IT’S THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS WEEKS, which means the TV newscasts and the “newsmagazine” shows are even fuller of alarm and scare tactics than usual. So, as a public service, this week’s online Misc. column will mix at least two pieces of good news for every piece of scary news.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #1: The new best-of-Misc. book will be out this summer, somehow or another. It’ll be available online via Misc. World, via mail-order, and in at least a few local stores. (A more comprehensive bookstore-distribution contract’s still pending.)

GOOD NEWS ITEM #2: My old book,Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, will probably get back in print sometime this summer as well. There’s still a lot to be worked out about that, though; I’ll keep y’all in touch.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #3: I’ll appear in April at a public reading series, dishing up segments from one or both books. Stay tuned to this site for further details.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #4: I finally got a replacement modem, so I’m back doing full Web research. With any luck, my 2400-baud backup modem (which sent some of you the same Misc. World email alert five or six times) won’t see any further use.

SCARY NEWS ITEM #1: Martha Stewart may be moving to (or at least setting up a second home in) the greater Seattle area. Actually, this was first rumored about a year ago. When Seattle magazine held a silly reader survey to find “the Martha Stewart of Seattle,’ it reported the real Stewart had been seen around town, holding the well-manicured hand of some Microsoft exec.

Why should this information fill me with such fear and dread? I happen to know several acquaintances who sorta like Little Miss Perfect’s handy cooking and decorating hints, but aren’t quite yet completely seduced into the total worldview of Marthaism. If the Anti-Goddess of perkiness were to set up a household somewhere in western Washington, or even move a piece of her Time Warner-backed book-magazine-TV empire here, I fear these good people, and perhaps many others, might fully succumb.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #5: A P-I story claims bulimia just might be related to a brain-chemical imbalance. The article says a study at Oxford linked the binge-and-purge disorder to screwed-up amounts of tryptophan, the chemical that regulates appetite. Like depressives who found a simple prescription could offer the basic capability years of therapy couldn’t, maybe now we’ll stop psychiatrically picking on girls and young women who can’t keep their food down. Their torture just might not be due to body-image paranoia and the negative influence of fashion advertising after all, but to a simple, potentially fixable, misdose of the brain’s natural pharmaceuticals. The phrase “it’s all in your head” is becoming a statement of hope!

GOOD NEWS ITEM #6: Both Scarecrow Video and the Elliott Bay Book

Company are being sold to new owners with deep pockets and the determination to keep these local institutions alive and kickin’. Scarecrow, home of the astounding 40,000-title selection of cinematic faves and obscurities, will now be under the care of owners with MS money and the determination to maintain it as a film-lover’s paradise. Elliott Bay’s coming under the stewardship of the guy who runs the Honey Bear Bakery (the beloved north-Seattle loitering spot for underemployed computer “consultants”) and Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (just about the only reason to ever go to that particular stretch of sprawl). He plans to add used books to Elliott Bay’s shelving, which should double the selection at that large but more-spacious-than-it-has-to-be literary palace.

SCARY NEWS ITEM #2: After months of hostile citizen input, Sound Transit’s still going ahead with plans to run its light-rail tracks at surface level down Martin Luther King Jr. Way South. At hearing after hearing, south-Seattle residents said they’d rather have a subway tunnel, which would (1) let the trains go faster, (2) let car traffic down and crossing MLK go faster, (3) require the demolition of fewer existing buildings, and (4) provide more of that good urban atmosphere; but would also (5) cost a lot, lot more than surface light rail. Neither Sound Transit nor its critics even mentioned the everybody-wins solution to this problem–sticking the tracks above the street, instead of on or beneath it. But that, of course, would require bureaucrats to stop pooh-poohing the sensible claims of the Friends of the Monorail, something these stubborn we-know-better-than-you officials appear loath to ever do.

GOOD NEWS ITEM #7: Low-power radio might become legal. The Federal Communications Commission’s rumored to be drafting new rules to let educational and other nonprofit entities operate FM stations of one watt (creating a signal reaching a one-mile diameter) to 1,000 watts (about 18 miles). That’d be great for ethnic minorities and subcultures not currently served by ever more-consolidating commercial broadcasters or by upscale “public” broadcasting. The big broadcasters don’t like this, natch, and may sue to stop it. And even if that challenge fails, I doubt if any licenses will be granted to the parties now running unlicensed pirate stations (of which one’s now running evenings in Seattle at 87.9 FM, and another’s supposed to be starting any week now). But maybe, just maybe, this’ll mean we can get a real, above-ground, community station in this town for the first time in over a decade.

SCARY NEWS ITEM #3 and GOOD NEWS ITEM #8: Researchers at the University of Amsterdam are embarking on a study to see whether virtual-reality

technology can treat people’s phobias. Their idea is to immerse patients in 3-D video-game-like scenarios to help people confront, and ultimately overcome, their deepest fears, all within the safe real-world confines of a clinic.

It’s good news because, if it works, it could help a lot of people. It’s scary news because, if it works, I might one day feel the urge to use it myself. Here, for examples, are some of the situations I might ask to be programmed into a VR headset for me to face:

• I must persuade a gaggle of stoned-out neohippies and ravers to leave a burning building.
• I must get somewhere NOW. But all along the street, I’m hounded by adamant people demanding things from me. “You! Three blocks away! Tell me the time, NOW!” “Where’s Third Avenue from here?” “Hold it, kid! You’re not going anywhere until you tell me the capital of Nebraska!”
• I’m dying from a heart attack on the sidewalk, surrounded by dozens of people who just stand around laughing.
• I’m dying of starvation, and meet a long series of people with plenty of food on hand who simply tell me I should be glad I’m not at risk for any of the long-term health problems related to obesity.
• I’m in Hell, which turns out to be a really bad comedy club.
• I’m in Hell, which turns out to be a video store with a thousand copies of each Meg Ryan movie and no copies of anything else.
• I’m in Hell, which turns out to be a recording studio where a bearded recording engineer makes me eternally listen to the same Steely Dan song while he enthusiastically explains the technical brilliance behind its recording and mixing.
• I’ve been spending decades happily in the afterlife of my choice, until a descendant posthumously prays my way, against my will, into the Mormon Heaven.
• I impatiently wait for my guru to tell me the ultimate meaning of life. But it turns out to be just like one of Richard Pryor’s early appearances on Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas–a seemingly-endless, carefully detailed set up for a single punch line, that’s completely bleeped out. Only instead of silence followed by howls of laughter, I hear silence followed by gasps of realization among all the other disciples in the audience.

ON THAT PLEASANT NOTE, let’s again remind you to nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our splendid Misc. Talk discussion boards, and to read these words from Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation: “Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right.”

THE LONG ORDEAL of the coup attempt is over at last. MISC., your thank-God-it’s-after-Valentine’s-Day online column, wishes it had something intelligent to say about it, but doesn’t. All that can be said now is Clinton won what may have been a calculated risk, putting his own career and the institution of the Presidency on the line in an attempt to break the Religious Right’s popularity base. After he spent his first term trying to woo big business away from the GOP, he’s spent his second term engaged in bringing the Right’s pious hypocrisies to a kind of public referendum. I’m not saying he tried to get caught cheatin’ on his wife. I am saying he and his team artfully managed the crisis, to turn it away from being a judgement on him and into a judgement on his accusers. Speaking of smut and its purveyors…

CLIMACTIC MOMENT?: A few weeks before Dan Rather tried to shock America’s TV news viewers with the “rise and rise” tale of Seattle cyberporn tycoon Seth Warshavsky, Business 2.0 magazine claimed his empire’s probably peaked. The cover story alleges Netporn (and specifically Warshavsky’s IEG group of paid-access sites) has hit the wall, can no longer commercially expand at its accustomed-to growth rates. The mag claims we oughta see pay-per-view skin sites consolidate and thin out this year. Warshavsky, as we’ve noted in previous weeks, has already planned for such contingencies by attempting to branch out into other Web-programming genres (gambling, stock quotes, even online surgery videos). Still, having come of age in a Seattle that thought itself to be just another sex-repressed northern city, there’s a kind of almost-kinky delight in knowing the world now thinks of our too-fair city as the cutting edge of sleaze spectacle. Speaking of entertainment dollars at work…

THE ART OF THE DEAL: So highbrow arts are worth the corporate/government investment, according to a highly publicized Corporate Council for the Arts report. It claims 200 King and Pierce County arts groups (specifically the bigger, more “professional” ones) generate $373 million in “economic impact,” hiring 16,000 people (mostly part-timers and contract workers) and selling 5.9 million tickets a year (almost 20 percent more admissions than major pro sports generate here). That’s all nice to know, but will the positive fiscal PR generated by the report be used to help promote more funding support for the arts, or just for more arts-related construction projects?

STRIKING: It’s spring training time, and the sports pages are once again spouting questions of Whither baseball? (Not again?) This time, the athletico-pundits claim that despite the recent NBA player lockout, pro basketball (and pro football) are in much better fiscal shape than baseball. With no salary cap to keep a few well-heeled team owners from grabbing all the top stars, the sport could become as uncompetitive as it had been in its alleged golden age, when the Yankees and the old New York Giants were always at or near the top. This time, the commentators warn, the deck’s so stacked against the less-rich teams that some might go under.

How about a better question: Whither major-league sports as we know them? Player-salary inflation can no longer be supported by TV contracts, now that the explosion of channels has decimated network sports ratings. Sneaker endorsements and team-logo merchandise may also be nearly tapped out as revenue sources. Almost every team in each sport either has a new luxury-box-beholden arena or is working to get one, so that particular money well’s just about maxed out as well. And with each of the big sports suiting up 30 teams or more, there aren’t many cities left to threaten to move a team to. The salary-cap sports have a few more years to deal with this trap than baseball, but they’ll have to deal with it eventually.

Here’s how I’d save major-league pro sports: All new teams, teams that get sold, and teams that move into publicly-funded stadia should be controlled on the league-franchise-contract level by regional, quasi-public corporations, similar to the organizations running many of the stadia. In turn, they’d contract out team operations to management companies, essentially turning team GMs and presidents from owners into contractors. Teams can only build new arenas or pay hyper-inflated salaries if the management companies can financially justify such moves. If a management company can’t make a team pay, it could let its contract to run it expire. Teams could move only if the regional authorities couldn’t land a feasible operator. Speaking of home teams worth saving…

THE BOTTOM OF THE BARREL: On the day after Stroh Brewing (current owners of Seattle’s Rainier Brewing and Portland’s Blitz-Weinhard Brewing) announced it was getting out of the beer business and selling off its brewing plants and beer brands separately, the sidewalk sandwich sign at 2nd Avenue Pizza read: “Keep Rainier in Seattle.” The loss of the Rainier Brewery (at 121, perhaps Seattle’s oldest manufacturing enterprise) would mean more than just the loss of some 200 jobs. It would mean the real end of one of our proudest local institutions, even if a beer continues to be sold under that name.

In the days before microbrews and Bud Light dogs, most of the beer drunk in the Northwest came from five places: Rainier in Seattle, Carling-Heidelberg in Tacoma, Olympia in Tumwater, General Brewing-Lucky Lager in Vancouver U.S.A., and Blitz-Weinhard in Portland. Rainier pretty much owned the Seattle market (and had a nice sideline with its drunkard’s-favorite Rainier Ale, whose dark green label inspired the nickname “The Green Death”); and Blitz-Weinhard (and its later flagship brand, Henry’s) likewise in Portland. But Oly was by far the biggest of the quintet, shipping enough product in 13 western states to qualify in some years as America’s #6 beer vendor (after Anheuser-Busch, Schlitz, Miller, Pabst, and Coors, which was also a western-only brand back then).

But industry-wide sales stagnations and the onward marketing pushes of Bud, Miller and Coors saw all these Northwest favorites tumble in the marketplace. The Lucky and Heidelberg plants closed down; the other three breweries changed owners several times. Now, perhaps only the Oly plant will be left. Oly’s facility is now owned by Pabst but is to be sold to Miller as an aspect of the complex Stroh asset sale (though it may still engage in “contract brewing” on behalf of Pabst, which would keep the Olympia trademarks and would buy the Rainier’s and Weinhard’s brands and distribution networks from Stroh). Because Oly used to sell so much more beer than Rainier and Blitz combined, that brewery has far more underused capacity; it could easily produce what all three now make, plus Miller’s brands.

The problem in this scenario is that Rainier’s and Henry Weinhard’s brand identities are closely tied to their sources of production. A Rainier beer not brewed in Seattle, or a Henry Weinhard’s not brewed in Portland, would not carry even a fraction of the decades-developed goodwill built into their names. For the Stroh people (who’d already collected the trademarks and a few branch plants of such prior fallen giants as Heilman and Schlitz) to sell the brands without the plants will only doom them to permanent secondary or tertiary status, like Pabst’s ownership has instilled upon such once-proud brands as Lone Star, Hamm’s, Lucky, and Olympia itself.

A better scenario would be for locals to make a counteroffer to Stroh to buy Rainier and Henry’s (the brand names AND the facilities). Could it happen? The Stroh folks would probably want a higher bid than it’s getting from Pabst for just the brands, and Pabst might also want some dough to walk away from an already-done deal. Could that kind of investment work out for a local buyer, given the stagnant state of both mainstream and upmarket “micro” beer sales? Just maybe. Could such a local buyer sell more Rainier and Henry’s than a Pabst-Miller-Olympia contract venture? Undoubtedly.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, join the drive to keep the soon-to-be AT&T/TCI combine from monopolizing high-speed Internet access, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building for our current survey via email or at the bubblicious Misc. Talk discussion boards, and heed these words from one Peter Wastholm: “All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy.”

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #1: An outfit in northern California’s selling officially-licensed Space Needle brand bottled water.

MAKE YOUR OWN JOKE HERE #2: Banners have been mounted all along the streets of the Darkest Eastside, calling on one and all to “Celebrate Redmond.”

WORKIN’ IT: A week or two back, we recounted alarming statistics in Variety claiming kids’ TV viewership was significantly down in each of the past three years. Now, other articles offer up a reason why. Not too long

ago, Those Kids Today were constantly berated as illiterate videots and Nintendo-junkies whose slacker study habits were going to be America’s downfall as a productive player on the global economic stage. Now, Time, the NY Times, and other media outlets are crying in alarm that kids as young as the first grade are being inundated beneath piles of homework so daunting nobody has time to be a kid. The NY Times account, citing a U. of Michigan study, claims in the last 17 years “homework for first- to third-graders had nearly tripled, to 123 minutes a week.”

The first caveat, naturally, is the mass-media biz might be worrying that young eyeballs are getting too captivated by mandatory attention, therefore limiting the young’uns’ ability to be marketed to.

Beyond that, another question arises–at a time when the effective application of knowledge is more nonlinear (or, rather, multilinear) than ever, when Net-based reference tools may make data acquisition as simple as using a calculator, why should we be dooming our children by force-feeding them a rigorous, narrow discipline of left-brain rote memorization? The most likely answer’s that in the ’80s, everybody was so darned worried we weren’t keeping up with those other industrialized nations in producing quantifiable test-score results. Test-score results, of course, don’t really equal knowledge; and knowledge certainly doesn’t equal wisdom–let alone economic “success.” As far as I’ve been able to figure, Japan’s schools are just as tough and soul-sapping as ever, while the nation’s economy’s gone to the dogs for reasons totally unrelated to study habits.

POT-CALLING-THE-KETTLE-BLACK DEPT.: In a recent PBS hour called We the (Rude) People, Morton Kondracke joined the chorus of those who bemoan the death of “civil society” and who blame America’s subcultural fragmentation and in-group politics and just about everything else wrong (or perceived to be wrong) with America on those darned ’60s antiwar protesters. Really, for a veteran panelist on The McLaughlin Group to claim the liberals are causing all the hatemongering is beyond ludicrousness!

THE FINE PRINT (In the closing credits of Artisan Entertainment’s video trailer to Jerry Springer: Ringmaster): “All characters and events in the preceding motion picture were entirely fictional, and nothing is intended to depict any actual participant in, or aspect of, ‘The Jerry Springer Show,’ which is broadcast on television. This motion picture is not connected to ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ and is not licensed from its producers.”

THE OTHER FINE PRINT (from a brochure soliciting public-art proposals for the UW Medical Center’s new Maternity and Infant Care wing): “Since not every MIC patient outcome results in a live or healthy birth, the successful artwork will respect this fact with appropriate imagery. For example, the artist may decide to omit direct references to children, babies, or reproduction.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I seem to always be praising the NW punk bible 10 Things (Jesus Wants You to Know). Its latest issue (#20) is its best yet. Besides the usual acreage of interviews and reviews, it’s got editor Dan Halligan’s tale of his Vegas wedding, a woman named Mels disappointedly relating how punks turn out to have most of the same sex hangups as other Americans, interviews with two DIY Netporn entrepreneurs, lotsa talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance repeal advocates, an art-photo by Wendy Wishbone of three goth models representing “the Three Fates of Punk: Death, Hypocrisy, Capitalism,” and Ben Weasel’s cogent analysis of how a vital, energetic subculture’s degenerated and ossified into a conformist, formulaic, commercialized “New Punk Order.” (Mightily timely reading during last week’s ESPN “Winter X Games” with all the post-Green Day noisemakers used for snowboarding sountrack tuneage.) Free at the usual dropoff spots or $3 from 8315 Lake City Way NE, #192, Seattle 98115.

LOSS OF DOWN: Another Super Bowl Sunday’s on the way, and with it the usual pseudo-intellectual garbage about pro football as an institution of violence and stupidity and that perennial fall guy testosterone–even though football puts more kid through college than any other sport, even though it’s really a game of coaching and choreography as much as one of hitting and tackling, and even though it’s got enough female fans for QVC to offer NFL-logo costume jewelry trinkets. Time staff essayist Lance Morrow recently claimed, “Football, still in bad odor among thinkers, needs a fancier mystique;” then proceeded to offer up a “deconstructionist theory” of the sport–which, natch, turned out to be less a defense of the gridiron game than a spoof of PoMo egghead jargon. (“Football enacts the Foucaultian paradigm wherein all actions, even involuntary motions or ‘fakes’ or failures (quarterback sacked), coalesce in meaning, and everytyhing that the game organizes in the way of objects, rites, customs (the superstitious butt slapping, the narcissistically erotic Bob Fosse touchdown dances) constitutes a coherent whole — the game lui-meme.”)

I, however, am not afraid to stake whatever remaining highbrow street-cred I might have on the line by actually and sincerely stating my praise for the game. I’ve (largely) grown out of my sensitive-post-adolescent jock-hating phase (my above remarks about snowboarding hype notwithstanding), and have come to an honest appreciation of the Big Game played by Big Dudes, their bodies (and usually their faces) hidden beneath the group-identity of the uniform, their individual heroics interdependent upon the coordinated effort of the entire team. A game with separate offensive and defensive players, in which fully half the participants can usually do nothing but “loss prevention.” (Hmm–maybe Safeco should’ve bought the naming rights to the new football stadium instead of the new baseball stadium.)

Here, then, is my partial list of what makes the perfect Super Bowl experience (please feel free to print this out and keep score at home):

• At least four hours of increasingly shrill yet picayune pregame “coverage.”
• The National Anthem sung by somebody who can’t hit the high notes or forgets the words.
• At least one safety.
• A missed point-after-touchdown.
• A successful really-long field goal.
• First and third quarters ending within the 10 yard line (if the teams are going to change sides at the quarter breaks, it should be as overt as possible).
• A homemade sign in the stands listing a Bible verse other than John 3:16. (My fantasy: To hold up signs displaying the verse numbers for the passages about Onan spilling his seed, or David spying on the bathing Bathsheeba, or a sequence of the verses that turn out to be “And Judas went into the potter’s field and hanged himself,” “Go thou and do likewise,” and “Whatsoever ye do, do so quickly.”)
• At least 20 increasingly shrill promos for the premiere of a new hit series, or the special episode of an established hit series, to air “immediately following the game.”
• A marching-band rendition of a contemporary hit song not originally meant for horns. (“MMMBop,” or maybe “Cop Killer.”)
• A scoreless third quarter (so you can get to the convenience store for restocking without missing the halftime extravaganza).
• A really ridiculous touchdown-celebration dance. (Perhaps involving pirouettes.)
• A couple of wasted time outs early in the fourth quarter.
• A penalty assessed against one team for having 12 men on the field, negated by a penalty for the other team having 13 men on the field.
• A true blooper-reel moment (a player running in the wrong direction, or the inadvertant tackle of a sidelines microphone operator).
• A good Master Lock commercial.
• A dumb Pepsi commercial.
• The whole thing coming down to one last come-from-behind miracle play that either somehow succeeds or at least comes very close.
• At least one hour of anticlimactic postgame rehashing.
• A premiere premiere of a new hit series, or the special episode of an established hit series, eventually following the postgame denouments and turning out to really suck.

NEXT WEEK: The long-delayed final results of our quest for appropriate honorees on a mythical Seattle women’s walk of fame. ‘Til then, here’s your next topic to mull over via email and our luscious Misc. Talk discussion boards: What’s the most beautiful “ugly” building in town (i.e., a beautiful structure the official tastemakers would despise)?

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.”

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.”

WELCOME BELIEVERS AND HESITATORS alike to MISC., the pop-culture column that can’t help but see Xmas as a Season of Wonders….

WONDER #1: Watched HBO’s Walter Winchell biopic last week, which naturally got me into pondering about the fate of a columnist in career decline without the backing of his ex-paper. As you might know, Winchell’s one of my all-time idols (despite the rightward tilt of his later writings and his prediliction for dumb personal feuds). For over 40 years he put fun, passion, and zest into prose. His Broadway gossip columns weren’t merely about entertainment; they were entertainments. But by working exclusively in the perishable commodities of newspapers and radio, Winchell was on what his contemporary, radio comedy legend Fred Allen, called a “Treadmill to Oblivion.” When that golden age of NYC-based entertainment faded, Winchell was left without a milieu to cover or a paper for which to cover it. Makes a scribe think seriously about trying to get more books out (which I pledge to do in ’99 somehow or another).

WONDER #2: It’s sure peculiar how Geore Carlin’s making commercials for a long-distance service. Wasn’t it just a year or two ago Carlin made an HBO special in which the venerable standup comic (who’s reinvented himself more times than Madonna, and at the time was in an angry-old-geezer mode) devoted the first 10 minutes of his monologue to brutally chastizing commercials–not any specific ones, but the whole damn advertising industry–for supposedly dictating consumer tastes and ruining public discourse?

WONDER #3: The Pike Place Market’s embattled management inserted an upscale-as-all-damnation Xmas flyer inside its December Market News tabloid. It’s got purple prose about snob-appeal products (just how many times can one repeat the word “unique” on the same page?), recipes for eggplant cavier and panzanella con calamari, and images of exotic birds, fancy cocktail glasses, and those quintessential icons of today’s Hustler Caste, cigars. and pictures of It makes one wonder whether any further proof’s needed that Market management’s gone totally 100 percent of-the-upscale, by-the-upscale, and for-the-upscale, to the exclusion of the more diverse communities the Market’s supposed to serve according to city mandate.

WONDER #4: After years of generally ignoring non-crime stories in south Seattle, local mainstream media now highly publicize opposition efforts to RDA surface light-rail in the Rainier Valley. Are the papers and TV stations really listening to the neighborhood advocates who’d rather have a subway tunnel in the south end (and under Roosevelt Way in the north end)? If I were a conspiracy theorist, which I’m not, I’d consider whether emphasizing public opposition to surface-level transit tracks was part of a larger strategy to re-discredit Monorail Initiative supporters.

WONDER #5: Why the huge 3-day blitz of “personality profile” publicity for Kalakala Foundation bossguy Peter Bevis in the Times, P-I, and the Times-owned Downtown Voice? If I were a conspiracy theorist (and I’m still not), I’d say the Communtiy Development Round Table elitists might have decided (after ignoring Bevis’s ambitions for a decade) that the ’30s-vintage streamline ferry, once restored, would be a great fulcrum for re-development plans at the Pier 48 dock off Pioneer Square (where the Northwest Bookfest has been held, in a building now scheduled for tourist-oriented replacement). Of course, whether Bevis (who’s spent a ton of cash and two tons of debt on the Kalakala effort) will get his due, or whether the powers-that-be will simply wait for his group to fail and then buy the boat from it at a distress-sale price, remains to be seen.

THEATRICAL UPDATE: Years of uncertainty might finally be over for Seattle’s Seven Gables movie chain. 7G’s parent circuit, Landmark Theaters, was quietly bought up recently by the Dallas-based Silver Cinemas outfit; thus freeing 7G from the clutches of mercurial financier John Kluge.

LOCAL PUBLICATION UPDATES: Some months ago, I complained about the dance-music mag Resonance as the Seattle music publication that never covered any Seattle music. Now, I’m happy to report, that’s no longer true. Issue #18 has local DJs Eva Johnson and Donald Glaude on its cover, a local fashion spread in the middle, and articles about Critters Buggin, film promoter Joel Bachar, and the expanding empire of local entrepreneur Wade Weigel and Alex Calderwood (owners or co-owners of Rudy’s Barber Shops, the Ace Hotel, ARO.Space, and Tasty Shows). Not only that, but the whole mag’s now on slick paper with colors you can eat with a spoon. (Free in local clubs or $15/year from P.O. Box 95628, Seattle 98145.)….

Mansplat, Jeff Gilbert’s occasional tabloid tribute to beer, B-movies, and low living, is out with a fresh issue #14 full of snide buffonery about “the worst cartoon characters of all time” (Scrappy-Doo only made #10), made-up superheroes and wrestlers, a “history of swear words,” silly rock-star stage names, and real and fake ads (one of the fake one’s for “Marty’s Discount Gynecology”). But the strangest parts are the letters and notices referring to issue #13, which is officially “completely out of stock” and which I, for one, never found to have ever been available, but is purported to have featured “the Mansplat staff–naked!.) (Free at select dropoff spots or from 2318 2nd Ave. #591, Seattle 98121; home.earthlink.net/~mansplat/.)

SIGN OF THE WEEK (On a Gourmet Sausage Co. van parked in Pioneer Square): “Enjoy, Just Enjoy.” Runner-up (ad poster at Kinko’s promoting color laser copies of family photos): “There’s only one you. Make copies.”

THAT NEVER STOPPED THE EAST GERMAN OLYMPIC TEAM (P-I correction, 12/12/98): “O’Dea should not have been listed in the Metro League high school girls’ basketball preseason rankings that appeared on Page E4 of Wednesday’s Sports section. O’Dea is an all-boys school.”

HANGING IT UP: The Meyerson & Nowinski Gallery’s closing after three years: The two owners, who currently each live in separate states (neither of which is Washington), got distracted by their primary careers and couldn’t take the time to make a go of what, at its opening three years ago, was to have been Seattle’s premier, world-class commercial modern-art emporium. Instead, the Foster/White gallery’s moving its (be brave, Clark, say the phrase) glass art (see, you could do it!) into the M&N space. With M&N, Donald Young, and Richard Hines all gone, who will attempt another would-be premier viz-art showcase around here and when?

NOT-SO-SOLID GOAD: Life continues to be crazy in the universe of Jim Goad, the Portland writer behind the book The Redneck Manifesto and the almost-banned-in-Bellingham zine Answer Me! His wife and Answer-Me! co-publisher Debbie Goad left him shortly after the Redneck book came out in ’97, then publicly accused him of physical abuse. He denied the allegations. But on May 29, according to Portland prosecutors, Jim “kidnapped” his more recent ex-girlfriend–even though he’d applied for a restraining order against her.

As Goad’s fellow underground-zinester Jim Hogshire claims in a recent mass e-mailing supporting Jim’s side of the dispute:

“It seems the two ex-lovebirds were fighting in Jim’s car as Jim drove for about 20 minutes through populated areas of town, obeying all the traffic rules, stopping at red lights and not doing anything reckless. Goad did not have or use any weapon, use any force, or even make threats to keep his spurned, but very angry ex-girlfriend in the car with him. The car doors were not locked — a fact made clear when the alleged “kidnap” victim, Sky Ryan, tired of her harrowing “kidnap” experience and effected a daring escape by the simple tactic of opening the car door and getting out.”

A version of the case more sympathetic to Goad’s accusers appeared in the Portland paper Willamette Week:

“According to Ryan, she and Goad got into an argument while driving to her apartment around 5:30 that Friday morning. The verbal battle soon got physical, Ryan says. ‘He locked me inside the car and skidded out,’ Ryan told WW. ‘He was laughing, saying he’d kill me. I was pleading for my life. He’s pounding me.’ On Skyline Boulevard, Ryan, ‘screaming and bloody,’ finally convinced Goad to let her out of the car.

“When police interviewed Ryan at St. Vincent’s [hospital], her left eye was swollen shut, she had bite marks on her hand and she was bleeding in several places, according to an affidavit filed by District Attorney Rod Underhill in Multnomah County Circuit Court.

“In June 1997 Debbie Goad learned that she had ovarian cancer. After that, her husband of 10 years began beating her almost daily until October, according to a restraining order filed in Multnomah County Circuit Court. Debbie Goad accused Jim Goad of kicking her, spitting on her, hitting her and threatening to kill her, among other things.”

Goad’s remained in jail (bail’s now up to $760,000) and is set to go on trial on Jan. 18. Hogshire insists it’s all a trumped-up case, pursued by publicity-minded authorities eager to use Goad’s writings as character-assassination ammo. I hope the prosecutors aren’t really planning such tactics. Censorship and free-speech issues needn’t belong in what, to the best I can figure, appears to be a situation involving two self-admittedly excitable people and the murky issues of which one did what to whom.

I don’t personally know the parties in this case, but I have known people living on certain emotional wavelengths, who attract friends who are on corresponding wavelengths. People who can get all too easily caught up in the excitement of vicious relationships, and not know (or not immediately care) when those relationships degrade into a realm (physical violence) where one partner has a decided disadvantage. This isn’t a gender-specific thang: I’ve seen it among gay and les partners, and among non-romantically-involved members of the same rock band. Censors should not get away with using ‘protecting women’ as their excuse; abusers should not get away with crying ‘censorship.’

YOU’VE ANOTHER WEEK OR SO to nominate people, places, and things on the shine or the decline for our annual MISC. World In/Out List, either by email or in our fresh new MISC. Talk discussion boards. ‘Til then, pray for snow, and ponder these words from Denis Dutton, webmaster of Arts and Letters Daily: “At this stage in its evolution the Web resembles a typical Australian goldfield, with vast mountains of low-grade ore.”

THE VOICE OF DESCENT: On this Pearl Harbor Day, let us remember not too many years ago, when “the Japanese threat” meant their high-flying companies were going to take over our economy. Now, there’s a new Japanese threat–that their troubled companies, and those of other structurally-shaky Asian economies, might stop buying America’s soybeans, wheat, and jet aircraft.

Once again, as it has several times over the past 30-odd years, Boeing’s given a lump of coal to the Puget Sound region’s collective Xmas stockings. After all the manic growth, all the stupid growth, all the countryside-clearing growth and all the urban-life-draining growth, part of me actually looks forward to the more sluggish economy 48,000 layoffs and unfilled job vacancies might bring. Yet another part of me still feels sorry for the young adults and newcomers who’ve known nothing here but constant economic expansion, and who might find it more difficult to land decent jobs or backing for their dream restaurants.

ALREADY WE’VE ONE major business closure due to changing economic conditions. As you might expect, the last week of KSTW’s local news (mandated by the station’s current owner, Viacom) played out as both personal desparation (clips of old cute-dog stories strung together by a staff obviously intent on assembling demo reels for its resumes) and light pathos (co-anchorman Don Porter holding up a “Will Anchor For Food” sign). The headline graphic for the top story on the final newscast (a story about a newly-found cache of dynamite in Puyallup): “TNT Destroyed.” KSTW’s former call letters, several owners ago, were KTNT (from its original owner, the Tacoma News Tribune). Also throughout the final broadcast, the station ran the logo from its old ownership by Gaylord Broadcasting–not the ugly “UPN 11” symbol Viacom management had imposed. The cancellation means 62 newsroom and studio layoffs, and turns what had been one of the strongest non-big-three-network stations in the country into just another mere outlet for reruns and forgettable semi-network shows (can you even name any UPN original production other than Star Trek Voyager?).

PULP FRICTION: A couple weeks back, I mildly dissed a Stranger article dissing the retro-swing revival. Now I’ve something I never expected I’d say: Seattle Weekly, once one of the few “alternative” weeklies to be more conservative than its town’s daily papers, has lately become darn near pinko with Geov Parrish publicly questioning the canonization of the late Seattle School District PR machine John Stanford and Mark Worth listing Seattle’s equivalent of the “50 families” that run everything in certain Latin American countries. This is one case of a publication becoming more progressive under chain ownership. When it was locally owned, the Weekly was tied heavily into this town’s business and political elites, far more so than many urban weeklies in other towns. Founder David Brewster was a defender (to this day) of ’70s-style notions of leadership by an enlightened intelligentsia; as applied in his pages, it meant individual politicians and political decisions could be criticized but not the larger priorities of our Pro-Business Democrat machine. But after Brewster retired and sold out to the Hartz Mountain chain of papers, the paper’s rather suddenly started growing something resembling a spine. (And I’m not just saying these things ‘cuz I’m trying to get a job with them. Honest.)

CATHODE CORNER: Finally saw digital cable over the holidays, and was immediately taken by the way each channel first appears on screen as a collage of small screen areas, taking as long as a second before all the rectangles fill in. How long do you think it’ll take before the effect appears as a deliberately-planned schtick in music videos? (It’s already been used in series, if you count the “puzzle piece” effects that used to lead into and out of commercials on Get Smart! and The Streets of San Francisco.)

SCREEN DEFENSE: The same week the mighty Scarecrow Video store celebrated 10 years of rough-and-tumble survival, Capitol Hill’s smaller but equally feisty Video Vertigo posted photocopied trade-magazine articles on its wall, claiming 400 indie video-rental shops are going out of business each week in the US due to predatory pricing by, and sweetheart deals offered by studios to, Blockbuster. While some of these individual stores and small chains probably won’t be missed (I’m thinking of those stores offering only the same creaky action-hits and moldy ’80s sitcom movies as the big chains), there are also plenty which deserve to stick around (with more, or different or better, selections than the corporate stores, and/or better rates or looser return policies). Wanna see a flick at home tonite? Go to one of those joints first.

THIS MONTH’S FIRST-THURSDAY HIGHLIGHTS:

1. Gloria DiArcangelis’s stunning neo-realist paintings at Myerson & Nowinski. Nobody else (on this continent anyway) can make contemporary faces and figures look so much like they belong in the Renaissance.

2. Meghan Trainor’s tiny wall shrines (made from “authentic Boeing aluminum” and what look like labels from ancient brands of produce) at the relocated Roq La Rue.

3. Parris Broderick’s “Sitting Duck” series at Zeitgeist Espresso. You’ve seen his murals, sandwich signs, etc. all over town; now see his loving post-expressionist touch applied to images of ducks (or are they decoys?).

4. The abstract-installation piece at Oculus, a study in geometric form and color created by gluing hundreds of Starburst Fruit Chews to the wall.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Emerald City Connections (“Seattle’s #1 Meeting Place”) purports to be a slick singles’ resource with personal ads, relationship advice, and related articles. But six of the first issue’s 24 pages comprise ads for escorts, phone-sex lines, and other “adult services”–as if the publishers were admitting the personal ads might not work. (Free at vending boxes around town, or from 1767 15th Ave. S., Seattle 98144.)

TWO FOR THE SHOW: At least one secret to understanding the eternal conflict of American culture can be found in the decades-old conflict of burlesque vs. vaudeville. Burlesque wasn’t just raw as in naked (or rather as naked as the law allowed or could be bribed into allowing). It was raucous; its dancers and skits and comic monologues celebrated the boistrous passions of turn-of-the-century urban immigrants. It also regularly barbed politicians, judges, bosses, and other authority figures. Vaudeville (as shown in a KCTS documentary late last year which still haunts my memory) was squeaky clean, celebrated “wholesome family entertainment,” and promoted a monocultural America of thorough white-middlebrow dominance (with just a few ethnic touches inserted for the mildest of spiciness).

Vaudeville led to the everywhere/nowhere America of Hollywood movies (several of the big studios trace their corporate history from vaudeville-theater chains), Lawrence Welk, Mickey Mouse, Reader’s Digest, Miss America, soft rock, light beer, weak coffee, and eventually to what The Nation and The Baffler call today’s global “culture trust.”

Burlesque, conversely, led to Milton Berle, Betty Boop, the prewar version of Esquire, drag-queen shows, the comedy-relief segments in early porn films, and (eventually and indirectly) to punk rock, S/M showmanship, and zine culture.

Despite its handful of often fondly-remembered burlesque “box house” theaters in and near today’s Pioneer Square, and our status as home to burlesque’s greatest star Gypsy Rose Lee (born into a vaudeville family), Seattle was a vaudeville town through and through. Seattle’s first corporate inroad on the national entertainment biz was the locally-founded Pantages vaudeville circuit.

The battle continues. Across the country, city governments are trying to banish strip clubs and adult video shops (slicker yet raunchier descendents of burlesque), sanitizing downtowns for the sake of Planet Hollywood and The Disney Store (dining and shopping as toned-down descendents of vaudeville).

At its best, the spirit of vaudeville represents precision, energy, showmanship, and a pleasant good time. And all those things are good. But at its worst, it represents cloying paternalism and sentimental “family entertainment” that bores kids and insults grownups’ intelligence. Burlesque’s descendents have their own downsides; particularly the recursive traps of parody and ironic detachment seen in so much pseudo-hip art, music, and advertising.

But we need more of burlesque’s assertive populism, its healthy skepticism about authority and its healthy affirmation of the life force. Somewhere between post-vaudeville’s mandatory naiveté and post-burlesque’s relentless cynicism lies the truth.

(Good, close re-creations of classic vaudeville can be found year-round at Hokum Hall in West Seattle. The best evocation of burlesque in town’s the “Fallen Women Follies,” held two or three times a year at Re-bar. You can also see the old days of burley-Q at the Exotic World museum out in the southwest.)

‘TIL NEXT WEEK, pray for snow, and be sure to enter your nominations for this year’s Misc. World In/Out List (the only worthwhile and accurate list of its type in the known world), either by email or in our lovely new >Misc. Talk discussion boards.

WORD OF THE WEEK: “Aporia”

Words Against Words

Original book feature, 12/7/98

THE ALPHABET VERSUS THE GODDESS:

The Conflict Between Word and Image

by Leonard Shlain

(Viking) $24.95

THE RISE OF THE IMAGE, THE FALL OF THE WORD

by Mitchell Stevens

(Oxford) $27.50

Between these two tomes, you get two men taking 728 pages to denounce left-brain linear thought and its chief manifestation, the written word.

Surgeon-physicist-author Leonard Shlain, in particular, has few nice things to say (except as afterthoughts) about either his own medium or his own gender. One of those men who loves to claim everything associated with his own kind is intrinsically evil, it takes him until a brief afterword to acknowledge that a few males have done a few good things during this planet’s history. Most of his long, long account involves reiteration after reiteration of one greatly oversimplified premise; an expansion on the new age/radical feminist belief that the whole world was into goddesses and matriarchy but it ended just before recorded history started.

His notion: It was the ability to record history itself that put goddess worship out of business; that as soon as any particular tribe or nation of humans started (or, in the case of the Renaissance, restarted) the widespread use of written language, everything promptly went straight to H-E-double-hockey sticks, particularly regarding women’s civil rights. Shlain sees militaristic Sparta as having been far more gender-equal than literary Athens. Egypt: A supposedly great place for the ladies during the hieroglyphic days, much less so once they got ahold of the Coptic alphabet. China: Despite its whole different writing system it’s still a writing system, blamable for everything from foot-binding to the Cultural Revolution. Wherever writing goes, Shlain posits, narrow-mindedness, drab official clothes, grim military discipline, sexual repression, and male domination, and denunciations of visual art all follow.

In real life (that universe far more complex than even the best-thought-out book), left-brain, literal thinking isn’t just for men; and visual-spatial enjoyment isn’t just for women. Women can certainly create and consume words. Indeed, women buy most of the novels in this country; men buy most of the comic books (and porn videos). Women can be literal-minded too, and self-righteous, and grim and drab. Women can also be very interested in the maintenance of strict social rules and castes (particularly those women who are on the winning side of those rules).

Still, Shlain’s initial premise could, with tweaking and better arguments and more acknowledgement of the diversity and complexity of social existence, turned into a notion with a few intriguing possibilities. I’d suggest a slightly different premise, no more or less supported by Shlain’s package of historical “evidence.” I’d say wherever militaristic nationalism takes hold, with its need to mold humans of all genders into impersonally-assigned roles, that all those glum suppressions follow. Shlain would likely counter-argue that you couldn’t have big, far-flung, Roman-style armies without written commands, so it’s still writing’s fault.

NYU prof Mitchell Stevens can write about the limitations of writing much more effectively than Shlain can. Mitchell’s clearly a professional wordsmith who struggles daily with his art form’s strengths and weaknesses. But his choice of hopeful talismans for a new, neo-iconic age are a bit odd: those ’60s “collage films” that always seemed to stick a mushroom-cloud image into everything; hyperactively edited MTV specials; the image-layered intro to an ABC documentary on religion in America. The use of these particular examples, out of the hundreds of thousands of filmed, videotaped, televised, and/or animated works generated this past century or so, basically reveals Stevens’ own wishes for what he calls “the New Video.” He wants a medium that can do what he feels can’t be done in boring ol’ text narratives. He wants quick juxtapositions of images that can stir viewers’ minds as well as their emotions. He wants works that can combine and compare scenes from different places and times. These tasks have been accomplished in verbal form (from the interludes in John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy to any newspaper front page).

While both Stephens and Shlain see hope for a post-linear mindset from computers and the Net, they forget programming is intensely literal and abstract. Indeed, any post-Word age is going to be at least as word-filled as this one. Movies and videos have scripts and editing lists. Websites have text surrounded by HTML scripts, which are intrepreted by more abstract program code. The daily stuff of commerce and governance will still involve forms, documentation, instructions, memos, etc.

Mind you, I’ve got my own problems with The Word and those who purport to be its champions. If any medium, even my own, has stuffy pendants like Jerry Mander, Neil Postman, and George Will as its bigtime defenders, there’s got to be something wrong with it. Besides, words can be so darn clumsy at trying to express what Bette Davis or Salvador Dali or animator Tex Avery could get off in a single, well-planned instant. But words can do many things images can’t do well (witness any number of good novels made into bad movies). Instead of seeing words and pictures as rivals, as Stephens and especially Shlain do, it’d be better to see them as complementary ways of seeing our world and of imagining other ones.

WELCOME BACK to Standard Time and to MISC., the popcult report that was quite bemused by the coincidental confluence of the fun, fake scares of Halloween and the depressing, real scares of election attack ads. The strangest of this year’s bunch has to be the one for Republican Rep. Rick White with the typical grim music and the typical grim B&W still images telling all sorts of supposedly nasty things about Democratic challenger Jay Inslee–ending with the criticism that “Jay Inslee is running a negative campaign.” (But then again, one can’t expect moral consistency from Republicans these days, can one?)

KROGER TO BUY FRED MEYER AND QFC: The Cincinnatti-based Kroger Co., long one of the big three upper-Midwest grocery chains (with A&P and American Stores/Jewel), was America’s #1 supermarket company for a while in the ’80s, at a time when it, Safeway, and A&P were all in downsizing mode, selling or closing not just individual stores but whole regional divisions. Now that the food-store biz has worked out a formula for profit levels Wall St. speculators find sufficient, the big players are expanding again, building bigger stores and gobbling up smaller chains. By gobbling Fred Meyer, QFC, and the various Calif. and Utah chains Fred Meyer’s absorbed, Kroger again will be #1 (ahead of American Stores, which just took the prize when it announced its big combo with Albertson’s). What’s it mean to you? Not much–what really matters in the biz is local-market dominance, not chainwide strength.

THE FIRST THING I’VE EVER WRITTEN ABOUT CLINTON-HELD-HOSTAGE: Why are followers of Lyndon LaRouche manning card-table protest stations downtown, pleading with passersby to support Clinton against the GOP goon squad? Maybe because the Repo men could quite easily be seen as trying to accomplish what LaRouche (before he was imprisoned on credit-card fraud charges) used to accuse liberals and Jewish bankers of conspiring to establish–a quasi-theocratic “New Dark Ages” where demagougery and raw power would overtake all remainiing semblances of representative democracy.

Another potential interpretation of the whole mess: Clinton’s lite-right political stances were engineered from the start to tear asunder the most important bond of the Reagan coalition, that between corporate Republicans and religious-authoritarian Republicans–not necessarily to improve the political lot of those more liberal than Clinton himself, but more likely to simply improve the playing-field chances of corporate Dems like himself. With the impeachment frenzy being whipped up ever more noisily by the authoritarians (to increasing public disinterest), Clinton may be almost deliberately setting himself up as a potential self-sacrifice to this Quixotic quest, to finally disrupt the Religious Right’s ties not only to its big-biz power brokers but its pseudo-populist voter base.

Of course, an institution at the heart of U.S. political maneuvering for some three decades or more (going back at least to Phyllis Schafly’s major role in Barry Goldwater’s ’64 Presidential bid and the concurrent drive to impeach Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren) won’t go away, and won’t give up its hold on the system without a fight. By driving the theocrats into increasingly shrill, dogmatic, and hypocritical positions, Clinton’s setting up next year to be the year the theocrats either shrink into just another subculture or finally achieve their darkest dreams of quashing the democratic system of governance as we know it. Next Tuesday’s midterm Congressional elections might or might not mean that much in the main scheme-O-things, but the months to follow will be a bumpy ride indeed.

WHAT THIS TOWN NEEDS: Last week, I asked you to email suggestions about things Seattle oughta try to get soon, now that we’re at the potential endgame phase of our recent economic boom. Here are some of your, and some of my, wants:

• A citywide monorail line. It’s being worked on.
• Repeal of the Teen Dance Ordinance. It’s being worked on.
• A sign in the library: “This is not a convenience store.”
• A community radio station. A collective called Free Seattle Radio is currently raising money to start another pirate FM operation. But what I’m talking about is a real station, licensed and above-ground, with just enough resources to cover the issues, arts, and voices that make the city.

  Reader Dave Ritter adds, “Seattle needs a new common ground. Ideally, this would be a radio station owned by a consortium of local entertainment figures. The programming would be market-exclusive and inclusive. The format would rely on tried and true radio (pre-1973) small market rock-radio principles. Kind of a Stranger with sound. It wouldn’t even have to be FM, if done correctly, but it would need to be legal, and competent.”

• A theater festival for the troupes and directors too big for the Seattle Fringe Fest (which is fringier than most other North American fringe festivals).
• A good Scottish pub (not Irish or English).
• Better bus service, particularly between neighborhoods (like Magnolia) and non-downtown workplace districts (like Elliott Avenue).
• Rent control or something like it. A reader named Dee writes, “I’ve heard enough horror stories and I feel Seattle is going in the same direction as San Francisco with the big money moving in, and people of low to moderate incomes becoming further displaced. My one hope is Seattle has strong working class roots with a bit of a socialist heart. I think enough educated people will become pissed off enough to make the noise which will lead to better changes.”
• A local, live hip-hop showcase club. For that, we might need–

• A city attorney who’s not a stooge for gentrification. Sure lotsa people hate the classist, possibly racist policies of Mark Sidran, but nobody even ran against him the last election.
• Saner liquor laws. The Washington Liquor Control Board was born in post-Prohibition times when the more “upstanding” elements of local society were worried at the threat of the wild-west saloon culture coming back. To this day, the liquor bureaucracy believes its mission to be keeping a tight lid on what adults can and cannot do on licensed premises while consuming legal drugs. A healthy urban society needs a strong nightlife industry; while the liquor bureaucrats are less restrictive in some aspects than they used to be, they’ve a ways to go toward abetting this the way other “regulatory” departments help the industries they lord over.
• A movie theater with booze. The truly-vast McMenamin’s brewpub empire in Portland has a couple of these. Up here, General Cinemas is planning to convert its low-profile multiplex at 130th & Aurora to a movie theater with food, but no word yet on a liquor license. Before Paul Allen bought the Cinerama theater downtown, another bidder on the property wanted to turn it into a viewing-‘n’-sipping establishment. The Rendezvous restaurant’s Jewel Box Theater has hosted many film screenings with full booze service. Some think there must be a Washington liquor regulation against booze and movies, but that appears to be not the case. Besides, if you can have sports bars with multiple big-screen TVs, you oughta be able to have a bar with a movie screen.
• A real winter bacchanale, not the tame bar-promotion event Fat Tuesday quickly became. Something with real joie de vivre. For that matter, our all-too-fair city could use a little less prudery overall. Scrap that ten-year “temporary” moratorium on new strip joints, so we could get one of those nice “gentleman’s clubs” your girlfriend’s not ashamed of you going to. Establish at least one public clothing-optional beach in the county. Even legalize (or at least decriminalize) prostitution, and make it a co-ed biz (old widows and middle-aged divorcees need love too, ya know).
• A bowling alley in or near downtown. Maybe one could go in part of the yet-unleased old Nordstrom complex, or in the Convention Center expansion (as a leisure amenity for tourists and locals alike).
• More spirit and less “attitude.”
• More democracy and less demographics.

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET, be sure to vote next Tuesday for the library bonds and the minimum-wage hike (and against the abortion ban and affirmative-action ban), and consider these words from Alexander Pope: “Vice is a monster so frightful to mein, that but to be seen is to despise; yet seen too oft familiar with her face, we first endure, then pity, then embrace.”

(Be sure to send in your Halloween party reports, including the number of Monica Lewinskys seen, to clark@speakeasy.org.)

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.)

AND SO IT HAS COME TO THIS: Seems everything in this once-sleepy town’s Growing! Changing! Morphing!

Even in print.

The powers-that-be at The Stranger have decided they no longer want to publish this here little compendium of factoids and opinionoids.

The concept behind Misc., first in June 1986 at the old ArtsFocus monthly and since November 1991 at The Stranger, was to report aspects of the Seattle popular culture that didn’t fit a standard format of arts reviews, previews, and interviews.

Its schtick of assorted short and long items was never intended, as some have alleged, as a short-attention-span paean to any so-called “MTV generation” but rather a revival of the classic three-dot newspaper column as practiced by such past masters as Walter Winchell, Irv Kupcinet, and the P-I-era Emmett Watson.

The real value of a three-dot column isn’t depth but breadth. At a time when knowledge and careers are increasingly specialized, there’s a need for generalists who can explore the contexts, juxtapositions, and connections among seemingly unrelated phenomena, from something as general as global socioeconomic trends to something as specific as a candy bar.

This column’s treated fashion, food, politics, music, architecture, medicine, painting, porn, magzines, talk radio, etc. etc. as equally important disciplines, each with something to reveal about the larger world.

It’s treated its readers as intelligent humans, not as some target-marketing stereotype. It hasn’t told you what bands, movies, or shows to see; it hasn’t promised to make you wealthier or slimmer or more sociable or more orgasmic; just to inform and entertain. It’s taken a personal point of view, yet hasn’t tried to promote the author as its own biggest topic. It’s been opinionated, but without any in-your-face “Attitude.”

The column’s also tried to reflect and respond to today’s ever factioning, increasingly complex society. Canadians used to say the U.S. was a “melting pot” but Canada was a “mosaic,” where different ethnic and cultural groups got to maintain more of their own identities with less pressure to conform to a “mainstream” norm. Nowadays, the U.S. is getting more mosaic-y than ever (while Canada’s searching for some kind of social grout that’ll keep its tiles from flying apart).

It takes a generalist to detect the patterns among the tiles, the developing harmonies and disharmonies and color schemes–without excessively oversimplifying the patterns, without invoking obsolete stereotypes of one “dominant culture” vs. one “counterculture.”

While having fun with the convoluting minutae of modern urban life, the column’s tried to advocate the idea that this unmelting of the melting pot’s an overall good thing. Much as I enjoy the documentation and ephemera of our cultural past (movies, magazines, postcards, records), I’ve no wish to return to any “good old days” when racism was official national policy, or when book publishing was firmly controlled by a few tweed-suited men in Manhattan.

We need more tribes, more virtual communities, more ways for individuals to find their own voices and form their own affinity groups. But along with that we need ways for these communities to learn about, and from, one another.

Thanx and a hat tip to all my loyal readers, sources, and informants over the years, and to the Stranger staffers who’ve helped to keep it accurate, pretty, and properly-spelled. A special nod goes to Matt Cook and James Sturm, who helped get the column into the paper back in ’91, and to Alice (no relation) Savage, who commissioned its first incarnation at ArtsFocus.

The column existed before The Stranger did, and will continue online at Misc. World, www.miscmedia.com. There’ll continue to be non-columnar material by me elsewhere in the paper (“Cyber Stuff” and the new “Diversions” in the Calendar section, “X-Word,” reviews, one-shot essays and articles). And I’ll be working on new projects, including a long-threatened “Best of Misc.” book and a new edition of my local music-history book Loser.

‘Til then, some closing words from the last broadcast by ex-Seattleite and pioneer network newscaster Chet Huntley: “Keep the faith; there will be better and happier news, one day, if we work at it.”

The Microsoft File

Book reviews for The Stranger, 9/15/98

The Microsoft File:

The Secret Case Against Bill Gates

by Wendy Goldman Rohm

(Times Books/Random House) $25

Bill Gates’ Personal Super Secret Private Laptop

by Henry Beard, John Boswell, and Ron Barrett

(Simon & Schuster) $13.95

If you don’t know much about the federal, state, and competitors’ accusations against the Redmond Software Behemoth, this might be a relatively painless place to start.

Over the course of some 300 pages spanning some 10 years, Rohm slowly conveys the various, wide-ranging complaints made against MS (that it’s hustled and bullied people around in order to maintain its lock on PC operating systems and to leverage that monopoly into full market control of applications software, Internet browsers, and electronic commerce).

But if you’re already familiar with the basics of the story, Rohm’s slow-yet-hurried pace and her convoluted attempts to stick it all into a “human interest” linear narrative may leave you almost as frustrated as, say, trying to remove the Internet Explorer icons from a Win98 desktop. She seems less interested in the case of U.S. v. Microsoft than in her soap-opera sagas of its players.

That’s the only obvious reason for her frequent side allegations concerning the premarital Gates’ sex life (concerning one alleged tryst: “She was beautiful. It didn’t matter that she was paid”).

Like Ken Starr, Rohm apparently believes an unrepressed libido’s a telltale sign of an unworthy character. Also like Starr, she apparently wants to sway public opinion against her target more than to gather and disseminate factual matter. Despite Rohm’s obsessions, Gates’ character isn’t the real issue; it’s his company’s actions and their legality.

Besides, much of the world already sees Gates as a near-mythical figure of limitless ambition and limited conscience. It’s enough of a premise for National Lampoon vet Henry Beard and his partners to create a whole picture book purportedly consisting of screen shots from Gates’ own PC.

Some typical gags involve a proposed Star Trek script with himself as the hero, a hype-generation program that “changes comparative adjectives to superlatives,” a Perrier-filled wading pool for baby daughter Jennifer, proposed “on-screen error messages so users will blame themselves for foul-ups and glitches,” and in-house acronyms such as “OGITWEP (Our goal is the whole enchilada, period).”

Nothing in it’s actually funny, but it’s a telling document about exploitable public sentiments toward the fifth-richest American in history.

AS PROMISED three weeks ago, here’s the official Misc. list of the 64 arts and sciences a modern person should learn; as inspired by one of the nonsexual parts of the Kama Sutra. (Here’s the original passage; here’s how to get the whole book.)

I’m not claiming to be an expert on all of these, or any. They’re just things I, and some of you, feel folks oughta know a little better, in no particular order:

• Appreciating different aromas, textures, and tastes. Discerning the difference between Ritz and Hi-Hos.
• Rudimentary knowledge of a foreign language.
• Intelligent discourse with persons of other subcultures.
• Hosting a successful party.
• Dancing (Lindy hop, Virginia reel, tap, lap).
• Holding your liquor; preventing or relieving hangovers.
• Personal health and hygeine; including brushing and flossing.
• Contraception and STD prevention.
• Chemistry; including different pharmaceuticals’ good/bad effects.
• Tanning without burning.
• Posture and bearing; preventing carpal-tunnel syndrome.
• At least one athletic or semi-athletic activity (downhill skiing, swimming, yoga, step aerobics, bowling, bicycling, Buns of Steel).
• One or more social games (poker, Scrabble, Twister, pinball, foosball, Quake,

  street hockey, et al.).

• Knowledge of the major professional sports (other than wrestling).
• Food preparation and storage; knowing how long to microwave a leftover pizza slice.
• Dining for pleasure, not merely for sustenance. Creating unusual food combinations (peanut butter on mashed potatoes).
• Discernment of fine yet reasonably-priced liquors and beers.
• Knowledge of agriculture, food technology, and the dangers of fad diets.
• Architecture and civic planning.
• Home building and repair.
• Interior design and/or Feng Shui.
• Gardening; mulching and composting.
• Acquaintance with U.S. and world literature, art, comics, film, theater, TV, and periodicals.
• Knowledge of the world’s assorted cultures, philosophies, and religions.
• Music theory and history; awareness of at least one country singer other than Patsy Cline.
• Awareness of the natural environment of your home and the larger world.
• Awareness of the history, politics and economics of your home and the larger world.
• Political action and organizing.
• Dealing with corporate and governmental bureaucracies.
• Judging people not by the color of their skin, but by the color of their lip gloss.
• Inquisitive skepticism toward public, political, and commercial speech.
• Holding your own amid hostile situations (i.e. workplaces, playgrounds). When to engage in verbal self-defense; when to keep your big flap shut.
• Value shopping; bargaining and haggling.
• Cordial relations with neighbors, relatives, and postal workers.
• Politely yet firmly declining the entreaties of proselytizers and telemarketers.
• Being nice to young children without letting them walk all over you.
• Caring for and feeding pets (biological or virtual).
• Getting along with housemates, lovers, cubicle mates, or bandmates without killing one another or even wanting to. Social negotiation and consensus-building (deciding which film to see or which pitcher to get at happy hour).
• Falling in love hard; falling out of love soft.
• Developing a healthy self-esteem, not an unhealthy egomania.
• Reinventing oneself every few years, a la Madonna or George Carlin.
• Personal discipline (getting to the center of a Tootsie Pop without biting).
• An area of knowledge associated with a different ethnicity or gender (for a man, Barbara Cartland novels; for an African American, butoh).
• Fashion design, selection, color-coordination, accessorizing, and repair.
• Sorting laundry.
• Programming a VCR and remote (not that hard, really!).
• Personal law (wills, contracts, income tax, warranties, et al.)
• Improving or repairing your credit.
• Packing a carry-on suitcase.
• Traversing your city via public transportation; reading a timetable.
• Solving crossword and jigsaw puzzles.
• Short-term weather forecasting.
• Ability on a musical instrument (including the voice).
• At least one of thevisual arts(painting, drawing, calligraphy, photography,

  cinematography, videography, Photoshop).

• Rudimentary computer usage.
• Desiging a website with no annoying “construction signs” or bad MIDI music.
• “Netiquette”: Writing e-mails to the point, but not too pointedly.
• Grammar and spelling; knowing the difference between “its” and “it’s.”
• Composing effective thank-you notes, resumes and cover letters, yearbook salutations, personal ads, and responses to threatened legal actions.
• Dressing and grooming for various occasions (seductions, funerals, job interviews, Halloween).
• Magic tricks and parlor games.
• A healthy sense of humor; jokes and anecdotes for all occasions.
• A repertoire of film, music, and TV trivia.
• How to tell different types of trees from a far distance. Number one–the larch….

———————–

Subject: 64 Arts for the Modern Person
Sent: 7/27/98 9:20 AM
Received: 7/27/98 12:45 PM
From: erinn kauer, eakamouse@webtv.net
To: clark@speakeasy.org

Interesting topic. All modern persons should bone up (no pun intended) on the various methods of BIRTH CONTROL. To include: proper condom etiquette, taking the pill on time, abstinence, getting off without actually having intercouse, and covering one’s butt by always having a supply of the newly available emergency contraceptive pills (actually just the regular pill, taken within 72 hours of unprotected intercourse, it reduces the chance of actual conception by about 75%… this is not RU486, and does not abort anything, it just does not allow the conception to take place). PLEASE include this particular item in your list, there would be far less unwanted pregnancies occuring, either resulting in having the child because the misguided fool believes so strongly that abortion in wrong (like having a child unprepared and setting them up in this world on a shaky base is right) or in having the costly and scary and stigmatizing abortion and suffering needless guilt because of it. However, abortion is not the end of the world, and should be seriously considered if all other options are not viable at that point. Please call the FDA at 301/827-4260 and ask for Lisa D. Rarick for more info on the 72 hour emergency contraception pill, or 1-800-NOT2LATE, or your local pharmacy. Do not let the pharmacy give you any bullshit about having to get it through your doctor, it is available WITHOUT a prescription and is perfectly legal, etc, etc, etc. I found that my pharmacy balked at the notion, but this has only recently been approved and they are simply not used to it yet. They need to be shaken though, they are needlessly telling people to go through their doctor, but you DO NOT HAVE TO, this should be available OVER THE COUNTER.

Besides contraception, folks of the modern age should study organic gardening, meditation (stress-buster, dream fulfiller, life lengthener), keep an eye on politics and actually know something about the world and the U.S. of A., and how to make a good latte…

I am sure there is much more, and my list is pretty lame, but the CONTRACEPTION/ FAMILY PLANNING is extremely important.

Thanks for hearing me out!

Erinn Kauer / eakamouse

P.S. Concert ettiquette, Gourmet Camping, and the fine art of bodybuilding (look good now AND later!). Whatever. Bye.