OFFAL-LY STRANGE: Your day-earlier-than-normal pre-Thanksgiving Misc. begins with feast-related news from London. In that town where darn near every non-chain restaurant has a veggie page on the menu, where mad-cow disease is still a recent memory, and where vegan activists used to pass out anti-meat flyers outside McDonald’s outlets until the chain sued them for slander (the vegans won), the latest food fad is a return to a UK tradition, delicacies made from offal–organs and other animal parts not normally consumed by modern Western humans. An AP dispatch claims “more than one-quarter of London’s 600 biggest eateries” now serve such items as pig’s-head salad, bloodcake with fried egg, goose neck (stuffed with gizzards), and veal-kidney risotto with crispy pig’s-ears. Many of these meat-byproduct dishes are illegal to commercially serve in the U.S. (you can’t even get a genuine haggis, the national dish of Scotland, ’round these parts); but hey, there’s another air-fare war going on now. In other food news…

BIG STOREWIDE SALE!: Why, you ask, would Fred Meyer (the regional everything-for-everybody chain) want to buy up QFC (the fancy-pants grocery specialists)? Besides the normal drives for consolidation in today’s chew-’em-up, spit-’em-out corporate world, QFC was threatening to infiltrate Freddy’s Oregon stronghold, and QFC’s role in the Pike & Broadway urban-strip-mall complex (with its food-drug-variety-banking combo) is too close to Freddy’s under-one-roof hypermarket concept for Freddy’s to afford to ignore.

Media coverage, natch, emphasized the merger’s potential impact on the Q’s upscale core clientele. The Q responded to this press-generated nonissue by running full page ads promising the Q will remain the Q. Tellingly, there’ve been no ads promising Freddy’s would remain Freddy’s; just a brief reassuring statement from Meyer management. But with seemingly everything else getting gentrified these days, I know I’d be afraid of such possible consequences as Ralph Lauren goods taking over the Pant Kingdom department, Smith & Hawken on the hardware shelves, Aveda at the cosmetics racks, Bang & Olufson replacing the Panasonic boom boxes in the Photo & Sound section, or even a wine shelf with F. G. Meyer’s Choice Beaujolais Nouveau.

MEANWHILE, Freddy’s won an appeal earlier this month in its plan to build a big store at the former Leary Way steel-mill site. The neighborhood advocacy group SOIL (Save Our Industrial Land), which seeks to stop the plan, sez it’ll continue appealing in higher courts. It’s not against a Freddy’s in their part of town, just against it at that particular location. Its latest flyer reiterates a suggestion made in an old Misc., that Freddy’s instead take over the ex-Ernst block up the street. (SOIL’s hotline: 789-1010, fax 789-7109.) In other retail-space news…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The former Kid Mohair on Pine will reopen (maybe as soon as this week) as the Baltic Room, a piano bar (with just beer & wine). While a lot of remodeling work has been done, the space still looks largely like its elegant former self. Why’d Mohair go the way of 80 percent of U.S. small businesses? Maybe the “cigar bar” fad passed its peak; maybe the gentlemanly surroundings clashed too much with the loud, uptempo DJ music. Why might the Baltic Room fare better? For one thing, it’s phase three of the Linda’s Tavern/ Capitol Club cartel, forming a veritable market-segmented lineup of not-specifically-gay watering holes on Pine. Imagine Linda’s as the Chevy of the chain, the Capitol as the Caddy, and the Baltic as the lush-yet-comfy Buick. In other entertainment news…

WET & WILD: Scientists in Quebec City have announced an “invisible condom” they hope to market after a couple years of further testing. According to Reuters, it’s a “polymer-based liquid that solidifies into a gel at body temperature,” forming a waterproof film that blocks STD transmission. Inventors say “it can be used without telling the partner who doesn’t want to use a latex condom.” I’m sure even before the thing gets gov’t. approval, test users will quickly find additional fun uses for the stuff, some of which might even involve sex.

CLASS WARS: Amid the controversy regarding Ballard High’s students and staff being shunted from their reconstruction-impaired regular digs to the quite dilapidated Wallingford carcass of the closed-in-’81 Lincoln High, Showtime’s been running Class of 1999, a truly bad B-thriller filmed at Lincoln in 1989. Exec-produced by onetime SIFF co-boss Dan Ireland, this RoboCop ripoff starts with that #1 cliche of bad sci-fi, the present-day trend exaggerated into the future. Teen-gang violence gets so bad by ’99, the opening narration states, that high schools have become total-security compounds with armed robots disguised as teachers. Only some of the robots go schizo and start killing teens, causing the all-white gangstas to retaliate in a predictable orgy of blood and steel limbs. Anybody who saw it (or worked on the crew) could tell Lincoln was perfect as a fictional bombed-out shell of a school, hence a lousy site for a real school.

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: A kind reader, visiting a local dollar store, found and sent in a package of Smack Ramen, an Asian-style meal in a packet (as made in Costa Mesa, CA). While the name obviously derives from a Japanglish attempt to invoke lip-smackin’ goodness, there is (as is oft the case with Japanglish) an unfortunate double meaning. Is this also the cheapo-meal of choice for those who’ve spent all their money on a certain poppy-derived non-nutritive substance (also Asian-derived)?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The second “more-or-less quarterly” issue of Platform, Morgain Cole and Bret Fetzer’s ambitious local theater zine, is now at Seattle theaters and other free drop-off spots. It’s got timely ideas about the organization and financing of local drama troupes, plus a 1983 Richard Nelson essay about the precarious state of “Nonprofit Theater in America.” He said the theater movement was “nearing disaster,” ‘cuz it was “without an adequate sense of tradition or a sense of social responsibility.” The fact that most of Nelson’s arguments could be made today (and are being made today, as in a recent NEA staff report) proves (1) the theater movement’s done a good job of not dying, and (2) how little further than that it’s gotten. (No subscriptions, but info can be had from 313 10th Ave. E, #1, Seattle 98102.)

WORKIN’ IT: The Discover U catalog offered a course two weeks ago on the “Secrets for Making Love Work.” For those of you who couldn’t attend that day or didn’t have the $29 class fee, we hereby offer a few of our own secrets:

• Cut off love’s phone and cable TV.
• Threaten to cancel love’s MasterCard and/or bar tab.
• Offer love a management-track position with three weeks’ vacation, stock options, and full dental.
• Show up at love’s door in a Ride-Share commuters’ minivan. Keep a-honkin’ the horn ’til love comes out.
• Enroll love in an employees’ softball league.
• Change the locks on love’s room and throw all love’s stuff onto the sidewalk.
• Get love a really cool metal lunchbox, pre-filled with a pastrami sandwich and a pack of Hostess Sno-Balls.
• Enroll love in an SCCC career-training program.

I WANNA KNOW: Last month, we asked who you thought had more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It wasn’t one of our most popular surveys, but all four respondents agreed: Sabrina. Our next survey: What will ’90s nostalgia look like? Which sights, looks, sounds, and consumer goods will future movies and collectors deem as evoking those silly days of now as A Simpler Time? Submit your suggestions at our new email address, clark@speakeasy.org.

PASSAGE (from Topper author Thorne Smith): “Like life itself, my stories have no point and get absolutly nowhere. And, like life, they are a little mad and purposeless. They resemble those people who watch with placid concentration a steam shovel digging a large hole in the ground. They are almost as purposeless as a dignified commuter shaking an impotent fist after a train he has just missed. They are like the man who dashes madly through traffic only to linger aimlessly on the opposite corner watching a fountain pen being demonatrated in a shop window.”

INSTEAD OF SPENDING Election Night at the Muni League’s annual media gathering or one of the big candidate bashes, Misc. watched the returns on a tiny portable TV in Linda’s Tavern with a dozen or so members of the Monorail Initiative campaign. (One campaign leader was named Grant Cogswell–same last name as a Jetsons character!) As the tiny-type updates beneath Mad About You and NYPD Blue kept displaying a solid lead for the measure, the bar’s ambience of conversation and DJ music kept getting punctuated by cheers and loud kisses. The rest of the election went pretty much as polls predicted, with Schell’s slightly-narrower-than-expected victory reassuring a municipal political machine that believes government’s highest and best purpose is construction, what Canadian politicos call “megaprojects.” But this night, at this place, belonged to a civic project the machine hated and the people liked.

Now it’ll be up to the people, and to the new neo-progressive wing on the City Council, to shepherd this unusual city-transit vision into reality without letting the machine and its planning corps literally “derail” it. The Seattle machine’s been rather effective at taking popular concerns and re-interpreting them into problems best solved by more business-as-usual. (Note, for instance, how the “neighborhood empowerment” movement thoroughly got re-interpreted by the politicians (even some of the “empowerment” politicians) into a movement for the upscale homeowners to keep affordable housing out and home-resale values high.) Watch for Schell & co. to try to replace the Monorail mandate (maybe in court) with just more commuter buses and park-‘n’-ride lots.

MEDIA INSIDER-ISM should come as no surprise. Note the reaction to the Monorail Initiative. The papers and the TV stations couldn’t find enough ways to “objectively” dismiss initiative instigator Dick Falkenbury and co. as loonies, threatening to saddle a citizenry with an impracticable transit scheme all the experts pooh-poohed.

Before the election, the papers and stations treated the Monorail plan as a sideshow to the gun-lock initiative and the Seattle mayoral race. The Times’ May 8 story treated the issue as a cute human-interest piece, starting off by describing Falkenbury as “a big, burly guy with a deep, heavy voice.”

The Weekly did run an enthusiastic cover story two weeks before the election (the biggest pre-election coverage the initiative got), but the following week its official endorsements list recommended against the initiative, giving no explanation why. The dailies also endorsed a no vote, also without much elaboration. The Times’ pre-election editorial headline set the tone: “Charming but unsound.”

Once the returns came in, this party-line portrayal came down hard. The Times’ Wednesday and Thursday stories Monorail dissings from the current mayor, the mayor-elect, city attorney Mark Sidran, and downtown-establishment publicist Bob Gogerty. The only pro-Monorail quotations were from Falkenbury himself, who was still described in less-than-flattering terms.

Times editorial columnist Terry McDermott tore into the vote: “It was one of the most charming proposals to get to the ballot in years. And one of the worst.”

Fellow columnist Jean Godden, taking the establishment line that there’s no way this can be paid for, wrote a column of facetious fundraising ideas–tin cups, bake sales, et al. (Never mind that it chiefly relies onmayor-elect Paul Schell’s favorite financing mechanism, the “public-private partnership,” via passenger-station retail (ask a few espresso vendors about the value of high foot-traffic locations). Never mind that much of it could be paid for by reallocating funds already earmarked for RTA light-rail routes that’d duplicate some Monorail mileage. And never mind that the initiative’s text clearly states it’ll use bonds and B&O taxes as a backup scheme.)

The Post-Intelligencer similarly described Falkenbury in every story as “initiative leader and tour-bus driver” or “the 44-year-old cab driver.” Its Friday story emphasized Falkenbury’s “whimsey” and lack of engineering experience, and described the initiative as “a giant transportation project with a seat-of-the-pants blueprint and a wild-guess price tag.” The P-I‘s Thursday story started out with Sidran, Schell, and city councillor Jan Drago; the former saying it “raises a lot of questions without answers.” It also dismissed America’s biggest current monorail, at Disney World, as an “amusement ride” novelty (even though it efficiently carries up to 200,000 people a day throughout that sprawling complex). But at least the P-I bothered to contact some pro-Monorail professionals. On Thursday it quoted two executives with U.S. companies building systems overseas. On Friday it found an ex-UW civil-engineering prof who acknowledged the thing not only could work, it might be more practical than RTA’s light-rail scheme. (Nobody, though, wrote how new urban monorails are currently underway or under consideration in Florida and southern California.)

The TV stations weren’t that much better. Even KOMO, which is planning an office-retail expansion to its building near the existing Monorail line and would hence potentially benefit from an expanded line, treated the vote as a thorn in the side of the new mayor and council. KING made Schell’s pre-election rejection of the Monorail plan the prime focus of his first post-election interview. (He said he’d examine the situation and maybe submit a referendum asking voters to repeal or modify it.) Even Almost Live! host John Keister likened the initiative to “asking people, ‘Do you like monorails?’ The next election they’ll ask what’s our favorite color.”

Compare this to the press’s treatment of the stadium and Commons proposers, who were nearly unanimously lauded as far-thinking visionaries (except in the columns of full-time skeptic McDermott). Papers and radio stations that normally treated sports-team bosses as meddling clueless dorks become sanguine when owners start demanding new playpens. Apparently, the difference between a “visionary” and a “whimsical” crank is whether he’s got cash and connections.

Here’s how I’d analyze the results: The initiative was extremely well conceived despite McDermott’s claims to the contrary. It was a Seattle-only scheme, aimed squarely at urban transit supporters and avoiding suburban conservatives and car-culture addicts. To this core constituency, the Monorail Initiative promised specific benefits at a relatively modest public cost. Nothing “whimsical” about that.

There’s even a legitimate point to the part in the initiative text about withholding city council members’ salaries if they don’t set up Monorail planning promptly. While the clause might not hold up if it’s ever tested in court, it shows Falkenburg suspected from the start that the insiders might try to ground the Monorail Initiative if it passed. So far, he’s being proven right.

YUPPIFICATION MARCHES ON: While the developer-owned politicians were promising to be more responsive if citizens just gave ’em another chance, the developers themselves kept on a-doin’ what they do best. The 66 Bell art studios, where the first Misc. installment was written for the old Lincoln Arts Association paper, were vacated and will become re-divided into smaller spaces at higher prices. The long-abandoned landmark Austin A. Bell bldg. was demolished, except for the front facade (which will become a false-front to the condos being built on the site). And Deja Vu lost its lease on the 1st & Pike strip club where countless businessmen and longshoremen paid out big bucks to momentarily feel slightly less lonely.

The daily papers were aglow about the possibility that entrepreneurs might turn the ex-Deja Vu space into an 1890s-retro “general store.” A general store was a place that sold most of the basic needs of frontier life. Downtown could certainly use a basic-needs retail outlet today. But, of course, this wouldn’t be anything like that. The would-be storekeepers want to sell T-shirts, gourmet jams, lattes, “fine art” (that stuff that’s not as good as just-plain art), and “unique gifts” that’d undoubtedly be just the same as all the other “unique gifts” sold in and around the Pike Place Market. For at least a year, the Samis Foundation landlords had openly expressed their wish to be rid of Deja Vu as a tenant as soon as they could legally kick it out. On my scale, of course, the human physique is wholesome and yupscale trinket stands are a little closer to obscene.

IN MORE POSITIVE RETAIL NEWS: The Pike-Pine Corridor where Linda’s is, an area hyped as the next happenin’ business district for some years now, has stumbled onto a niche. The arrival of several stores full of friendly antique furnishings at Pine and Bellevue has coalesced the area’s status as a bric-a-brac district to rival Portland’s Burnside Street. (The Seattle branch of Hamburger Mary’s, Burnside’s famous bric-a-brac theme restaurant, is now just a few blocks away at Bellevue and Olive.) From the retro ’30s at Fibber McGee’s Closet to the retro ’80s at Penny & Perk, from the vintage skin mags at Starlight Video to the pre-WWI sheet music at Filippi’s Books, the Double-P strip’s got most of the acoutrements for any time-pastiche home look you might imagine. Let’s just hope the big-money boys don’t “discover” the place and ruin it all.

WELCOME BACK to a return-of-standard-time edition of Misc., the pop-culture column that will miss traded-away Sonics benchwarmer Steve Scheffler. The lovable, lanky Scheffler was an inspiration to everyone who toiled just outside the three-point-arc of fame. He was basketball’s version of St. Bartholemew (the guy in the 12 Apostles who had nothing written about him in the Gospels except his name).

ON THE BUS: Ever feel cramped inside an airplane fuselage? Boeing’s arch rivals at Airbus Industrie have a potential answer, though they’re only promoting it right now as a freight plane. The Airbus Super Transporter, which recently touched town for a promotional event at Boeing Field, is this huge bulbous thing, like a giant Playmobil toy plane; perhaps the most unairworthy-looking thing big engines can push off of the ground. I couldn’t get hold of a picture of it, but it looks almost exactly like the “Thunderbird 2” equipment-transport plane on the classic UK puppet show Thunderbirds. Imagine the kind of interiors you could have built in the thing: Multi-tiered seating, or better yet a multi-level party yacht in the sky, with potential amenities (saunas, beds, live bands) limited only by total weight and power consumption. Just the thing for flying over the International Date Line at the turn of the millennium!

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Alien Pops not only come in great flavors like “Watermelon Slice” and “Strawberry Shake,” they’re shaped like your classic bald, bug-eyed, UFO-abduction-story alien heads. Even better, they come from the saucer-sighting capital, Roswell, N.M. Available at Dan & Ray’s in Belltown or by calling (800) 522-5534.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: XX (Where the Girls Are!), the latest addition to the growing subgenre of local zines proudly billed as “By Women,” is a concise four-tabloid-page monthly newsletter edited by Sandra Faucett and Cresentia Jenkins, focusing on event listings of interest to third-wave (or is it third-and-a-half wave?) feminists of varying sorts. Issue #1focuses on women’s basketball with Seattle Reign game dates and trivia. There’s also a review of ex-local writer Natalie Jacobsen‘s book No Forwarding Address and breast-cancer-info Web links. At the usual drop-off spots, by mail (at P.O. Box 20834, Seattle 98102), or online (www.yin.org). In a somewhat different vision of feminine “empowerment”…

THE POLITICAL SPECTACLE: I’d long wondered when the three not-all-that-compatible branches of Republican ideology (unfettered capitalism; moral prudery; anti-governmental ranting) would stumble apart on an issue. It might be happening in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, directly north of Seattle. There, managers and staff of the Sugar’s strip club are circulating petitions on an initiative that, if it makes the ballot and passes, would change the new town’s set-up to add an additional layer of bureaucracy. Sugar’s management openly says it wants a government less capable of restricting operations at the club (known as among the raunchiest table-dance joints in the state), and believes a more cumbersome municipal organization would be more likely to leave the place alone. In other words, less governance via more government. (But then again, the exotic-dance biz has always known about less equalling more.)

Anyhow, the initiative’s chances of success are questionable. The Sugar’s people (most of whom, along with most of the club’s clientele, live outside Shoreline) have done a good job of publicizing their effort, but have done a poor job of communicating how their proposed governmental change would benefit the suburb’s 5,000 residents. Still, it’s interesting to see the sex industry reaching out for public support, instead of just lobbying politicians and suing in courts to defend its right to exist. Club managers are betting that commercial pseudo-sex has become mainstream enough that Shoreline voters will actively agree to help the club stay in business. After all, it’s not like they’re a sports team demanding a subsidized arena or a department store demanding a pedestrian park be sliced in two.

WORD-O-THE-WEEK: “Abulia.”

(This week’s reader question: Who has more powers, Sabrina the Teenage Witch or Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Respond at clark@speakeasy.org, our new email home. Thanx.)

WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOU’RE LAME: Here at Misc., we’re among the many sports fans who aren’t all that sad to say goodbye to Shawn Kemp. He wasn’t the first legend-in-his-own-mind to believe the world would instantly recognize and appreciate his all-around superiority if he only got outta Seattle, where grandstanding demands for idol-worship are often answered not with supplication but with dismissive pleas to get real. Most of the ambitious emigrants I’ve known, who all left town in full certainty of their imminent superstardom, got as far as becoming studio musicians on centerfold videos or bit parts on unaired TV pilots. It takes more than just a hostile attitude toward most everybody around you to make it in one’s chosen profession’s bigtime. It even takes more than the extraordinary talent Kemp’s definitely got. Despite NBA and Nike marketing themes to the contrary, basketball’s still a team game. And, as just about everybody’s middle-school P.E. teacher used to say, there’s no “I” in the word “team.” Speaking of poor sports…

THE FINAL SPORTS BLOOPER REEL: Disgraced sportscasters, like dead celebrities, appear to come in threes. First O. J. Simpson, then Frank Gifford, now Marv Albert. I’m just waiting for the inevitable Albert-meets-Tyson jokes to pop up. The whole tawdry affair almost makes those Fox Sports Northwest promo ads (the ones with images of the lovably square Dave Niehaus intercut with images of a trashed hotel room) seem nearly plausible.

THE MAILBAG: Seattle Scroll writer Jesse Walker writes in to insist he knew all along how the anti-Internet-hoax letter he ran in a recent “net hysteria” essay (reviewed in Misc. two weeks ago) was itself a hoax, and that attentive readers could’ve inferred from his piece that he knew. Unfortunately, he won’t get to clarify this in the Scroll‘s pages. The feisty year-old biweekly’s run out of money and probably won’t come out again.

DRAWING THE LINE: Recent years have seen lotsa grownup in-jokes in cartoons. One Cartoon Network promo spot’s built exclusively around material kids aren’t supposed to know about. It features the Tex Avery dog Droopy and Scooby Doo‘s Shaggy in a convertible, talking about how the Time Warner-owned cable channel’s now seen worldwide, when Shaggy asks, “Do you know what they call Pound Puppies in France?” Explaining how there’s no such thing as “pounds” in the metric system, Shaggy then asks, “What do they call Smurfs in Spain?” His answer: “Los Smurfs.” Only that’s wrong–as anyone who went to the Smurf theme park in France knows, the late Belgian cartoonist Peyo‘s critters have a different cutesy name in each major Euro language (Stroumphs, Schlumphs, et al.). In Spain, they’re “Los Pitufos.”

OFF THE LINE: Hard to believe it just a year ago when virtually every writer, photographer, cartoonist, graphic designer, and programmer in town was either being recruited for or trying to push their way into no-benefits “contract” employment as “content creators” for the Microsoft Network and/or Microsoft-owned websites. But now, the one company that could indefinitely sustain extensive, money-losing online ventures has chosen not to do so, at least not to its first extent. Many of the paid-access MSN sites (including the “alternative culture” site Mint) are being shut down; others are being scaled back. The free-access MSNBC website is also laying off almost half its “temp” workers; while the company’s Sidewalk entertainment-listing sites scattered across the country have faced greater-than-expected staff turnover (apparently several key people were hired as “creative” writers, only to find themselves stuck typing in movie-theater showtimes). While I’ll certainly look forward to seeing some of my acquaintances on this side of the pond a little more often,

ON THE LINE: After two years of development (interrupted by putting an ever-bigger paper out every week), there’s finally a Stranger website at www.thestranger.com. Each week’s current Misc. can be temporarily found on the site. The Misc. World HQ site (www.miscmedia.com) continues as a complete archive of the column and of assorted other things I’ve written over the years.

PASSAGE (from Incredibly Strange Music organist Korla Pandit): “Music may not save your soul, but it will cause your soul to be worth saving.”

HERE AT MISC. we can’t help but anticipate and enjoy the arrival of autumnal weather. I claim to be not really a weather person, but I can’t help but feel more comfortable when the outside changes from garishly bright 70mm Technicolor back to muted 16mm Eastmancolor.

THE MAILBAG: Responding to our recent praise of the yet un-hippified genre that is marching music, Liz Dreisbach writes in to plug a group she leads, the Ballard Sedentary Sousa Band. “It’s Americana at its best. Thirty players (ages 15 through 80), each wearing a radiant and different classic band jacket. We play nothing but old band tunes, mostly marches… We even have a sedentary majorette who twirls her baton sitting in her chair.” It next performs on Nov. 6, during a “Sousa Birthday Bash” at that hot new neo-vaudeville venue, Hokum Hall (7904 35th Ave. SW, West Seattle). In other old-timey spectacles…

FLIGHT OF FANCY: One event nearly ignored by the media this equinoxal season was the 50th birthday of Sea-Tac Airport. Airport management held a relatively low-key reception inside the main terminal recently: cake, mini-sausages, a kiddie choir, displays of ’40s-’50s flying memorabilia. The highlight was “stilt walker” Janet Raynor, dolled up in a ten-foot-tall version of a vintage-1967 Alaska Airlines flight-attendant’s dress. Raynor strode, pranced, and even danced in the long dress (which gave her the look of a mid-’70s Bon Marche fashion-ad illustration) while deftly fielding jokes from passers-by about which airline has the most legroom in business class. She also passed out reproductions of an old publicity photo with the dress’s original wearer standing beside the airline’s president. The guy in the photo’s just tall enough to provide the model with a degree of personal service not even Alaska Airlines is known for.

FEASTING ON A GRAND SALAMI: For as long as I could remember, Seattle was a sometimes-lovable loser of a city, whose “leaders” (mainly engineers, land developers, and steakhouse owners) wanted to become “world class” but usually muffed it. The Mariners, who played unspectacularly for so many years in that homely cement pit, matched this civic image perfectly. The same time Seattle became known as an assertive seller of software and coffee and sportswear, the Ms started becoming winners. This year, they not only won their division but had been widely expected to do so. Microsoft and Starbucks have become so dominant, they’ve generated ire within their respective industries as hyper-aggressive organizations bent on total domination. The Ms are a ways from that kind of rep, but how many consecutive seasons at or near the top would it take before they became as nationally reviled as the old-time Yankees? Just wondering.

HAVING A COMPLEX: The change of season often brings a reassessment of one’s life situation. If you’re feeling a little too much peace-‘n’-quiet in your personal world, here are some handy tips for voluntarily complicating your life:

• Start taking heroin.
• Start a relationship with someone who’s taking heroin.
• Develop a life-dominating crush on someone completely unavailable.
• Get a bank card. Max it out on cash advances. Blow the cash on Lotto tickets and/or “Make Money Fast!” multi-level marketing schemes.
• Get, or get someone, pregnant.
• Buy a “fixer upper” house, car, or boat.
• Become really, really fascinated by liquor, lap dancers, and/or rare books.
• Get a pet Siberian tiger.
• Settle for nothing less than the latest, most advanced PCs and/or VCRs.
• Decide your life’s too full to waste any time on some boring ol’ job.
• Become a feature filmmaker.
• Open your own private zoo.
• Start learning a performance skill worthy of a spot on the next Jim Rose Circus tour.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, cheer on the Ms, make sure you check out the truly-fine selection of Halloween party novelties at Chubby & Tubby (including the bleeding-hand candle with wicks on each finger, dripping blood-red wax to reveal plastic bones underneath), ponder the possibilities of a home life with the clear plastic inflatable furniture from Urban Outfitters (hint: better not have un-declawed cats or careless smokers around), and heed these words of the one-‘n’-only Liz Taylor: “There’s no deodorant like success.”

WHAT A RELIEF!: By the time you read this, the Mariners may have clinched the AL West championship and secured a role in the baseball playoffs. They were damn close to the clinch when this was written, but with the state of the Ms’ bullpen all year long nothing was sure. For just such jittery situations, Queen Anne-based Beadle Enterprises now offers Ninth Inning Worry Beads. These translucent plastic beads on a metal string come in Mariner blue and tourquoise, with a tiny wooden baseball and bat attached. The company claims they’re just the thing to “soothe nasty symptoms associated with penant fever. Twirl them. Rub them. Jiggle them. Hold them in your hands and pray. They’re almost guaranteed to work.” (Sales info: 217-9002.)

A SCHMICH IN TIME: Earlier this summer, a humorous text document was disseminated on the Internet far and wide, labeled as a commencement address to MIT graduates by author Kurt Vonnegut. Then, Net news sites (and mainstream news media) reported it was a hoax: Vonnegut never spoke at MIT, and the witty words-O-advice to today’s youth were from a Chicago Tribune column by Mary Schmich. Earlier this month, the Seattle Scroll ran a story about Internet rumormongering, claiming (via an email message from one Jem Casey, purportedly reprinting a Chronicle of Higher Education article) the hoax story was itself a hoax–that Vonnegut really did give the speech at MIT, and nobody named Mary Schmich had ever worked for the Tribune. From there, Scroll writer Jesse Walker uses the case to chastize the media for their collective “Internet hysteria.”

Walker’s arguments are well-taken and I agree with most of them. Too bad the anti-hoax message he opens his piece with is, you guessed it, a hoax. All Walker had to do was look up the Tribune‘s Schmich page (www.chicago.tribune.com/columns/schmich/archives/97/803.htm) to learn she’s real, she really wrote the words-O-advice (which included a plea to be sure and use sunscreen), and Vonnegut was nowhere near MIT this past June.

(After this was originally posted, Walker wrote in to say he knew the anti-hoax statement was a hoax, and that careful readers of his piece could have discerned that he knew.)

NOT THE SAME OLD SONG:Some weeks back, Misc. asked your input on formerly-popular musical genres that haven’t yet been turned into hip revivals. Some of you continued to write in past the initial deadline. Here’s some more of your nominations, with some more of my comments:

• Calypso. The aforementioned Walker writes, “I hereby predict that by the end of 1998 we will have been treated to a spate of headlines that announce, `Generation X Is Discovering Harry Belafonte!'” Actually, Belafonte was rediscovered almost a decade ago, with the Beetlejuice soundtrack. Calypso tuneage (particularly the bizarre Robert Mitchum LP Calypso Is Like So…) gets heavy play at neo-cocktail venues.
• Hawaiian music. King of Hawaii is a local instrumental group that’s halfway between ’60s surf music and more traditional Island sounds; its second CD comes out this week. The Oahu-lounge sound of Martin Denny has, of course, been a cornerstone of the whole “cocktail culture” thang. More authentic material can be heard on an Internet streaming-audio show, with the ever-so-urbane title Hawaiian Jamz.
• Indian ragas. Thanks to India being an ex-UK colony, the lushly over-the-top sounds of Indian movie musicals are common in London immigrant neighborhoods these days. These tunes are starting to infiltrate London’s white-hipster DJ clubs. There’ve already been raga nights at Seattle dance clubs like the Vogue; they’re bigger in Vancouver, with its bigger Subcontinent immigrant community.
• Truck drivin’ songs. The roots-country revival chronicled in No Depression magazine seems to have passed by such gems as C.W. McCall’s “Convoy” and Red Sovine’s “Teddy Bear.” ‘Tis a pity. From the ridiculous to the sublime, we go to…
• Bluegrass. Reader James Freudiger, describing himself as “an old fart of a beatnik, and in my fifties,” says he remembers “nothing more in the spirit of D.I.Y. than sitting around someone’s living room… shamelessly attempting falsetto harmonies while two or three friends plucked away at banjo, mandolin, etc. Even if you didn’t play an instrument there was always the jug, spoons, and inverted pots.” Sounds almost like a typical early-week night at the Tractor Tavern.

This first Misc. Midsummer Reading List is a totally random collection of titles, recommended for fun value and in some cases for insights into the writerly craft. I started it after two different people asked for recommended reading matter. Within the next few weeks, a regular book-briefs section will appear in The Stranger, featuring various staffers’ recommendations of tomes new and old. But here’s some of mine (and yours). (Book links provided in association with Amazon.com.)

• Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace. A half-million of the funniest, saddest words ever written about digital filmmaking, Quebec separatism, addictions (alcohol, media, sex), boarding schools, teen athletics, environmental catastrophe, and advertising. Reader Chris Niccoli (writing to recommend Wallace’s essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calls Wallace “whip-smart, funny, wildly imaginative, and neurotic as Hell.” Maximalism at its finest.
• The Sadness of Sex, Barry Yourgrau. Eighty-nine short-short stories of desire, longing, confusion, betrayal, more confusion, and more desire. Minimalism at its finest.
• The Last Days of Mankind, Karl Kraus. The horrors of WWI, as written during the war (but published after it) by an antiwar Austrian intellectual, in the form of a Ring Cycle-length avant-garde play script. Minimalism to the max.
• Chick-Lit 2: No Chick Vics, Cris Mazza, Jeffrey DeShell, and Elizabeth Sheffield, eds. Feminist (or “post-feminist”) stories with no victims, survivors, or avengers? It’s not only possible, but the break from formula makes the contributors create proactive heroines and antiheroines who don’t just take shit and react against it, they get up and do things–even bad things.
• Let’s Fall in Love, Carol de Chellis Hill. Precursor to Chick-Lit, this 1973 tongue-in-cheek thriller about the sassy female leader of an international crime ring might have then been the most sexually explicit above-ground novel by an American woman.
• The Great American Bathroom Book, Vols. 1-3, Stevens Anderson, ed. Dozens of 2,000-word summaries of classic and contemporary lit, plus fun quotations, obscure-word lists, and valuable reference stuff mixed in.
• Chasing Dirt: The American Pursuit of Cleanliness, Suellen Hoy. The next time your out-of-town aunt remarks about how “clean” Seattle appears, read this and learn how looking clean wasn’t always a priority. We’ve come a long way from Huck Finn boasting of the benefits of drinking muddy river water to today’s kitchens with Brita filters and antibacterial cutting boards.
• The Art of Fiction, David Lodge. Lessons in writing, disguised as lessons in reading.
• A Void, Georges Perec. Not much for plot or characters, but Perec and translator Gilbert Adair have tons-O-fun with the simple premise: A whole novel completely without the letter “e.” The convoluted prose constructions employed to get around this self-imposed discipline are hilarious. (Perec also wrote more serious (even melancholy) tales, such as Things and Life, A User’s Manual.)
• Wildmen, Wobblies, and Whistle Punks, Stewart H. Holbrook. Northwest history the way we love it: Anarchists, labor agitators, frontier bordellos and saloons, religious cults, weird criminals, hoaxers, bombastic rail barons, and raging forest fires. In his later years, the prolific Holbrook (1893-1964) founded a tongue-in-cheek regional anti-development movement, the James G. Blaine Society (acknowledged inspiration for Times columnist Emmett Watson’s “Lesser Seattle”).
• Dictionary of the Khazars, Milorad Pavic. In 1988, this Serbian surrealist novel about fragmentations of religion, politics, history, and memory seemed an amusing fantasy. Now, it’s more like prophecy.
• The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Marshall McLuhan. His first (1950) pop-cult criticism collection, still imitated (knowingly or not) by all who’ve followed in the topic. Every exploitive sociocultural trait people now blame on TV, McLuhan found already entrenched in the media-ted environment of movies, radio, newspapers, and magazines.
• Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector. Forget your images of Samba Land: Young Brazilians, this novel asserts, can be as awkward, shy, and frustratedly virginal as young adults anywhere.
• Pale Fire, Vladmir Nabokov. Everybody nowadays likes to snicker at the excesses of literary criticism, but the funniest Russian emigré novelist of all time did it best: A narrative poem, followed by a line-by-line “commentary” that tells an almost completely different narrative.

Online Extras

• Lisa Roosen-Runge recommended Doris Lessing’s Love Again: “It is very modern, and one would not guess Lessing was in her mid-to-late 70s when she wrote this. It was gripping, surprising and very well-written.”
• Michael Peskura wanted to promote Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson, a “hard” science fiction tale (first of a series, natch) about Earth scientists trying to turn Mars into a human-habitable place: “The appropriate choice for summer reading in the season of the Pathfinder.”
• Another reader, whose name I mistakenly neglected to take down, entered a vote for the Hunter S. Thompson collection The Great Shark Hunt; for the record, I personally believe the screechingly self-hyping Thompson to be the single worst influence on young writers today, but that’s my opinion–I could be wrong.
• And Red Diamond of Olympia wanted to use the Reading List to plug his self-published poetry collection, R.I.P. Muthafucker. Its selections include “July Is a Good Time for Revolution,” “Existential Sparkplug,” and “I Am Thinking About My Dick.”

BILL OF `RIGHTS’: It’s official. The catch phrase of mid-1997 is “right on.” But not the assertive, exclaimatory ’70s “Right On Brother!” like you might have heard from Richard Pryor or Bill Cosby in Uptown Saturday Night. No, this contemporary version’s a quick, perfunctory expression, dropping and then suddenly rising in tone to make the two syllables sound like three. It’s less of a commanding statement, almost like a question: “Right o-on?” I’ve heard it all over town in the last month: on buses, in clubs, at street fairs, in theaters, in convenience stores. People who claim to be in the know tell me it started either with the snowboard crowd or the young-adult backpacking crowd, then spread to the general bar-and-coffeehouse populace, until it finally reached local ubiquity this season. Speaking of the neo-jock crowd…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK #1: That chocolate-goo candy in a modified toothpaste tube I reported on a year or so ago has been reincarnated with a supposedly practical purpose. Clif Chocolate Peanut Shot (“The Natural Energy Burst”) is apparently popular among bicycle marathoners and “X-treme” sports enthusiasts. It’s billed on its tube as “an easy to digest, high-energy food” for folks on the run (literally; the tube’s front shows a sprinter crouching at the starting blocks). It’s made with rice syrup, peanut flour, cocoa powder, ginseng, and salt. As for the taste, imagine a combo of Nestlé’s Quik powder, creamy peanut butter, and a touch of Vegemite (that Aussie yeast-extract sandwich spread). Speaking of odd edibles…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK #2: Burger King’s Land before Time “Dino Tenders” are chicken patties formed in vaguely dinosaur-esque shapes. There’s something odd (yet not as disconcerting as one might expect) about meat pieces flaked apart to the point that they don’t look anymore like pieces from an animal, then re-shaped to look like another (albeit guilt-free-because-extinct) animal. Speaking of species whose time has gone…

BOXING DAY: It’s been nearly four years since the last CD “long boxes” were in stores; surprisingly, I still haven’t seen a significant collector/ speculator market for them (maybe there is one and I’ve just missed it). Anyhow, let’s next see if we can dump the CD jewel box. It’s always a bother trying to take the insert out of those plastic tabs; and those hinge thingies never, ever last. For years, many European record labels have used cardboard CD sleeves with plastic disc holders and paper booklets glued on inside. American labels have traditionally balked at this format, not so much because of cost as because of production flexibility. It’s quick ‘n’ easy to run off those paper front sheets and cardboard back sheets, in any quantity desired, to be stuck into pre-made jewel boxes; while the Euro system (sometimes known by the trademark “Digipak”) adds a few extra steps of assembly work at the time of duplication.

But now there’s really no more excuse.

Several recent releases (from the major-label Minus Five disc to the very indie compilation Big Choice) have proven that even without the plastic disc holder, the ol’ miniature LP-style cardboard sleeve’s snazzier and more convenient. These plasticless sleeves are simple die-cut and glued jobs, as efficient to make as the sleeves for those freebie America Online CD-ROMs attached to computer magazines. Sure they bend, fold, and mutilate under the right level of mishandling, but that only means the package’s no longer in “mint” condition; the disc itself’s still fine. Asking record labels to make more plasticless CD sleeves might not save that much petrochemical product in the long run, but it’d certainly make CD buying a lot cooler and CD handling a lot easier. Speaking of enhancing one’s media experiences…

BOOK ‘EM: I know summer’s already way underway (at least according to the calendar), but it’s never too late to start getting literized. In that spirit, the first Misc. (mid)summer reading list will appear here in two weeks. Send your nominated titles now (remember, only specific individual selections, not “anything by so-and-so”) to clark@speakeasy.org. Hey, if Oprah can do it…

MY ADORATION OF JACK BENNY notwithstanding, I decided years ago I wouldn’t rue or deny the inevitable entry into the fourties. I wouldn’t be like those pathetic boomers, forever striving to retain ever-fading remnants of youthful bodies and identities. (My recent diet-exercise regimen had nothing to do with staying young; I was as out-of-shape at 17 as I was last year.)

No, I plan to age disgracefully into a crochety old geezer. Having bosses younger than me, at a paper targeted at readers younger than me, has offered plenty of practice. “Back in my day Sonny, we had real music. Einstruzende Neubauten! Skinny Puppy! Throbbing-fuckin’-Gristle! That crap they listen to these days: Why, it’s just noise!”

I also plan to enjoy the collected experience of my years on Earth. A few years ago I wrote something called “Everything I Ever Really, Really Needed to Know I Learned on the Playground.” Since then I’ve learned a few more things, including the following:

• If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the concentrate.
• Everything retro is neo again.
• Women aren’t just different from men. They’re different from other women.
• Hipsters can be just as prejudiced as anybody. They just have a different set of targets.
• People whose lifestyles are different from yours are not necessarily fascists.
• People who let downtown Manhattan tell them preciesely how to think are no more “empowered” than people who let midtown Manhattan tell them precisely how to think.
• If you only read the New York fucking Times and only listen to NP fucking R, you’ll never know what’s really going on.
• The New York Times really is the Cadillac of American newspapers. It’s bigger, and weighted down with more luxury features, but it’s still built on the same Chevy drive train.
• In an average week, America generates 1,000 books (including 300 new and reprinted fiction volumes), 500 CDs, 150 porn videos, 55 soap-opera episodes, 152 TV talk shows, about 10,000 issues of daily newspapers, 115 prime-time TV shows (in season), a couple hundred magazines, 20 direct-to-video movies, and three theatrical movies. Decentralization of culture isn’t pretty. Live with it.
• Hedonism makes a lousy premise for a revolution, but a great premise for advertising one.
• I used to laugh at people stuck in the ’60s, until I met people stuck in the ’80s.
• Other things happened in the ’60s besides affluent college kids getting stoned and/or laid. In fact, that’s probably the least important thing that happened then.
• You’re not personally guilty of anything that happened before you were born.
• If you’re born into relative privilege, use it to help make a better world. There are enough real victims around, negating any need for victim wannabes.
• Feeling good about yourself isn’t enough. Feeling bad about yourself isn’t enough either.
• Protesting isn’t enough either. You’ve gotta be for something.
• There’s more than one way to think about everything. There’s even more than two ways.
• Natural born hustlers don’t have a clue about what it’s like to not be a natural born hustler.
• There’s nothing inherently truthful about The Word or corruptive about The Image. Images merely deceive; words lie.
• People who suck up to the real centers of money and power are not “rebels,” no matter how loud their custom-painted Harleys are.
• Punk’s older now than hippie was when punk started.
• There is no master race. There is also no master gender, no master sexual orientation, no master bioregion, and no master dietary regimen.
• White women, white gays, and white leftists are still white.
• Grammatical rules are made to be broken, with one exception: Never put an apostrophe in the possessive version of “its.”
• If you like to view images of women’s physiques, it doesn’t necessarily mean you hate women. It probably means you like them.
• We don’t have to tear the fabric of society apart. Big business already did it. We have to figure out how to put it back together.
• Everybody’s ignorant about something.
• A dictatorship of the proletariat would still be a dictatorship.
• Most evil people don’t say they’re evil. They say they’re so utterly, completely good, they can do evil things and it’s OK.
• Love is more important than self-righteousness.
• Even among misfits you’re misfits.

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-cult column that just can’t think of any good jokes about the Eastside having its own area code. When the outer reaches of western Washington became “360,” at least one could joke about “going full circle” or “matters of degrees.” But there’s nothing worth saying about a nothing number like “425.” It’s the Bellevue of three-digit numbers.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (outside Bruegger’s Bagels in Pioneer Square): “Our salmon is smoked. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t compete.”

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WEIRD WEBSITES ARE FROM VENUS: Amid all the media coverage earlier this winter when the Deja Vu strip-club chain bought the Showbox building downtown (but not the nightclub operating therein), nobody mentioned how its retail spaces had been previously porn-related. First Avenue in the ’40s hosted a string of penny arcades, bowling alleys, and other inexpensive entertainments. One of these was the Amusement Center, operating in the Showbox building’s ground floor. By the ’70s, the Amusement Center had become a porn peep-show operation. In 1978, the peep show took on the name “The Venusian Church,” enveloping its attractions within a New Age-esque ideology of sexual freedom. (It got written up in national media as “the churchof the sacred sleaze.”) Besides the coin-op movies and live strippers, it advertised sex-ed classes and workshops, some of which were held at a camp-like compound outside Bothell. Those who paid for the workshops were invited to pay more to join the church, with assorted consensual “encounters” promised as a benefit. But by the early ’80s, one the group’s founders had died; its compound was razed for suburban sprawl; the peep operation was sold (eventually morphing into today’s Lusty Lady across the street); and the Venusian Church faded from public sight. Some members continued to practice group marriage and tantric-yoga sex rituals at a house on the Eastside, but offered no publicly-advertised programs.

But now, like disco, Qiana, and other ’70s relics, the Venusians are back. They’ve got a website which sells $50 “associate memberships” providing access to online porno stills, which (according to the free samples) appear to have be from pre-existing CD-ROMs. For $100, they throw in enrollment in a “divine sexuality” course called Pathway to Paradise, billed as a prerequisite for more advanced levels of involvement. These advanced levels are advertised on the web site as taking place on “The Isle of Eros,” and as including everything from revelations of eternal sacred mysteries to real sex rituals, the latter including “a mystical marriage” with “a divine priest or priestess.” The site’s vague about what the latter entails, but it’s not direct sex-for-money; the “priesthood” is billed as comprising advanced group members rather than hired help.

I knew people who were involved in the old Venusian operation and either loved what they learned from it or got bored and wandered away. Still, the new Venusian pitch rings off alerts in my Skeptic Zone. It combines the promise of relief from spiritual isolation with the promise of relief from sex frustration, two of the most effective come-on lines known to humanity–especially to lonely, isolated Net users of any gender. (The site includes many buzzwords from “sex positive feminism” as well as more traditionally male-directed orgy fantasies.) I’m fully in favor of spiritual exploration, and of finding safe ways to learn about your sexual nature. But I’d try to find out what a group’s really about, in plainer language than the Venusians’ sales hype, before plunking down big bucks. (Those without Web access can write the Venusians at P.O. Box 2607, Seattle 98111.)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, observe but don’t buy the Dennis Rodman fashion doll at FAO Schwarz, and consider these observations from Susan Sontag: “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”

(Mark your calendars now for our grandioser-than-ever Misc.@11 anniversary party; Sunday, June 8 at Ace Studio Gallery, 619 Western Ave.)

WELCOME TO A MAY-DAY MISC., the pop-culture column that believes if the Seahawks had been even half as incessant on the field as their pseudo-grassroots fan group has been in the political arena, the team would never have gotten into its current mess.

THE FINE PRINT (on separate sides of a King Edward Cigar box): “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco with non-tobacco ingredients added”; “This Product contains/ produces chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm”; “A Great American Custom: Ask for King Edward Birth Announcement Cigars.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: They’re billed as “Seattle’s Original,” despite actually coming from Darkest Bothell. Despite this labeling inaccuracy, Frutta Italian Sodas do have a certain bite all their own, combining assorted fruit and “cream” (vanilla) flavors with my personal all-time favorite soda ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin (it’s a thickening agent that gives fruit-flavored pop a “mouthfeel” more like that of real juice). At hipper convenience stores near you.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Iron Lung is Stephanie Ehlinger’s conversation and information zine for the bike-messenger community. Issue #2 includes a historical account of the Critical Mass rides, first-person stories of weirder-than-normal messenging runs, and an ad for a bicycle-injury attorney. Free at Linda’s and other outlets, or pay-what-you-can to 924 16th Ave., #204, Seattle 98122,

LIKE SWEEPS WEEKS ON THE SOAPS, real life often brings short fits of big changes in between long stretches of stasis. This might be one of those times, at least locally. First, Rice sez he won’t run for mayor again, opening up at least the possibility of a City Hall not completely owned by megaproject developers. Second, the Weekly, 21-year voice of the insider clique that gave us Rice, gets sold.

Third and least publicized of the trends, Nordstrom announces a flattening of its previously rapid sales-growth trend. Since the ’70s, Nordy’s has personified the philosophy of upscale-boomer consumerism and the aesthetic of obsessive blandness cultivated by the Rice administration, the Weekly, and other insider institutions. It’s the centerpiece of Rice’s whole downtown plan, as this paper has previously documented. Nordy’s troubles are partly due to national shopping trends away from the mainstreamed wares of department stores and mall shops, toward specialty boutiques and discounters. But I’d like to think this was also affected by changing customer tastes, away from the tired retrowear pushed lately by Nordy’s (and by corporate fashion in general). But industry trend-proclaimers insist retro’s still the way to go. For this fall, they’re planning to succeed the ugly-but-spirited ’70s revival with an ’80s power-suit revival. Everything you hated about Reagan-era dressing is slated to come back, from Dress for Success pomposity to women’s “menswear” with shoulder pads almost suitable for playing football in. I’m confident this won’t be nearly as popular as its pushers want it to be. What remains to be seen is how far down this gap between sellers’ and buyers’ tastes will drag Nordy’s and other companies.

It’s easy to tell why the industry loves the looks of the ’70s and early ’80s. They represent a time before DIY culture really took off, a time when a fashion industry at its peak of power felt it could dictate trends which the nation’s shoppers would ecstatically obey, no matter how homely or depersonalized. Similarly, Nordstrom’s business strategy has been heavily predicated on wringing sweetheart deals from cities and mall landlords. But with neighborhood and strip-mall shops now drawing business away from big malls, and online shopping arriving any year now, high-profile locations aren’t going to be as important. Nordy’s collection-of-shops store layout might help it weather this sea change into a post-mass-market era, if it doesn’t get caught up in trying to preserve a passing status quo.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, stock up on dented cans of marischino cherries at the Liquidator’s Outlet store in the old Sears basement, check out the new Tube Top record (splendiforously fresh!), and ponder these words attributed to Lilian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

CORREC: GameWorks does indeed have a Sonic the Hedgehog video game on the premises. Still no Crazy Climber, though…

THE MAILBAG (via Michael Jacobs): “I realize you’ve just lost all this weight and everything, but here’s the lowdown on a couple new candies. Starburst Fruit Twists: The ad looked good so I grabbed a pack. I was a bit disappointed. It was like flavored licorice, but made (I think) of that fruit-based plastic they use to make Dinosaurs fruit snacks, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles fruit snacks etc. Only a little harder. Reese’s Crunchy Cookie Cups: Go find some! They’re like peanut butter cups, but the inner bottom has a chocolate cookie. It’s as if Reese took an Oreo side and built a peanut butter cup around it. Suprisingly, they’re better than you’d expect by far!”

GOING FLAT?: The Northwest microbrew craze may have peaked. A recent Puget Sound Business Journal piece by M. Sharon Baker described how, after growing 20 percent a month earlier this year, state microbrewery output fell 2.5 percent in November, the last month for which the Liquor Board had numbers. The questions: Have the indies taken as much business (now 8-10 percent of local beer sales) from the big boys as they’re gonna? Have bars run out of tap space for all the hefeweizens, porters, and ales? And has that Cocktail Nation fad permanently drawn young ladies & gents away from the foamy stuff? If the latter’s true, when will “microdistilleries” pop up?

BETWEEN THE LINES: Last time, I complained about word worship–the popular-in-highbrow-circles notion that the mere activity of reading, regardless of content, automatically makes you smarter. Now I wanna discuss the similar notion of word nostalgia–the longing for a past Golden Age of U.S. publishing. Mark Crispin Miller’s Nation cover story, “The Crushing Power of Big Publishing,” embraced this nostalgia as a contrast to today’s big-stakes, corporate-dominated bookland. In my recent feature piece about Amazon.com Books, I said early-20th-century publishing only seemed “purer” because it was a more elitist cabal reaching a much smaller audience.

Since then, I’ve found corroboration via The Wonderful World of Books, published in 1952 as part of a Federal program to encourage reading. (Yes! Even back when TV was still an expensive toy found mostly in the urban Northeast, society’s bigwigs worried about folks not reading enough.) Among essays by spirited-minded citizens extolling how books are fun and nonthreatening and good for you and you really should try a few, there were numbers on the narrow scope of books then. There were only 1,500 regular bookstores, plus another 1,000 outlets (department stores, church-supply stores, gift shops) where books were sold along with other stuff. Darn few of those were outside the big cities and college towns. Mass-market paperbacks were more readily available, but they only accounted for 900 titles a year (mostly hardcover reprints) from 21 publishers. The industry as a whole produced 11,000 titles a year back then, of which 8,600 were non-reprints (including 1,200 fiction titles and 900 kids’ selections). Only 125 companies put out five or more “trade” (bookstore-market) books a year. The book also noted, “The output of titles in England often exceeds that in the United States.”

Today, a U.S. population one-and-two-thirds times as big as that in 1952 gets to choose from five times as many new books, from hundreds of small and specialty presses as well as the corporate media Miller vilifies, sold just about everywhere (96 “Books–New” entries in the Seattle Yellow Pages alone). I won’t presume to compare the quality of today’s wordsmiths to Faulkner or Hemingway, but there’s plenty more styles and a helluva lot more races and genders on the stacks now than then. Behind the celebrity bestsellers is a diverse, chaotic, unstable, lively verbiage scene. Not everybody in it’s making money these days, and a lot of good works aren’t getting their deserved recognition. But I’d much rather have the current lit-landscape, with its faults and its opportunities, than the tweed-and-ivy past Miller yearns for, when bookmaking and bookselling was run almost exclusively by and for folks like him.

HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.

CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.

UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.

SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”

UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”

A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.

EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.

PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…

SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…

IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.

The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.”