MISC. PROUDLY OFFERS the simple, elegant solution to the ideological quandry that’s gripped the American discourse for the past month: Both sides in it are right. Larry Flynt is a defiant First Amendment crusader and a shameless money-grubbing sleazebag! (He’s also an epitome of the late-century business libertarian, who promoted an even purer religion of unfettered capitalism than the GOP hypocrites who hounded him. His relentlessly anti-niceness approach toward lust, religion, and other base desires in the ’70s just might have indirectly helped influence the Trump/Murdoch ’80s aesthetic of unapologetic avarice and the Limbaugh/Gingrich ’90s aesthetic of unapologetic bullydom.)

DEAD AIR: The party may soon end for local pirate radio stations. Because the FCC’s triangulation trucks (needed to locate sources of unauthorized transmissions) travel a lot, pirates in any one place may enjoy several months of broadcasts before getting caught. That seems to have been the case here. But one volunteer pirate station in Bellevue was busted this month. That probably means the triangulation trucks are in town, ready for further busts. We might not know right away, since they sometimes lay low while gathering evidence. All the Feds have officially to say is pirate operators oughta be ready to get arrested any ol’ time.

WEIRD AD LINE OF THE WEEK (on an ad for a Vancouver video-editing firm in Media Inc., displaying an image of a breast-feeding infant): “When was the last time you had everything you needed in one convenient location?”

HAT TRICK: As devoted front-of-the-paper readers know, this column has always championed preserving Seattle’s declining stock of old-time short-order eateries. So I was both gladdened and worried when Hattie’s Hat on Ballard Ave., perhaps our best surviving classic populist eatery, was sold to a partnership including Tractor Tavern owner Dan Cowan, former Backstage owner Ed Beeson, No Depression magazine contributor Kyla Fairchild, and Fairchild’s husband Ron Wilkowski. While it was heartening to know the Hat wouldn’t go under, I was worried these hipsters might falsify the Hat experience, turning it into an upscaled, smartypants parody of its former self. I was especially worried when the new owners announced they’d hired a chef to redo the menu and were going to “restore” the interior. We’ve all seen too many examples of stores, buildings, streets, et al. “restored” into a yuppified “original elegance” they’d never previously had.

So far, though, the changes are well within the Hat’s pre-yup heritage. The wood partition in front of the cocktail lounge has been lowered by over a foot, but remains stoic and lusciously dark. The back dining room’s been modernized and prettified, but not excessively. The ’50s-era ski-lodge-scene mural behind the diner counter has been cleaned and brightened but not altered. If the mural’s mid-century realism looks familiar, it might be because creator Fred Oldfield also painted wall scenes for Village Lanes, the original El Gaucho, the Dog House (all gone now), and Ernie Steele’s (that mural’s still partly up at its successor, Ileen’s Sports Bar on Broadway).

As for the food, it’s only slightly fancier (and costlier) than that of the Hattie’s of old. It’s still burgers, omlets, soups, salads, sandwiches, and spuds. Nothing on the menu has that horrid “Market Price” notation. And yes, you can still order that Scandihoovian specialty lutefisk (with 24-hour advance notice)! So kudos to the new Hat squad for not doing too much, and long may this topper of unpretentious pleasure remain.

ELSEWHERE IN FOODLAND: I’d thought that silly “wraps” fad was a Cali import, but apparently others believe otherwise, or want people to believe otherwise. A former taco stand in Albany, OR has now changed its name to Seattle Wrappes. Beneath the Space Needle logo on the sign is the slogan, “Real Food for Real People.”

‘TIL OUR FIRST FAB FEB. column of the year next week, ponder these thoughts of John W. Gardner: “We must have respect for both our plumbers and our philosophers, or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”

(Invisible Rendezvous, an anthology of collectively-written fiction pieces I’d contributed to in the ’80s, is now at the University Book Store remainder racks while supplies last. Other odd fictions of mine are online at Misc. World HQ.)

AD VERBS 1: Pontiac’s got this new ad with a computer-animated version of the Munch Scream man. A red sports car appears on his bridge. He gets in and immediately morphs into a shades-clad “dood,” happily puttering down the road. By treating chronic depression and/ or realistic world-weariness as just a minor “attitude adjustment” problem, it ridicules the worldview of the young-adult generation it’s trying to sell to. How typical. Speaking of ill-advised selling points…

AD VERBS 2: I know I’m not the only one disturbed by the new Blockbuster Video slogan, “One World, One Word.” It harkens back to a line used in the ’80s by its now sister company MTV, “One World, One Music, One Channel.” Both phrases envision a singular corporate deity commanding the entire Earth’s population with a single brand of formula entertainment. It’s not just monopolistic, it’s monotheistic. And it’s not what either music or video ought to be. Rather, millennial pop culture is (or is becoming) a pantheon of sources, ideas, aesthetics, genres, sounds, and looks; something as vast and chaotic as the world itself. Speaking of dangerous delusions of hegemony…

ANGUISH LANGUISH: The whole Ebonics mania is about teaching the ability to communicate. The furor over it shows just how much miscommunication we have to deal with. From hate radio to the op-ed pages, Beemer conservatives and Volvo liberals alike are decrying something Ebonics isn’t, something that existed only in oversimplified newspaper descriptions. What the Oakland, CA schools want to do isn’t to “promote” the language spoken by Af-Ams in inner cities and the rural south. They want to treat that language in class as a legitimate idiom, with its own rules and norms–and then to use these notions of rules and norms to teach business English as a second language. Think of it as sorta like your Pygmalion/ My Fair Lady shtick, with modern school-bureaucrat propriety substituted for Prof. Henry Higgins’ old-time classism.

The more rabid critics of Ebonics are using it as an excuse to deride Black English as “gibberish,” and those who speak it as “illiterate thugs.” This kind of arrogance is part of the whole point of Oakland’s Ebonics scheme. It’s a scheme to teach kids to speak and write business English without telling ’em they’re idiots for not already knowing it. It’s a scheme combining Calif. new-age “empowerment” hype with legitimate linguistic studies. Indeed, as occasional Stranger contributer Zola Mumford can tell you, Black English is a fascinating mix of words and pronounciation patterns from Africa, the US south, and elsewhere. Everybody from beatniks and mall rappers to jazz and art lovers have benefitted from its traditions and continual innovations. (I wrote a couple years ago that “teen slang in advertising” could be defined as how old white people think young white people think young black people talk.) The catch is that most potential employers speak a different idiom, one which must be learned by potential employees. What might really frustrate both rightists and centrists is where Ebonics departs from the Higgins metaphor. It treats business, or “white,” English as a trade idiom (like the old-Northwest “Chinook Jargon” taught by white pioneers to conduct business with different native peoples who spoke different tongues). The idiom of CEOs (and of talk-show hosts and columnists) is treated as just another English variant, not as the language’s one and only proper form. Speaking of learning…

CRUNCHY NUMBERS: Tucked away in the residential enclave of Maple Leaf (89th & Roosevelt) is an educational-toy store with a wonderful name, Math’n’Stuff (looove that juxtaposition of specifics and generalities!). If you didn’t grow up in the kind of Harper’s-subscribin’, Pendleton-skirt-wearin’ family you see in all the Nordstrom Xmas ads, you can now fantasize about that sort of patrician cocooning with this store’s vast array of geometric puzzle games, algebra flash cards, mind-bender storty-problem books, and K’Nex building sticks. (They’ve even got genuine Rubik’s Cubes!) Much of the store’s merchandise is meant to teach kids to see math as relevant, by relating “real” world observations to the world of numbers. I imagine a different, equally-valuable use–to teach teen and adult computer nerds that the world of senses and physicality is just as exciting as the world of logical constructs.

IT’S A THANKSGIVING MISC., the pop-cult column that asks the musical question, “Why doesn’t the columnist like sweet potatoes?” (Answer next week.)

THE MAILBAG: Ex-Almost Live! cast member John Garibaldi writes, “Credit my friend now in New Hampshire, Geordie Wilson. One visit back to Seattle this fall and he instantly renames the new REI store Hiketown.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Matt Asher’s Seattle Scroll has arrived to take the place of the now-suspended Perv as Seattle’s biggest one-piece-of-paper publication (it measures an odd 11″ x 40″). Its first issue was highlighted by associate editor Chris Walker’s essay on the real meaning of Chief Seattle and a haunting photo by George Vernon of Georgetown’s abandoned but still gorgeous Hat n’ Boots gas station. Biweekly at the usual dropoff sites, or from P.O. Box 3234, Seattle 98114.

BLOBOSITY: The second Seattle Scroll has a beautiful shot of the lower Queen Anne restaurant building unofficially known as The Blob. While that space still sits empty (but no longer awaiting demolition), its playful spirit lives in the hearts of local developers. The chapel now under construction at Seattle U., designed by Steven Holl, includes a sequence of oddly-shaped roof structures and baffles. As previewed in the local architecture mag Arcade, they represent elements of iconography, light, and mystery in Catholic tradition.

On a less meditative note, initial designs for the Experience Music Project at Seattle Center (still popularly known by its former working title, the Hendrix Museum) show a series of connected buildings, in shapes and colors that, looking down from the Space Needle, would vaguely resemble a smashed guitar. It attempts a “fun” rendition of Blobosity, but ultimately succumbs under the heavy thumb of Boomer-nostalgia pretensions. Speaking of spaces made for fun…

MALLED DOWN: By now there’s something pleasantly weather-beaten about Northgate, “The Mall That Started It All” (in 1950 it was the first complex of its kind anywhere), making it an almost human experience compared to newer, more hyperreal retail theaters. That hasn’t stopped mall management from vying to “upgrade” the joint with ever more yuppified chain boutiques.

But when the now-disappearing Ernst chain abandoned its N-gate hardware outlet, the mall took a rare populist turn and lured the first in-Seattle Toys “R” Us. If you’ve never been to one, it’s essentially an overgrown version of a discount-store toy department (it grew out of the long-defunct White Front discount chain). Tall shelves, narrow aisles, bright boxes, and more echoey sounds of screaming kids than in a suburban YMCA pool. The opening-day festivities included costume-character versions of favorite kiddie stars, including a woman dressed up as Barbie. (No, pervs, I didn’t ask her how she goes to the bathroom.) It’s nice to know the store’s there in case of a really good advertised special, but for day-to-day plaything accumulation I still prefer Archie McPhee’s.

IT AIN’T ME: By the time this comes out, we’ll have seen if the local media that got all aghast over Annie Dillard’s throwaway remarks about the Northwest’s intellectuals (or lack of them) will be equally incensed over the more deliberately nasty regional barbs of Nanci Donnellen, KJR-AM’s former Fabulous Sports Babe. In her new blather book, out this week and predictably titled The Babe in Boyland, the now nationally-syndicated radio sports gabber calls her ex-stomping ground “a hopeless zero” and “a fucked-up backwater town… filled with the dumbest people in the world.” Her KJR colleagues? “Small-time nobodies who thought that because they lived in Seattle they were some big deal and that the rest of the world should come kiss their asses.” To further prompt cheap over-reactions, she writes how when she moved here from Tampa she pledged to work to get the Mariners moved there. Her introduction even thanks Jeff Smulyan, the ex-Ms owner who tried to facilitate such a move, whom she calls one of her “true friends.” Yawn.

IT’S NEARLY TIME for our annual In/Out List. Your suggestions are now being accepted at Misc. World HQ. ‘Til then,ponder these improbably risque remarks attributed to Phyllis Schafly: “Marriage is like pantyhose. It all depends on what you put into it.”

Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Tabloid Dreams’:

Inquiring Minds

Book feature by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 10/29/96

Robert Olen Butler published six serious literary novels over twelve years, to critical acclaim and meager sales. Then he got a Pulitzer for A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, a collection of interconnected stories about the struggles of Vietnamese refugees. Fame and fortune (or at least screenwriting contracts) ensued.

Now for something completely different: stories torn from today’s headlines, specifically from supermarket-tabloid headlines.

In the hands of a less expert fantasist, Butler’s new collection, Tabloid Dreams (Holt) might have ended up a glorified writer’s-workshop exercise. God knows, tabloid-spoofing (as practiced by everyone from David Byrne to Jay Leno) might just be the laziest, most sophomoric form of “humor” writing ever invented. But Butler goes the other way, and treats his topics with total sincerity, if not total seriousnes.

Each of Butler’s 12 first-person vignettes takes its title from a tabloid cover story, then goes on to explore how the star-crossed protagonists of the stories might feel about their improbable situations. In every case, Butler depicts his heroes and heroines as fully drawn, fully sympathetic characters caught up in extraordinary circumstances.

Tabloid Dreams is soon to become a big HBO miniseries, with each story adapted by a different big-name director and screenwriter. But this is definitely a situation where you should read the book instead. It’s Butler’s writing that makes these stories work, the way his protagonists matter-of-factly state their peculiar experiences and then plead for the reader’s sympathy, expressing what a publisher’s blurb calls “the enduring issues of cultural, exile, loss, aspiration, and the search for the self.”

“Nine-Year Old Boy Is World’s Youngest Hitman,” the most realistic of Butler’s tales, comes toward the book’s center. It’s not all that far off from being a standard wasted-urban-youth melodrama save for the jaded antihero being six or seven years younger than the typical subjects of such pieces. The kid’s a street-smart sass in a Russian-immigrant part of Brooklyn who respects nobody and nothing but his gun, the only thing left behind by his disappeared dad.

“Woman Struck By Car Turns Into Nymphomaniac” ups the surrealism a notch, yet remains fully plausible as it introduces us to a New York PR agent jarred by the first truly intense physical experience of her life and drawn into seeking further adrenaline rushes via sex.

The book begins and ends with takes on the 1912 Titanic shipwreck, told in ice-water-on-freezing-skin detail. The first, “Titanic Victim Speaks Through Waterbed,” introduces us to an English gentleman who remembers patiently waiting for the rising water to reach him, while he smokes one final cigar and bids farewell to an American women’s-suffrage advocate whom he’d persuaded, against her as-tough-as-any-man bravado, onto a lifeboat. He “speaks” to us from a disembodied afterlife, as a spirit fated to flow eternally through the earth’s water cycle. In the last story he’s reunited (as bath water) with the suffragist, who tells her own time-traveling tale in “Titanic Survivors Found in Bermuda Triangle.” She expresses little surprise about her lifeboat’s emergence in a later decade; but as she waits on her (female-captained) rescue ship to re-enter the world, she imagines the gains she’d fought for having been realized, and that the world of her future will therefore have no need for her: “I am certain in a world like this that women have the right to vote. And I am confident, too, that politicians have become honest and responsive, as a result. And if there is a woman ship captain and if we have been enfranchised, then I can even expect that there have been women presidents of the United States. It is selfish, but this makes me sad. It would have been better to have died in my own time.”

The collection’s other stories play like the better installments of The Twilight Zone, putting ordinary people into extraordinary situations that reveal their strengths and weaknesses. The heroine of “Woman Uses Glass Eye to Spy on Philandering Husband” finds herself caught between the churning hell of her suspicions and the dread of how she’d react if she used the psychic power of her replacement organ to confirm them. The “Jealous Husband” who “Returns in Form of Parrot” is fully cognizant of his surroundings but is unable to speak more than a reflexive “Hello” while his widow fucks other men right outside his cage. The “Boy Born With Tattoo of Elvis” obsesses about his gift the way regular teens obsess about regular physical distinctions, worrying whether potential girlfriends will find it too freakish.

The great stories of any culture tend to involve characters in larger-than-life situations: A prophet swallowed by a big fish, a man who can swallow the sea, a woman made pregnant by a swan. Butler knows this, and so do the tabloid editors he took his themes from. If there’s a disconcerting aspect to Tabloid Dreams, it’s how Butler treats the original tabloid articles (which remain uncited and uncredited) as if they were old public-domain tales, free for him to retell with his own literary and sometimes upscaly spin. Somebody wrote (and probably fabricated) each of these titles. They ought to at least be recognized for it.

(Also by Butler: They Whisper, the erotically-charged tale of a Vietnam vet who dreams of hearing women’s souls speak to him, only to risk losing his own.)

Diane Williams’ Precision Angst:

Small Sacrifices

Book feature for The Stranger, 10/24/96

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf said something to the effect that women’s writing ought to have “incandescence,” a force of light shining outward. The terse, descriptive, often dark short-short stories of Diane Williams don’t beam forth so much as they pull in. Williams says she tries to create “what I’m calling, for lack of a better terminology, stories” that are “powerful, durable, and could conceivably have a scarring effect.”

Such effects can be found usually in the very beginnings and endings of her stories, which in turn are often in the same paragraph. Her story “The Revenge” begins: “She sat in a chair and looked out a window to think sad thoughts and to weep.” It ends, 92 words later: “She arrives at a plausible solution for at least 8 percent of her woes. I know what she is thinking, and I am envious of her. But I am shitting on it.”

In eight years, Williams’ published output has consisted of three slim collections, comprising a total of 163 stories (none longer than 700 words, many as short as 50) and one 7,000-word opus, The Stupefaction (the title story of her newest book), billed by her publishers (Knopf) as a “novella.”

In a recent phone interview, Williams admitted she wrote The Stupefaction to comply with commercial requirements for longer, more traditional narrative structures. Yet even here, Williams eludes the easy summer read. Her long story turns out to be more like 44 of her tiny stories, strung together with the thinnest of narrative strands–one woman’s sequential thoughts and sensations while with a male lover in a country cottage. Yet even this simple premise is broken up and refracted by Williams’ technique. For one thing, it’s narrated by an enigmatic, voyeuristic third party–possibly the woman having an out-of-body experience, though it’s never explicitly stated.

What is explicitly stated is the woman’s sex drive, how her hunger for her man’s flesh leaves her “stupefied”: dazed, dulled, beyond her mind’s control. Unlike today’s “women’s literary erotica,” which usually focuses on women’s bodies and emotions, Williams’ heroine and narrator devote a lot of their (her?) attention to the man, to his “helike face” and his “impressively distinct penis.” Williams is one of the few women writing about men as objects of physical desire instead of moral contempt.

Sex played a principal role in her earlier books, This Is About the Body… and Some Sexual Success Stories, and a major role in this one. One of the short-shorts in The Stupefaction uses a male narrator to remark about how great Diane Williams is as a lover: “How much fun I had with my prick up inside of the great Diane Williams.” She insists there’s more to that piece than mere boasting: “My awareness of my own shortcomings, or my own self-loathing, is also revealed.”

Some of her stories are microscopic observations of personal life: “The stewing chickens–they didn’t lay eggs, and they got their heads copped off. They are tough. The fryer, the Perdue, the capon–they are tender, is her verdict on them.”

Others are like fragments, ending just when another writer’s story would start: “I remember when there was no nostalgia.” And others play with verbiage to pull nuances of feeling into their disciplined length: “Maybe he has not figured out yet how much I wish to stiffly represent myself at coital functions as stiffly as I do here as I speak.”

“It’s the way dreams are,” she explains; “it’s my attempt to have some sort of mastery over what I have no mastery over–to at least in this realm have a measure of control.

“I become very frustrated with my everyday talking in the world of speech. Just retrieving words is getting harder for me. I become more desperate to do the composition work that I do.”

The work she does isn’t as familiar or as popular as longer fiction, but it now has at least a niche in the marketplace, thanks to the short-short boomlet (including the Sudden Fiction and Micro Fiction anthologies). But when she was getting started in the late ’80s, it was a form without a forum, except for tiny-circulation literary magazines.

“There didn’t seem to be too many modern examples of short work. I’ve had to explain what I do in terms of the crucial speeches or declarations of history, which have always been rather short; and in terms of the Psalms, the prayers, the magical incantations, the proclamations, the Old Testament.”

She co-edits the literary mag StoryQuarterly, which despite its title comes out only about once a year. It is, as you might expect, a slender thing, 80 pages of huge type. She joined the journal when she was still living in Illinois; she won’t even go there on book-selling tours now, calling her memories “too painful, still.” Since 1991 she’s lived in New York City (though refraining from the literary-schmooze circuit). She lives with two sons, whom she says are “scared” by some of her writings. It’s easy to imagine, with passages like this from “Rain”: “Found stretched out dead, dead, dead is a speck that used to look like all of the rest. I don’t say they’re all like that, but I might as well say it.”

“If the imagination is not amoral,” Williams insists, “it is not free. I have said things that were disturbing, especially to a small child. Now they’re proud of me, but I don’t know if they want to get too close to it.”

She has another “novel” and batch of “stories” already written, awaiting the vagaries of publishing schedules. But don’t think this stuff comes quickly.

“I collect text in a rather chaotic fashion; and then I manupulate it. Sometimes it’s conscious; some maneuvers are less conscious for [the text] to find its shape. The procedures are slow and tedious and difficult. I am intimidated by what I do. I don’t know many artists who don’t feel that way.

“I would like to feel that what I do isn’t that different from anybody else doing a hard job. I never sit down feeling masterful. I want to keep that in mind.”

HERE AT MISC. we’ve figured out the easy way to figure out whom to vote for next month: Vote for all the candidates who appear on TV ads in color, and against all the guys who appear in black-and-white.

BELO CO. TO BUY KING, SELL KIRO: This leaves a wonderful opportunity. Let’s buy KIRO-TV. We (myself and you dear readers) will form a private-stock corporation, get some venture capital, and take over Channel 7. First, we’ll bring back J.P. Patches. Then we’ll show America how a station oughta be run. Imagine: A local performance-art variety show, with the Black Cat Orchestra and Pat Graney Dancers. Consumer-watch segments attacking the real corporate crooks, not nickel-and-dime mail-order frauds. The Sanjyit Ray Movie of the Week. Art lessons with Ed Fotheringham. Live curling matches. Late-night rerun marathons of Thunderbirds (the original versions, not the cut-up Fox manglings from two years ago).

FIRST XMAS CAROL spotted on a Seattle restaurant background music system: Sept. 23.

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Sailors Union of the Pacific Hall, home of such nice all-ages shows last year, is now about to house the reincarnation of El Gaucho, formerly one of Seattle’s best-loved steak and bourbon outlets. Its old downtown manifestation, now the Olive Way branch of the Red Balloon Co., was famous as the watering hole of old KVI DJs Bob Hardwick (the official Ninth-Coolest Seattleite Ever) and Jack Morton.

DILLARD’S DULLARDS: During a post-speech Q&A at a Michigan writers’ conference some six months ago, Connecticut essayist/ poet Annie Dillard was asked if she missed living in the Northwest (she was holed up in Bellingham and the San Juans in the late ’70s). She said no, claiming “it’s no place for an intellectual woman” and offering a brusque retort imaging NW females as breast-feeding, fruit-canning, chainsaw-wielding mutes. Dillard’s remark eventually caught the attention of editors at the Seattle Times, who don’t have a particular interest in intellectualism but do have a lot invested in the image of Seattleites as at least a pseudo-sophisticated sort. A Scene section front page was assembled around Dillard’s brief quotation, headlined “Women intellectuals: A Northwest oxymoron?.” To fill the rest of the space, the paper added interview quotes from local citizens and defensive editorial commentary (“OK, Northwest women, dab that drool off your chin, put down your chainsaw and listen up”), treating readers as if they were as dumb as Dillard claimed they were. The Times, which would rather cultivate readers who can grapple with complex wines than ones who can grapple with complex ideas, treated Dillard’s throwaway remark as a call to defend, not the Northwest Mind, but the Northwest Lifestyle. The notion that there could be some bright earth mamas out there, or some well-dressed urbane ditzes, hasn’t seemed to occur to the paper.

Incidentally, here’s a perhaps-fortuitous slice of Dillard’s only novel to date, The Living (set in 1890s B’ham): “…But the times had gotten inside them in some ways as they aged, and made them both ordinary… No child on earth was ever meant to be ordinary, and you can see it in them, and they know it, too, but then the times get to them, and they wear out their brains learning what folks expect, and spend their strength trying to rise over those same folks.” (Italics added.) (The Times’ review called The Living “a novel of character that blends history, social change, and individual dreams in a sophisticated, seamless prose.”)

BASES OF OPINION: So “Refuse to Lose II” ended with a whimper (and a wild pitch), not with a Grand Salami. That’s OK. Last year was the grand Drive for Repsect, when the Ms (and, by extension, the region) proved it had contender stuff. This Randy Johnson-less year was more for fun, for accomplishment for its own exhilarating sake, and for the fans to prove to the taxpayers there really was long-term support behind the team (and, by extension, the new stadium scheme).

‘TIL NEXT WE GRAPPLE with the limitations of the written word, recall these words from the legendary Hedy Lamarr: “Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid.”

BYTE ME: The infamous Tacoma internet tax was repealed last week. The city wanted to collect 6 percent of all revenue from online activities sold to Tacoma residents, no matter where in the world the service providers are. Dozens of angry on-liners packed a city council meeting on the tax, only to be told that mayor Brian Ebersole and a majority of the city council had already agreed to dump the scheme at the earliest opportunity.

CATHODE CORNER: Spud Goodman’s exile in out-of-state cable hell is over. KCPQ has agreed to air the episodes Goodman now makes for an obscure cable channel nobody here can get. They’ll run ultra-late-night Monday nights/ Tuesday mornings this fall. Most of the fictional relatives and fake talk-guests seen on Goodman’s old KTZZ show will reappear in the new show, at least occasionally. The new show’s shot in a makeshift studio in a Tacoma garage with a tiny crew, resulting in something even less slick than Spud’s old show.

TUBE TOP: A little over a year ago, I told you about the big-screen capabilities of hi-definition TV. Now, I’ve seen that invention’s inverse: Virtual i-Glasses, from Seattle’s own Virtual I-O company. It’s a headset that looks sort of like the virtual-reality glasses, but instead has two LCD-based miniature TV screens (one for each eye) and stereo sound. Blockbuster Video will rent you one for $9.95, compatible with most VCRs and video-game systems. Versions for personal computers are now being rolled out. The device is still delicate, particularly under heavy-use situations (I had to return the first unit I rented from Blockbuster; its audio didn’t work and its video only worked intermittently). But when it’s working, it turns TV into something more akin to the theater experience. Instead of the picture and sound fighting for attention with assorted room distractions, you’re hearing and seeing everything up close and at attention. While the LCD screens lack sufficient brightness variations (making black-and-white images look washed out), in most other respects the picture’s as good as anything on a full-size TV. You can read NBC closing credits and can even sometimes see baseballs being pitched. Between this and the CD-sized Digital Video Disc players due later this year or early next, video will be a truly portable medium. Imagine: No more settling for the CNN Airport Network or the Hollywood dregs that become in-flight movies. I can imagine ravegoers using them to escape into a trance-like state (Virtual I-O’s people tell me its most popular use is at dentists’ offices, for just that same purpose).

GAZING & GRAZING: Local artists Josh Greene and Paul Sundberg have this outdoor installation, Living Room, at the ex-nightclub lot at 5th & Lenora. A fully-furnished room (with two walls), its intended (according to the artists’ statement) to examine “homelessness, socio-economic class distinctions, as well as various other facets of urban life.” A similar but more elaborate installation’s now showing in Copenhagen, where conceptual artists Henrik Lehmann and Malene Botoft are about to finish a three-week stint living inside a fully-furnished home set up in a plexiglass cage at the city zoo. Every part of the artists’ 320-square-foot temporary home (except the bathroom) is fully visible to the public during the zoo’s open hours. An AP dispatch says there’s a zoo-standard plaque outside the homo sapiens cage “describing their main characteristics, life expectation, average number of young, and distribution on earth.” It quotes Lehmann as having devised the installation “to make visitors think about their

ties to nature.”

SAY WHAT??: “Personally, I’m sick and tired of old-world media, and I’m also a little bit tired of old-world values… This is an opportunity not only to do something new, but also an opportunity not to surrender to the powers that be. And in creating this new commercial place and this new commercial paradigm, our generation has the opportunity to maintain control over something we’re implementing.”–Hikaru Phillips, telling the mag Go Digital about his online gambling enterprise, Virtual Vegas.

(Misc. still seeks any half-good Jack/ Shawn Kemp jokes. Leave them at clark@speakeasy.org.

WELCOME TO A late-summer sunspotted Misc., the pop-culture column that knows there’s gotta be some not-half-bad Jack Kemp/ Shawn Kemp jokes out there. If you know any, send them to clark@speakeasy.org.

UPDATES: Adobe Systems will indeed keep the former Aldus software operation in Seattle; it’s negotiating to build offices in the Quadrant Industrial Park next to the Fremont Bridge… Wallingford’s fabulous Food Giant, winner of this column’s no-prize last year as Seattle’s best regulation-size supermarket, won’t become an Alfalfa’s “natural” food store. It’ll become a QFC. The wonderful Food Giant sign, its nine letters blinking on and off in not-quite synchronization and with a few neon elements always out, will shine for the last time around mid-November. The store will then be redone to QFC’s standard look, floor plan, and merchandise mix. Oh well, at least Wallingford will still have the original Dick’s.

AUTO-EROTICA?: A home video called How A Car Is Made, currently plugged on TV ads, is sold in separate adult and children’s versions. Does the adult version show more explicit rivet scenes? Or maybe nice slow shots of a car’s steel frame descending into a paint bath, emerging moments later all dripping-damp and pink?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: It took the long, slow, painful death of Reflex before this town could get the take-no-prisoners (or grants) visual-art zine it’s needed. The new bastard-son-of-Reflex bears the highly apt title Aorta. (The name was chosen long before Jason Sprinkle’s big steel heart became the most important work by a Seattle visual artist in this decade.) EditorJim Demetre seems to have the right priorities: Northwest art, he and his contributors believe, ought to be something more original than copying the latest flavor from NY/Cal, and something more personal than the upscaled decorative crafts now dominating the local gallery market. The first issue’s highlighted by a clever piece by Cydney Gillis on how local artists were persuaded to donate their time to benefit SAM’s Chinese-textiles show, while SAM still does little on its part to support non-Chihuly local art. The only problem so far: Like Reflex, Aorta will only appear every two months, so no exhibit it reviews will still be up when the review comes out. Free around town or pay-what-you-can to 105 S. Main St., #204, Seattle 98104.

SIGN-O-TIMES (on the readerboard at the Eastlake flower shop): “Pro-Environment Bumper Stickers–Joke of the Century.”

DAUGHTER OF `DESIGNER GRUNGE’: The trumped-up media outcry over the alleged Heroin Chic look has brought atention to a new outfit called Urban Decay, which has been cleaning up on helping young women look dirty. Its cosmetics, sold with slogans such as “Burn Barbie Burn,” just might be the only products sold at both Urban Outfitters and Nordstrom. Its nail polishes and lipsticks have dark un-shiny colors and come in styles named Pallor, Bruise, Frostbite, Asphyxia, and Plague. Its ads read like the work of professional ad copywriters trying to sound like slam poets (“Colors from the paint box of my life. Pallor is the sheen of my flesh.”) Founder Sandy Lerner has promoted herself everywhere from the fashion mags to the NY Times as an expert on pseudo-dirty “street” looks; even though she’s quite non-street herself (she co-founded Cisco Systems, a computer-networking giant) and her company’s based on the not-so-mean streets of Silicon Valley. But then again, fashion has always been about role-playing, and in that context “gritty reality” is just another fantasy. It might be more expedient, marketing-wise, for Lerner and company to be closer to the mall kids who wish they were on the Lower East Side than to actually be anywhere near the Lower East Side.

LET US MAKE a pledge to meet in September, and until then ponder these Ways to Praise Your Child, from a refrigerator magnet available from KSTW: “Terrific Job. Hip Hip Hurray. A+ Job. You Tried Hard. What An Imagination. Outstanding Performance. You’re A Joy. You’re A Treasure. A Big Hug. A Big Kiss. I Love You. Give Them A Big Smile.”

MISC. WASN’T SURPRISED by the cops’ way-over-reaction to Subculture Joe‘s big steel heart outside Westlake Center. Authorities here and elsewhere have long shown a fear of art surpassing only a fear of love.

THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA: With any luck, this will be the last Olympics to be packaged and curated for traditional network TV. The pay-per-view Triplecast in ’92 was the way it oughta be covered: Multiple channels, unedited complete live events, more field footage and less of that annoying human-interest featurizing. But they charged too much for the Triplecast, didn’t get enough buyers, and aren’t repeating it. If we’re lucky, we’ll get something like that on the Net or satellites or expanded cable (only free or at least cheaper) in time for the ’00 games.

BOTTOMS UP: First, there was that silly fad-let of snowboarding/ rave headgear resewn from boxer shorts. Now, an outfit called “Get A-Head” in Lewiston, Idaho (sister city to Clarkston, Wash.) offers Undee Shirts, women’s athletic sport tops made from men’s briefs (not pre-worn). Make your own joke here about that which you wish to hold close to your heart. I’m still pondering whether it’s another example of women appropriating masculine iconography for the sake of power (from George Eliot’s cigars to the ’80s “menswear look”). Speaking of the ol’ gender/ culture thang…

COCA LEAVES: “Seattle loves gay men but not lesbians.” That’s one of the theories given me by visual-art scenesters to explain the relative unpopularity of the Center on Contemporary Art’s first all-lesbian group exhibition, Gender, Fucked. (The opening-night party attracted “almost none of the COCA regulars,” said a COCA official.) I wouldn’t go that far, but it is true that lesbians are a minority-within-a-minority. (Just look at the proportion of lesbian to gay-male bars on Capitol Hill.) Events like the Pride Parade and all-encompassing monikers like “queer” notwithstanding, the lesbian and gay-male communities aren’t as intercommunicative as they perhaps oughta be. (Mr. Savage sez that’s a matter of men who prefer to be with men and women who prefer to be with women; I say it’s an aspect of larger forces in a society dividing into ever-smaller, more separate subcultures.)

Additionally (here’s where the scenesters’ theorizing comes in), lesbian artists have a PR problem. They’ve been stereotyped as humorless self-righteousness addicts. Gay-male art, the typing goes, are perceived to be outrageous and fantastical and fun even when it’s about the direst of topics; while lesbian art’s expected to be forever dour, judgemental and hostile to outsiders, even when it’s about desire and love. All it takes to disprove this is to look at some of the diverse works being made by lesbian artists in our own region alone, from the hypnotic choreography of Pat Graney to the wonderful cartooning of Ellen Forney to the universal rage and joy in Team Dresch’s music. These artists and others (including those at the COCA show) prove lesbians aren’t all the same, as the existence of lesbians proves women aren’t all the same.

OUT OF LINE: Politicians in Seatle and Tacoma, ever eager to find new ways to get you and me to support subsidies to business, want to impose a modem tax on all online communication. Tacoma’s scheme, which is further along than Seattle’s, would tax all data streams in, to, or from the city at 6 percent of monthly revenues plus an annual fee. The money would be taken from online providers no matter where they’re located, no matter how little of their business goes through Tacoma’s city limits. This is bad, for reasons beyond simple cyber-Libertarianism. The scheme’s logistically impossible; and taxing locally-based services simply invites ’em to move to a lower-tax city or state. Better to keep taxing online use indirectly, via the phone (and in the future, cable) lines they run on.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, enjoy the hydros (always faster, louder, and more fun than any dumb ol’ dreem-teem) and ponder the unexpected meanings of the online mission statement from arka.com: “This purpose of this server is to give free-thinking authors a place to put their web pages without fear of content.”

MISC. HATES TO say it, but the rest of the local media were more than a bit mistaken about the hyped-up overimportance of a certain out-of-state chain restaurant opening up shop in Seattle. Now if White Castle had moved into town, that would’ve meant something.

Besides, we’ve already got a watering hole for Seattlites who love film. It’s called the Alibi Room. Instead of loudly pandering to manufactured celebrity worship (just what has B. Willis actually done to deserve this kind of Messiahdom?), this place quietly honors the art and craft of making film, with published screenplays on a shelf for browsing and many of Seattle’s growing tribe of director and cinematographer wannabes hanging out and networking. They’re even mounting a local screening series, “Films From Here.” Seldom has the divide over competing visions of America’s cultural future been more clearly shown than in the contrast between a corporately-owned shrine to prepackaged Global Entertainment and a local independent gathering place for creators.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: The Vent may be the only alternative literary zine published on that rock of antisociality known as Mercer Island. The current issue’s highlighted by “Rage,” George Fredrickson’s two-paragraph micro-essay on “how crazy it is 2 live on Mercer Isl. and b black at da same time.” Free at Twice Sold Tales on Capitol Hill or pay-what-you-can from 3839 80th Ave. SE, Mercer Island 98040… July’s Earshot Jazz newsletter has an important piece by new editor Peter Monaghan about DIY indie CDs and some of the pitfalls unsuspecting musicians can face when they try to become their own record producers. (Free around town or from 3429 Fremont Pl. N., #309, Seattle 98103.)

NET-WORKING: the same week I read this month’s Wired cover story on “Kids Cyber Rights,” I also found a story from last September’s Harper’s Bazaar about “Lolitas On-Line.” In the latter article, writer David Bennahum claims there’s a trend of teen females (including “Jill, a precocious 15-year-old from Seattle”) acting out sexual fantasies in online chat rooms and newsgroups. Bennahum proposes, that online sex talk isn’t necessarily a Force of Evil but can, when used responsibly, be a tool of empowerment and self-discovery; letting users explore the confusing fascinations of sexual identity safely and pseudonymously.

In the Wired piece, Jon Katz offered some similar notions. I’m particularly fond of his assertions that children “have the right to be respected,” “should not be viewed as property or as helpless to participate in decisions affecting their lives,” and “should not be branded ignorant or inadequate because their educational, cultural, or social agenda is different from that of previous generations.”

Twenty years of punk rock should have proved kids can make their own culture and don’t like being treated as idiots. Yet the Right still shamelessly uses “The Family” (always in the collective singular, as one monolithic entity) to justify all sorts of social-control mechanisms. Near-right Democrats try to muscle in on the far right’s act, using “Our Kids’ Future” to promote gentrification schemes that make family housing less affordable, while cracking down on any signs of independent youth culture (punks, skaters, cruisers) and going along with dubious “protection” schemes like V-chips and Internet censorship. And too many of yesterday’s Today Generation (like Garry Trudeau) mercilessly sneer at anyone too young to be From The Sixties. (In ’92 a Times subsidiary hired me to write for its tabloid for teens; I was laid off when its baby-boomer bosses found, to their surprise, that actual teens could indeed compose their own sentences.)

Yes, teens and preteens face a lot of problems. They always have; they always will. But they’re far more likely to get abused by daddy than by an e-mail correspondent. They’ll hear more (and more creative) cuss words in the playground than on HBO. Let’s stop stunting kids’ growth by forcing them into subhuman roles they often can’t stand. Instead, let’s treat kids as human beings, who could use a little friendly advice now and then (as could we all) but who ultimately should, and can, take responsibility for their own lives. John Barth once wrote, “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.” I’d add: Innocence excessively enforced becomes fetishization.

Bernstein Book Finally Appears:

Jesse Lives

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/19/96

Almost five years after Jesse Bernstein’s suicide, and two years after Left Bank Books staged an all-star fundraiser to get a selection of his writings into print, the Zero Hour partnership has quietly gotten out a different set of Bernstein works. The still-pending Left Bank book [More Noise Please, published after this review’s original publication] represents one aspect of Bernstein’s star-crossed life–the frustration he faced almost daily to get his art made and appreciated. The Zero Hour book, Secretly I Am An Important Man, represents another aspect–his drive to get the work done, and to get it out by whatever limited means were available to him.

In this age of self-released CDs and credit-card-financed films, it can be hard to remember how tough it was not too long ago to get a piece of real artistic work out on a non-corporate level. Bernstein spent the last 25 of his 41 years in Seattle–doing odd jobs when he could, getting on and off drugs and booze (serving to inflate his already otherworldly demeanor), living sometimes in squalid apartments and residential hotels, befriending strippers, artists and other outsiders, going through three marriages, fathering three kids, taking short stays in the psych ward, and above all else working on his writing and his music; making it right, making it honest, getting it out in whatever tiny zines would have it.

The book also represents the friends who kept Jesse going and supported his work in the face of personal turmoil and an indifferent or misunderstanding public. The Zero Hour partners (Deran Ludd, Alice Wheeler, Jim Jones) knew Bernstein; Ludd had personally published two of Bernstein’s short novels, both now way out of print. They also understood what Bernstein was trying to accomplish with his writing. Many people didn’t understand him, including many who counted themselves among his fan cult.

Audiences at his spoken-word readings sometimes saw him only a “crazy” man, a junkie, a loud ranter with a strange appearance and demeanor, supplying weekend punks with entertaining travelogues about the lowlife underground. While he put a lot of intensity into his performances (his training as a nightclub jazz musician would demand nothing less), audiences’ expectations of him (with which he frequently played and teased) didn’t allow for much depth beyond the loud words about drugs and fucking and bodily functions and despair. Removed from the context of live performance, the stories and poems in Important Man show how much more there was and is to Jesse and his work. He indeed was an important man. A complex man, whose cocktail-curse of physiological, mental, and emotional troubles (many stemming from early-childhood polio) affected and sometimes overshadowed an insightful heart and a brilliant mind.

Despite his reputation, Bernstein seldom indulged in shock-for-its-own-sake on stage and never in his writing. Like the best work of his mentor William Burroughs, Bernstein sought to explore the human condition as he found it, as realistically as possible. Yes, he sometimes wrote about misery and emptiness. But he also wrote about love and hope and sweetness and people’s attempts, no matter how futile, to find a point of commonality. He was not, despite his public image, a nihilist or a cynic. He cared for the world and for people, deeply and sometimes painfully. His pain was deepened by his poignant wishes to be freed from it. As he writes in the story “Out of the Picture,” “I can no longer write about things that contribute to the collective disorder of human thoughts–but I cannot help writing such things either.”

A good starting point for exploring just how serious Bernstein can be is “The Door,” placed near the center of the book. Like many of Burroughs’ stories, it uses a sci-fi premise (here, a man from the present accidentally stepping through a time portal into the Old West) to envelope a tale of extreme behavior (including domestic violence and homicide). Bernstein doesn’t settle for wallowing in the novelty of the premise. Nor does he spew self-indulgently over the sex and violence in his narrative. Instead, he uses the premise to help bring the reader into the same sense of dislocation and helplessness felt by characters trapped in time, in the wilderness, in a hell of unrelenting sameness.

Another example is “Daily Erotica.” Read aloud, one might imagine getting enraptured by all the story’s explicit descriptions of masturbation and gay hooking and not hear much else. But in print, the story reveals itself to be really a chronicle of the narrator’s lifelong loneliness, both when in and out of sexual relationships. A loneliness rooted in a longing for an experience, a state of being, a something perhaps no human love can fulfill:

“Every lover I have had has seemed to be a figure from a mythology I had forgotten and was on this earth to be reminded of, rejoined with–a mythology that has yet to be realized, that must be remembered at the same time as it occurs, in order to be able to become part of the past, to become myth. This vanishes into the dark, scatters among the stars, and shines down on us forever. Influences the shape of things, the pool of dreams, the odd fate of the living, forever.”

He didn’t write to promote himself as some celebrity brand name. A lot of his stories are about himself (and nearly embarassingly revealing). But others have first-person narrators who are clearly not him. The stories in Important Man concern women, men, gays, children, architecture, war, brutality, politicians, nuclear fear, crippling illness, unsatisfying sex, the inevitability of decay, and everyday victories of survival.

Bernstein wrote much about these things, and many others as well. He left hundreds of stories and poems, three short novels, several plays, and several hours of spoken-word material on tape and film. Left Bank’s anthology is still supposed to come out one of these months. With any hope (and Bernstein’s despair was of the kind that always acknowledged the existence of hope), more of his work will become available.

WELCOME AGAIN one and all to Misc., the pop-culture column still anxious to try those Olestra potato chips with the chemically-engineered fake fat. If any out-of-town readers live in the chips’ test markets, could you send some over here? Thanx.

UPDATE: Looks like the brick-and-concrete light-industrial building that housed RKCNDY, that recently-closed rock n’ roll purgatory, may soon house the Matt Talbot Day Center, a Catholic Community Services drop-in ministry attending to drug-addicted or otherwise troubled teens. The lease hasn’t been finalized and could still fall through (like the deal last winter to buy the club and keep it operating). I’ll let you generate your own forces-of-redemption-take-over-din-of-iniquity remarks; you might even consider it the Big Guy’s smirking revenge for Moe taking up business in an ex-Salvation Army rehab center.

AD VERBS: Not too long ago, advertisers loved to claim their products would help you attract a sex partner. Now, masturbation metaphors are the rage. First, there was the shampoo that promised women a veritable scalp orgasm. In a more recent spot, a phone-sex worker emotes gushingly about the Pay Day candy bar’s sensuous qualities. And a still-small but growing trend of advertising for women sneaks in references to that self-satisfaction aid, hardcore porn, like the Revlon lipstick promoted as “SuperseXXXy.” If you believe the conspiracy-theory thinking in zines like Adbusters Quarterly (I don’t), you might theorize how the marketeers want to exploit people’s natural drives by redirecting those drives away from the nature-intended craving for intimacy with another human soul and toward sexual identification with the Product itself. Certainly the ad where a woman fantasizes (apparently during intercourse) about how she’d rather be driving a Mercedes could be so interpreted.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Industrial Workers of the World, the radical-labor outfit that earlier this century tried to forge “One Big Union of All the Workers,” still exists. The Real Deal: Labor’s Side of Things is its regional monthly zine, edited by Mark Manning. It offers a little labor history (in the May ish, an essay on the Spokane IWW’s fight to overturn 1909 laws banning public speech in the Lilac City). But most of it’s of the present day, documenting workers’ struggles and conditions here and in other parts of the world. At a time when much self-styled “radical” literature either ignores or sneers at working-class Americans, Manning refreshingly extols not just sympathy for but solidarity and common cause with wage slaves everywhere. One flaw: The back-page article chiding downtown business interests for opposing hygiene centers for the homeless starts picking on one particular businessman without explaining why. (Pay-what-you-can to PO Box 20752, Seattle 98102.)

PRICELESS-ADVICE DEPT.: One side effect of writing for an increasingly popular alterna-paper is mainstream journalists treating you, perhaps foolishly, as an expert on Those Darn Kids. An AP writer called from Portland late last month, preparing a story on theChurch of Kurt Cobain opening down there and wanting my sound-bite-length comments. I said Cobain was clearly uncomfortable with the role of Rock Star, and would undoubtedly reject veneration as some demigod prophet of Gen X. As I interpret his work, he longed for a world without gods or at least without leaders and followers, a world where folks create their own cultures and work out their own ideas. From first glance, these lessons seem to be lost on the church’s founder, Jim Dillon, who told the P-I his 12-member congregation “pays homage to this alienated tribe and to the man who they have called `saint.'” But then again, if Jesus’ words can be interpreted in as many different ways as they are, it’s only natural to expect Cobain’s sometimes expressionistic word imagery to become similarly reread or misread.

‘TIL NEXT WE SHARE INKSTAINS, ponder these words of Indian movie star Madhuri Dixit, quoted by interviewer “Bitchybee” in the magazine Cineblitz: “Work is worship. Play is a waste of time. Night clubs, parties socializing saps your energy and gets you nothing, but unwanted notices from snoopy gossip journalists. Avoid the night spots and dark circles. It’s even helpful in avoiding pimples.”

MISC., THE COLUMN that likes to be dressed in tall, skinny type out here in the shade, welcomes the arrival of TicketMaster master Paul Allen to the Seahawks’ helm, tho’ it could mean a Kingdog might soon cost $2.75 plus a $10 convenience charge.

CORREC: Katrina Hellbusch, whose published first-person rape story was mentioned here last month, works in music promotion but isn’t in a band herself.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Grand Salami is a 12-page, slick-paper sports zine put out every Mariners homestand by Jon Wells and Mark Linn. Each ish features updated stats about the Ms and their upcoming home opponents. The next ish will have a cartoon of the editors’ choice for a new stadium–they want one built on top of the present Kingdome, with a AAA team playing in the old dome for quick player transfer. $1 at Bulldog News or outside the Dome before games, or $15/year at 328-1238. Speaking of running for home…

ON THE ROAD: Was amused by the minor brouhaha when a Seattle urban-advocacy group issued a report a few weeks back claiming you’re physically safer living in town than in suburbs, ’cause we might have a few more violent crimes but they’ve got a lot more car wrecks. The suburb-lovin’ Seattle Times found a UW traffic-engineering prof to call the study flawed. He claimed the report’s methodology was insufficiently documented, and questioned its choice of neighborhoods to compare–the gentrifying upper Queen Anne vs. the sprawling, insufficiently-roaded outskirts of Issaquah. While I can buy the validity of the prof’s hesitations, I also think the report’s premise is definitely worth further study ‘n’ thought. For too long, we’ve allowed “personal safety” to be defined by interests with a decided bias against cities and walking, for suburbs and driving. I know I personally feel more secure in almost any part of Seattle than in almost any part of Bellevue. Speaking of symbols of comfort…

THE GOLDEN BOWL: You already know I think cereal, that all-time “comfort food,” is one of America’s eight or nine greatest inventions. On those rare occasions when I neglect to eat prior to leaving home in the a.m., I always look for a place with cereal on the breakfast menu. (I’m allergic to eggs, so I have few other breakfast-out options.) I was pleased when the Gee Whiz espresso palace opened near the Weathered Wall on 5th, with a modest yet tasty selection of flakes, mini-wheats and Crunch Berries. Now I’m even more pleased ’cause the Red Light Lounge is now open at 47th & U Way (at the front of the New Store’s newest annex). In a setting of classic (and increasingly expensive) diner furnishings, it offers heaping helpings (not tiny single-serve boxes) of your choice from over 50 great cereals, in beautiful oversize bowls with beautiful oversize spoons. No cartoons to watch, but you do get to look at the latest fashion magazines while you enjoy a sugar-frosted treat those emaciated models must deny themselves. Speaking of fast food and gender roles…

WHAT’S YOUR BEEF?: At a time when Burger King and McDonald’s have simultaneous Disney promos, some burger chains are indeed trying to reach adult eaters (or at least arrested-post-adolescent eaters). An Advertising Age story reports how the Rally’s chain has a TV spot (running in about 30 percent of the country but nowhere near here) that opens with a shot of a pickup truck waiting at a traffic light. As the article relates, “A convertible pulls up with a guy driving and two beautiful babes aboard. `What’s he got that I ain’t got?’ the pickup driver says to his friend, who responds matter-of-factly, `he’s probably got a Big Buford.’ The driver stares downward in astonishment: `Look at the size of that thing!’ `We see the women in the car suggestively eating their giant Big Buford hamburgers. `You like ’em big, huh?’ the driver says to one of the women. `It’s not the size,’ she says coyly. `It’s the taste, stupid.'”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, ponder this from the late great Erma Bombeck: “Know the difference between success and fame. Success is Mother Teresa. Fame is Madonna.”

IT’S TYPOGRAPHICAL MAKEOVER WEEK here at Misc., the pop-cult column that’s ever-so-slightly confused by Tropicana orange juice’s big promotion for Apollo 13 videos. Shouldn’t the Tang people be doing this instead?

SORRY, ALL YOU CLEVER MUSIC PEOPLE: Hate to tell ya, but there’s already a band named Mad Cow Disease. It’s an indie-label industrial combo (latest import CD: Tantric Sex Disco) formed in 1990 in a mostly-rural part of England where herds were already suffering from the deadly epidemic, years before authorities discovered it could spread to humans.

AIR CHECK: Two more attempts at pirate radio operations are now underway, joining the existing FUCC collective in the few open slots on the FM band. “KXTC” (info: 587-9487) hopes to be on the air next Monday night at 89.9, for once-a-week broadcasts of dance and house music. And “Seattle Liberation Radio” (PO Box 85541, Seattle 98145), a group of some 12 local political and cultural advocates, wants to start a full-time unlicensed station to primarily transmit alternative news and talk programming under the slogan, “End Corporate Hegemony of Media.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: I’ve previously mentioned Dan Halligan’s approximately-quarterly punkzine 10 Things Jesus Wants You to Know. But the new issue #13 particularly stands out, due to Katrina Hellbusch’s essay “A Friend No Longer.” In explicit, downbeat, name-naming detail, Hellbusch (a member of the local punk band Outcast) writes about passing out drunk at a party, awakening to find herself being raped by a close friend (a member of another local punk band). Never straining for exploitation or self-pity, Hellbusch vividly images a crime in which the assailant degraded himself to a subhuman state and tried to shove his victim there with him. She also begs (but doesn’t specifically ask) what this means about the punk scene–whether it’s an excuse for self-styled Bad Boys to be rowdy without rules, or whether it is (or oughta be) a closer-knit community of people who cooperate with and protect one another. Free at Fallout and Cellophane Square, among other dropoff sites, or $2 from 1407 NE 45th St., #17, Seattle 98105.

ONE, ETC., FOR THE ROAD: Recently, at two different occasions among two different sets of people, the topic arose about whether one could bar-hop in Seattle hitting only places with numbers in their names, in numerical order. I think I’ve figured how. Some of these places are far apart so you’ll need wheels (as always, be sure to have a designated driver and always drink responsibly):

* Van’s 105 Tavern (602 N 105th St.)

* Either the Two Bells (2313 4th Ave.), 2 Dagos From Texas (2601 1st Ave.), or the 211 Club (2304 2nd Ave.)

* Either the 318 Tavern (318 W Nickerson), or one of the two unrelated Triangle Taverns (1st Ave. S. or 3507 Fremont Pl. N.)

* Either the Four Mile Tavern (15215 Aurora Ave. N.), the Four B’s (4300 Leary Way NW), the Four Seas Restaurant (714 S. King St.), or the lounge at the Four Seasons Olympic Hotel (1300 4th Ave.).

* Either the 5 Spot (1502 Queen Anne Ave. N.), the 5 Point (415 Cedar St.), Zak’s 5th Ave. Saloon (206 5th Ave. N.), or the Old 5th Ave. Tavern (8507 5th Ave. NE).

* Either the Six Arms (600 E. Pine St.), the Six Eleven (611 2nd Ave.), or the 6th Ave. Bar & Grill (2000 6th Ave.).

* Either Cafe Septiéme (214 Broadway E.), or the 7th Ave. Tavern (705 NW 70th St.).

* The Speakeasy Cafe (2306 2nd Ave.), home of the Internet site for Dom Cappello’s Cafe 8Ball comic.

* Either the Gay 90s (700 Pike), or the bar formerly known as The Nine (now the Family Affair, 234 Fairview Ave. N.).

That’s about it sequentially. With the end of Rosellini’s Four-10 and Six-10, the closest thing to a “10” joint is the Tenya Japanese Restaurant (936 3rd Ave.). Then you’d have to skip a couple to get to the 13 Coins.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, try the Hershey’s Cookies and Creme bar (yum-my!), giggle at the new Mercedes 4 x 4 (ugg-ly!), and ponder these inscrutable words credited to Winston Churchhill: “We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm.”

MISC. DOESN’T BELIEVE everything’s cyclical, but still finds it cute when something that goes around comes around again. F’rinstance, local mainstream retailers seem again interested in exploiting the popularity of the local music scene. Why just last week, the E. Madison Shop-Rite had its neon sign altered, either deliberately or by accident, to read 1ST HILL FOO CENTER.

INDECISION ’96: Drat. Now I won’t get to recycle old druggie jokes about “a really bad Gramm.”

LEGISLATURE WANTS TO BAN STRIP CLUBS: When lap dancing is outlawed, only outlaws will wear buttfloss. But seriously, our elected guardians of hypocrisy are out to kill, via punitive over-regulation, one of the state’s growth industries, employing as many as 500 performing artists in King County alone, many of whom support other artistic endeavors with their earnings. (Old joke once told to me: “What does a stripper do with her asshole before she goes to work? Drops him off at band practice.”)

Yes, these can be sleazy joints, drawing big bucks by preying on human loneliness. Yes, in a more perfect world these clubs’ workforce would have more fulfilling employment and their clientele would have more fulfilling sex lives instead of costly fantasies. Yes, no organized political faction is willing to defend them (‘cept maybe some sanctity-of-the-entrepreneur Liberterians). But if we let the state’s sultans of sanctimony outlaw something just ’cause they think it’s icky, there’s a lot of gay, lesbian, S/M and other stuff they’d love to ban next.

REELING: You’ve heard about the Oscar nominations representing a surprising triumph for “independent” cinema. I’m not so sure. Just as the global entertainment giants have created and/ or bought pseudo-indie record labels, so have they taken charge of “independent” cinema. The Independents magazine given out at 7 Gables theaters lists the following participating sponsor/ distributors: Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight Films, Fine Line Features (owned by Turner Broadcasting, along with New Line and Castle Rock; all soon to be folded into Time Warner), Miramax (Disney), and Gramercy (PolyGram).

Seven Gables’ parent firm, the Samuel Goldwyn Co., just became a sister company to Orion, which at its peak was considered a “mini-major” but is indie enough for my purposes here. And there are a few other real indies still out there, including Jodie Foster’s Egg Films. But between buying up the domestic little guys and crowding out foreign producers, the Hollywood majors (half now non-US owned) are on their way to monopolizing everything on big screens everywhere in the world. Speaking of silenced voices…

THE OTHER SIDE: This paper’s reported how ethnic-rights and environmental activists in Nigeria have faced arrest, torture, and execution. The Nigerian govt. defended itself in a slick eight-page ad supplement running only in African-American papers (includingThe Skanner here). In the same quaintly stilted 3rd World PR prose style seen in the USA Today ad section Our World, the supplement extols the west African nation as a land of “Investment Opportunities” and “Investment Incentives,” whose rulers are “Truly Peace Makers and Peace Keepers.” The center spread insists the country’s military junta’s still on “The Road to Democracy” (“Only those detractors who deliberately persist in a negative view of Nigerians and their efforts fail to take account of all that Nigerians have achieved in a short time”).

The junta’s execution of opposition leader Ken Saro-Wiwa is discussed on the back page, in a “Letter to the Editor” by Af-Am conservative Rev. Maurice Dawkins: “The Nigerians are learning the hard way that the majority media and the international liberal left network is a dangerous foe.” Dawkins denounces Saro-Wiwa as “a terrorist determined to overthrow the government” and his anti-junta movement as “a group of bandits;” justifies the crackdown against his movement under “the right of a soverign nation to conduct business and maintain law and order within its borders,” and accuses the junta’s western critics of holding “a racist double standard, depicted by misinformation and disinformation.” In short, the persecutors are re-imaged as the persecuted–a classic Limbaughan doublespeak technique.

PASSAGE (British-Israeli-American social critic Eli Khamarov in Surviving on Planet Reebok): ” People are inherently good. Bad people are created by other bad people; their survival is guaranteed because of their safety in numbers.”