’s legs. And they weren’t even argyles.
PRESSED: Out of fond remembrance or whatever, the Rocket‘s “NW Top 20” chart (supposedly confined to regionally-made product) has recently found space for the Melvins (who moved to Calif. six years ago) and CD repackagings of Jimi Hendrix (who left Seattle at age 18 and came back only on tour). Will they find space on the chart for the new solo album by Guns n’ Roses bassist/ex-Fastbacks drummer Duff McKagan, or anything by Roosevelt High grad Nikki Sixx or Garfield grad Quincy Jones? Or the next CD by Robert Cray, who not only went south around the time the Melvins did, but soon after lost his local street-cred by marrying a fashion model?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Barflyer is Stephanie Emmett’s monthly tabloid about the joys of hanging out in bars, wasting one’s evenings at foosball and darts (sounds fine to me). The Sept. issue included the proclamation that “it’s cool to play pool!”, noting that “celebrities such as Michael J. Fox, David Brenner, Madonna, Eddie Murphy, Roseanne Barr and Randy Travis have picked up the cue.” The best part is the horoscope, “Playin’ With the Planets,” which advises people of every sign that it’ll be a great month for playing pulltabs.
BACK IN THE BOX: Now that KIRO has an anchor desk again, it’s using this weird graphic when anchorpeople chat with reporters. Even though both people are still seated within 15 feet of one another, they’re cut up into separate sides of a split screen above the captions “KIRO” and “Newsroom.”
SEAL OF DISAPPROVAL: Seattle’s first gift to the music-video universe is back! Sort of. Kevin Seal was a UW drama major who passed a national “talent” search and served as an MTV VJ for four years. For the past couple of years he’s stayed in New York, auditioning for industrial-video productions while trying to regain the spotlight. Seal has now retaken the airwaves as second banana to fellow MTV throwaway Dave Kendall on Music Scoupe, a weekly hour of videos and rock-star gossip that makes a viewer appreciate MTV’s comparatively thoughtful selection and presentation. How unimportant is this show, you ask? KCPQ airs it Sunday nights at 1 a.m. – after an hour of infomercials.
PLUGGED: New cable channels keep getting announced, in preparation for the promised 500-channel delirium. We’ve already discussed The Game Show Channel and the Cartoon Network, neither available in this area. Coming soon, allegedly: Cable Health Club (all aerobics, all the time!), the Jazz Channel, and the Food Channel. No all-curling channel yet, though some foreign sports events are now being offered on pay-per-view.
THE ENFORCERS: The new hoopla over violence on TV is pure-n’-simple censorship, promoted by some of the paternalistic-liberal politicians who professed to hate censorship in the Reagan era. Back then, the White House tried to silence art/entertainment containing sex, cuss words or non-rightist politics, but wholeheartedly endorsed shoot-em-up movies and sought campaign endorsements from their killing-is-fun macho stars. This new drive is at least partly a ploy by the Dems to get back at the GOP’s past folderol, partly a ploy to show pro-censorship independent voters that Dems can be just as tuff on those nasty media people.
ILL WILL DEPT.: Ever since I caught a glimpse of the Artists for a Hate-Free America benefit at the Crocodile, I’ve been obsessed with the contradictions of contemporary artists and musicians preaching against hate. Organizers made sure the people on stage at the benefit were smart rockers and folk-rockers like Peter Buck and Sister Psychic. Much of the rest of the art and music scenes, though, are addicted to the adrenaline high from sustained hatred. You don’t have to be a right-winger to be controlled by the power of hate. I’ve seen too much poetry and “political humor” based on the premise of “Hatemongers are bad. Let’s kill them all!” I’ve seen shows by TchKung!, Seven Year Bitch and the Nuyorican Poets that were exercises in righteous posturing, relishing in the dehumanization of anybody who ate incorrect food, possessed incorrect genitalia, lived in incorrect towns and/or wore incorrect clothes. The whole radical/punk tradition presupposes disrespect for anyone outside “our” pure elite. “People like you and me” arenot intrinsically superior to other Americans. “Alternative” people are subject to the same temptations as all humans, including that of fearing and hating people different from us. We all have to confront our own bigotries, not just those of other people. We have to reach outside our college/coffeehouse world to build connections of love with other classes, other subcultures. The antigay agitators cleverly built their fear campaigns in small-town churches, in direct one-on-one organizing. We have to get out there too, and we’ll have to leave our snobbery behind. Bohemian elitism is an aesthetic of divisiveness. The homophobes use divisiveness too, far more effectively. We’ve gotta fight fire with water, fight division with unity.
XMAS ’93: The biggest toy news this season is that all the Ninja Turtles junk has been replaced by Barney junk, a ploy toward a new generation of pacifist parents. In better news, Mattel has licensed an independent manufacturer to bring back two of my favorite electrical toys, Creepy Crawlers (you bake the “icky insects” yourself from molds, a Thingmakerreg. oven and Plastigoopreg.) and the Vac-U-Former (you pump a pressure mold that turns sheets of plastic into toy car bodies). Hot new stuff includes Chip-A-Way (a “pretend rock” you break up with a plastic hammer and chisel to reveal “a cave man and dinosaur parts” that you then assemble and paint) and the board game Eat at Ralph’s (with cardboard junk food and a diner billboard with an outstretched mouth; “Stuff Ralph with all your snacks. But if he eats too much, it all comes back!”). Moms who want their kiddies to learn future career skills have a few main options: lots of video-paintbox devices and electronic trivia/math games that look like tiny PCs; or the line of McDonald’s Happy Meals Makers (which let you make “creamy shakes,” “real-looking fries using bread,” “real cookies without baking,” or the scariest, “easy, tasty `burgers'” from vanilla wafers and other common household ingredients). Or, you can mail-order Road Construction Ahead, a half-hour video “recorded at actual construction sites” with shots of “bulldozers, excavators, rock crushers, bucket loaders, and giant trucks!” Awesome.
FLAKING OUT: We may be seeing the end of breakfast cereal as a modern art form. Ralston Purina has stopped its series of limited-run movie and TV tie-in cereals marketed partly to box collectors (Breakfast With Barbie, Nintendo Cereal System, Batman, Urkel-Os, the Robin Hood tie-in Prince of Thieves, and the great Addams Family cereal). Nabisco has sold its admittedly weak line-up of brands to Post. Recession-weary shoppers are flocking to house brands and Malt-O-Meal’s big bags of wheat puffs, which cost less ‘cuz they don’t support cool commercials, toy surprises or mail-order offers (let alone R&D into new shapes and colors). Girl Trouble used to toss out cereal at some of its gigs; so did the late Andy Wood. Cereal is more than the first food of the day, it’s pop culture you can eat. Its ever-changing forms and flavors make it the ultimate American hi-tech food. Its modern crass-commercial reputation belies its distant origin in a Michigan health spa, as chronicled in T. Corraghessen Boyle’s bestselling novel The Road to Wellville (soon to be a major motion picture). It’s time to do your part to keep an essential part of our culture from going soggy. Buy an extra box of Cocoa Puffs today. Future generations will thank you.
‘TIL NEXT TIME, when we bring back America’s only reliable year-end In/Out list, ponder the pseudo-profound words of the Joop! Jeans ads: “In the uterus of love we are all blind cavefish.”
Raymond Carver, now the most popular dead sage since Jim Morrison, with some advice for life I’ve tried to follow all my career (as quoted in Jon Winokur’s Friendly Advice): “Eat cereal for breakfast and write good prose.”
My history of local music still awaits publication. A rough draft is now going the rounds on the east coast; initial reaction is that publishers might have liked it if it had less music history and more superstar gossip than I want to include. I’d prefer to deal w/local people, but there aren’t any regional book publishers interested in something this non-yuppie and non-tourist. Anybody want to help start a publishing house?
Seattle’s brightest written-wd. guy’s still available for all your desktop-pub. and document-proc. needs. Leave a message at 448-3536.
“Phenocryst”
9/93 Misc. Newsletter
NO WEATHER JOKES! NO SLUG JOKES! NO COFFEE JOKES!
Here at Misc., the only column that wonders why ads for toilet paper consistently use images of infants (the only humans who don’t use the stuff), we feel obligated to repeat a disclaimer issued earlier this summer: A concert held in the middle of Eastern Washington with no public transportation cannot by any logical definition be called a “Seattle” show. I wouldn’t even call it an Ellensburg show.
`OTHER’ WISE: Two readers have suggested that the source of “The Other,” that now-ubiquitous term used by Reflex writers to rant about how bigoted everybody outside the Art World is, was Simone de Beauvior’s classic essay The Second Sex. She apparently used it to describe how people divide the world of their own minds and bodies (“The Self”) from everything else in the universe (“The Other”). Most of the folks using the term today intend to denounce other people’s bigotries, but inadvertently reveal their own (damning entire groups of people, defined by such totally superficial criteria as their race and gender, as incapable of sympathy toward Otherness). We need alternatives to bigotry, not just alternate forms of bigotry.
NOSTALGIA REVISITED: Pop-culture recycling is completely out of hand. With every permutation of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s re-played to death, they’re now reviving gimmicks from the ’80s that didn’t make it the first time. Seventeen brashly proclaims that thefashion trend for fall will be — ready? — “The New Romantics: Fall’s fresh style takes its cue from the romantic dandy, mixing floaty white shirts with an old English beat.” Where’s Adam Ant when we need him?
Speaking of dumb fads, did I tell ya I got a designer grunge fashion spread from a March ish of the Glasgow Sunday Post? Imagine — telling the Scots how to wear plaid.
And even worse, some UW-licensed sweatshirt company’s got a “Grunge Puppy” design: a UW Husky looking like it’s high on something, in torn jeans, Docs and an open flannel shirt over a T-shirt reading “Eat, Sleep, Party.” Looks as horrid as it reads.
MUST TO AVOID: Under no circumstances should you pay money for The Seattle Style Guide, a self-published handbook for new residents. The author lives in Bellevue (the first sign of knowing nothing about Seattle), he refers to certain obnoxious yuppie bars as hangouts for the “artistic crowd,” he calls Kenny G Seattle’s proudest contribution to music, and he suggests you learn to appreciate grunge by playing a little Pearl Jam in between your Eagles records.
CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE DEPT.: KCPQ’s got this ad chiding all the recent turmoil, firings and resignations in local TV news departments, and offering its own nightly information alternatives – A Current Affair and Inside Edition!
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Teen Fag is a little zine of stories and art not exclusively for teens or fags. Its main selling point is a review of the final Seattle show by G.G. Allin, NY’s self-proclaimed “violent and obscene rock performer,” who died weeks later. There’s also an extensive piece on Naughty Bits cartoonist Roberta Gregory. Available at Sound Affects Records on E. John (home of the sign, “Hey boys and girls: Home taping is killing the music industry. Keep up the good work”)….
Also available there is Sixth Form, a stapled Xeroxreg. zine with a thickly laminated cover, devoted to the (or should I say “thee”) gothic side of things. Issue #2 documents the heretofore undocumented Seattle/Salt Lake City band connection, apparently based on the ethereal/dreamscape bands Faith and Disease, Mary Throwing Stones and Ursula Tree. The zine celebrates a tight little clique of black-shawled explorers down there in Zion. Local coverage includes Diamond Fist Werny, Self Help Seminar, and a brief piece on Common Language‘s forthcoming British CD. (Hey, Common-ers: You’re one of the greatest bands around, but import-only releases by American alternative bands sucked 13 years ago. They still suck today. Same goes for the Walkabouts: Please get your stuff out at the affordable price, even if it’s on a label the size of eMpTy.)
DEAD AIR: It’s been a while since we talked of the KCMU Konflict. The CURSE/UW lawsuit is somewhere in the digestive tract of litigation. It’s been almost a year since station management imposed authoritarian controls and bland programming. Their official reason was to keep increasing station ratings and revenues. Even by those dubious measures, they’re an utter failure. So why would they apparently rather see the station die than admit they made a mistake?
It’s becoming clear that money isn’t what they’re after. The mess now seems to really be after the one thing all good UW administrators crave above all other desires: administrative turf. In the “nonprofit” equivalent of a corporate takeover, the honchos at KUOW down the hall wanted to assert control over KCMU, to turn it from a volunteer community station to a paid-staff institution that would suck up to wealthy listeners and corporate donors in the established NPR manner. They sincerely don’t understand that KCMU thrived as a very different station, with a different audience and a different operating philosophy. If they really want to make KCMU strong again, they should gentlemanly step aside and let it be run by the people who know how to run it right, the ex-volunteers who built it.
CLICHESTOPPERS NOTEBOOK: The only thing more lame nowadays than calling your band “grunge” is to call it “not grunge.” I’ve been reading the latter label applied in the last month to everything from the cowgirl-kitsch Ranch Romance to local rappers to a compilation record of frat-party bands (see below). As early as 1990, stupid national rockzines labeled 90 percent of Seattle bands as “not your typical Seattle band.” Don’t tell me what you’re not, tell me what you are.
NOTES: Just when you thought music meant something again, the forces of mindless entertainment prepare to counterattack. I’ve seen what promoters and managers are offering as the Next Big Thing, and it ain’t pretty: white funk bands. Jocks and fratboys from Portland, Boise and elsewhere, in backward caps and butt-cleavage jeans, waving attempted guesses of gang hand signals. These guys reinterpret Funkadelic and Run-DMC the way George Thorogood reinterpreted the blues, into one-dimensional macho posturing. The sounds associated by mainstream America (rightly or wrongly) with drug dealers are being revamped into the property of drug buyers. Actually, some of it’s stupid-cute, as long as you don’t take these guys as seriously as they take themselves. Few onstage sights are sillier than accountants’ sons hunching their backs and shouting “Yo!” And as for the authenticity issue, ya gotta figure that your average ex-high school football player has probably had more black friends than your average ex-conservatory jazz player.
CAN’T YOU SMELL THAT SMELL?: One of the few pleasures of my current unemployment (you thought this column was a full-time job or something?) is living without fear of the dreaded cologne cult cornering me at my desk. At most every office I’ve worked in, even spaces separated from the public by two layers of reception desks, I’d invariably get confronted this time of year by blank-eyed young adult males demanding that I buy their cheesy impostor colognes or cheesier framed prints of floral arrangements. I don’t know who they are or where they come from. I haven’t been able to stop any of them long enough to ask.
CULTURE CLUB: With something of a budget finally passed and health-care reform a while away, the right-wing Gridlock Machine has been backtracking for targets. Among the “scandals” recently recycled on talk radio and in pundit magazines is that all-purpose nemesis, the National Endowment for the Arts. They’re giving the same ol’ blah-blah about Our Tax Dollars and flaky artist types who mock all that is pure and proper. The real scandal about American arts funding isn’t that taxpayers are supporting too much “controversial” art but too little.
A couple of people who say “fuck” on stage notwithstanding, most NEA money subsidizes formula entertainment for the rich. It’s just as bad on the local level. Washington’s reputation as an artistic center is overrated and based more on consumption than production. We rank well in the bottom half of states in terms of public arts support. And a lot of that money goes either to bland sculptures by out-of-state artists, to “major performing institutions,” or to “support services” (buildings and bureaucrats); while the citizens who make images/films/texts, particularly of the non-touristy or non-upscale kind, scrape by as always.
The rich should pay for their own lifestyles, either directly or thru corporate support. I don’t wanna see any bassoonists lose their jobs in today’s economy, but if the symphony and the Rep are gonna get public money, it should be for public stuff: free or discounted shows, in-school appearances, etc. Since we’re always gonna have inadequate arts funding, what we can spend should emphasize investment in new works, works that might or might not find a big audience, works that might or might not even be good (experiments must be allowed to fail).
NEWS THAT DIDN’T MAKE THE NEWS: About 10 Seafair parade drunks headed to Broadway near midnight 7/30, presumably to fag-bash (baseball bats in hand), but were rounded up by a herd of police and State Patrol cars sent up the hill from the parade site.
COP OUT?: Twist Weekly claims to be the real reason Police Chief Patrick Fitzsimons resigned. The gay tabloid ran some articles about Paul Grady, an openly gay police sergeant who resigned in May. He said it due to harassment by fellow officers; but only Twistreported Grady’s claim that Fitzsimons specifically allowed and even encouraged the harassment. More damaging, Twist claims Fitzsimons’s homophobic attitude was a front — that the chief privately made moves on Grady and other male officers, and that he once tried to pick up a teenage restaurant busboy. Local mainstream media (except for KVI talk host Mike Siegel) pooh-poohed or hush-hushed the allegations, and treated Fitzsimons’s sudden resignation as the ordinary retirement of a great public servant. (Seattle Weekly did mention it, including Fitzsimons’s denials of all charges). If true, it’s another tragedy of the Closet — of someone trapped between his true self and a career that made him deny it, only to hurt himself and others. In any case, Fitzsimons still leaves a questionable legacy: the harassment of gay officers, overzealous tactics against young and/or black people, the still-in-the-works Weed and Seed paramilitary-occupation plan.
POST(ER) IMPRESSIONISM: Somebody (not me) put up street posters along Broadway and U Way, to harass my ex-employerFantagraphics Books. Around an old teenage photo of co-owner Kim Thompson (misspelled as “Thomson”) and rows of dollar signs, the poster invites people to work there and “earn up to $500 a week. Summer may be hot, but the heat is on!” Apparently, the office was inundated by calls from Ave rats seeking big bucks at the comix publisher. The hoax was probably instigated by one of those firees. The same person may have been responsible for a press release claiming Fantagraphics star Peter Bagge (Hate) was leaving to start his own comix company; the phone number on the press release belongs to a Bellevue dry cleaner.
PHILM PHUN: If you’re like me, you’re tired of hearing some stupid movie star favorably describing their stupid movie as “like a roller coaster ride,” sometimes using old Disneyland lingo as “an E Ticket ride.” For that matter, a lot of films these days are being turnedinto theme park rides, usually cheesy and expensive ones. I say, if we’re going to have theme park attractions based on movies, let’s have ’em based on good movies: The Murnau Sunrise streetcar, the Magnificent Ambersons sleigh ride, the Lover Model A (on a fake colonial-Saigon street), the Women on the Verge taxi, the (adult-scale) Battleship Potemkin baby carriage, the Detour hitchhiking experience, the Lift elevator ride, the Women in Love male wrestling show…the list is endless. And concession stands: Under the Volcano bar drinks, Merchant-Ivory cucumber sandwiches, Repo Man plates of shrimp, Prospero’s Books wedding feasts. Let’s have licensed merchandise from good movies, too: Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! bath toys, When the Wind Blows fallout detectors…
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: I know this department used to appear a lot more often in the past than it does now, but that’s because fewer great new junk foods are being developed these days. One reason: the consumer-products conglomerates, like the media conglomerates, are fading. The recession’s led consumers toward store-brand products, while the breakup of the mass media leave fewer resources to build new brands. (Procter & Gamble, once TV’s biggest advertiser, whose daytime dramas inspired the term “soap opera,” is laying off an eighth of its workforce due to permanent downsizing.) But General Mills is giving it one more go by launching Fingos, billed as “the cereal you eat with your fingers.” They’re actually like little cinnamon-graham or oat crackers, and quite habit-forming indeed. They’re also a great on-the-run alternative to gooey breakfast bars.
DYING WORDS: Two separate parties have sent me copies of These EXIT Times, an 8-pp. zine distributed at the Oregon Country Fair by a small group called VHEMT (Voluntary Human Extinction Movement; the acronym refers to “vehemence”). Business interests sometimes accuse environmentalists of being anti-people; these folks really are. They want the human race to agree to die off without reproducing, so “the earth can recover.” They don’t want you to kill yourself, just to leave no progeny. I don’t see how they can expect ideology to overcome standard-equipment biological instinct. Besides, why preserve the land for future generations if there won’t be any? (Remember Reagan’s Interior Secretary James Watt, who said it was OK to exhaust the Earth because the Rapture was coming soon?)
ON THAT INSPIRATIONAL NOTE, be sure to visit the years-in-the-making Toaster Museum inside the Wonderful World of Art studio-gallery, refurbish your home for cheap with durable, utilitarian items from office furniture surplus stores (dumping the working tools of all those laid-off bank employees), and heed these words of Bret Maverick: “My pappy always said to never cry over spilt milk. It could’ve been whiskey.”
Robert Anton Wilson from Reality Is What You Can Get Away With (published in 1992, already badly dated): “In an accelerating, fast-evolving universe, whoever does not change moves backward relatively. Did you ever notice that takes only 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative, without changing a single idea?”
Still looking for people to talk to for my history of the Seattle music scene. I especially need to talk to people who’ve been involved with local music since the mid-’80s, not just from the early punk days. So write me, OK?
Also, I’m thinking of an alternative tourist guide to Seattle, showing the joints everybody who comes here wants to see but regular tourist guides don’t mention (the Off Ramp, Jimi’s grave, et al.). Depending on space, it may also have a few cheap eating/drinking/shopping/staying places. What do you think should be in it? (Don’t nominate only your own business.)
“Lenticular”
THE REAL MESSAGE OF `EDUCATIONAL’ CARTOONS:
YOU CAN GET AWAY WITH SHODDY WORK
IF IT MEETS BUREAUCRATIC REQUIREMENTS
8/93 Misc. Newsletter
(incorporating three Stranger columns)
AREN’T YOU GLAD BUDWEISER’S GOT BRANCH PLANTS?
Here at Misc., where we can’t help but repeat what you all must have thought about Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts (i.e., surely he could have picked better), we think the next Brit blue-eyed soul singer, Mercer Island blues babe, or frat-boy funk band that pretends to be black should have to earn it. Get thrown out of Denny’s, get hassled by cops just for standing outside, get rejected for jobs and mortgages for no good reason, see your band blackballed from almost every venue and rental hall in town while blue-eyed party boys imitate your music at showcase clubs every week. Only then you could boast about how much soul you’ve got.
UPDATE: Remember when we talked about the old Seattle band that had a logo instead of a written name and a yelp instead of a spoken name? They’ve re-formed! Look for ’em in the club listings any week now, printed as “Aiieee!” or something similar.
ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES: During the Stranger‘s recent off week, some folks with access to DTP and too much time on their hands created a 12-pp. spoof, the Whimper. It’s OK and sorta funny, ‘cept for the “Miscue” column. I’ve been spoofed two or three times now, and nobody’s gotten it right. Keep trying.
1991 NOSTALGIA: I’d forgotten, as many of you likely forgot, that no Democrat gets nominated for President without the support of pundits and interest groups that demand a business-as-usual foreign policy. By starting Gulf War Lite, the Pentagon’s acting just like the Irish and Mideast vigilante armies that answer opponents’ isolated acts of mindless terror with their own. The week before the missile attack on Iraqi intelligence HQ, the new Wired had a short article claiming tomorrow’s warfare would be “infrastructure war”: precision raids against electronic and information targets. Maybe Wired really is the magazine o’ the future it claims to be.
LACTOSE INTOLERANCE: Tower Records Pulse! sez Danken’s licensed “Strawberries and Pearl Jam” ice cream won’t come back from its limited production engagement, partly ‘cuz some band members are anti-dairy vegans. One potential successor: “Nirvanilla.”
THE SAME OLD SAW: KIRO’s running a half-hour infomercial paid by the timber industry. Washington Private Forest Report, hosted by ex-KIRO anchorman Jim Harriott, is a self-congratulatory paean for timber management’s current environmental practices, with edited remarks by corporate, governmental, tribal and environmental “leaders” who all back the industry line about “a balanced solution” between ecological and commercial needs (i.e., letting the big companies cut all they can get away with). The show only discusses practices on company-owned lands, without directly mentioning the dispute over clearcutting old growth on Forest Service lands, though its “trust us” message is clearly meant to apply to public as well as private lands. Shows like this reduce issue politics to the level of campaign politics: the side with money gets to say anything in the media at any time; the side without money only gets a few words in real newscasts, edited by station employees and “balanced” with words from the moneyed side.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Zealot claims to be Seattle’s first-ever motorcycle zine (there’ve been bicycle and scooter zines), by and for the local rider community (more intelligent, and more co-ed, than old biker stereotypes suggest). A glance at the staff box reveals the street integrity here: 14 people listing the bikes they personally ride, plus one business manager who admits to having a Toyota Corolla. Within the free tabloid are bike photos, hot bike comix, repair tips, race reviews, and Dana Payne’s essay on the differences between riders and non-riders: “They look at us and see lemmings, chattering happily down the road to destruction. We look back at them and see the eyes of rabbits, of guinea pigs. Soft. Dewy. Fearful.” And not a single precious Young Republican Harley in the whole paper….When Adam Woog wrote his book about local inventors, I said it was the kind of book I should have written. His and Harriet Baskas’s new Atomic Marbles & Branding Irons is a book I have tried to write (the backing never came through). It’s a guide to “museums, collections and roadside attractions in Washington and Oregon.” You get all about the General Petroleum Museum on Capitol Hill, Dick and Jane’s Art Spot in Ellensburg, the Walker Rock Garden in West Seattle, the Advertising Museum in Portland, and the “world’s largest hairball” at Oregon’s Mount Angel Abbey (but not Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere). Recommended.
MAD RAGS: You can now get the most realistic G-word-wear from one of the authentic sources used by the original musical creators. Yes, the Salvation Army store on 4th Ave. S. has opened an “Alternative Gear” boutique, complete with 15-percent discount flyers for “ripped flannel.” (G-word insiders prefer Value Village or Goodwill.) Meanwhile, USA Today (which boasts to advertisers that, “compared with the general population,” its readers are “23 percent more likely to dance/go dancing”) ran a pic of a truly stupid designer-G-word teen couple taken from the JC Penney Back To School ’93 collection. Maybe if the chain likes the Seattle urban look so much now, it’ll think about having a store in town again.
LOVE’S LABOURS: We now know that several weeks back, Kurt was arrested and went to jail for three hours on a domestic-violence rap, before being released without charges. Cops say they went to his place on a neighbor’s noise complaint. There,Courtney supposedly said they’d argued about his gun-buying binge and their busted $300 juicer; they supposedly shoved each other, he supposedly dragged her to the floor and choked her. (So much for juiceheads being laid-back.) She insisted to the P-I that it was all a big misunderstanding, that they’d argued but not physically fought, that he’s still a great guy and an ardent feminist. She echoed these remarks at the Hole gig at the Off Ramp: “This is a song about domestic violence, not! I don’t mean to joke about it, I know it’s a serious issue and shit…” The show itself was one of those gigs where the band valiantly keeps efficiently chopping away throughout the frontperson’s half-drunken stumblings (she gave up on guitar playing in the middle of a couple of songs). In short, a definitive sloppy old-fashioned punk show. Perfect.
THE FINE PRINT (disclaimer title on the public-access show H.A.R.D. TV (Hardbody Alternative Rock Digest)): “All bands on this show sound 500% better live. This audio is the worst (and we know it).”
WHERE AMERICA SHOPPED: It’s one thing for Sears to kill its catalog, but to remove the candy counter at its 1st Ave. flagship (its oldest surviving U.S. store) is unforgivable. That little stand between the first-floor escalators was the heart and soul of the place. They might as well stop selling DieHards.
PHILM PHACTS: Free Willy is a new mid-budget “family film” about a boy who helps a lonely killer whale escape a nasty, fictional “Great Northwest Water Park.” Execs from Sea World, the Anheuser-Busch-owned theme park chain with 18 performing killer whales (all named Shamu), have reportedly been to the San Juans, hobnobbing with area whale experts to help assemble their anti-Willy PR campaign. They’re telling you that captive orcas have great lives and are treated fine, that no Willys need ever be freed….I got to see a few scenes from Sleepless in Seattle some months back, and the finished film is every bit as stupid as those scenes cracked it up to be. Yo, Hollywood: We’re not all rich boomer airheads here.
NOTES: The Chamber of Commerce’s idea of Seattle music, Kenny G, will play the Coliseum in Sept. with Peabo Bryson. He’s the male half of most of those sappy love-song duets at the end of dumb blockbuster films (new catch phrase: “The movie ain’t over `til Peabo sings”). He oughta have a giant screen behind him showing closing credits through his entire set.
GRAFFITO OF THE MONTH (outside B. Dalton Books on 1st): “Read less. Live more.”
THE NOAM-MOBILE: Congrats to all of you for making Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media one of the biggest documentary hits in a long time, even though I don’t agree with much of it. Chomsky treats the mass media as one monolithic, unstoppable force exercising mind control over all America (except for himself and his East Coast intellectual pals). He can’t, or won’t, notice how tentative that hold really is. People who consume lots of media are very cynical about what they’re consuming. Compare the faux-ironic, “air quotes” speech patterns of MTV viewers with the blind-faith naiveté of tube-loathing neohippies. A typical TV viewer takes nothing by faith, treats everything with (excess?) skepticism. A typical nonviewer is ready to believe almost anything, as long as it’s told in the proper “alternative” lingo by recognizably “alternative” faces. The Robertson right, the Perot moderate-right, and the Chomsky left all hate the commercial mass media. Everybody’s a “rebel” these days, and the press is one of the few universally recognized symbols of what everybody’s rebelling against. Newspaper circulation is flat, and ad revenues have plummeted. (Ratings and ad revenues for TV news are also down.) Most people are already aware that their local newspaper is beholden to its town’s business and political bigshots. It doesn’t take listening to three hours of Chomsky to figure out that national and Eastern-regional media might be similarly beholden to the NY/DC bigwigs. The New York Times is, after all, the Cadillac of American newspapers: it’s bigger, and it’s got more luxury features, but it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train.
Just as leftist economists talk as if the world’s economy was still based on heavy industry, so do media critics like Chomsky still “analyze” an American media comprised only of three networks, two wire services, two weekly news mags, five opinion mags, and two or three big Eastern papers. Can Noam adapt to a media, and a nation, that are becoming more decentralized and diffuse (but perhaps no more “progressive”)? Stay tuned.
RE-PRESSED: At least Chomsky does sometimes get around to telling you his worldview, instead of just dissing other media worldviews. That’s the problem with most leftist “media analysis,” especially the syndicated “Media Beat” columnists in the Saturday Seattle Times. Those two guys give only a shadow of the “reality” they claim exists. They keep telling us that the papers aren’t telling the whole truth about some issue, but they expend little or no space telling us what their idea of the “true story” is. I wanna throttle those guys and dare ’em: “Yeah yeah, I know these other people aren’t telling me the whole story; so why won’t you tell it to me already?”
NOT MY GENERATION: The Weekly still treats rich baby boomers as the only people (besides political-corporate bigshots) it wants to talk about. Its preview of summer music festivals treated tame boomer nostalgia music as a refreshing novelty, not the reactionary albatross that’s helped keep original music off bigger stages for two decades. The same issue had Walt Crowley with one of those puff pieces about how great it was to be young 25 years ago (ostensibly a review of a book about old underground papers, like the one he used to edit). Like most such articles, it depicted a Sixties America populated only by middle-class college boys. Unlike most, he didn’t treat it as a gone-forever “age of miracles.” Instead, he wished young’uns would follow the path set by elders like himself, without saying how. It’d be unwise to do everything like it was done then. Hippies made a lot of mistakes: they appropriated Black Power slogans while doing little to integrate their own world; they abrogated 50 years of leftist heritage by stereotyping all working-class people as redneck fascists. We’ve gotta learn from that time, including its mistakes, to do better. Don’t live in the Sixties, be radical now.
MIA ZAPATA, 1965-1993: In the past three years I’ve said goodbye in print to six members of the local music/arts scenes, some I’d known personally and some only through their work. They all died needlessly and too soon. This may be the most senseless death of them all. Zapata, a poet, painter and singer-lyricist for the Gits, was found strangled in an alley near 25th and S. Washington, an hour and a half after she left a small get-together at the Comet, honoring the one-year anniversary of her friend Stefanie Sargent’s fatal overdose. Zapata died a week before she was to have recorded vocals for the Gits’ second CD. I knew her only as a presence on a stage, a dynamic presence delivering some powerful and fun tunes, a voice rooted in the early notion of punk rock as a statement of positive defiance, not just a lowbrow lifestyle.
Some 300 friends of Zapata and the band attended a wake at the Weathered Wall, which included the surviving Gits and friends playing her songs one last time (the band won’t continue without her) on a stage filled with candles and yellow roses. Some people ask me how Seattle bands can be so strident and negative, contradicting the official image of Seattle as heaven on earth. I tell those people to look around themselves: There’s a madness here, subtlely different from the madness in the nation at large. Due partly to our western boomtown heritage and surviving Greed Decade attitudes, far too many people here believe they have the right to do anything they want, to whomever they want. Seattle’s “nice” image is at best a cover-up, at worst an emotional repression. Beneath the enforced attitude of passivity sometimes called “the Northwest lifestyle,” you’ll find a barely-contained force of sheer terror. There’s no running away from it; you’ll still find that terror in the white-flight suburbs and the hippie-flight countryside. Don’t move out, stay and reclaim the public space. Do that and we can help fulfill the pledge shouted by the people at her wake, “Viva Zapata!” (A reward fund is being formed to help find her killer, in cooperation with King County Crime Stoppers. Any info that might lead to Zapata’s killer can be given anonymously to Crime Stoppers at 343-2020.)
‘TIL WE MAKE A PLEDGE to meet in September, be sure to see the digitized Snow White, be courteous to foreign Seattle Sound tourists, and ponder this thought from Night of the Living Dead master George A. Romero: “People are operating on many levels of insanity only clear to themselves.”
PASSAGE Chris Stigliano in the Sharon, PA zine Black to Comm: America’s Only Rockism Magazine:
“Don’t you miss the days you could turn on your fave UHF station and watch any of the Nick at Nite programs without the computer animation and with those great car salesman ads? Me too….You can pay upwards of $30 a month to see ’em presented in a yuppie/disco manner that ultimately insults them (and you), but ain’t television supposed to be free and not controlled by spoiled brat cokeheads with little understanding of what we (as noncorruptable, wild rock & roll reactionaries) are?”
Almost finished with the first draft of my book chronicling the Seattle music scene since 1976. All you who’ve been holding back on offering your stories and reminiscences: Drop me a line already. All you who have offered, but haven’t heard back from me yet: Be patient a week or two longer.
I’m thinking of offering official Misc. T-shirts, stickers and the like. Any favorite slogans you’d like?
“Orphic”
