Here at Misc. we love the idea of the recent McDonald’s All-American Gymnastics Tourney. You probably always think of Quarter Pounders with Super Size fries when you see lithe toned athletes bulging out of their tights. It’s the weirdest corporate sponsorship since Yuban coffee sponsored the Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker, a story that takes place while its heroine’s asleep.

CONSUMER TIP OF THE WEEK: Dave’s cigarettes are really made by those Jesse Helms lovers at Philip Morris USA. The pseudo-small-business ad campaign is just a crock, like all the “family” winemakers in the late ’70s that were really owned by Gallo. As if a one-tractor, 20-acre tobacco farm run by one guy “who works for nobody but himself” could afford all those fancy ads, billboards and point-of-sale displays.

WEB SITE OF THE WEEK: Alternative X is an online journal curated by a literary essayist using the (allegedly real) name Mark Amerika. Its main attraction is “In Memoriam to Postmodernism,” a book-length package of essays on “avant pop” fiction (defined here as everybody from Kathy Acker to Mark Leyner) and other topics. Included in the package are:

* “Strategies of Disappearance, or Why I Love Dean Martin” by Stranger interviewee Steve Shaviro (praising the eternally-indifferent “Zen Master of the Rat Pack”);

* “A Mysterious Manifesto” by Don Webb, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a mainstream science-fiction fan (because commercial SF/ fantasy denies any real sense of mystery and wonder in favor of “grey” formula predictability); and

* “An Essay-Simulacrum on Avant-Pop” by Curt White, the piece that made me realize why I’m not a “radical” (because they haven’t “advanced any description of a social organization beyond capitalism more invigorating than the oft-used and dusty phrase `true participatory democracy'”).

Also on the site is “Toward the New Degenerate Narrative,” a “literary manifesto” by Bruce Benderson that starts with a cute rant against bureaucratically-edited school textbooks and goes on to expose the classist assumptions behind the “progressive” fantasy of a utopian small-town society where everybody’s “nice” and soft-spoken–the same fantasy behind the “Northwest Lifestyle” rhetoric. Benderson notes that much of the post-hippie left’s politics “have been loaded with the psychic markers of a certain lifestyle: polite euphemisms, nostalgia for rural space, emphasis on Victorian ideas of child protection, reliance on grievance committees and other forms of surveillance, and an unacknowledged squeamishness about The Other.” He also disses the slogan “Hate Is Not A Family Value,” asserting that “hate and resentment keep the family’s incestuous urges tensely leashed.”

THE FINE PRINT (on a tub of Dannon Light ‘N Crunchy Low Fat Yogurt with Aspartame Sweetener and Crunchies): “Contains one-third fewer calories than the leading brand of sugar-sweetened yogurt with crunchies.”

HEY SAILOR!: As some of you know, I live in the general vicinity of the Sailors Union of the Pacific hall in Belltown. So when chartreuse-haired guys n’ gals started lining up in front of the place on the evening of 3/3, some neighbors and neighborhood people shuddered out loud that they were gonna be kept awake by another of the all-night raves that had been held there over the past year. I reassured them this was different: Live bands (no incessant disco beats), in an all-ages show that’d be over before midnight.

Inside, the scene was a flashback to a time when today’s underage punks were in diapers. By the time the amazing Team Dresch played a Siouxsie and the Banshees cover, the time warp was complete. With one big difference (bigger than the gig’s total on-stage ratio of eight females to three males)–unlike the old rental-hall punk shows, where drinking, drugging, fighting and hall-trashing were constant presences or threats, this crowd grew up under the burden of the Teen Dance Ordinance, knew an all-ages show was something precious, and behaved accordingly. Part of the credit goes to promoter Lori LaFavor (a partner in the old local music tabloid Hype). She booked some of the biggest names in indie music, who also happened to share a belief that music should be more than a mere excuse for partying but a means toward communication and community.

A Short History of the Seattle Comics Scene

Based on an essay for The Stranger

by Clark Humphrey and James Sturm

3/15/95

Nearly two decades after central Seattle native daughter Lynda Barry first snuck a small comic strip onto the classified pages of the old Seattle Sun, the Seattle comics scene boasts a diverse and vibrant community of artists, writers, and publishers. Perhaps not in a generation has there been such a gathering of comics creators in one place. These artists’ lives weave together at work and play. Seattle has been, and continues to be, a mecca for a generation of cartoonists who are more concerned with the exploration of their craft than the demands of the marketplace.

First off, let’s offer an attempted definition of “alternative comics.” A simple definition would be comics created for their artists to express themselves. Another definition involves works that derive direct or indirect inspiration from the 1967-73 underground comix explosion–when artists like R. Crumb, Bill Griffith, S. Clay Wilson, Art Spiegelman, Trina Robbins, Seattle native Shary Flenniken(Trots and Bonnie) and scores more mingled, penning and publishing hundreds of black-and-white comic books in the process. That scene fragmented, along with the rest of the “counterculture,” and sputtered along for several years.

As the ’80s dawned, so did a new distribution system that helped make post-underground comics publishing more feasible. Under this system, known as the “direct market,” specialty stores bought publications on a non-returnable basis. This scheme led to a network of mom-and-pop comic book stores, many of which found shelf space for works by small publishers with non-action-adventure subjects.

This anti-corporate stance may be the most important link among the Seattle comics community. Just as first Seattle theater groups and then Seattle bands broke with their respective established industry hierarchies to start doing and promoting their own thing, so have Seattle cartoonists.

And just as there never was one singlular “Seattle Sound,” despite the national music-press hype of one, there isn’t one “Seattle Look” in cartooning. What there is, is an attitude of cooperation, self-expression, and relatively hype-free promotion.

It’s also a place where living, working and getting around are still practical: One former New Yorker noted that there were at least as many alternative cartoonists in New York as here in Seattle; but back there, the city itself was such a demanding presence that fostering a community in such a hectic environment was difficult at best. Some artists even claim the local weather makes it easier to stay home and keep concentrating on their drawing.

History of local cartooning

There’s at least been newspaper cartooning since this place was settled. Washington’s most famous politician, the late Sen. Henry Jackson, got his nickname “Scoop” from an Everett Herald comic strip about a lazy paperboy. Dennis the Menace creator Hank Ketcham grew up on Queen Anne Hill. Basil Wolverton, a resident of southwest Washington, is acknowledged today as the first master of hideously funny caricature. Other Northwest artists of national note included Uncle $crooge creator Carl Barks and Broom-Hilda creator Russel Myers.

But the force that really got local kids from the late ’50s to the early ’70s turned on to the possibilities of funny drawings came not from the papers but the tube. KING-TV had a succession of three “Cartooning Weathermen”: Bob Hale, Bob Cram, and Tom Davie. In the pre-minicam years they added a visual dimension to what were often static talking-head newscasts. They chatted to the audience about the day’s weather and other light topics while making funny drawings with felt markers on big sheets of paper. Their nightly real-time demonstrations helped demystify the creative act, and instilled the cartooning bug into local kids like Lynda Barry,Mike Lukovich (now a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist in Atlanta), and Tacoma native Gary Larson. (Berkeley Breathed, who moved here after establishing his career, isn’t related to this history.)

More recent roots

The more specific origins of the local comics scene began in the mid-’70s. The Evergreen State College (specifically, its radio-station program guide and its student paper) provided a training ground for Barry, Portland native Matt Groening, Charles Burns, Steve Willis, and Dana Squires (whose hip yet lighthearted images helped inspire the “innocent” graphic look associated with the K Records scene).

Barry was known at the time as a typical comics loner, who preferred the company of her pen and paper to the companionship of other artists. Still, she appeared in a lot of places before she left town in the mid-’80s. After leaving Evergreen, Barry contributed to the UW Daily (alongside her high school buddy John Keister) and to the Seattle Sun, an alternative weekly published from 1974 to 1982. The Rocket began as a Sun spinoff in 1979, publishing Barry, Burns, Holly K. Tuttle, Mark Zingarelli, Michael Dougan (who moved here from east Texas), Ron Hauge (later a writer for Ren & Stimpy and Seinfeld), and Triangle Slash. The Rocket also commissioned strips and covers from out-of-town alt-comics stars like Gary Panter (who married former Rocket art director Helene Silverman in New York), Drew Friedman, Raymond Pettibone (famous for his Black Flag album covers), Carel Moisievitch, andHarvey Pekar. Local publisher Michael Dowers was printing mini-comics (including Willis’s Morty the Dog) from 1982 on.

But despite all this activity, there was not much of an interacting community of cartoonists here in 1984, when Peter Bagge arrived from New York (because his new wife got a job at her parents’ deli in Kirkland). Bagge describes the Seattle cartooning scene at the time as stuffy and Victorian, a city of loners and hermits. The cartoonists didn’t see themselves as a group. No one wanted to meet anybody. Bagge was editing Weirdo (a quarterly anthology comic book founded by R. Crumb) at the time, and sought out cartoonists as a way of making friends. Weirdo began to take on a Northwest flavor, with artists like Dougan and Zingarelli appearing in it regularly. Taking it upon himself to build a community, Bagge hosted parties and gatherings with people like Dowers, ex-Rocket writer Dennis P. Eichhorn, and Bruce Chrislip.

As Eicchorn remembers those times, “I’m not going to mourn for the good ol’ days. Cartoonists were starving to death then and they’re starving to death now.”

The coalescing of it all

Bagge persuaded the publishers of his solo comic book Neat Stuff, Fantagraphics Books, to move from L.A. to Seattle in 1989. Over the previous eight years, Fantagraphics had become the preeminent U.S. publisher of alternative comics. Besides Bagge, its stars included Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets), Daniel Clowes (Lloyd Llewellyn, Eightball), Roberta Gregory (Naughty Bits), Joe Sacco (Yahoo, Palestine), and Stan Sakai (Usagi Yojimbo). Its magazine about the business, the Comics Journal, was recognized and/or castigated throughout the alternative-comics world as the chief vehicle for news and criticism about the field.

Fantagraphics honchos Gary Groth and Kim Thompson set up house in a remote suburban split-level near the King/ Snohomish county line. They held parties there for their staff and local and visiting cartoonists about once a month or so. Because many of them had to carpool to get there and back, the Groth-Thompson parties forced many typically-shy cartoonist types to learn to become social, to keep talking to their fellow guests over the course of an evening. This furthered the local comics scene’s evolution from a bunch of individuals isolated at their own drawing boards, toward a mutually-supportive group.

Gregory, Pat Moriarity, and Jim Blanchard came to Seattle specifically to work in the Fantagraphics production department. Other creators began to move here to become part of the community forming around the company: Julie Doucet, Ed Brubaker, Jeremy Eaton, and Al Columbia.

The Stranger brought James Sturm and Jason Lutes here, and has given freelance work to such creators as local kid Megan Kelso and newcomers Ward Sutton and Ellen Forney.

Posters, advertising work, record covers, and Rocket and Stranger illos provided work for several local cartoonist/illustrator crossovers, including Triangle Slash, Friese Undine, Carl Smool, and Ed Fotheringham (who’s gone from Sub Pop covers to the pages of the New Yorker).

The current scene

The work of Seattle’s cartoonists varies greatly in content, style, ambition, and maturity. Some, for instance, are inspired by Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics), others by underground creator Joe Coleman. There are various factions and, like in most communities, a fair amount of gossiping.

The scene has continued to grow on its own momentum, as cartoonists move here to be part of it. Some (like Doucet) leave; others (like Forney) settle in for the long haul. Cartoonists like Jim Woodring and Bagge own houses and have children.

Despite the hype and media exposure some alternative comics creators have gotten in recent years, theirs is still a fairly underground cult milieu. If this medium is ever going to break through and be taken seriously by a larger public, better work needs to be produced. Perhaps the conditions here in the Northwest will allow comics to take another step forward.

Welcome again to Misc., the column with only one word for Eartha Kitt’s recent Jazz Alley stint: Purr-fection!

FAT, NOT SASSY: As a civic booster, I’ve always been a bit embarrassed by Fat Tuesday, the Mardi Gras for people who are just too boomer wimpy or too laid back to do a real Mardi Gras. Mind you, it’s a screwy notion for a stuck-up Protestant city to attempt a Mardi Gras in the first place (even the northern towns that pull off successful Winter Carnivals tend to be in Catholic-dominated places like Quebec and southern Germany), but the way the idea’s been executed usually hurts. I was at the 1978 Fat Tuesday, the last big nighttime-outdoor one, and it almost became for real (i.e., people getting shitfaced and fucking in public, or dressing up like all get out). Since then, it’s been tamed into a promo tool for the boomer-blues-bar circuit, and it’s been an experience not unlike a boomer blues bar on a bad night: predictable, unoriginal, yet annoying. Every place needs a real letting-go time, a healthy respectful vacation from inhibitions; many of us could use a real Lent too, but self-denial isn’t part of the consumer society’s agenda.

VANITY PLATE OF THE WEEK (on a Suzuki Samurai parked on Queen Anne): “F8L CR8.”

PIERCE-INGS: I heartily recommend voting for the big transit proposal next week. Do we need more freeway lanes? No way. Could we use a reliable regional transit system that makes it possible to live as well as commute sans private wheels? You bet. Public transit is a populist, civilizing force, bringing diverse people together as well as saving resources. I saw it when I took the transit proponents’ demonstration train. Hundreds of eager citizens young and old, sitting in adequately comfy seats and chatting happily while we rumbled speedily past the south King/north Pierce County neverland toward the wonders of Tacoma.

Decade-old bumper stickers used to say “Admit It Tacoma, You’re Beautiful.” Recent T-shirts for local band Seaweed admonished us to “Visualize Tacoma.” There’s no need to be so apologetic. Tacoma really is one of the most honestly attractive cities in the region (and perhaps the nation). Except for one area, it’s a human-scale city with a homey lived-in look to it. Its compact downtown was bypassed by the freeway and hence maintains much of its solid brick prewar buildings. The chain stores may be gone from downtown but there are two great “restored” theaters and an Antique Row, plus your usual array of “unique shops and restaurants” at Freighthouse Square. There’s even an elegant coffeehouse in the storefront that served as Tracey Ullman’s pizza joint in I Love You To Death. The town’s got lotsa wonderful architecture: stoic old warehouses, a music store with a rooftop piano neon sign, the ivory-white world HQ of Roman Meal bread (billed on the building as “Nature’s Nut Brown Food”), and of course the world-famous Java Jive. The one part of Tacoma that sucks, the soulless hole in its urban donut, is the Tacoma Mall area–as whatshername might say, a mall is a mall is a mall–yet even it has its particular charms, specifically one of the area’s last surviving Chuck E Cheese robotic pizza parlors.

And you can go there carless too, without waiting for permanent commuter-train service to start, six days a week on the express buses ($2 each way) run by Pierce Transit (where “Your Ride Is Our Pride”). Better still, you can transfer in T-Town to another express and end up in Indietown USA, Olympia. Too bad these express buses don’t run after 8 p.m.; it’d be great to see a show at T-Town’s Victory Club or Oly’s Capitol Theater (or for those town’s folks to see shows here), and afterward Leave the Driving to Them. But you will be able to use the bus this summer to see outdoor AAA baseball (the most “professional” ball we might get this season) at glorious ol’ Cheney Stadium.

NEXT WEEK: The first-ever Misc. Frequently Asked Questions list. Get yours in now.

Welcome to the new-look Stranger. Hope you didn’t have too hard a time looking a few pages further into the paper for Misc., the pop-culture column that actually likes to be printed in smaller type (a more intimate reading experience, ya know). For newbies, this is a column of public phenomena from cult- to mass-level, along the whole personal-cultural-political-corporate continuum, in Seattle and beyond. We don’t do gossip, we don’t do gonzo, we don’t settle wagers.

COUNT YR. BLESSINGS DEPT.: Even if you’re uncomfortable with the new-look Stranger, just remember it could be worse. It could be like KIRO-TV’s old “News Outside the Box.” Worse, it could be like the new-look Sassy, a second-rate imitation of the early-’90s teen mag of the same name, now run by a different company with an all-different staff. The old Sassy was an interesting attempted compromise between real communication and the same old consumerist hype. The new Sassy is just the hype, delivered in a lame impersonation of the old mag’s breezy copy style. What’s more, the old Sassy acknowledged that teenage girls had a wide range of motivations for doing (or buying) things. In the new Sassy, everything in a girl’s life’s supposed to revolve around boys–getting them, bending them to your will, dumping them, getting new ones. (It even encourages its readers to become online-service users because “for one thing, it’s a great place to meet guys.”)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perfect Universe is an anonymous four-page zine of altered comic strips, available at Linda’s Tavern and other places. It’s an old trick to make familiar characters start talking about VD, condoms, beastiality and alcoholism. But it takes a certain snazz to make it work, and whoever redrew these strips has it. My favorite segment: the cut-up image of Andy Capp sitting silently at his barstool, in the exact same pose for seven consecutive frames.

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF: Imagine my surprise when I found, in a second-hand store, a paperback of a sci-fi novel called The War With the Newts! Imagine my glee when I read the back-cover copy, calling it a “prophetic and stirring novel about man’s fatal propensity to pervert the best things of the world.” Turns out to have been the final work of Karel Capek, the brilliant Czech satirist whose play R.U.R. gave the world the term “robot.” Capek wrote Newts in 1936, two years before the Nazis asked the Western powers for the right to take over his country in exchange for a promise not to invade anywhere else.

The book’s a satire of colonialism, racism, and global trade, among many other things. The Newts of the book are four-foot-long salamanders found on a remote South Seas island. They’re at least semi-intelligent; they can be trained to speak and to use knives, explosives and construction tools. And when given enough food and protection from predators, they breed like mad. In the story, which spans about 50 years with no true central characters, the major nations take to breeding Newts as all-purpose slave laborers for everything from manufacturing (in special shallow-water factories) to dredging and building new islands. They become an obsession for socialists, missionaries, and angered labor unions. “Exotic” songs, dances, and films are created to exploit their novelty. They’re described as perfect workers, always hard-striving and never complaining–until a billion-Newt army asserts control of the world’s seaports and announces plans to dismantle the continents, so the world can become one big Newt habitat. (R.U.R. also ends with the robots conquering the humans.)

The Newts paperback’s introduction quotes Thomas Mann’s daughter Erika writing to Capek praising “Your story of those sly, clever creatures which were first trained by man for all sorts of uses, and which finally, turning into a mob without soul or morals but with dangerous technical skill, plunge the world into ruin.” Any similarity between Capek’s disciplined, emotionless army of destruction and any similarly-named contemporary force is purely coincidental, of course.

CONFIDENTIAL TO MRS. FREELAND: My big Seattle punk-history book goes to press this month. I could still use your memorabilia. How do I reach you?

1/95 Misc. Newsletter

(the last newsletter edition)

(incorporating expanded versions of three Stranger columns

and one Stranger zine review)

ALL LIFE TO THE LIVING! (FRANKLIN ROSEMONT)

As it must to all zines, death comes to the newsletter version of Misc. Do not feel forlorn; I’m simply gonna concentrate on the Misc. column in the Stranger and on my book projects, including the Seattle music history coming out this spring.

Misc. started in June 1986 as a monthly column in the Lincoln Arts Association rag ArtsFocus; the current numbering system dates from that first monthly column. When that paper slowly died, I started the newsletter version (in August 1989) to keep the pop-cult chroniclin’ job going. Since November 1991, Misc. has concurrently run as a monthly newsletter and a weekly column in theStranger. Newsletter subscriptions have fallen drastically in the past year as the Stranger’s free circulation grew. It’s time to concentrate my work on the 80,000 Stranger readers instead of the 50 remaining newsletter subscribers. For now, let’s start one more big roundup of the weird and wonderful:

I DUNNO BAYOU: Winter draws nigh, and with it the seasonal yearning for warmer climes. This year, the preferred destination of many Seattlites isn’t Hawaii or Mexico but New Orleans, and not merely as a visitation site. At least two people I know, who don’t know one another, are moving there; two other friends of mine are thinking about it. As southern-tier towns go, it’s got a lot to offer. It’s perceived as a place of classic architecture, raucous partying, cool cemeteries, hot food, traditional music and weird spirituality; especially when compared to the New South stereotype of sterile suburban sprawl, sleazy developers and sleazier politics. But be prepared. I know people who’ve gone there and come back. They describe a French Quarter full of yuppies in the houses and fratboys on the streets, a political system as sleazy as any in the Sunbelt, a city totally dependent on tourism and plagued by tourist-targeting thieves. There’s a lot to be said for any town that could give us Tennessee Williams, Fats Domino and Anne Rice; just be ready to see fewer welcome mats than you might expect and more “Show Your Tits” placards.

AFTER THE SMOKE CLEARS: It’s not the liberal wing of the Democratic Party that failed this past November, it’s the conservative wing. The wimpy, submissive Lite Right tactics, the tactics of Dems from Scoop Jackson thru Jimmy Carter and beyond, utterly collapsed. Now that there’s no further purpose in preserving the careers of “moderate” Democratic officials, liberals should take over the party machinery and offer up a strong, no-compromise, no-apologies alternative to the right.

To do that, the Dems’ll have to stop playing by the Republicans’ rules. This isn’t a matter of simply infiltrating precienct committees and party organizations to force McGovernite policies onto party platform announcements. I’m talking the whole works, the big boring job.They’ve gotta rethink everything from constituency groups to organizing to fundraising to advertising. We’ve gotta flush away the stinking turd of the idea that liberalism can’t become really popular.

(This ties in with what I’ve been saying about the making of a populist left; one that will expunge the English Department elitism, and instead bring in the funky inclusiveness of the motley loveable mutt of a nation that is America.)

The Right’s ideology has divided society between the Bads who don’t support a big-money agenda (media, government, intellectuals, gays, the “counterculture”) and the Goods who do (big business, big military, big religion, developers, seniors, yuppies). The conservative Democrats divided America between the Bigs who deserved to run things (big business, big government, big construction, big labor) and the Littles who didn’t (pesky Left activists, loony Right demagogues). The post-hippie Left has, for far too long, been trapped with the narrowest goodie/baddie division of them all, between philosopher-king wannabes and those heathens who never studied for a liberal arts degree. All three of these ideologies imply the inevitability of a centralized, hierarchical system of power; they disagree over which sectors of society should have that power.

There’s another way out there, a way that favors small business over big, close communities over sprawling suburbs, new decentralized media over old centralized ones, thinking over obedience, passion over zombiedom. This is the way that could build a coalition among punks, intellectuals, immigrants, minorities, feminists, the downwardly-mobile working class, people who like a healthy environment, people who prefer real economic progress instead of pork-fed defense industries. It won’t be easy; it’ll be hard to keep all these disparate elements together. But it’s the only real way toward a post-conservative future.

FREAKS R US: Don’t have my annual Snohomish County suburbanization rant ‘cuz I stayed home this Xmas. Went back for Thanksgiving, tho, and decided then that there’s one thing you can say about going home for the holidays. It reveals that all of us are connected by fewer than six degrees of separation to at least one potential Montel Williams or Jenny Jones guest. Indeed, tabloid TV serves a vital purpose in remaking our social myths. In the past, people were intimidated into thinking they, or the people they were close to, were just about the only people around with nasty secrets That may have been especially true in places like the Northwest, where a fetishized vision of bland “normality” (the so-called “Northwest Lifestyle”) is virtually a state religion. Weirdness isn’t something that happens only to strangely-dressed people who live in “abnormal” parts of town. And no matter what people do to escape weirdness (like building ever-blander suburbs ever-further-out), it’ll always be there with ’em. “Normal” is simply a wishful fantasy. Understanding this could become one step towards the left-wing populism I’ve advocted. We Outré Artsy Types aren’t the only people who ever transgress against whitebread-Christian behavior. Everybody (almost) is doing or has done it. Need more proof? Just go to any 12-step meeting in a middlebrow neighborhood. The confessions there are enough to make the people on talk shows seem positively blasé. Artsy folks like us aren’t really rebelling against square people, only against their delusions. We’re only exhorting folks to stop hiding their weirdness and start celebrating it. As Boojie Boy said nearly two decades ago, “We’re All Devo.”

COPY WRONGS: Actually found myself agreeing with something Newt the Coot said, when he championed the Internet and other “new media” for “many-to-many” communication rather than “few-to-many” corporate entertainment. Newt saw the rise of right-wing media (talk radio, religious TV, “upscale” magazines, et al.) become a counterforce to the “objective” corporate media, and thinks the new telecommunications could further strengthen his favorite voices. (Let’s not tell him his favorite media’s just the same few-to-many syndrome without the old-school bureaucratic propriety Newt mistakenly calls “liberal.” Real many-to-many communication would encourage real empowerment, not submission to the rich and the PACs.)

Anyhow, another reason Newt wants to keep the new media (the Internet, umpteen-channel cable, video dialtone, et al.) out of the claws of the established media industry’s ‘cuz the latter has been in bed with the Clinton/ Gore crowd. Of course, the media biz also loved Reagan, and any politician who supports its expansionist agenda.

One example: the way Reagan, Bush and Clinton-era FCC officials kept rewriting the broadcast rules to favor ever bigger radio-TV station ownership groups, to the point where broadcast properties are increasingly held by out-of-town financiers bent less toward serving the stations’ communities than toward speculation and empire-building.

Another example: the Clinton administration’s proposed copyright law rewrite. Clinton’s National Information Infrastructure Task Force has drafted legislation to drastically limit what folks can do with information. Among other nasty provisions, it’d trash the “First Sale Right” that lets an info buyer do whatever she wishes with the copy she bought — the right that allows the video-rental industry to exist. In addition, the “fair use” provision (allowing authors to use brief relevant quotes from copyrighted works) would be greatly restricted; devices that could undermine electronic anti-copying systems would be outlawed; and “browsing” a copyrighted work, in a store or online, would be technically illegal.

As the online service GNN NetNews quotes Univ. of Pittsburgh Prof. Pamela Samuelson, “Not since the King of England in the 16th century gave a group of printers exclusive rights to print books…has a government copyright policy been so skewed in favor of publisher interests and so detrimental to the public interest.” NetNews also quotes Wayne State Prof. Jessica Litman as saying the proposals would “give the copyright owner the exclusive right to control reading, viewing or listening to any work.”

The punk/DIY decentralization aesthetic isn’t just a cute idea. It’s vital if the “info age” isn’t going to be a globally-centralized thought empire. Newt, despite his rhetoric of “empowerment,” wants a thought empire controlled by the Limbaughs and Robertsons; Clinton wants one controlled by the Viacoms and Time Warners. It’s up to us to demand None Of The Above.

SCHOOL DAZE #1: Ya gotta hand it to UW Prez Wm. Gerberding. He may be retiring soon, but he’s still got a keen eye for PR. He tried to raise public sympathy against state-mandated university budget cuts by threatening to shutter the Environmental Studies department, but to no avail. But then he made another presentation in which he threatened to close the journalism school, and by golly it made just about every front page in the state. As a grad of the School of Communications, I can attest that it was (and probably is) a graveyard for a lot of outmoded ideas about what makes good media, and its only official purpose (to provide entry-level staff to local media companies) might seem moot in an age when every opening for a local proofreading job gets 100 resumés from ex-NYC managing editors, but I’d still hate to see it go.

SCHOOL DAZE #2: The Garfield High School Messenger student paper published a student poll last month on the question, “What Makes A Person A Ho?” Responses from female students included “It’s the way you carry yourself, the number of people doesn’t matter;” “A girl that sleeps with more than five people a week is a ho;” “Most girls that guys call hoes aren’t;” and “If a person is having sex with two different people during the same time period of two weeks, for example, she is a ho.” Male responses included “It depends on how easy it is to get it and how quickly they can get it;” “If a girl has sex with another girl’s boyfriend she is a ho;” and “If you don’t demand your respect and you allow yourself to be treated any kind of way, then you sleep with them anyway, you’re a ho.” When asked “Can a guy be a ho?” one male student said no, “but it is a blatant and unfair double standard.”

PINE CLEANERS: The holidays are when merchants put on their friendliest seasonal spirit. Not so for Jim “Ebenezer” Nordstrom. With all the civic-blackmail skills his family learned as ex-NFL team owners, he’s promising (after months of hedging) to move his store into the old Frederick’s building as part of Mayor Rice’s pet development scheme, but only if the city re-bisects the tiny Westlake Park and lets commuters careen down 5th & Pine again. Granted, the street isn’t used much, except as a parking strip for cop cars and a walkway between the park’s two little plazas (themselves poorly planned and expensively built).

The city’s done so many things to aid private developers downtown, and so few have worked. Westlake at least partly works, so a lot of people are understandably upset at its threatened desecration. It doesn’t take an urban-planning degree to see what really works in downtowns: Lively streets and sidewalks with something intriguing every step of the way. Vancouver’s got lively street retail along Robson (which has car traffic) and Granville (which doesn’t). What will save downtown Seattle are (1) more stores for all tastes and income levels, not just the upscale, and (2) an adventurous day-and-night street life.

Instead of making threatening demands on the city, the Nordies oughta make grand promises to help build something better than some windswept empty one-block street: a new downtown that’s a life-affirming gathering place, with all the joyous chaos that makes urban life great. Offer shoppers and pedestrians something worth giving up that block of Pine for.

XMAS XTRAVAGANZA: Again this year, the gift industry’s outdone itself. Among the wackiest ideas is LifeClock Corp.’s Timisis, a digital clock embedded in a fake-granite desktop pyramid paperweight. Besides offering the current time and “Motivational Messages Every Minute,” the top readout line lets you “watch the hours, minutes and seconds counting down until your next vacation, until you must meet your sales quota, until your retirement, OR… The rest of your statistical lifetime!”

Also for the grownups are the Marilyn Monroe Collector’s Dolls, with six costumes but no tiny bottles of sleeping pills, and theScarlett Barbie-Rhett Ken series. Kid stuff’s hit a creative lull this year, as violence-genre video games and Power Rangers character products grab most of the cash and glory. One glorious exception: Zolo, a plastic doll-building set sort of like Mr. Potato Head, only with cool modern-art shapes and colors so you can build anything from a Dr. Seuss-like creature to a Calder-like mobile. Also worth noting are the pocket computer notebooks for kids, including the all-pink girls’ model My Diary (at last, something to draw young girls into computing!).

Haven’t get gotten around to trying the CNN board game, in which you take the role of your favorite TV correspondent trotting the globe in search of breaking news (I can imagine all the drag-queen-theater people playing it and all of them wanting to be Elsa Klensch).

SPINNIN’ THE BLACK CIRCLE: For every image of the corporate takeover of “independent” music (including Time Warner taking 49 percent ownership Sub Pop for a rumored $20 million), there are also signs of hope for the real thing. The NY Times reported that indie record labels (including pseudo-indies like Caroline and Seed) have gained a few points of market share in the past two years, to between 16 and 20 percent of the overall record market. That figure includes genres like country and classical where the majors completely dominate. (The indies’ share is undoubtedly higher in rock, rap, dance, and ethnic music.) And Pearl Jam‘s vinyl first-edition release of Vitalogy became a boon to the specialty stores that still stock the black flat things. Speaking of sonic artifacts…

JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Skeleteens beverages from L.A. capture the PoMo generation spirit in ways the OK Soda people couldn’t even dream about. There are five varieties — Love Potion No. 69 (lemon-berry), The Drink (lemon-cola), DOA (vaguely Mountain Dew-ish), Brain Wash (a tart carbonated herbal tea), and Black Lemonade. All are sold in bottles only, in bars and cafes only for now, at hefty microbeer prices. All have cute-skeleton graphics and cute slogans on the labels (Love Potion “Helps to Keep Your Heart On;” Brain Wash “Relieves the Garbage They’ve Been Dumping In Your Mind”). All have plenty of caffeine, ginger and ginseng for a kick stronger than Jolt Cola or many espresso drinks (don’t drink more than one at a sitting if you’ve got a heart condition). Other ingredients in one or more of the flavors include jalapeno, ginko leaf, skull cap, ma hung, mad dog weed, jasmine, dill weed, and capsicum. Brain Drain has a tourquoise color that sticks to your lips and tongue (and other digestive organs and their byproducts). They’re so system-altering in their undiluted state, I’m scared to imagine them as mixers…

Some of you may recall Wrigley’s 1981 bubble-gum novelty in the shape of a tiny LP, packaged in tiny reproductions of Boston and Journey cover art. Now there’s CD’s Digital Gum, from Zeeb’s Enterprises in Ft. Worth, a five-inch slab of gum in a CD jewel box, complete with fake cover art. The six flavors include “ZZ Pop” and “Saltin’ Pep-O-Mint.” If you chew it backwards, do you get secret Satanic messages?

KNOW THE CODE: With the new year will come the new 360 area code, comprising two non-contiguous areas of western Washington: from Marysville north (including the San Juans) and from Olympia south (including the Olympic Peninsula). It could be interpreted as a symbol of growing isolation between the Seattle area and the rest of the state, as exploited in Republican political campaigns. It also means the Oly music-scene people finally get symbolic confirmation of their self-image as the capital of their own little world.

STARRY EYES (UW astrophysicist Dr. Bruce H. Margon in the 11/29 NY Times): “It’s a fairly embarrassing situation to admit that we can’t find 90 percent of the universe.” Maybe it’s under the sofa, or tucked away forgotten in a mini-storage unit. Maybe it’s in another dimension, the place missing socks go. I hope we don’t find a way into that dimension if it’s there, ‘cuz ya know the first thing that happens is that unlucky dimension will get zoned for all Earth’s prisons, waste-treatment plants and landfills.

AFTER DARK, MY SWEET: Caffé Minnies, that just-slightly-overpriced all-night diner on 1st & Denny, has just opened a second 24-hrs. outlet on Broadway, in the space where Cafe Ceilo had replaced one of the dopiest restaurant concepts in Seattle history, the fern bar Boondocks Sundeckers and Greenthumbs (home of the silly-pretentious “Established 1973” sign). ‘Bout time the Hill had an all-night spot (besides IHOP and the Taco Bell walk-up). In other grubbery news, the Hurricane Cafe has indeed become a “scene” place, though not necessarily a scene I’d wanna get very far into. The Puppy Club, the other son-of-the-Dog House, is shaking out into an experience as solid but plain as its food. Worse, it closes at 10 (Sundays at 6!).

HOW CHEESY: There was this recent newspaper ad with the headline “No Cheese Please” and the logo of a wedge of cheddar inside a slash circle. Local oldsters might remember those as the name and logo of a 1981-82 Seattle power-pop band, The ad had nothing to do with the band, but instead offered a mysterious, undefined “personal care kit” called The Ark, packaged by Survivor Industries Inc. and sold at warehouse stores and gun shops. The ad didn’t explain what a “personal care kit” was but hyped it as a gift-giver’s alternative to cheeseballs and fruitcakes.

It turns out to be a box of survival gear (up to three days’ worth of preserved food and water plus a blanket). This could arguably be useful for those who spend time out in (or driving thru) the mountains or other places where the power supply’s subject to the whim of seasonal windstorms. While the ads don’t mention that or any other suggested use, they subtlely identify with the apocalypse/ mountain man ideology. Not exactly a peace-on-Earth-good-will-n’-brotherhood kinda feeling.

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET IN THE PAGES OF THE STRANGER, look for word of our big Misc.-O-Rama live event Fri., Jan. 20 at 911 Media Arts, and check out these words found on a bumper sticker on a Honda: “Preserve Farmland. Live In Town.”

PASSAGE

A lovely parting gift from paintmeister David Hockney: “Always live in the ugliest house on the street. Then you don’t have to look at it.”

REPORT

Every current subscriber with at least three issues remaining will get a free copy of my book, now retitled Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, when it comes out (current ETA: April).

Those who still want to get the column in the mail can subscribe to the Stranger: $19.95 for 12 months or $11.95 for six months within Washington state, $49.95 for 12 months or $29.95 for six months out of state. Don’t write to me but to Stranger Subscriptions, 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 1225, Seattle 98122-3934. Yes, it’s a lot more than the final Misc. sub rate of $12/year, but you get tons more stuff, including my own slightly troubled crossword puzzle, music reviews by me and others, disturbing cartoons, political commentary, and other people’s columns that I don’t always agree with.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Altricial”

ZINES I NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVIEWING

I used to cover zines regularly in Misc.,

but I’ve gotten so verbose at other topics that the zine reviews got sidetracked.

For now, here’s a roundup of self-made publications I’ve seen.

Mad Love: The Courtney Papers (no longer available): Billed on the cover as “posts from America Online left by, presumably, Courtney Love.” At least some of the entries are really hers; some might be hoaxes. On one level, these 17 electronic missives could be seen as the creatively-spelled, quasi-venomous rantings of a person with a past reputation for egotism and flakiness (like many music-scene types), someone who’s burned her share of bridges, particularly with her estranged father and with much of the Olympia rock community. But on another level, they’re the public soul-stripping of a survivor, facing the twin shocks of sudden widowhood and public scorn and slowly getting her shit back together with the tools available to her, chiefly the gift of sarcastic wit.

22 Fires (Chris Becker, 4200 Pasadena Pl. NE #2, Seattle 98105): A 12-page half-legal-size zine, with listings/ reviews of 49 Washington-based zines, plus a cassette sampler of local bands (including one of my faves, Laundry). Issue #2 should be out soon; if it’s as good as #1, it’ll be an invaluable resource for regional self-publishers. Highly recommended.

Radio Resistor’s Bulletin ($1 from P.O. Box 3038, Bellingham 98227-3038): An outgrowth of the battle to keep community-access programming on Western Washington U. station KUGS, this newsletter covers efforts to promote and defend true noncommercial and community broadcasting across the country. Learn how battles against NPR/ Corp. for Public Broadcasting bureaucratic types are popping up all over, not just at KCMU. Issue #6 reviews the book Telecommunications, Mass Media and Democracy, Rocket co-founder Bob McChesney’s revisionist history of the so-called “Golden Age of Radio” detailing how a potentially powerful tool for public education and enlightenment was quickly monopolized by the purveyors of Amos n’ Andy.

10 Things Jesus Wants You To Know ($1.58 from Dann Halligan, 1407 NE 45th St. #17, Seattle 98105): It comes out regularly, it’s big, and it’s chock full of indie-rawk bands from here and elsewhere (#8 had Chaos UK, Unsane, and NOFX). Halligan’s editorials provide concise arguments for the indie-purist party line. Christine Sieversen, who sometimes writes for the Stranger, also sometimes writes for these folks.

Feminist Baseball ($3 from Jeff Smith, P.O. Box 9609, Seattle 98109): Smith was Mark Arm’s partner in the fondly recalled teen-punk band Mr. Epp and the Calculations. Now he’s involved in a couple of small labels, Box Dog and Cher Doll, and puts out this tightly-packed collection of articles and over 250 record reviews. Issue #13 features an interview with Richard Lee, the guy who goes on public access Wednesday nights to claim Cobain and Kirsten Pfaff were murdered (accusations based on seemingly minor discrepancies in the coroner’s and media’s accounts of the deaths).

Thorozine ($2 from Mark M., P.O. Box 4134, Seattle 98104-0134): Well-scanned photos (a zine rarity) accompany profiles of punk & noise bands (#6 includes Portrait of Poverty, Fitz of Depression, and North American Bison). No relation to out-of-town zine Thor-A-Zine.

Farm Pulp ($2 from Gregory Hischak, 217 N. 70th St., Seattle 98117-4845): Twenty issues old; still the slickest zine in town. Beautiful manipulated Xerox and collage art; fascinating surrealist fiction.

Point No Point: A Blue Moon Reader (free from Blue Moon Tavern, 712 NE 45th St., Seattle 98105): Maybe the only “alternative” literary zine to ever have a (real, paid) full-page PR ad from Boeing (editor Patrick McRoberts has a day job at a PR agency). A mostly-male, mostly-old-hippie crew contributes solid if sometimes bland fiction, poetry and essays. Highlight: Charles Mudede’s story “Crepuscule With Clarity,” fast-paced and action-packed.

12/94 Misc. Newsletter

(incorporating expanded versions of four Stranger columns)

MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE, 1940-94:

LET’S IMAGINE IF ELVIS

HAD A MASSIVE CEREBRAL HEMORRHAGE…

MISC.’S WALKING TOUR this month takes you to Madison Park Greetings at 11th & Union. Outside, you can see rack upon rack of beautiful friendly greeting cards thru the window, right above a tasteful sign noting that “This Building Is Under 24 Hour Video Surveillance.”

UPDATE: The Computer Store won’t be sold to Ballard Computer after all, preserving competition for full-line Apple products in Seattle. Alas, TCS is gonna abandon its longtime Apple-only policy and start carrying Windows clones–or so said a particularly confusing Times piece that claimed Apple was in deep deep trouble market-share-wise, that the company was on the verge of being permanently marginalized in a Windows-ruled computer universe. Then back on the jump page, the article acknowledged that Apple isn’t having trouble selling its newest products at all, but in fact can’t build enough of ’em to meet demand.

HEADLINE OF THE MONTH: The cover of the 11/7 New Republic has this huge banner, THE REPUBLICANS COMETH, followed by the smaller blurb line INSIDE. Gee, I was wondering why we hadn’t heard anything from Packwood lately…

BRAVE OLD WORLD REVISITED: The election debacle confirmed several trends I’ve often cud-chewed about in this space. Chiefly, the right-wing sleaze machine’s got a grip on the late-modern (not yet postmodern) political economy, efficiently funneling cash and influence from both eastern Old Money and western New Money into smear campaigns, stealth campaigns, one-sided religious TV and talk radio operations, etc. They’re good at convincing voters that they’re Taking Charge when they’re really getting them to suck up to the forces that control most of the real power and money in this country.

The middle-of-the-road Democrats, having shed most populist pretenses in the futile dream of winning corporate cash away from the GOP, is trapped in limboland; while too many left-wingers still think it’s a statement of defiance to stay out of the electoral process and let the right win. The GOP effectively controlled Congress the last two years anyway, but now it’s gonna create Gridlock City, getting nothing done in a big way and blaming the “liberals” for everything. At least it might, just might, force Clinton into the spin doctor’s office for an emergency backbone transplant.

How to change this around? Like I said at the end of ’92 and again this past April, we’ve gotta rebuild a populist left from the ground up. “Progressive” movements that refuse to venture more than a mile from the nearest college English department aren’t worth a damn. We’ve gotta persuade working-class people, rural people, parents, and ethnic minorities that corporate ass-kissing is not people power. The right’s effectively played on voters’ justified resentment at centralized power structures, only to rewire that energy back into those structures. We’ve got to reroute that wiring, to lead people away from the right’s faux-empowerment into real empowerment. We’ll have to do it against deliberate apathy from corporate-centrist media and hostility from right-wing media. And we shouldn’t depend on help from mainstream Dems, who might revert to their Reagan-era coddling (the equivalent of S&M’s “consensual bottom role”).

Eventually, the right’s hypocrisies should collapse as an emerging decentralized culture supersedes today’s centralized culture–if we stay on guard against those who would short-circuit the postmodern promise into the same old hierarchical system. Speaking of which…

FRAYED: Wired magazine’s two years old next month. While it’s still the smartest (or least-stupid) computers-n’-communications mag, it already seems to have fallen toward the rear flanks of the computer-aided social revolution it covers. While the Internet, the World Wide Web (more on that in a future column) and related technologies are rapidly empowering people everywhere to create, connect and think in new ways, Wired stays stuck in its Frisco provincialism, its relentless hype for already-lame technoid fantasies (masturbation with robots? No thank you.), and most importantly its vision of the new media as tools for Calif. and NY to keep controlling the world’s thoughts and dreams. It salivates at special-effects toys for Hollywood action movies, and sneers at anyone who dares challenge the culture cartel (like the French).

One remarkable example: the backwards logic with which the mag exploited Cobain’s hatred of being a rock star in a piece hyping techno-disco. They took the passionate feelings of a man who wanted to decentralize culture, to create a world where anyone could create, and used it to laud one of today’s most centralized music genres, canned in studios according to trends dictated in the media capitals.

But I now understand the magazine’s pro-corporate-culture stance. Turns out its publishers belong to the Global Business Network, a corporate think tank started by ex-Shell Oil strategists (you know, the company that used to be so pro-German that Churchillstarted BP so Shell couldn’t cut off Britain’s oil supply in WWI) and dedicated to keeping multinational elites on top of things. The Whole Earth Catalog guys and other Hipster Chamber of Commerce types also belong to it. This explains the mag’s other pro-corporate stances, like its tirades against “universal service” (govt.-mandated cheap phone and cable rates). But back to techno-culture…

140 COUGHS PER MINUTE: Last year I told you about Rave cigarettes. Now there’s a brand that even more explicitly targets techno-disco culture. Wheat-pasted posters for Buz cigarettes promise “industrial strength flavor.” The packs, cartons and ads have ad-agency re-creations of techno-rave flyer art. Even the Surgeon General’s warning is in fake-typewriter type. Remember, dance fans: tobacco is no “smart drug.”

YOU MOVE ME: Ooh, we’re so urbane now, we’re even getting a subway beneath Capitol Hill! ‘Tho only if it passes three counties’ worth of bureaucrats and a referendum vote, and even then the system won’t be all built until 2010. Still, I wanna be the first to ride each built segment of the system (to involve lite rail, regular rail, and new buses). But how would this affect the initiative drive to build a citywide elevated light-rail under the name of the beloved Monorail? Or how would the initiative conversely affect the big regional scheme? Let’s just hope that the whole scheme, in whatever its final form, doesn’t get derailed by the pave-the-earth troglodytes now ascendant in political circles.

(latter-day note: The transit plan failed in a public vote, with only Seattle voters approving.)

AD SLOGAN OF THE MONTH (from a commercial that aired on the Fox Kids’ Network): “What do you want in a plastic power shooter?” “Balls! More balls!”

WE ARE DRIVEL: Ford’s been running commercials stoically reciting a corporate mission statement attributed to founder Henry Ford Sr., proclaiming that “We live by these words every day.” The commercials don’t include any of Mr. Ford’s noted anti-Semitic remarks.

A SWILL BUNCHA GUYS: Budweiser recently ran a commercial during Monday Night Football: “Sure, in 1876 we were a microbrewery too. But then we got better.” How bogus can you get? We’re talking about a product born at the dawn of national distribution and advertising, that used the now-discredited pasteurization process to turn beer from a local agricultural product to a mass-market commodity… By the way, how d’ya spot a New Yorker in a Seattle bar? He’s the only guy protectively clutching his Bud bottle amidst a group of micro-guzzlers.

WHAT A DISH!: Home satellite receivers have been a fixture on the Eastern Washington landscape for a decade. Nearly every tiny farmhouse between Ellensburg and Spokane has an eight-foot dish, supplying isolated ruralites with the latest crop-futures trades on CNBC as well as last year’s cop movies on pirated HBO. Now, GM-Hughes and Thomson-RCA want to bring that experience to anybody who’s tired of their cable company and has a spare $700 or so (plus $30-$65 a month for programming). Magnolia Hi-Fi will gladly show you how it works.

The picture looks great, especially on a fancy-schmancy TV with surround sound. You need your own home (or a landlord who’ll let you install the 18-inch dish) and an unobstructed sky view to the southwest (tough luck, valley-dwellers). RCA’s flyers promise “up to 150 channels,” though only 60 are named (including 24 movie channels); the rest, for now, are pay-per-view movies and sports. You get most of the famous cable channels, including channels most local cable viewers can’t get (Sci-Fi, Comedy Central, C-SPAN 2, ESPN 2, but not the arts channel Bravo). You get the local sports channel, but for broadcast networks and local stations you’ll need a regular antenna.

The one thing you can’t get on home satellites is public access. Cable companies have treated access as a municipally-mandated obligation, to be minimally begrudged. Now if they’re smart they’ll put money, promotion and support toward public access, the one thing (besides better broadcast reception) they’ve got that the dishes don’t. Satellites might offer a wider trough of Hollywood product, but only cable can give you your own town. Speaking of local imageries…

EYE TRANSPLANT UPDATE: KIRO continues its evolution into a non-network station (CBS shows move to KSTW next St. Patrick’s Day). The station’s painted over the big rooftop CBS eye that used to serve as the Chopper 7 helipad, and recently gave away a lot of old-logo pencils and keychains at Westlake Center. Its daytime talk show Nerissa at Nine did a long segment about “soap opera addicts,” subtly criticizing people who watch some of the shows KIRO soon won’t have.

DRAWING THE LINE: Fox TV’s nighttime soaps have long sold a glamour-fantasy LA, at a time when practically nobody else (except porno and Guns n’ Roses videos) professed any remaining belief in the image of La-La Land as all sand, swimming pools and silicone. The parent company’s practices reflect a different attitude, however. First, they threatened to hold off on an expansion of the 20th Century-Fox studios (address: Beverly Hills 90212) unless they got special zoning and financial considerations. Now they’re building a new cartoon studio, to be run by animation vet Don Bluth, in a Phoenix office park. The Screen Cartoonists’ Union complained that Fox was building in a right-to-work state in order to keep the guild out. Bluth’s lawyers sent a letter to the union’s newsletter, asserting Fox wasn’t trying to shaft future animation employees but indeed was doing them a favor by giving them a chance to move out of that icky, polluted, high-rent, full-of-non-white-people LA.

PHILM PHACTS: The Pagemaster, a new animated feature released by 20th Century-Fox (but not made by Bluth in Arizona) about a boy lost in a universe of old children’s books, is a 90-minute extrapolation of the library-poster imagery of reading as a less-efficient medium for outmoded notions of action-adventure escapism. The only place you see pirates anymore is on posters exhorting kids to “live the adventure of books.” You still see knights and dragons in paperback fantasy trilogies, but that’s an entirely different interpretation of the myth than you get in the Once and Future King/Ivanhoe iconography on library walls and in The Pagemaster.You’re not gonna turn kids into bookworms by promising the same kinds of vicarious thrills they can get more viscerally from movies and video games. You’ve gotta promote the things writing does better than movies: the head-trip of imagination, the power of the well-turned sentence, the seductive lure of patient verbal storytelling that doesn’t have to “cut to the chase.” The Pagemaster, like the earlier Never-Ending Story, couldn’t do this. It’s possible that the Disney fairy-tale films could lead a few kids toward the original stories, especially when the originals are more downbeat or violent than the cartoons.

THE FINE PRINT (on the back of a Rykodisc CD): “The green tinted CD jewelbox is a trademark of Rykodisc.” Next thing you know, 7-Up will claim it owns anything made from green plastic and threaten to sue Mountain Dew and Slice.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Freedom Club is a slick new newsletter promoting local counselor Jana Lei Schoenberg’s specialized services in “Re-Empowerment Resources” for traumatized people. How specialized her work is is evident in her subtitle: “Ex-Alien Abductees Unite.” As her opening editorial says, “Our focus is to get beyond the story telling of personal abduction experiences… The questions we need to be asking ourselves are not ‘Do aliens exist?’ or ‘Is our government covertly working with them?’ but rather, ‘What can you do to heal your life from their control and intrusion?’ and ‘What steps do you need to begin the process of recovery from their control over your life?’ ” Free from 1202 E. Pike St., Suite 576, Seattle 98122-3934, or by email to empower@scn.org.

URBAN TURF WARS: With the Seattle Downtown News gone, two parties have launched rival freebie tabloids for the condo-dwellers and commuters. The Times Co.’s Downtown Source is plagued by that trademark cloying blandness some like to call “Northwest Style,” down to a person-in-the-street segment on the question “Do you drink too much coffee?” Much less slick and slightly more interesting is Pacific Media’s Downtown Seattle Forum, highlighted by this quip from UW prof and third-generation Chinese Canadian Tony Chan: “Seattle people are really Canadians in drag.”

‘TIL NEXT WE VIRTUALLY MEET in the snowcapped (I hope! I hope!), short days of winter solsticetime, be sure to stay warm, don’t get any of the gunk that’s going around, be nice to people (in moderation), and ponder these goodwill-toward-whomever holiday greetings from Alan Arkin: “I don’t love humanity. I don’t hate them either. I just don’t know them personally.”

IF THE WORLD SHOULD STOP REVOLVING…

Like Hewlett-Packard, ’70s easy-listening singer David Gates (no relation to Bill), and some public-domain poet whose name I forget right now, Misc. never stops asking, and sometimes even gets around to answering, that simple yet profound question, IF:

• IF I were Jack in the Box, I’d think twice before I tied all my fourth-quarter ad budget in with a movie (Star Trek Generations) that promises the death of one of its two main characters.
• IF KVI said it was raining outside, I’d still want to get the story confirmed by a more reliable source.

• IF I were a conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion industry deliberately made clothes as ugly as possible so customers could be convinced the next year of how foolish they’d been. Ponder, for instance, the new slogan of Tower Records’ clothing racks: “Tower Clothing, Because Some People Look Better With Their Clothes On.” (Indeed, many folks do look better in their own clothing than in Tower’s snowboarding jackets, gimme caps and mall-rat “hiphop” shirts.)
• IF I were a real conspiracy theorist, I’d wonder whether the fashion, music and media industries invented and promptly denounced all that phony “Seattle scene” hype as a way to dissuade young people from catching the real message behind what’s been going on here, the message that you don’t have to remain a passive consumer of media-invented trends. In this theory, the corporate elite deliberately tried to redefine a rebellion against shallow fads as a shallow fad. But that would require big business to be smarter than it probably is.
• IF you’re really into those two great tastes that taste great together, you’ll eat Reese’s Peanut Butter Puffs cereal withButterfinger flavored milk (recommended only for the brave).
• IF I ran the city, I’d change the name of Dexter Ave. N. to “Dextrose Ave.,” after one of that street’s most prominent and aromatic sights, the Hostess bakery.
• IF I were a betting man (and I’m not), I’d start a pool to wager on the day, week and month Newt Gingrich is forced to resign from the House speakership for saying something just too dumb and/or outré. Speaking of which…
• IF Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly were still with us, he’d have a field day satirizing ol’ Newt. Imagine, a right-wing politician with the same name as a salamander!
• IF Brian Basset was really laid off because the Times couldn’t afford an editorial cartoonist anymore, howcum the lower-circulation P-I still has two? The Newspaper Guild claims Times editors tried to fire Basset over personal disputes, but his union contract wouldn’t allow it, so they eliminated his position instead. The Guild’s suing the paper to get Basset hired back. Both sides insist content censorship’s not an issue here; Basset’s cartoons have drifted rightward along with the paper’s editorial stances. (The Times still runs Basset’s syndicated strip Adam.)
• IF I wasn’t so ill-disposed to outdoor participant sports in the first place, I’d be all fired up over the newly-found fashionability of golf. Several local and national rock bands are now into the game of big sticks and little balls. Local illustrator-of-the-utterly-posh Ed Fotheringham‘s made an EP of golf-themed punk songs, Eddy and the Back Nine (Super Electro/Sub Pop), backed by the members of Flop. Local lounge-instrumental savant Richard Peterson made a CD called Love on the Golf Course. And in the ultimate sign of commercialized trendiness, Fox is gonna start promoting its own made-for-TV golf tourneys. Perhaps by this time next year we’ll see lime-green Sansabelt slacks and sensible sweaters at the Tower Clothing racks (at this point, anything would be an improvement over the snowboarding look).
• IF the reason/ excuse given for sexual repression nowadays is that we’re in the “age of AIDS,” howcum gays are still exploring new frontiers of sexual liberation in public and private, while heteros (statistically much less likely to get the virus than gay men) are the ones feeling they have to stay home and settle for porn, phone sex, and/ or dildos? Virtually every book, film, performance event, seminar, or public demonstration promising “new, radical expressions of human sexuality” turns out to be by and/or for gays and lesbians only. Those who enjoy the company of chromosomes other than their own oughta be given the chance to consensually discover their hidden powers and passions too.
• IF I were running out of space, which I am, I’d close this entry with the following highly appropriate graffito, found in the Two Bells Tavern men’s room: “Visualize A World Without Hypothetical Situations.”

PASSAGE

Some universal advice from PBS’s favorite Af-Am-Neo-Con, Tony Brown: “Never offend people with style if you can offend them with substance.”

REPORT

There will be some sort of celebration of the 100th (and possibly last?) Misc. newsletter in mid-January. Details as the date approaches. In the event the newsletter does get dropped, all current subscribers will receive credit for other fine Humph rey literary product.

Due to the demands of book production and other tasks, I cannot accept any unpaid writing work until further notice. Don’t even ask.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Procrustean”