(Advisory: Today’s installment deals with topics some readers might find kinda gross.)

IN THE ’80S, RON HARRIS created and produced the TV exercise shows Aerobicise and The :20 Minute Workout.

You may remember them as the shows with the ever-perky spandex queens thrusting their butts out while on a slowly-turning white turntable, before an equally stark white backdrop.

Aerobicise, which aired on Showtime, treated the exercises as a voyeuristic spectator sport. Scenes were shot to emphasize “arty” camera angles and close-up body parts in motion, rather than to show how viewers could imitate any particular sequence of movements.

The syndicated :20 Minute Workout (excerpted during a scene in Earth Girls Are Easy) at least purported to be a participatory, instructional show. (The heavily Southern-accented hostess tried to make a catch phrase out of “Fo’ mo’, three mo’, two mo,’ and one. Take it down.”)

While the shows made no legally-binding promises to viewers, they certainly implied that you could work your way toward a supermodel physique.

Later, Harris went on to producing softcore “erotic” videos for Playboy and his own production company. These used the same turntable set and similar body-choreography as Aerobicise, but showing skin instead of skin-tight suits.

Now, Harris is embarking on a publicity stunt of questionable taste which essentially says no, workouts won’t work out. Ya gotta be born beautiful ‘n’ sexy.

Or, to quote a slogan on the site selling stills from Harris’s nudie videos, “Not all pussy was created equal.”

To add to the overall air of sleaze surrounding Harris’s supposed online auction of glamour-model eggs, the USA Today story about it quotes a couple of the models as saying they’re doing this because they don’t want to pose nude to pay their bills; even though Harris’s video and photo sites promise un-augmented breasts, full spread shots, and lotsa hot girl-on-girl action.

(The models on the egg-auction site are not identified as having ever worked on Harris’s other projects. But Feed found a few faces that appeared on “Ron’s Angels” and also on Harris’s more explicit sites.)

Even odder, Harris claims on his auction site that you might as well buy into the kinds of prejudices denounced in books like The Beauty Myth. “Choosing eggs from beautiful women,” Harris vows, “will profoundly increase the success of your children and your children’s children, for centuries to come.”

Particularly if they’re willing to appear in “tasteful” photo shoots called “Girls Who Love Girls.” (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

In the end, word finally filtered up to clueless mainstream news media that this was, indeed, almost certainly a cyberhoax.

Maybe Harris is a better showman than I’d given him credit for. Maybe his next stunt could pretend to offer the eggs or sperm of clever hustlers, for parents who want to raise future Net entrepreneurs.

IN OTHER NEWS: My cable company’s just started showing ZDTV, the all-computer-news channel–sorta. On the cable system’s schedule channel, where the TV Guide Channel video inserts normally go in a quarter or a half of the screen, I’m getting that portion of the visual portion of ZDTV. The TV Guide Channel audio remains, leading to some quite interesting juxtapositions–particularly during commercial breaks….

MONDAY: Postmodern fiction, trashing old hierarchies or just building new ones?

ELSEWHERE:

• You had to know egg-auction parody sites would quickly show up….
• This fake sex-machine ad would be funny if I weren’t suspicious somebody somewhere’s trying to invent something like it for real (found by Bud)….

THINGS OF BEAUTY: The current issue of the architecture mag Arcade carries the cover headline, “So There Are A Lot of Female Public Artists. So What?”

The short title essay, by Carolyn Law (not yet available online as of this writing), attempts to define a universal feminine aesthetic behind the success of certain women in the realm of government-commissioned sculpture and environmental-art pieces. A philosophy that would link women’s historic role in influencing the look of the home, the private built-environment, and many women’s current careers in influencing the public built-environment.

Law further believes (citing Carol Gilligan’s book In A Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development) in a universal female point of view.

“Women,” as Law paraphrases Gilligan, “tend to define the world through an ethic of caring, take into account circumstances and relationships in our consideration of events, and think of responsibility as a response to diverse considerations rather than a limiting action defined by rules and beliefs….

“As we work in the larger community of neighborhoods, towns, and cities, the potential exists for advancing a sense of meaning and living that is grounded in a complex sense of relationships, a recognition of the need for a flowing connection, less bounded by a hierarchy of rules and beliefs. I believe that this perspective can lead us to a more creative, more cooperative mode of life.”

I’d offer an additional, less ideological reason for the achievements of some of the artists profiled in the Arcade issue’s other articles (Sheila Klein, Norie Sato, Linda Beaumont, Elizabeth Connor, Beliz Brother, et al.).

Artists whose work isn’t really very much alike, except in its shared sensibility of reassurance and emotional safety–something the buyers of public art (always justifiably paranoid of news-media “You Paid For THIS?” pieces and of censorious conservatives) like a lot.

My theory: Commercial-gallery art is run by a business aesthetic of rugged individualism and PR hype.

Public art is bought and sold by bureaucracies, in committee meetings–a realm North American women have historically felt comfortable in (c.f. school boards, church planning committees, ladies’ aid societies, et al.).

Women in other careers could study these traditional areas of strength, to help organize more female-friendly structures in their own lines of work.

This goes beyond early-’80s “networking” buzzwords.

It also shouldn’t be construed into a belief that everything in every social institution would be automatically better if “Women” were ruling them (no specific ones, just generic “Women”).

For one thing, even the most officially “progressive” committee- or collective-style organizations can degenerate into quite hierarchical, procedure-laden entities, or into dictatorships of the bullheaded. Certainly, anyone who’s been involved with a public-art bureaucracy can tell a few horror stories about its internal politics and those participants (M or F) who exploit and abuse it.

We’ll close this with remarks elsewhere in the Arcade issue by Beliz Brother:

“I make sculptures that are components of a larger spatial experience, rather than isolated elements…. I develop public art projects that respond to civic need, to a specific space, to the human condition…. Is this gender specific?”

IN OTHER NEWS: Twenty years ago, my then-UW Daily colleague and now unemployed TV raconteur John Keister wrote a mock proposal for “Homosexual Cliff Notes”–study guides what would help you write a guaranteed-“A” essay proving every major character in every major literary work was really gay. Now, someone appears to have actually written such a guide, only covering composers, musicians, and singers.

WORD-O-THE-DAY: “Gazumping.”

TOMORROW: “Alternative” college radio, sold out or rescued?

ELSEWHERE:

• Sometime when I wasn’t looking, American Movie Classics expanded from the hits of 1939 into the hits of 1959….
• When and how to use that pesky “schwa” sound….

BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…

I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)

• The baby boomer bragged about how, when he was younger, he marched and protested to try and save the world. The world listened to the boasts and replied, “That’s all nice, but what have you done for me lately?”
• If we printed fewer poems about trees, we’d have more trees.
• A Libertarian is a Republican who smokes pot.
• I watch TV, I eat meat, I shop at regular grocery stores. I demand the right to not be a hippie. (And that doesn’t mean I’m a Republican.)
• If God didn’t want men to watch TV, He wouldn’t have shaped the corners of the screen like a woman’s shoulders.
• Women aren’t just equal to men; men are equal to women too.
• Women and men are just about equally ignorant of one another; but the men are a little more likely to admit it.
• Everybody’s ignorant about something.
• Just about everybody’s beautiful when naked. It’s just that some bodies are better made for wearing clothes than others. But our great-grandchildren will have see-thru, microchip-controlled force fields to keep the air around their bodies warm and dry, so they won’t need to bother with this dilemma.
• People have been having sex since before you were born.
• Everybody loves black music as long as it’s at least 20 years old and performed by white people.
• For 23 years, the picture-postcard view of downtown Seattle from Alki Beach has been of a bookshelf of office towers, bookended by the Space Needle and the Kingdome (both of which were reproduced as Jim Beam bottles you could theoretically use for real bookends). When the Dome goes, that nearly-symmetrical image will go too. Safeco Field just doesn’t make a good bookend.
• The Mariners keep winning at home! Are they feeding Safeco Field food to the opposing teams or what?
• We can’t afford all the money that’s moving here.
• Science uses big words for the sake of precision. Pseudoscience uses big words for the sake of intimidation. Social science uses big words for the sake of obfuscation.
• If you can’t stand the heat, move to Anchorage.

IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.

MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?

ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”

A YEAR OR SO AGO, we wrote about the revived interest by hip bars in bowling iconography (balls, pins, shirts, trophies).

But a revival of bowling images, we warned, didn’t necessarily mean a revival of bowling.

In the past 15 years or so, the Seattle area’s lost the Green Lake Bowl, the Lake City Bowl, Village Lanes, and Bellevue Lanes (now a Barnes and Noble!). The DV8 dance club and the Alley minimall on Broadway also stand where lanes and pinsetters once ruled.

While entertainment complexes of all shapes and sizes have sprouted around here lately, real bowling hasn’t been part of any of them.

One oft-cited reason: Those Kids Today aren’t supposed to be interested in the kegler’s art; and adults are finding it harder to keep league-bowling commitments.

A more plausible reason: Entertainment-center developers simply felt bowling couldn’t provide income-per-square-foot at the rates of, say, video games or water slides.

But now, the Jillian’s yuppie pool-hall chain wants to build Seattle’s first new bowling alley in decades. The proposed 16-lane alley would be built next door to the existing Seattle branch of Jillian’s on south Lake Union. That building now houses an outlet of the Video Only big-box retail chain, central Seattle’s only remaining consumer video-electronics store. But that joint could easily move, maybe to one of the many new retail developments downtown.

Knowing Jillian’s pool schtick, you can expect a Jillian’s bowling alley to be all fancy-schmancy and costlier than your average suburban pin palace. But as long as it’s not too gussied-up, it’d be a great step toward bringing back one of America’s greatest pastimes.

Now, if only Fox Sports Net would bring back the women’s bowling matches that had been a weekly staple of its predecessor channel Prime Sports.

Speaking of the grace of the female form in motion, clueless mass-media people went mildly agog last week when a member of the victorious U.S. Women’s World Cup team took off her jersey at the end of the match, revealing a new-model Nike sports bra that’s far more modest than what beach-volleyball women wear. For one thing, end-of-match shirt-doffing is a long tradition in men’s soccer. For another thing, I dunno about that particular player but women’s soccer has this rep of attracting women who enjoy other women’s physiques. In other words, what’s the big deal here? (The obvious answer: A lot if you’re Nike and you’d like lotsa free publicity for your new garment.)

TOMORROW: The end of Seafirst Bank as we know it?

ELSEWHERE: Thanks to nubbin.com, here are some English-language instructions on Japanese-model Pokemon character model kits:

“Our Company motto is ‘Give safe and enjoyable toys and dreams to children’. That is why we research & improve out produets all the time. This might create out toys to be slightly different from each other amony same iteu depending. On the diffarent lots. As for as out product quality is concerned we pay extre affention…

“It is advised not to take off all the parts because you may may be confused. Tske off and assemble one by one according. Some parts are point so please take care not to be hart.”

MISC. can’t help but wonder how all those Montlake English profs are taking the news about Ford buying up Volvo: “Oh my God! I’m driving a car from–gasp–a domestic automaker!”

MISC. UNPLUGGED, SORTA: Came home from the movies last Sun. evening to find a dead telephone and a dead modem. After clearing out the giant bookshelf I’d inconveniently placed in front of my phone jack, I replaced the cord with a shorter one I had lying around. The phone came to life. The modem could again detect dial tones and call out, but couldn’t receive any data–not from my normal ISP; not from any of the BBSs or alternate dialup numbers at my disposal. After several such attempts, the computer would no longer even recognize my modem as having been installed. After multiple talks with the Speakeasy tech-support crew and hours on hold (at full-rate daytime long distance) to the modem manufacturer, an operator at the latter asked if there’d been any lightning storms that day. There weren’t. So the only reasonable explanation: The phone co. must have sent an inadvertant power surge down my line, killing my cord and my modem. (There are two condo projects going up on my block; who knows what mischief might’ve been done while reconfiguring the underground wiring.)

Anyhow, I FedExed my beautiful regular modem to Boca Raton, FL for warranty repair. They’re shipping it back, however, via UPS Ground (the slowest ship in the shipping business).

All this week, I’ve been using the only other modem I’ve got, an ancient 2400-baud model from circa 1990. I can perform normal email and website-upload tasks with it, as long as I’m willing to wait umpteen minutes at a time. I can’t do anything involving a graphical-based Web browser, though, and even all-text Web research (using telnet software) is achingly cumbersome.

It’s been weird, to say the least, to be without full WWW access, my favorite time-waster and fast-food-for-thought source. I’ve felt like a tourist in my own home–no, more like a business traveler in my own home, since I’ve had to meet all my regular freelance and Website deadlines without my normal tools. With any luck, all should be restored by the end of next week.

In the meantime, I promptly received a piece of junk mail offering me a free 56K modem if I sign up for two months of Internet service from, you guessed it, US West. And, of course, they don’t have any Mac modems in their offer. (What was that slogan during last year’s strike? Oh yeah: “Life’s Bitter Here.”)

WALKING THE WALK: Here’s the final at-long-last result of our reader poll for a virtual Seattle women’s walk of fame, inspired by the parade of shoeprints surrounding the new Nordstrom store but more responsive to the gender which represents, among many other things, Nordstrom’s primary clientele.

This listing doesn’t include the women who did get on the Nordy’s shrine: The late UW Regent Mary Gates (whose contacts may have helped her kid Bill get that IBM contract that put MS-DOS, and hence Microsoft, on top of the cyber-world), KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her philanthropist daughters, and painter Gwen Knight. (When I first mentioned this topic in December, the sidewalk plaque honoring both Wright and hubby Jacob Lawrence was covered up by the store’s Santa booth.)

(Also, I’d previously, erroneously, listed the Wilson sisters of Heart fame as among those honored by Nordy’s. They’re not, alas.)

The results of my research and your suggestions for other unsung heroines, in no particular order:

• Thea Foss, matron of a regional tugboat and shipping dynasty and inspiration for the beloved ’30s film heroine Tugboat Annie.
• Princess Angeline, daughter of Chief Sealth and prominent waterfront figure until her death in 1896.
• Gypsy Rose Lee, all-time undisputed monarch of burlesque, who combined a great body (and the willingness to show much of it off), a sharp wit, and an instinct for publicity.
• Gracie Hansen, nice middle-aged lady hired as hostess for the Seattle World’s Fair’s burlesque show; ahead of her time in announcing through her presence that nice girls enjoyed sex.
• Frances Farmer, actor and Depression-era socialist sympathizer, who probably would’ve been blacklisted from the movies in the late ’40s even if she hadn’t been put away by her equally strong-willed mother.
• Dyan Cannon, who went from a quiet West Seattle childhood to marrying and divorcing Cary Grant, among other accomplishments.
• Pat Suzuki, Broadway’s first Asian-American star.
• Carol Channing, singer-belter whose performances can not only be heard but seen from the third balcony.
• Ernestine Anderson andMarilee Rush, vocalists-living legends.
• Amy Denio and Lori Goldston, instrumental geniuses who continue to prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean singing magazine-cover icons.
• The women in the rock scene: The assorted members and ex-members of Seven Year Bitch,Kill Sibyl,Maxi Badd Sleater-Kinney, Bikini Kill, Mavis Piggott, Violent Green, etc. etc.; and such frontwomen and soloists as Kim Warnick, Laura Love, Anisa Romero,Lisa Orth,Shannon Fuchness, Dara Rosenwasser, etc. etc. They continue to collectively prove “women in music” doesn’t just mean out-machoing the men.
• The women behind the rock scene: Caroline Davenport, Stephanie Dorgan, J.A. Anderson, Lori LeFavor, Kate Becker, Trish Timmers, Kerri Harrop, Susan Silver, Candice Pedersen, Barbara Dollarhide, etc. etc. The level-headed facilitators who keep the chaos possible.
• Mia Zapata, Kristen Pfaff, and Stefanie Sergeant, who, if nothing else, proved there’s nothing romantic at all about rockers dying too young.
• Jini Dellaccio, Etiquette Records cover photographer; visualizor of the finely-honed edge of pop and noise behind the Sonics’ and Wailers’ garage classics.
• Imogen Cunningham, maker of photographic art at a time when many art-snobs still disdained the idea that such a thing could exist.
• Lori Larsen, first lady of the Seattle theater circuit and an unsung force in forging the art-as-fun aesthetic still seen today at places like the Annex.
• 33 Fainting Steps and Pat Graney, dancer/choreographers helping modern dance find new ways to tell stories and express particular aspects of particular human conditions.
• Anne Gerber, art collector-patron responsible for helping support and publicize the ’50s “Northwest School” painters.
• Guendolen Pletscheff, fashion collector and advocate of the community-building institution known as high society, something few others here really bothered with in her day.
• Nellie Cornish, founder of Cornish College. (So when are they gonna start a football team, the Game Hens?)
• Kay Greathouse, longtime Frye Musuem empress and defender of visual traditionalism (as jazz teachers know, you need to know the rules before you can properly break ’em).
• Ruby Chow, restaurateur, politician, and early patron of Bruce Lee.
• Chow’s sister Mary Pang, whose frozen-food plant was the unfortunate target of a son’s misplaced sympathy.
• Ethel Mars, co-founder of a family candy dynasty still Snickering along today (and name-inspiration for its Las Vegas-based upscale division, “Ethel M”).
• Linda Tenney and Sunny Kobe Cook, frontline soldiers in the battles to preserve locally-owned retail and locally-produced advertising.
• Mary Ann Boyer (“Madame Damnable”), Seattle’s first madam; she and her successors kept Seattle going as a weekend destination for outlying lumberjacks while the town’s “legitimate” early economy went through massive ups and downs.
• Anna Louise Strong, organizer-publicist of the 1919 Seattle General Strike.
• Hazel Wolf, 100-esque year old environmental activist and thorn in the side of the likes of…
• Dixy Lee Ray, Pacific Science Center cofounder and one-term governor; elequently advocated a number of political-economic theories I completely disagreed with.
• Barbara Hedges, UW athletic director; repeatedly makes bold moves which defy the wishes of the influential football “boosters.”
• Patty Murray, successful soccer-mom icon and less-successful Senator.
• Bertha K. Landes, America’s first female big-city mayor.
• Elizabeth Montgomery (Julesberg), creator of the Dick and Jane books; envisioned a very Seattle quiet-bourgeois fantasy universe.
• Nicola Griffith, scifi writer (Slow River); envisions a different, but still very Seattle, fantasy universe.
• Rebecca Welles, K.K. Beck, J.A. Jance, Ann Rule, and Jayne Ann Krentz, masters of mass-market storytelling.
• Stacey Levine and Rebecca Brown, pioneers of Po-Mo (or is it Neo-Mo or Avant-Pop?) storytelling techniques.
• Lynda Barry, chronicler of the inner dysfunctional child within most of us.
• J.Z. “Ramtha” Knight, propagator of a revisionist “ancient warrior” mythology that allowed rich people to feel a little less guilty.
• Mary McCarthy, author, satirist, and chronicler of the futility of intellectualism.
• Sandy Hill; Good Morning America’s sucked ever since it fired her.
• Ruth “Wunda Wunda” Prins, early local kids’-TV hostess and curator of a potted-flower puppet known alternately as Wilting Willie or Stand-Up Willie (you never knew, when she watered it each day, which he would become).
• Mary Kay LeTourneau, romantic rebel. So what if the rest of the world doesn’t understand?

(More about notable Washingtonians past and present at History Link.)

OUR CURRENT QUESTION at the fantabulous Misc. Talk forums and via email: What’s your favorite beautiful “ugly” building?

IT’S A DOG-DAYS-OF-WINTER MISC., the online column that couldn’t help but be bemused by the huge, handsome “Iams Sold Here” poster advertising yupscale pet foods, a poster taped to a window at the Queen Anne Larry’s Market–specifically, a window directly above the store’s cafeteria.

NOW LET’S GET THIS STRAIGHT: The Downtown Seattle Association/Community Development Round Table clique, via one of its frequent planted front-page puff pieces in the P-I, believes the Seattle City Council doesn’t have enough big-business toadies on it? What’s wrong with this picture?

THE FINE PRINT (from the Internet service provider Xensei): “The requested URL was not found on this server. No further information is available. I’m sorry it didn’t work out. And it looked so promising for a while there too.”

PUTTING-ON-AIRS DEPT.: A kindly reader did some seeking out on the FCC’s website and found some interesting license applications on file. KCMU’s applied for a power increase from 450 to 720 watts. Even more interesting–KSER, the Lynnwood-based successor to the late Seattle community station KRAB, has applied to move from 1000 to 5800 watts (will residents south of Shoreline be able to receive the station everybody in the Seattle area’s talked about but almost nobody’s heard?). And two more UHF TV channels are in the works: KHCV on channel 45 (which has been broadcasting black screens and computer graphics promising great shows any month now), and something called the African American Broadcasting Co. has filed a construction permit to start transmitting locally on channel 51.

I-KID-YOU-NOT-DEPT.: A headline in Variety announces a grim portent for our nation’s future: “Kids may be toddling away from television.” The story sadly relates, “Kids viewership is down a massive 13% so far in the fourth quarter compared with the same dime period a year ago,” across network, syndicated, and cable schedules; continuing and accellerating a two-year trend. Maybe the most recent demands that broadcast stations stick more educational content into their kidvid has worked to drive the tots away from the screen, something the anti-TV Luddites have wanted all along. Of course, it could mean the young’uns are simply switching to violent shoot-em-up video games on the Playstation instead.

The same Variety issue (12/21-1/3) also contained the trade magazine’s annual “International Locations Supplement” (containing absolutely no mention of any Washington location work but plenty of Vancouver stuff). It’s a document of either frustration or misplaced commercial ambition that all these cities, states, and countries are investing heavy amounts of public and/or private investment, not into making their own films but simply into providing scenery and/or cheap labor for Hollywood.

GAME THEORY: At a time when Hollywood rules the popcult globe, but Hollywood’s increasingly under foreign investment capital, The Price is Right has been running an opening banner “Made In the USA.” The show’s still churned out in LA, but it’s now owned by the British media conglomerate Pearson (owners of Penguin Books and a lot of other stuff), which acquired what’s left of Goodson-Todman Productions in order to strengthen its position as the global leader in administering foreign remake rights to new and old game show concepts. Indeed, it claims to either produce, co-produce, or control the rights to half the game shows now airing around the world, from the French version of The $25,000 Pyramid to the Australian version of Sale of the Century to the British version of Family Feud (retitled Family Fortunes). It’s even offering international remake rights to The Honeymooners (“Le Pow! Le Zoom! Dans la lune!”)

PHILM PHUN: The Faculty, that dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-space-aliens movie, is being hyped with an MTV video featuring the voice (and, for just a couple of seconds, the image) of erstwhile Alice in Chains frontman Layne Staley (who’s otherwise still in his self-imposed hiatus from the stresses of the music biz), covering the Pink Floyd chestnut “Another Brick in the Wall.” The coincidence (well, maybe not a coincidence if Staley knows his local-film history): The onetime supergroup that recorded the track’s credited as Class of ’99. Very close to Class of 1999, the title of a dumb high-school-teachers-as-evil-robots movie filmed ten years ago at Seattle’s old, now reopened, Lincoln High.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Dinosaur Creamy Coolers are fruity drinks made with ultra-pasteurized milk, corn syrup, flavorings, a slight tinge of carbonation, and wild colors-not-found-in-nature. The label lists flavors by colors, just like Jell-O afficianados: “Red (cherry), orgnage (orange), blue (tropical punch), green (lime).” And it all comes in a little plastic miniature sports bottle, which you have to cut or rip open at the head of the built-in flexible straw. Made in California but sold at Uwajimaya.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jet City Maven is a feisty, independent free tabloid for the near-north-end neighborhoods of Seattle (Fremont, Ballard, Wallingford, et al.), run by former North Seattle Press participants Clayton and Susan Park. Besides remiscinces by old North Central Outlook cofounder Stan Stapp, it’s got the usual business briefs, community-planning updates, neighborhood-vs.-developer articles, and arts-and-entertainment notices (by local journeyman musician Jason Trachtenburg). However, I’m personally a bit perturbed by the front-page editorial in its Jan. issue. The story involved Civic Light Opera musicians seeking union representation against management’s wishes, even while the company mounts a show (Rags) about old-timey working-folks’ struggles in 1900s NYC. Nick Slepko’s commentary on this not only is accurately summed up by its Newtesque headline, “BIG Labor takes on small community theater,” but goes on to Cold War-nostalgiac Red-baiting by gleefully describing picketers outside the show as including “UW Socialist Workers Party diehards outside blocking the theater.” I’ve worked for big employers and small employers, and trust me: workers at small outfits need a living wage and basic rights as much as workers at big outfits, and may require representation to attain ’em. (Free each month at drop-off sites in the targeted neighborhoods; by subscription from 12345 30th Ave. NE, Suite HI, Seattle 98125.)

DOUBLE DRIBBLES: The evening before the NBA’s belated return was announced, I witnessed Seattle Reign Appreciation Day at the Seattle Center House. The center floor of the cavernous old National Guard armory was full of mourning and love-festing fans–teenage girls, moms and daughters, dads and daughters, hand-holding lesbian couples, and more than a few gents like me who simply love the grace of the female form in action. To the corporate sports world, ABL pro women’s basketball may have been just another short-lived, underfunded wannabe league like the ones I mentioned two weeks ago (WFL, USFL, NASL, WHL, ABA, Liberty Basketball Association, several indoor-soccer attempts, Arena Football). But to the 500 or so at Reign Appreciation Day, and the two or three thousand regular gamegoers they represented, the ABL represented something different–a dream (albeit a commercially-exploited dream) that girls could one day be valued not merely for their bodies (as objects of desire) but for their bodies (as machines of active achievement), in an organization that understood the street-level, populist aspect of women’s-sports fandom and didn’t try to treat it as a junior version of all that’s icky about corporate sport.

(Meanwhile, a few pamphleteers at Reign Appreciation Day wanted to spread the news about some adamant fans in San Jose, CA who want to rescue the ABL by recruiting a few thousand of the league’s loyal followers to put up at least $1,000 each to collectively buy and resuscitate the league.)

The morning after that celebratory wake for this now-deferred dream, the NBA owners (purveyors of the ABL-killing, corporate-as-all-heck WNBA) ended their player lockout (the sorriest demonstration of what’s wrong with corporate sport since, maybe, 1995). As many of you know, the Sonics are owned by local billboard czar Barry Ackerley; for almost a year, the team’s dedicated Ackerley billboard site outside its practice gym facing Aurora Ave. has borne a message encouraging fan noise: “Your voice will come back. Eventually.” During the lockout, it seemed like a desperate promise that games would again be played one of these months (or years). Now, though, maybe it could be a rallying cry to encourage all the frustrated fans to raise their own voices against corporate sport’s increasingly pathetic edifice.

BE SURE TO ADD YOUR SUGGESTIONS for our still-hypothetical Seattle Women’s Walk of Fame by email to clark@speakeasy.org, or at our very own Misc. Talk discussion boards. Results will be announced in this space next week. Until then, see Elizabeth, pray for snow, and consider the potential application of these words from Samuel Butler to the current D.C. tragicomedy: “Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them.”

Her Throbbing Volvo:

My Troubles With Upscale Erotica

Book review feature, 1/6/99

SEDUCTIONS: Tales of Erotic Persuasion

Edited by Lonnie Barbach, Ph.D.

Dutton, $23.95

HIGH INFIDELITY: Twenty-Four Great Short Stories About Adultery by Some of Our Best Contemporary Authors

Edited by John McNally

Quill/William Morrow, $13 (paperback)

THE PENGUIN BOOK OF INFIDELITIES

Edited by Stephen Brook

Penguin, $12.95 (paperback)

THE MAMMOTH BOOK OF NEW EROTICA

Edited by Maxim Jakubowski

Carroll & Graf, $10.95 (paperback)

Every year, a group of British book critics gives out an award-O-shame for the most ridiculously-written sex scenes in contemporary mainstream novels. Sure they’re fun, but bad writing, when it’s done right (no, that’s not a contradiction), can make a sex scene sexier. After all, sex at its best is a release from the rigors of the intellect and the propriety of good taste.

Would that any of that contest’s winning examples of purple prose appeared in the ’80s-’90s specialty genre of upscale “literary erotica.” You know: those hardcover and trade-paperback collections sold in the back of Tower Books or the front of Toys In Babeland, promising ever-so-tasteful excursions into the lower passions, many of which proudly claim all-female and/or all-gay mastheads.

Instead, what you usually get are bland, mannered accounts of bland, mannered people, almost always upper-middle-class and ultra-caucasian (except in anthologies specifically ethnic-branded), for whom orgasms are merely another upscale leisure activity, and for whom discovering a new lover is no more or less exciting than discovering a new store.

Lonnie Barbach’s collections appear to be aimed at those readers who can only indulge in visceral-fantasy reading if it’s got a justifying patina of “education.” Her introductions in Seductions denote specifically what pleasures and psychological lessons the reader is expected to attain from each of the collection’s 20 stories. Only five of Seductions’ stories are written from a male point of view–in three, the men serve as helpless targets of women’s schemes; in one, a nice gay man pondes another man’s cute dimpled face (but never gets into discussing gay-male sex as explicitly as other stories in the book discuss lesbian sex); and in the other, a Renaissance-era rogue (i.e., a safe fantasy figure from a time and place far removed from ours) gives a lovemaking lesson to another man’s fiancee.

The book’s other stories are all about heroines, nice complacent heroines who have nice complacent fun with nice complacent men and/or women. Even when cheating on husbands or screwing compliant department-store workers in the fitting room, none of these women (except the ones who get converted to lesbianism) learn major life-changing things about themselves, and none of them does anything really mind-altering like falling in love.

(At least, however, the stories in Barbach’s collection present non-monogamous and recreational sex as something potentially beneficial and even wholesome. After 15 years of stupid “erotic thriller” movies and novels in which intercourse (even hetero intercourse among HIV-sparse population segments) was treated as a crime punishable by death, it’s welcome that fictional heroines can again enjoy their and others’ bodies this nonchalantly.)

In contrast to Seductions’ unbearable lightness of licking, the High Infidelity collection occasionally acknowledges the limitations of a lifestyle-centered sexuality. Indeed, its focus is not The Affair (let alone The Act) but about how affairs are great angst generators for self-centered, all-too-literate white people who seem to get off less on sex (or on the excitement of illicitness) than on the opportunity to wallow in their own guilt, confusion, and/or vengeance. This is a theme implicit in most of the book’s segments and is made explicit in one story (Robert Boswell’s “Flipflops”), wherein a philandrous couple vacationing at a Mexican seaside resort are only briefly, temporarily, disrupted from their vapid relationship-talking by the sight of a local man drowning just beyond their beach.

The Penguin Book of Infidelities tells more, and far better-written, tales of illicit couplings and the wide variety in cultural attitudes toward them in different places and times. While John McNally’s introduction to High Infidelitytreats extramarital play as an eternal problem, the Penguin collection notes it’s been considered more or less of a problem depending on where and when it happened. From Tunisian wives who found public veil-wearing advantageous while persuing local stable boys without being seen, to old French lords and ladies who sat for banquets as foursomes with their respective current lovers seated to each side, there’ve been plenty of social solutions to the stability/monotony dilemma, few of which (besides secrecy and guilt trips) find their way into the modern-day tales in High Infidelity.

If you want to find out about this genre without investing a whole lot of money, Carroll and Graf’s huge paperback collections give you a lot of different stories for not much money. Few are outstanding, but they do represent almost as much variety as you can expect in the scene. The best of them try to combine the visceral manipulation of the reader with a solid plot; such as The Mammoth Book of New Erotica’s centerpiece novella, Michael Hemmingson’s “The Dress.” A proper upper-middle-class British couple realize (unlike any of the protagonists in Seductions) the limitations of their mannered upscale life. The husband’s solution: Go out in public with the wife in highly revealing dresses. It revitalizes their sex life, but then leads them to further self-realizations that change their lives forever, as the wife goes from play-acting the “lead” role in the couple’s sex life (at her husband’s prodding) to taking charge for real. But still, all works out for the best; as both partners decide they’d rather enjoy their passions than sit around and brood about them. Perhaps a lesson to be learned by the characters in some of the other books discussed here.

IT’S A RELATIVELY POST-HANGOVER MISC., the column that looked for streetside strangeness at the full-moon New Year’s and found lots (unfortunately, none of it printable without violating either libel laws or personal discretion.)

ST. PETER TO NORMAN FELL: “Come and knock on our door…”

COFFEE PRESS: Starbucks is starting an in-store magazine. But Seattle writers and editors need not apply–or rather, they’ll need to apply to NYC. The yet-untitled quarterly, due out in May, is being produced by Time Warner’s “custom publishing” unit under contract to the espresso chain. An NY Daily News report claims it will be “modeled on The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, with contributions from both established and emerging writers and photographers.” If it’s anything like the chain’s in-store brochures (or CEO Howard Schultz’s memoir Pour Your Heart Into It ), you can expect material that’s nice, laid-back, mellow, and ultimately forgettable.

MARKET EXPOSURE: Seattle’s own cybersmut magnate Seth Warshavsky’s Internet Entertainment Group has become notorious for its sex websites (the official Penthouse magazine site; the Pam Anderson/Tommy Lee hardcore video). But now, with the commercial skin-pic trade apparently plateauing, IEG’s expanding into new e-commerce realms. Some of these expansions are a little further from the company’s original shtick (an online casino, a home-mortgage buying-guide); some are a little closer. One of the latter’s a nude stock-trading site, sexquotes.com (“the mage-merger between high finance and high society”), mixing business news and stock prices with small but free pinup pix. You can choose the gender, explicitness level, and general physique type of your temporary beloveds, who appear on the left side of the screen; you can also choose up to 20 stock and mutual-fund prices to scroll across the right side. It’s free, with plenty of ads for Warshavsky’s other sites. One of those other sites is ready to show you how Net-porn starlets are made–www.onlinesurgery.com!

CATHODE CORNER#1: Viacom management may have killed KSTW’s local-news operation, but at least they’ve let the station maintain one of its traditions–the annual alkie movie on, or shortly after, the hangover-strewn Jan. 1. In years past, the station’s assauged the suffering viewers with Under the Volcano, When A Man Loves a Woman, and more. This Jan. 2 (the night of Jan. 1 was, unfortunately, taken up by Viacom’s dumb UPN shows): Clean and Sober.

CATHODE CORNER #2, or BANDWIDTH ENVY:A couple months or so ago, the feisty indie Summit Cablevision finally added a bunch of the cable channels viewers have been pleading for for two years or more. Most TCI customers elsewhere in Seattle (as well as viewers stuck with similarly outmoded cable systems across the country) are still wondering what all these supposedly great channels with these supposedly great shows are really like. Herewith, a few glimpses:

• Win Ben Stein’s Money (Comedy Central) is easily the best non-kiddie game show ever made for cable. After years of badly-structured, badly-timed, badly-designed, and badly-lit shows like Loves Me, Loves Me Not, a cable channel’s finally figured out what makes a great game show great–it’s a pure televisual experience, involving the audience in a well-planned ritual of fun. WBSM is also that rarity, a “hard quiz” show with truly tough questions.

  I just wished I could feel a little less guilty about finding such screen-magnetism and loveability in a host whom you know as the monotoned droner from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Wonder Years, and Clear Eyes commercials, but who in “real” life is a former Nixon lawyer who writes virulently anti-choice, pro-impeachment screeds for Rabid Right journals such as the American Spectator–and who keeps a home-away-from-Hollywood at the infamous compound collection that is Sandpoint, Idaho.

• One Reel Wonders (Turner Classic Movies) exhumes some of the live-action short subjects that thrilled and/or bored movie-theater audiences in the ’30s and ’40s, and which have generally remained unseen ever since.

  Besides finally giving lifelong Looney Tunes fans an at-last reference to the original sources of many cartoon running gags (Technicolor travelogues ending “as the sun sinks slowly in the west,” etc.), they fill in a vital hole in any film buff’s historical knowledge. And any aspiring filmmaker (or storyteller) could learn a thing or two about how these shorts told complete stories in seven to 10 minutes.

• ESPN2 has recently devoted its 10 am (PST) hour most weekdays to reruns of its past Fitness America Pageant shows. These were originally conceived as a cross between aerobics and bodybuilding, skewed toward audiences (and advertisers) scared off by the masculine-looking figures popularly associated with women’s muscle meets.

  So instead of weightlifting and other tests of pure strength, each contestant performs two minutes of Flashdance-esque athletic dancing, then returns to the stage for a short swimsuit-modeling stroll. The swimsuits (and the dance costumes) are often of the bare-bunned variety; and the dances often display a vigorous eroticism that would probably be particularly popular among western-states men (it’s in our blood to admire a woman who’s no dainty waif, but who instead looks like she probably could’ve survived a frontier winter in the years before rural electrificaiton).

  But don’t for a second think the show’s “male oriented”–the ads are all for women’s vitamin supplements, women’s workout gear, and Stayfree. This is intended for a woman who likes to admire other women’s bodies, but who’d slug you in the stomach if you accused her of maybe, just maybe, having closet lesbian desires.

  Also of note: During set changes beetween segments, an announcer narrates short taped clips of past champions, most of whom are described as now working as “fitness celebrities.” Our fame-ridden culture’s gone so far, we not only have people who are famous merely for “being famous,” we have obscure people who make a living for merely “being famous” among relatively small subcultures–lingirie models, motorcycle-magazine centerfolds, pro wrestling’s “managers” and other outside-the-ring costars, CNN “expert commentators,” “celebrity greeters” at Vegas casinos, and, yes, Internet-based commentators.

• Space Ghost Coast to Coast (Cartoon Network) started out as the “hip,” grownup-oriented spot on a channel usually devoted to relentlessly exhuming old Hanna-Barbera and Kids’ WB shows.

  But the producers and writers have gotten further and further afield from the original talk-show-spoof concept over each of the show’s five seasons (CN often pairs a new and an old 15-minute episode in the same time block). It’s now the ultimate metashow, deconstructing not just cliché host-guest banter and backstage politics (the stuff of so many, many other self-parody shows from Conan to Shandling) but the very narrative structures of TV and of commercial entertainment in general.

  The show sometimes plays so fast and furious with viewer expectations, one can leave it fully forgetting how clean it is. (Its self-imposed rating is the squeaky TV-Y7.) Two or more generations have grown up equating avant-garde artistic styles with risqué subject matter (an assumption spread in part by CN’s sister channel HBO). But one of the most innovative Hollywood films of the’60s, Head, was rated G. Maya Deren’s experiments in filmic form and storytelling could have passed the old Hollywood Production Code; Satyajit Ray’s exquisite films all passed India’s even-tougher censorship.

  I’m not saying artists, filmmakers, or TV producers should be prohibited from creatively using what used to be called “blue” material. I am saying they shouldn’t feel they have to, either. Space Ghost can thoroughly alter your notions about well-made comedy while still being funny, and without a single poop joke.

• Star Trek: The Sci-Fi Channel Special Edition presented its presenters with a time-management dilemma. Sci-Fi execs wanted to promote this as the most faithful rerunning in decades of the old Kirk-and-Spock episodes, but they weren’t about to give up the extra minutes of commercials their channel (and most ad-bearing cable channels, except Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon) stick into their reruns. Network shows of Star Trek‘s day usually ran up to 51 minutes of show per hour. Sci-Fi usually cuts that to as little as 43 minutes.

  The answer: Stretch the shows into an hour and a half! That way, they could add even more commercials, promos, etc. To pad the remaining time, Shatner and Nimoy have been propped up to offer ponderous behind-the-scenes commentaries. (Q: Just how do they manage to speak in segments totalling 10 to 13 minutes about the making of even the minor, budget-balancing episodes? A: Very patiently.)

  Most viewers I know claim they tape the shows and fast-forward past the ads and extraneous material. But I like the new segments, for the sheer unadorned Shatnerity of them.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, consider these seasonally-appropriate words attributed to Frank Lloyd Wright: “A man is a fool if he drinks before he reaches fifty, and a fool if he doesn’t drink afterward.”

MISC., your post-print column for (what the Times Personal Tech section calls) the post-television age, was amused by the double standards and double dribbles in that front-page P-I headline on 12/22/98: “Reign star Enis judges basketball, parenthood.” Y’ever see a headline like that about, say, Shawn Kemp?

Alas, that P-I story was one of the last written in the local dailies about the Seattle Reign before the team’s parent American Basketball League announced its sudden, permanent shutdown, leaving fans as bereft of pro women’s b-ball as it is of the men’s game. One could lay the blame for the ABL’s demise on the rival WNBA, with its megabucks backing, its marketable-superstar orientation, and its stranglehold on sponsors and TV outlets. But a less-discussed factor was the league’s management structure. While it claimed to be a grassroots, fan-level outfit, it was really a centralized company which owned all its teams, hired and assigned all its players, and otherwise tightly ran all operations and marketing–just like the Roller Derby, Arena Football, and other assorted marginal team-sports ventures of the past three decades.

The graveyard of new team-sports organizations in North America is full of four decades’ worth of great and less-great visions, from the American Basketball Association to the World Football League and the U.S. Football League, to World Team Tennis and several attempts at indoor soccer. Aside from the American Football League (which got all its teams merged into the NFL in the late ’60s), none were long-term successes. (The only current such ventures with a chance at making it are Major League Soccer and the aforementioned WNBA.) None of those attempts found the formula for nationwide popularity and profits; though some tried to find such a formula thru centralized management. A single-ownership league structure (like that of the ABL) can present a unified public image and prevent a single well-heeled team owner from attaining an uncompetitive dynasty situation (like that which ruined the old North American Soccer League). But it also means local team managers can’t build their own squads, around personalities or playing styles popular in their own towns. And when league HQ runs out of cash and/or ideas, there aren’t local team owners (or buyers) to come up with individual solutions other teams can copy.

But for now, the WNBA (with its emphasis on megabucks and celebrity-driven advertising, and its neglect (or worse) of any lesbian fan base) is the remaining structure for women’s pro hoops, at least until the parent NBA can no longer afford to subsidize it (which, if there’s not even a mini-NBA season, might be more likely and sooner). Wish I had more encouraging news for stranded Reign fans, but a pro league of any sort, especially one with teams scattered across the continent, is an undertaking requiring immense logistics, savvy, and long-term backing. The ABL way didn’t work, and neither has just about any other way.

THE HOLIDAY TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 13th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical Misc. In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions via private email and the public Misc. Talk discussion boards; and apologies to those whose board postings I accidentally erased last week. (I think I’ve gotten the hang of the discussion-board software scripts by now.) As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of ’99; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Tickle Me Elmo dolls to sell you.

UNTIL NEXT WE MEET in the year so great there’s a Washington highway named after it, pace yourself by toasting the New Year once for each North American time zone (starting with Newfoundland at 7:30 p.m. PST), and ponder these thoughts attributed to Lillian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

MISC., the pre-Xmas relief-from-shopping column of choice, has been trying all weekend to come up with something to say about the topic you’re probably expecting something about today. There will surely be more to say about it in the weeks and months to come, but for now let’s just say it’s no exaggeration to call it a coup attempt, a kill-or-be-killed attempt by the Rabid Right to destroy the two-party system in favor of a quasi-Iranian theocracy. It’s because the GOP Sleaze Machine’s seen what Clinton and the Pro-Business Democrats have been up to (and largely succeeding at)–turning the Demos into the Lite Right party, the new “party of business,” thereby marginalizing the Republicans into the party of demagogues and hatemongers. It’s worked so well, all the Republicans can do anymore is to become even more extreme demagogues and hatemongers. I don’t believe Clinton will be forced out of office, but it’ll be interesting (as in the old curse, “May you live in interesting times”) to see just how much damage to the national discourse is made, and how many careers on both sides are destroyed, along the way.

AS FOR THAT OTHER TOPIC you might expect a comment on: No, I don’t believe Clinton bombed Iraq as a desperate impeachment-prevention tactic. Clinton can be dumb as doodoo about his private lusts, but he’s way too smart about his professional image to think a too-obvious mini-war at a too-obvious time would help it. No, I sincerely believe he sincerely believed the air strikes would serve a tactical purpose, no matter how many Iraqi civilians were killed or hurt by ’em, and no matter how little they’d do to topple the dictator we helped install over there.

JUST ONE, SLIGHTLY-TOO-LATE, XMAS GIFT SUGGESTION: My very first Misc. column, published in 1986 in the old monthly tabloid ArtsFocus, included a “Junk Food of the Month.” That title was never trademarked, so there was nothing stopping some clever entrepreneurs in NYC from starting their own International Junk Food of the Month Club. Its brochure boasts, “Each month you’ll receive a box stuffed with a new assortment of the best candy, cake, cookies, and chips the planet has to offer.” The first month’s package promises “raisins covered in strawberry chocolate, crunchy pancake-and-maple-syrup flavored snack puffs, chocolate-covered banana creams, toffee-and-crisped-rice chocolate bar, raspberry malt balls, chocolate-covered fruit gummies, plus a whole lot more!” Memberships are available in three levels, ranging from one to four pounds of goodies per shipment. Further info and signups are available by calling 1-888-SNACK-U4EA.

YOU GOTTA LOVE ‘EM, OR IT, OR… The Seattle Reign‘s a great b-ball squad, but that darned name just doesn’t fall trippingly off the tongue. These awkward singular-named sports teams just could be the one and only lasting legacy of the 1974-75 World Football League (whose teams included the Chicago Fire, Southern California Sun, and Portland Storm). What, exactly, do you call one member of the Reign (or the Miami Heat or Orlando Magic or Utah Jazz, for that matter)?

SEAGRAM’S ABSORBS POLYGRAM: Probably some of the 3,000 record-label employees to be sacked after the merger will be absorbing a lot of Seagram’s in the weeks to come…. Not mentioned in most accounts of the acquisition: The Decca trademark will finally be globally reunited. Decca was originally a British record company, which established a formidable U.S. subsidiary during the Big Band era but then sold it off in the ’50s. American Decca became one of the cornerstones of the MCA media empire, acquired by Seagram’s a few years back. British Decca (which used the London name on its U.S. releases) eventually became one of the three main components of PolyGram. The merger also means a company based in lowly Canada, one of those countries with cultural-protection laws to keep some semblance of indigenous entertainment production, now controls the biggest recorded-music conglomerate on the planet (or at least it’s the biggest now; management’s already promising massive roster cuts as well as the aforementioned staff layoffs).

WIRED: Free Seattle Radio, the third attempt in recent years at a freeform pirate station, is now on the air at 87.9 FM. The anonymous collective currently broadcasts evenings only, on a low-power transmitter whose signal mainly reaches Capitol Hill and slightly beyond. I haven’t been able to tune in, but readers who have tell me it’s got freeform DJ music and lotsa talk supporting Mumia Abu-Jamal and denouncing the Iraq bombings.

UNWIRED: Guess what, guys & gals? TCI won’t meet its Jan. 20 cable-upgrade promise to the city after all! You might not get to see South Park at home until maybe next October. By that time, of course, the show will have become soooo ten-minutes-ago.

UNPLUGGED: The end is finally near for RKCNDY, that cavernously run-down garage space that was one of Seattle’s leading rock clubs during those times a few years back when the “Seattle Scene” was in all the media. For the past year or more, it’s been an all-ages showcase while the property’s owners tried to figure out what to do with the building. They’ve decided–to demolish it, for yet another upscale hotel-retail complex. RKCNDY won’t close right away, but will within months eventually. The irony here: Even if activists manage to finally amend or repeal the Teen Dance Ordinance (whose heavy regulations make all-ages rock shows in Seattle even more financially risky than they would otherwise be) in ’99, the staggering pace of real-estate activity (barring any Boeing-influenced slowdown) might effectively eliminate any potential sites for such shows.

SEATTLE OLYMPICS BID (APPARENTLY) FINALLY DIES: Could there possibly be a limit to Seattle’s “world class” ambitions? Could the wishes of the city elite old-boy network (great-grandsons of the pioneers) to build, grow, build more and grow more finally have reached a point-O-no-return conflict with the somewhat more modest dreams of those upper-middle-class swing voters (see below) who want the nice, quiet, city-that’s-more-like-a-small-town they thought they’d moved to?

WELL-HEELED?: The Stranger’s 12/10/98 “TTS” column remarked on a relative lack of female shoe prints along the Walk of Fame outside the new downtown Nordstrom store. There are many regional women of achievement who could’ve made the sidewalk shrine, besides the six who made it (Bill Gates’s late UW Regent mom Mary, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt and her two daughters, and Heart sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson) alongside some 20 notable male Seattleites.

Of course, many of those other historic local women are political activists, socialists, madams, burlesque queens, Prohibitionists, psychiatrically-committed actresses, punk rockers, sometimes-nude modern dancers, and other types the Nordstroms might not consider community role models. (At least one reader’s already noted to me the oft-rumored role, documented in the late Bill Speidel’s Seattle-history books, of Pioneer Square prostitutes in funding the rebuilding of the city after 1889’s Great Seattle Fire and in supporting our first public-school system.) Suggest other enshrinable Seattle female individuals by email or at our new Misc. Talk discussion boards; results will be listed here in two or three weeks.

SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND… WELL, YOU’LL FIND SOMETHING: According to my new hit-tracker service, these are some of the phrases users are entering into search engines that end up sending them to this site:

• “Country music women nude”
• “Shaping breasts”
• “Essays on rap music”
• “woman size evening gown”
• “showering women”
• “loner loser `no friends'”
• “large breast”
• “large breasts”
• “my breasts grew”
• “nude gymnastics”
• “half naked comic book”
• “`thrown into’ near tub”
• “building on the moon”
• “cartoon squirrels picture”
• “Croatian Curses”
• “pretty preteen”
• “essays drinking”
• “mideval europe”
• “world images”
• “fun neon signs”
• “hetero handjob”
• “boggle”
• “women playing volleyball”
• “pageant and topless”
• “describing my dad”
• “Dr. Dreadful”
• “elliot gould naked”
• “Football throwing machine”
• “PHAT BLACKS”
• “naked waterfalls”
• “naked women on bikes”
• “nude women in tanning bed”
• “Masturbation Techniques”
• “anton chekov”
• “leaning (sic) to play guitar”
• “applepig”
• “warez windows 98”
• “Mary Throwing Stones”
• “collage (sic) football bowls”
• “patio furniture safety”

(All this is in addition to the search words that actually relate to topics I’ve written about here (however briefly).)

(The worse gag is that now that I’ve put all these phrases into this column, they’ll all be here waiting for some search engine to find them and mislead still more users here.)

BE BACK HERE NEXT WEEK for the always-splendiforous Misc. In/Out List (always the most entertaining and accurate list of its type done up anywhere). Your suggestions are still being accepted at our lovely Misc. Talk discussion boards, and by email. ‘Til then, enjoy the snow, have a happy Boxing Day, and consider these words from one Dr. John Roget: “Insanity is merely creativity with no outlet.”

SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”

As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.

Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.

HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.

Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.

My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.

My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!

NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.

In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.

So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…

PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)

As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!

At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!

STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.

(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.

WELCOME BACK TO THE ONE-&-ONLY ONLINE MISC., the pop-culture column that was as startled as you to find a full-color, almost full-page, atatomically-correct (more or less), side-view computer illustration of a male lower torso on the Lifestyles page of the 10/19 P-I. It was there, natch, for a long story encouraging prostate-cancer tests. But hey, if it takes the “educational” justification of a deadly disease to help demystify and de-demonize the Staff of Life, so be it.

STAGES: The Seattle Repertory Theatre now has a managing director named Benjamin Moore. So far, no scheduled productions of Paint Your Wagon.

AD OF THE WEEK (on the Stranger Bulletin Board page): “Lesbian Guitar Teacher.” Hmm, an instructor in the heretofore-underappreciated art of the Lesbian Guitar: I could go for the cheap anatomical-reference jokes every guitar student’s heard or said at one time, but instead will ponder “Lesbian Guitar” as a specific musical form. Could it be the ever-so-earnest acoustic fret-squeakin’ of Holly Near or Ferron? The somewhat more humanistic, yet still stolid, chord-thumpin’ of Phranc? The electrified “Torch and Twang” of early k.d. lang?

It’s the curse-in-disguise of all these women (and others of their various ilks) that they’re known first as statement-makers, second as stage presences, third as singers, and almost not at all as instrument-players. This neglect of the role of music in female-singer-songwriter-ing is at least partly responsible for the near-total lack of female instrumentalists on both Lilith Fair package tours. It dogged Bikini Kill throughout their career; it took that band’s co-leader Kathleen Hanna to start a whole new concept with a whole different instrumentation (Julie Ruin) for some critics to even notice that she’d been a darned-good musician all this time. (Lesbian-led bands that have gotten at least partial critical notice for their actual playing, such as Team Dresch, are exceptions that prove the rule.) Elsewhere in tune-land…

CLOSING TIME?: An NY Times story (10/15) discussed the precipitous decline of commercial rock as a music-biz force, noting sales charts now dominated by rap and rap/R&B hybrid acts. One quoted industry expert said “the Seattle bands” had been rock’s last best hope, but Nirvana ended and Pearl Jam got lost in its politics and the whole Rock Reformation got sidetracked. I’d put the blame on the suckiness of chain-run rock radio and MTV, which have bled the patient (themselves) to near-death with their repitition, selection of awful bland-rock acts, and stupidity. Of course, the suckiness of corporate rock radio (and of corporate rock promotion in general) is one of the things the Seattle bands had been trying to rebel against. Speaking of getting lost in politics…

BUMPER STICKER OF THE WEEK (seen in Belltown): “Chris Cornell for Mayor.” Actually, why not? If business success is the only prerequesite for a political career, Cornell sure counts. He and his Soundgarden bandmates started an enterprise from scratch, which grew steadily into a multimillion-buck operation that helped put Seattle on the music-biz map. (He’s even begun to assert a political worldview, having participated in that joint petition to Al Gore on behalf of old-growth forest preservation.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Steve Mandich’s Heinous #5 (the first issue in three years) is a professionally-written, DIY-printed mini-size zine, bound with strings of old audio-cassette tape. Topics include the Seattle Pilots (our ill-fated first MLB team), ’70s self-made celebrity The Human Fly, women’s motorcycle-jumping champ Debbie Lawler, rock records about Evel Knievel, and a Bob Newhart career retrospective for a change-O-pace. ($2 from P.O. Box 12065, Seattle 98102, or by email request to smandich@teleport.com.)

EX-LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Not only is commercial film production in Washington at an even lower ebb this year than last, but even MovieMaker, the slick magazine about indie filmmaking, suddenly moved from Seattle to L.A. over the summer. Does that mean no remaining hope for true indie (i.e., totally non-L.A.) filmmaking?

SCREEN PATTERNS: Actually, the reasons for the repertory program’s move to the Egyptian have little to do with the filmgoing tastes of college students and more with Landmark (née Seven Gables) Theaters’ schemes. 7G started repertory movies in Seattle at the Moore, which was where the Seattle International Film Festival also had started. Then Landmark came to town and bought the Neptune in the U District, driving 7G out of the repertory side of the biz until Landmark bought 7G. From there, Landmark decided to use the Neptune for hi-profile new releases, shunting the rep films to the smaller Varsity. Now it’s repositioning the Egyptian as the “Year Round Film Festival” theater.

(Still no word, by the way, about Landmark’s corporate fate. Last we heard, its current owner, financier John Kluge (who made a fortune selling five TV stations to Rupert Murdoch and promptly lost much of that fortune in Orion Pictures) had put the chain up for sale.) Meanwhile, Seattle’s other ex-locally-owned theater chain, the onetime Sterling Recreation Organization circuit now part of Cineplex Odeon, quietly had a change of management in recent months. CO’s now jointly owned by Sony and Seagram (whose respective studio units, Columbia and Universal, were the only major Golden Age Hollywood studios that hadn’t been connected to theater chains back in the ’40s).

MATERIAL BOY: Last week, I asked for your suggestions on new career moves I, your long-underemployed author, could take. A few of you didn’t quite get the “career” part of it (such as those who thought I should start a cable-access show or other unpaid stuff). Other responses generally fell into a few main categories, among them the following:

• 1. “Just write the same column but not about Seattle.” Easily the most common response. But not as easy as it sounds. Having observed the modest syndication success of Savage Love (one of only a half-dozen successful syndicated columns ever in “alternative” weeklies), I can appreciate the conceptual work required for one. I can’t just offer these papers an unlocal version of my regular commentary work, nor could I hook ’em on something their own staffs can produce (movie reviews, etc.). Besides, part of the whole point of this particular column concept is that it’s from one particular place at one particular time, even when it discusses the products of the far-off entertainment conglomerates. No, the Misc. shtick wouldn’t adapt well to the everywhere/nowhere of the national media universe. I’d have to start from scratch with a whole new column concept. (Which isn’t to say that I can’t or won’t.)
• 2. “Become a national magazine freelance writer.” There are prospects more depressing than the freelance life as lauded in old Writer’s Digest magazines (sitting in one’s home-office, sending the same “sure-fire” article proposals out to everybody from Grit to Cracked while cross-referencing all their rejections on index cards), but I can’t think of many right now.
• 3. “Chuck it all and go live (someplace warm) (in the country) (in NY/LA).” No; this little corner of Canadian-style propriety inside the U.S. (without Canada’s quaint accents or gun control or universal health care) is and will be my home. I could use some more travel, though. Anybody wanna fund my Searchin’-4-America book?
• 4. “Forget writing as a means of income, and take on a real career.” Thought about this one a lot, and still do. I’ve sent out lotsa resumes, attended the last High-Tech Career Expo, and scour the want ads for new exciting opportunities. Some of these pursuits (or at least fantasies about them) might lead to adventures or misadventures I’ll mention in future weeks. Imagine following me along as a taxi driver, meat cutter, stripper at bachelorette parties, legal assistant, or house painter.
• 5. “Go into business for yourself.” I am, to the extent I can afford to. This site may become more commercialized and more elaborate. The long-promised Best of Misc. book could appear as early as Xmas. There might be other assorted ventures as well. I’m already designing the T-shirts and looking at your-own-brand-on-the-box cereal makers. So while the global economy might be iffy, I’ll do everything possible to make Misc. World a more vibrant, economically robust place. Unless, of course, I win at Quinto one of these weeks.

TO CLOSE, some words-O-wisdom from the recently-deceased former TV Guide reviewer Cleveland Amory: “`Action-packed’ means the boys can’t act but the girls are stacked.”

(Our next reader quiz: What does Seattle need? The full essay and invite will appear in next week’s column, but you can send in your ideas now to clark@speakeasy.org.)

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.

SORRY TO LET YA DOWN, but Misc. just couldn’t come up with a sufficiently good/bad pun to describe the announced Quaker State/ Pennzoil corporate merger. Not even one involving the phrase “lube job.”

THE MAILBAG (via Michael Miller): “Regarding your question about being televised during a future Seattle Olympics under the `quaint local customs department,’ the answer depends. If a film crew expects me to walk around in Doc Martens, drink Starbucks, wear flannel, drive a 4 x 4, and brainlessly idolize Bill Gates, Boeing, and that idiot Chihuly, then the answer is `blow me!’ However, if they are willing to film me coming home from work in my classic Mustang, changing clothes, playing with my dogs, sneaking over to my neighbor’s mailbox, `borrowing’ her Victoria’s Secret catalog, and then jerking my stuff before yelling `Hi mom!’ into the camera, then fine, film away.”

LOADS OF SUDS: Anheuser-Busch, ever on the prowl for ways to replenish flat or slightly-declining beer sales, is now test-marketing Catalina Blonde, the “first beer for women,” in select areas (not around here yet). It’s a lighter-than-Lite concoction–half the alcohol content of regular Bud; fewer calories than Bud Light. No word on whether it’ll be promoted with tightly-dressed Catalina Blonde Boys tossing out key chains at the Flower & Garden Show.

PILOT LIGHT EXTINGUISHED: We neglected to previously report on the early-April passing of Dewey Soriano, the tugboat pilot who took effective control of the Pacific Coast League in the mid-’60s, and was rewarded for his efforts by the baseball establishment by getting Seattle’s first MLB franchise, the 1969 Pilots. He held a name-the-team contest as a PR stunt, but had already chosen to name it after his own former (and future) profession piloting commercial boats; that’s why its logo had a nautical, rather than an aviation, theme. Of course, his thin pockets could only take one year of losses at the beloved yet creaky old AAA ballpark, and by April 1970 (the same season Boeing laid off half its staff) the Pilots were sold and became the Milwaukee Brewers (now threatening to move again). The City of Seattle sued the American League, and in the settlement got the Mariners franchise seven years later. While the local dailies’ obits praised Soriano for bringing the majors to Seattle, I still wished the Pilots had owners who could’ve kept the team alive until the Kingdome finally got done. And it was touching, in a way, to see the ’98 Mariners remember Soriano by serving up Pilots-quality relief pitching in the weeks immediately following his passing.

SODDEN: Damn! The webzine Salon already did what I wanted–to request your own phony Microsoft support letters. If you’re tuning in late, the LA Times revealed a scheme wherein MS’s hired PR firms would concoct a supposedly spontaneous gush of letters and newspaper opinion pieces–all begging state and federal governments to back off from their assorted antitrust actions against the software giant. Commentator Jim Hightower calls these sorts of fake-grassroots campaigns “AstroTurf politics.” MS denied the allegations, claiming the newspaper had merely uncovered documents of unapproved PR-campaign proposals. The paper stood by its story.

It does read like something with which MS could conceivably try to get away. Except the trickery would’ve been all-too-obvious if all these supposed ordinary civilians all spouted the same leap-O-faith line–that the company’s dominance wasn’t really the result of its relentless deal-wringing and strong-arm tactics, but simply of releasing “popular” products within an unfettered open marketplace. It’s the kind of complex reality-distortion construct that too easily collapses when you try to translate it from spin-doctor lingo into more “natural”-sounding prose.

That’s where Salon’s invite comes in. They’re asking for original, equally preposterous, leave-MS-alone arguments. (Their own example letter: “Since I upgraded to Windows 95, my pancreatic cancer has gone into remission, my daughter was accepted to law school, and I won $50 in the Lotto Quick Pick.”) Send your own to www.salonmagazine.com. Or send ’em to us at clark@speakeasy.org.

NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK (NY Times, 3/4): “Jockey is introducing an advertising campaign intended to imbue the once-hidebound underwear company with a hipper image, particularly among younger shoppers.” Just what’s so bad about a “hidebound underwear company?” What other kind of underwear is there? Runner-up item (KIRO Radio News Fax, 3/5): “A Longview-area man plans a rally at the state Capitol to protest Indian hunting in the Mount St. Helens National Monument.” I thought we were over that despicable era of Western history.

GIRLY SHOWS: In recent weeks, the P-I Lifestyle section’s run two wire service stories, headlined “A New Heyday for Teens” and “Teenage Girl Power at the Box Office.” Of course, their idea of “girl power” is strictly limited to purchasing power, not political power or even the power to make films instead of just watching them. Still, that’s at least something. Some music historians claim we should credit teen-female fans for “inventing” rock ‘n’ roll. In other over-the-counterculture news…

QUEER NATION, INDEED: By now you’ve probably seen print ads for Triangle Broadcasting, “America’s First Gay Broadcasting Network” (unless you count American Movie Classics). The L.A.-based company just opened its second branch operation here (the first is in Philly). It runs low-power transmitters out of Bremerton (1490 on the AM dial) and Tacoma, plus a three-person sales office in Pioneer Square. All the programming’s beamed by satellite from Calif. They plan to include lotsa Seattle-based events listings and talk-show guests, but that’ll diminish as more network-owned stations start up around the country. The debut lineup’s mostly talk, with some dance-music hours at night. One host is described as “the queer Rush Limbaugh;” there’s also a Dr. Laura-like tuff-advice lady and a wacky-wacky morning dude. The company’s PR literature’s light on discussing station content, but big on praising gays and lesbians the way corporate America likes to hear people praised–as upscale, upscale, upscale! I suppose it’s progress or something like it if queers can now be depicted as not only non-threatening but as a key economic sector. But to effectively reach all those double-upper-income-no-kids households, they’ll have to grow into something beyond gay/ lesbian topics tacked onto regular dumb ol’ talk radio formulae piped in from out-of-state. Let’s hope they do. Speaking of gay listening habits…

INSERT OLD HOLYFIELD `EAR’ PUNS HERE: If lesbians hear more like men, howcum there’s not a male-appeal equivalent to Ferron? (Jewel doesn’t count.) On a more practical level, imagine if a special tuning fork or whistle could be developed, producing a sound only lesbians (and men) could hear. Single lesbians could find one another in any crowd, avoiding those straight women who think it’s hip to pretend to be bi. (And, if affirmed by further research, this could give further credence to something I’ve long believed-lesbians and straight men have more in common than the more bigoted members of both camps will admit.) Speaking of gender roles…

BYTE OF SEATTLE: Employment fairs can be glum occasions, with self-esteem-challenged jobless folk solemnly filling out application forms whilst getting sermonized about good grooming and interview skills. A far brighter milieu was offered at the Northwest High Tech Career Expo at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall. Dozens of firms, from Microsoft and H-P down to temp agencies and software-catalog companies, even outfits not primarily tech-oriented like Starbucks and PACCAR trucks; all with flashy booths and smiling flunkies eager to take resumes and business cards–at least from applicants with enough years of the right experience. (Safeco even offered to help train folks without hardcore computer experience to learn to program in COBOL). And you didn’t even have to be a short-listable candidate to pick up some of the freebies at the booths. More candy than Halloween. Sports bottles. Key chains, compasses, letter openers. Pens and pencils of most every variety. Luscious photo postcards (from digital stock-photo agency Photodisc). Sponges. Soap-bubble kits. Plastic mini footballs and baseballs (from Starwave). And the wackiest of all: Official Boeing-logo Hackey Sack balls! (Bet they bounce great off those tall hangar walls.)