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5/90 Misc. Newsletter
NEW PACIFIC 1ST FEDERAL TOWER BROKE, FOR SALE.
SERVES ‘EM RIGHT
FOR TEARING DOWN
THE MUSIC BOX THEATER
Welcome back to Misc., the column that is almost certain that the Log Lady did it (though we’re still trying to figure out what foghorns are doing on a small hydroelectric lake).
Clean, Reasonably Priced Accommodations: You may know by now that Twin Peaks’ Great Northern (named after a predecessor to today’s Burlington Northern Railway) is really the Salish Lodge. It was the Snoqualmie Falls Lodge for many years, a family-owned place known for honeymoon suites and a weekend farm breakfast; my parents went there often. Then Puget Power, which owns the building (and the dam behind the falls), decided to “upscale” the place by bringing in a new operator, who yuppified much of the old charm away.
Another Sawmill Soap Opera: The spotted owl is just a symbol of a whole eco-scape in danger. It’s not “environmental elitists” reducing timber-country jobs, it’s companies with their “efficient” automated clearcuts and log exports. If the forest lands now used were used in a more sustainable manner (as opposed to the short-term cash amortization of “high yield forestry”), we wouldn’t need to destroy the last of the old growth.
Behind Closed Doors: The Tacoma News Tribune revealed a Community Development Round Table, a group of business and media leaders started by the Times and the Seattle Chamber of Commerce in 1933, now including execs of the Times, P-I, KOMO and KIRO as well as bankers and business leaders. Members are bound by the group’s charter never to mention it to outsiders. A Columbia Journalism Review item about the TNT scoop noted that during the Boeing strike the Round Table invited a speaker from Boeing but not from the unions. Before you forment conspiracy theories, note that the press people in the group were execs, not editors, and that the media firms involved have long supported the business community. KIRO, for instance, shared a big booth at Earth Fair 1990 with the Forest Products Council.
Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Community Catalyst proposes to be the next great local alternative paper. The first issue’s a modest clearinghouse of info from assorted activist groups, plus a substantial background piece by Rich Ray on the making of the aforementioned Earth Fair, in which a commercial festival-organizing company pleaded with everybody to keep all exhibits upbeat and non-offensive to the major sponsors.
As it turned out, the people jamming the roads to Marymoor Park in their single-occupancy vehicles concentrated at the big tent crowded with all the little tables for the real environmental groups, with only a few straying out in the rain to the spacious covered displays for Chevron and Puget Power. Most of them missed the Wash. Natural Gas display, with free samples of a spirulina plankton-based protein drink packaged by its Hawaiian aquaculture affiliate.
Past Futures (from Uncensored magazine, April 1970): “A fascinating new book, The Country of the Young, paints a gloomy picture of what life will be in 1990 — when the generation war is all over and the drop-outs, pot-heads and sandaled freaks have become Old Hippies. The author, John W. Aldridge, says that the failure of the young today to develop their human resources, to cultivate discipline and skills, is going to backfire on them. If the hippies have their way and become catatonics, with all their needs supplied, `They will simply stare at walls for weeks on end, looking fascinated at such things as the copulation of insects. Having been relieved of the struggle of becoming, they would simply exist to be.'”
Phood Phacts: From in-flight magazines to the P-I to CBS This Morning, major attention has been drawn recently to something called the “Northwest cuisine.” WHAT Northwest cuisine? I’m a fourth-generation Washingtonian and never heard of any of these fancy dishes involving rhubarb, rack of lamb and alternatively-processed fish, let alone of many of their ingredients. It sounds suspiciously like some of those other western regional cuisines, invented from scratch from ex-LA chefs (Santa Fe, Colorado), allowing itinerant suburbanites the fantasy of “place” while the real communities of these places succumb to mall-ism. I am certain that we will see the “discovery” of Montana cuisine, North Dakota cuisine, and even Utah cuisine. Ya wanna know the true Northwest cuisine (at least among white people)? It’s Dick’s burgers (or Herfy’s burgers, now all but gone, in the outlying towns), barbecued fish with really thin bones, Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken, canned vegetables, Krusteaz pancakes with Mapeline-flavored syrup, maple bars, strawberry shortcake with Dream Whip, Fisher scones, Red Rose tea, Mountain bars, and Rainier Ale (the now-discontinued weak version). I don’t know if Lutefisk counts, since it seems to be perennially given as a gift but never eaten.
Your Own Private Idaho 1990: Many of Idaho’s civic leaders were all over the media in ’88-’89, insisting that the presence of a dozen neo-Nazis didn’t make them a fascist state. They were right, in a way. It’s the drive (vetoed by Gov. Andrus) to keep women barefoot and pregnant that makes them a fascist state, at least in potential. There ARE many truly non-fascist Idahoans, like liberals everywhere who complain but don’t vote. Some of these, there and here, are the same folk who eat fantasy regional cuisines. Maybe now that will change, as folks see the consequences of staying home and letting the Right win.
Junk Food of the Month: Again from Idaho, J.R. Simplot Inc. (best known as the nation’s top supplier of fast-food potatoes) brings us MicroMagic Microwave Milkshakes. You buy them frozen solid, then semi-thaw them in the zapper for 45 seconds. Will this be the foundation of the new Idaho cuisine? I doubt it. Some of the fun ingredients: Mono and diglycerides, guar gum, locust bean gum, polysorbate 80, carrageenan. The taste? Like a shake at a minor fast-food place that might buy its shake mix from the same source as its fries.
The Fine Print (from a Mr. Coffee coffee filter box): “Additional Uses: Use as a cover when microwaving. Line the bottom of your cake pans. Create snowflakes and Christmas decorations.”
Cathode Corner: KING sacked arts critic Greg Palmer after 14 years. I liked him most of the time, but that’s showbiz. What’s more shocking is that the the new KING news director is also vehemently opposed (sez the P-I) to on-camera signing of the 7:25 a.m. news insert, a friendly face and beautiful spectacle that’s helped many hearing people get through rough mornings and worse news. I once met longtime KING signer Cathy Carlstrom, who also signs church services and other events. She and her fellow signers deserve more respect…. So the world athletes in the Goodwill Games commercials are really local actors and models. What’s the fuss? We’ve all seen enough “Up Close and Personal” segments during the Olympics (or Lite Beer ads) to know that athletes are poor actors.
Ad of the Month (from the Weekly): “Sales, retail. MTV, trendy, fun & outrageous clothing. Mature person, exp’d only.”… Meanwhile, the newest batch of Rainier Beer ads soft-pedals the Only Beer Around Here” theme, dropping the slick stereotypes of mountain climbers and basketball players in favor of a partial return to the humor that made the old Rainier ads such favorites. One billboard reads in big black type, “Californians just don’t get it.” As far as I know, they’re made by the same Frisco ad agency that did last year’s unloved campaign.
Philm Phacts: It’s a shame that Peter Greenaway’s The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is so gory, because people will love or hate it just for that instead of for its many other qualities. It’s written for the screen, but could easily have been a five-act play. It mostly takes place on one huge 4-room set; the first hour unfolds in “real time.” The Thief, while nominally a gangster-extortionist, incarnates the whole history of English villainy (Henry VIII, Richard III, Dickens’ venture capitalists, on up to the Thatcherian present).
News from Medicine: A White Rock, B.C. man who walked around with a broken back for almost three months without knowing it was awarded $625,000 (Can.) damages. A Surrey, B.C. hospital had failed to notice the fracture when it treated him following an accident.
Who the Hell Are You?: The Kids Fair at the Seattle Center Exhibition Hall was an ex-substitute teacher’s nightmare. A whole hall full of screaming kids, frenzied parents, and merchant booths grabbing for the parents’ wallets. Everything from Looney Tunes frozen dinners to back yard jungle gyms, professionally installed. The high/lowlight was when they brought out guys in 7-foot Bart and Homer Simpson felt body costumes, hugging adoring little fans who lined up for photos. If a real Bart were there, he’d have pelted the oversize imposter with a pile of Ninja Turtles coloring books.
Arena Football: Barry Ackerly will build a new Sonics home directly south of the Kingdome (thankfully not, as was threatened previously, where Sears is now), but only if the city shrinks the Coliseum’s capacity, making it commercially worthless. In its original life as the World of Tomorrow exhibit in the ’62 World’s Fair, the Coliseum housed a scale model of the Puget Sound region dotted with new domed cities. What’s one of the few present-day structures shown to be still standing in this fantasy future? As the taped narrators said, “Look! There’s Coliseum Century 21!” “Yes, in the future we will retain the best of the past.”
Sell It to Murph: Unocal Corp. (née Union Oil), which once boasted of being the last company to still make gas for older cars, is now going to buy hundreds of hi-smog clunkers in the L.A. area, in order to retire them from the road. As an Earth Day PR stunt it was very effective and probably cheaper than paying for a cleanup of their old Elliott Bay terminal, where the Port of Seattle is having to deal with the residue of 60 years’ worth of minor product leaks and spills.
‘Til the fourth-anniversary Misc. next time, don’t get caught trafficking in counterfeit Nintendo cartridges (lest they sick a lawsuit equivalent of the Hungry Goriya on you),watch the new international-music show Earth to MTV, and ponder these thoughts by my goddess Tracey Ullman on her role in I Love You to Death: “Because the accent is Northwestern, it was tough to stay in character all the time. Southern accents are easy and so are New York accents, but the Northwest accent is the most pure of all the accents. You can’t just put one accent on top of another. You have to lose your accent completely.”
PASSAGE
One of the less-controversial lines in Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses:
“Should the inflight movie be thought of as a particularly vile, random mutation of the form, one that would eventually be extinguished by natural selection, or were they the future of the cinema? A future of screwball caper movies eternally starring Shelley Long and Chevy Chase was too hideous to contemplate; it was a vision of Hell.”
REPORT
If you want Misc. every month (we don’t get to every drop-off every time), subscribe.
My novel The Perfect Couple is available on Macintosh discs for $10.
CALL TO ACTION
ABC will soon decide whether to renew Twin Peaks. Send cards & letters to ABC Entertainment, 77 W. 66th St., NYC 10023.
WORD OF THE MONTH
“Syncretize”
4/90 Misc. Newsletter
IN MEMORY OF BOB & RAY
(THE BRAND YOU’VE GRADUALLY GROWN TO TRUSTOVER THE COURSE OF THREE GENERATIONS)
Damn. I was so looking forward to a baseball lockout. But at least we get to have an April edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can hardly wait the five years it’ll take to build the proposed bullet train to Moses Lake. The concept is to have international air travelers to Seattle stop there, at an abandoned Air Force base. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a lot more surplus military and military-industrial plant to recycle, so we’d better start thinking of such inventive re-uses for them now. Besides, they could carry the rail line further east, for romantic getaways in Spokane (or even Wallace, Idaho).
GREAT STUFF: We in Seattle may have seen, thanks to the UW, the launching of women’s basketball as the hot new sport of the early ’90s. It’s competitive but not violent (so far), wholesomely sexy, and more down to earth than the men’s game (by about a foot). It’s also a frontier sport, not yet smothered under commercial endorsements and TV time-outs (again, so far). But will interviewers ever ask coaches of men’s teams how they juggle coaching with raising a family.
THE TRUTH ABOUT NICARAGUA: So, after 10 years, some folks got tired of Ortega, his teenage military draft, his Castro-inspired corporate culture, and his rhetoric (not to mention the contras and the US economic blockade). Ortega has proven his commitment to democracy by allowing himself to lose, something you don’t see in some of those anti-Communist dictatorships the US government loves. The Sandinistas remain the single largest party in the parliament, and might one day make an informal coalition with the non-Sandinista leftist parties that campaigned as part of the diffuse UNO coalition. And we must still remember that before Ortega, there was no democracy in that poor, tiny (fewer-people than Washington state), dictator-brutalized land.
FISH OR FOUL: UW art student Horace Luke made a sculpture incorporating 75 goldfish in a plexiglass tube, surrounded by neon lights. The fish were supplied with oxygen from an air pump, fresh water every three to four hours, and regular meals; but they still began to die, on full display in the Art Building. Then somebody, perhaps one of the piece’s several critics, stole the whole contraption on 3/7, except for the air pump. Without that, Luke told the Daily, any “rescued” fish probably died within 15 minutes.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Seattle Radio Guide, an ambitious effort to provide free weekly listings of everything on every station. Publisher Bruce Buckner (“Having never worked on a magazine before…”) is apparently appealing to the few of us who cruise the dial on futile searches for something that’s not bland, old, or excessively market-segmented; but it’s no threat yet to Soundings Northwest….
The local black community could use a more professional, dignified newspaper. The Skanner (new branch of a Portland-based chain) isn’t it. It does, however, have a boxing column by Geek Love author Katherine Dunn.
TATTLE TALES: Mark Goodson and his late partner Bill Todman are famous for producing TV game shows. But, it turns out in the Malcom-memorial issue of Forbes, they made the bulk of their fortune owning a string of suburban papers in Pennsylvania (subcontracting the papers’ management to another chain). I don’t know if the reporters ever vowed to tell the truth, or whether they were stopped by the sound of a bell after asking a few questions (or if they had to stop if they got a no answer).
UNFAVORABLE IMPRESSIONS: The Nov. issue of American Printer carries the sad tale of printers stuck with worthless inventories of fad products whose times passed or never came: Michael Jackson posters, Trivial Pursuit game boards, books on Agnew, Dukakis, Gerald Ford and Oliver North. In the weirdest story, a small print shop invested in costly hardware to stamp photo-engravings of Elvis onto chocolate bars. (Thanx to Fred Woodworth of The Match, a Tucson political journal, for the tip.)
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Power Burst, an “advanced performance beverage” that vows to “beat Gatorade 7 ways.” All I know is you can prove your toughness by finishing an entire serving of the stuff….
A new line of oat bran English muffins is offered by a local outfit called Broadmoor Bakery. To the English, of course, Broadmoor is not known as an exclusive Seattle neighborhood but as a London psychiatric hospital.
SLOGAN OF THE MONTH: B.F. Goodrich T/A Tires, “The Athletic Shoes for Your Car.”
STAGES OF LIFE: The Coliseum Theater, last of the downtown single-screens, finally went RIP. Possible future uses for the historic building include yet another tacky upscale mall. Its death is directly due to 15 years of physical neglect by the misnamed Luxury Theaters, but can be related to the Reaganomics of the multiplex age, giving us (as noted in a recent Atlantic article) just long commercials, exercises in heavy emotional manipulation with little interest in storytelling or acting, let alone the “glamour” of the old Hollywood….
In happier news, Seattle promoters are trying to start an arts center in Concrete, Skagit County. They hope to set up shop in an old moviehouse this year or next, pending the success of a corporate fund drive.
NOSE FOR NEWS: I’m always defending USA Today from my fellow pseudo-intellectuals. One reason I like it: its recent national survey of urban smells. It printed a letter from Cedar Rapids, Iowa complaining about the local Quaker Oats plant (though “Thursdays aren’t too smelly because they make Cap’n Crunch”), from Wichita (where “the putrid smell of gas from the gas wells and crude oil from the oil wells was bad enough I wanted to brush my teeth”), and one from Milwaukee about the brewery and slaughterhouse smells (the mayor responds, “Milwaukee smells like a thriving city”).
BELLEVUE RICH KID DEAD IN C.D. CRACK SALE (3/20): Perhaps the only lesson from this tragedy is a reminder of the affluent who have abandoned the cities, their schools and industry, for a “quality” (euphemism for all-white) life in the suburbs, while serving as the customers who make the drug scourge possible. People are dying in the Rainier Valley and in Latin America so Eastside power-dressers can have their alleged fun.
SINGER FOR MOTHER LOVE BONE DEAD FROM HEROIN: Perhaps the only lesson from this tragedy is not to take ’60s revisionism too far. Back then, heroin was used by the Mafia/CIA to keep undesirable groups (first blacks, then radicals) under control. Besides, intense artificial “highs” are not the making of true cutting-edge art (especially in the age of Spielberg).
SWEET NOTHING: You know I don’t care for most commercial sentimentality, but I am wistful at Bartell Drugs’ centennial commercials showing an old drugstore soda fountain. The Northgate and old Westlake Bartells were just about the last drugstore soda fountains in town, but they were out by the late ’70s. (The last Seattle soda fountain was in an independent pharmacy on Broadway, replaced by a fancy restaurant that didn’t last five years.) I know they need room to stock all those high-tech prescription drugs and all those different shampoos containing “organic and other ingredients,” but they oughta find room in their bigger stores to bring the fountain treats back. Just don’t make it cutesy-wootsey, OK?
CATHODE CORNER: KIRO’s Aaron Brown has established himself as the nudge-nudge irony of modern TV adapted to local news. You know, the Lettermanian “We both know this is stupid but watch anyway” attitude that lets viewers think they’re too smart to be manipulated while continuing to be manipulated….
CBS has become an industrial dinosaur. Like GM and the Democrats, its attempts to revive itself fall back on the faulty practices that got it into its mess. Every “new look” show is over-researched, over-compromised and over-acted. When Moon Unit Zappa becomes a spouter of non-gag likes, you know something’s wrong.
PHILM PHACTS: The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle was cool and quite the nostalgia trip, especially for the kids in the audience who were still in grade school when the Sex Pistols happened. It was fun to look back at England before Thatcher (the next European dictator to fall?), when it still had a veneer of respectability to rebel against. But punk was more grass-roots than Malcom McLaren still will admit. None of the hundreds of other bands were mentioned in the film. For example, the women of punk were not a wife/mistress auxiliary whose own works waited for discovery by historians (as in surrealism or the beats), nor the later second wave of an established genre (as in stand-up comedy or even rap). Punk’s women were out front from the start with X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie Sioux, Deborah Harry, Deborah Iyall, Au Pairs, the Slits, and dozens of others. Their legacy is to credit for the recent dominance of women on the pop charts (six of a recent Billboard Top 10).
‘TIL THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY, don’t wear a leather jacket to anti-fur rallies, enjoy the handmade Word of the Week signboard on Corliss Ave. N. heading north from 44th to 45th (a recent display: “Piscatorial”), read The Quayle Quarterly, consider private chess lessons from our own world champ Elena Donaldson-Akhmiloskaya ($25/hr.), try to figure out Lee Iacocca’s statement that “it’s time to peel off the Teflon Kimono,” and visit the Cap. Hill antique store with the simple name “OLD!” See ya.
THE MISC. LIST
Some still think I’m “just kidding,” that beneath the facade of an Angry Young Man there’s a carefree, apathetic party boy. There isn’t. I’m really like this.
Things that make other people laugh but just make me puke
Christian TV, professional wrestling, supermarket tabloids (especially the Weekly World News, made expressly to be laughed at), spoof movies, any movie with an ex-Saturday Night Live or SCTV star (except Strange Brew).
Things that make other people puke but just make me laugh
The flag nonsense, Nintendo, Milli Vanilli, Channel One, Smurfs.
Things people expect me to adore but I don’t
Science fiction, sword-and-sorcery (especially sword-and-sorcery disguised as science fiction), speed metal.
Things people expect me to just loathe but I don’t
Idaho Spud candy bars, designer sneakers, working-class people.
OFFER
No new Misc. subscribers signed up last month, so everyone who signs on this month will get a special bonus: A special frameable essay and two random pages from my forthcoming novel.
Francois Campoin in the short story “Things That Made It Possible”: “I lost control of the video portion of my life. I kept fading in and out.”
“Aborescence”
3/90 Misc. Newsletter
Russia’s Getting A Multi-Party System!
(Wish We Had One.)
Spring, they say, is just around the corner, but you don’t have to wait any longer for Misc., the info-mosaic that wonders why you can now get a Big Mac in Moscow, but you still can’t get one in Winslow. You call that American freedom of choice? And hey, you vegetarians and epicurean snobs out there, stop scoffing long enough to consider the years of preparation McDonald’s undertook in making food ingredients in the USSR with the quality control needed for modern agribusiness. Most USSR food is still “natural” (as in less-processed), scarce and often rotting. Their system never developed efficient production and distribution; ours perverted those virtues into for-their-own-sake obsessions.
Giving Workers the Rack: I was set to write this month about the imminent closure of Nordstrom’s U-District branch (which has been there in various forms and addresses since the days of raccoon coats), but more important news came in the state’s $30-million decision in favor of employees stuck working extra hours for free. It took the pro-business but out-of-town Wall St. Journal to print the workers’ side of the labor dispute (kudos to reporter Susan C. Faludi, who uncovered not just mandatory volunteer overtime but a corporate culture of bullying, treachery, bigotry, and forced “happiness”). The local media have been as one-sided as they could get away with, taking the angle of “Bad news for Nordstrom” (Times headline, 2/16), never “good news for Nordstrom employees.” I can believe the worst stories and still understand the pro-management employees leafleting outside the stores. Some sincerely believe in the total-hustle policy; others just might be into the “defender” role familiar to analysts of dysfunctional families. What the cracks behind the mandatory Nordic smile mean to Nordstrom’s “service” reputation remains to be seen (computer magazines regularly publish columns suggesting it as a customer-relations role model to computer companies). Even more importantly, many facets of the scandal relate back to the laid back/mellow reputation of the Northwest, whose consumers madethe Big N. what it is today. Nordstrom is one of a handful of institutions that mean the Northwest to the rest of the world (along with the Nordstrom-founded Seahawks, Boeing, The Far Side, Heart, and Ramtha). What does it say when so many of us prefer to buy from a place that hires people on the basis of their conformity to the corporate “look” (a nebulous criterion that could be used against those with too-kinky hair or too-dark skin), and apparently treats them like well-dressed little Oliver and Olivia Twists?
Snow Wonder: You can tell real Seattlites by their attitude towards a big urban snowstorm. To them, it’s a source of childlike wonder and merriment. To suburbanites and Easterners, it’s a nuisance. To Southern Californians, it’s a mix of terror and shock that the weather they love to talk about to prove their “adopted native” stance can do something this big. I loved it, even if it didn’t last longer than four days. I almost got to see a Samurai turn over, live and in person!
The Fine Print (sticker affixed to the back cover of Ernie’s Postcard Book, funny-cat photos by Tony Mendoza, published by Capra Press): “The captions on the back of each postcard are unauthorized and not the work of the author.”
Local Publication of the Month: Adbusters Quarterly, a newsprint magazine on how we are all prisoners of the North American ad culture and even what we can do about it. A sort of radicalized McLuhanism, from the apparent capital of anarchist thought in the western hemisphere, Vancouver.
Modulations: The KZOK-AM frequency, long known as KJET and more recently as KQUL (which played moldie-oldies automation tapes inherited from the old KUUU), is playing new (or at least recently-recorded) music again, mass-market metal under the slogan Z-Rock. If the quintessential KJET song was Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” the quintessential Z-Rock song is Guns n’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” It’s nice that the new format also has room for local acts, though a lot of it sounds like KZOK sounded in 1979.
Cathode Corner: I’m trying to decide whether The Simpsons is the best TV show of the past 10 years or the best ever. From Bart’s different weekly chalkboard affirmations (“I will not instigate revolution”) to the gags you need a pause button to get (the nuclear-plant entrance sign, “Unauthorized Visitors Will Be Shot”), every second is packed with sharp humor and social commentary. And to think that it all comes from an ex-Olympian, Matt Groening (whose Life in Hell list of Forbidden Words for the ’90s alone qualifies him as world-class). The show’s setting, Springfield, is, of course, the name of the most famous “hick town” in Groening’s native Oregon; the nuclear plant where Homer Simpson works looks a lot like the one north of Portland on the Columbia. Am pleased to report that Bart T-shirts are being visibly displayed as far away as Federal Way, with Bart-head-shaped bubble gum due in June.
Everything’s Not Coming Up Roses: Oregon has a lot to cheer about this winter, between The Simpsons, the TrailBlazers and the OSU men’s basketball team. But there’s no pride in the governor’s race, in which incumbent Neil Goldschmit was forced out when rumors of a marital split came true (apparently we can have a divorced man in the White House but not in Salem). The rumor about the rumor claims it was started by GOP candidate Leon Frohmeyer, state attorney general and self-proclaimed environmentalist (really, say more radical eco-activists, an architect of compromise deals with logging and mining interests).
Power Politics: Downtown Blackout II lasted four hours, while its ’88 predecessor lasted four days. Could City Light have worked harder knowing that the thousands of Lotto players in three counties were losing their chances at becoming $6 million men and women (Lotto’s dedicated computer-phone lines are routed through downtown)? Ehh, probably not….
Tourist Trappings: Some multinational has started a mini-cruise ship, the Spirit of Puget Sound. Its ads promise “three hours of live entertainment and fabulous food” along with the usual seaside scenery. Don’t they know what the phrase “a three-hour tour” has come to mean?
Junk Food of the Month: Frozen dinners for kids. Banquet and others have devised microwave versions of all the classic kiddie meals (hot dogs, chicken, chili, etc.) with stereotyped kiddie graphics on the boxes. They’re presumably intended for the growing numbers of offspring with all-working parents, who must fend for themselves after school. Wish I had those things back when I was in that situation.
End of the ’80s Item #4: Perrier water can be bad for you!
Street of Silence: It’s sad to witness the death-by-installments of Broadway, the Aurora Village of urban business districts. Speculators would rather see buildings go empty than lower unrealistic rents. Hence, over a dozen major storefronts are now empty, from the venerable Broadway Theater to the Benneton sweater stand that replaced the cool Different Drummer bookstore. Even Sir Mix-A-Lot doesn’t cruise there much anymore, now that he’s got a house in Kent. Only Keeg’s remains of thesix furniture stores that had made Broadway Seattle’s furniture row back when E. Pike was its auto row. (But the long-pending Dairy Queen finally opened, that venerable chain’s first in-town Seattle store since the mid-’70s.)
(latter-day note: Broadway again thrives, with indie businesses replacing downsizing chains (including an ethnic restaurant where Dairy Queen was). Aurora Village got demolished. Keeg’s closed, leaving no more furniture stores on Capitol Hill except used office furniture outlets.)
Street of Noise: The Pike Place Market authorities are all a-flutter over what they claim are semi-secret plans by the NYC speculators who may or may not own the buildings to turn the Market into a high-priced, chain-stored parody of itself. What they’re not saying is that this would only accelerate a process the Market leaders already instigated, starting with sweatshirt stores and tourist-oriented parking projects. The promotion of the Market as a sight rather than a marketplace has already affected the remaining farmers, who see Saturday after Saturday of crowded walkways full of sightseers but bereft of actual food purchasers.
Ink Inc.: Just as we declared Spy magazine “outski” for 1990, imitations began to sprout. If the real Spy’s quaint we’re-from-New-York-and-you’re-not attitude doesn’t quite get your soul afire, you can enjoy self-conscious prose, retro art and graph-chart stories inWigwag (for the Garrison Keillor audience), Forbes Publishing’s Egg (for the most emptyheaded lifestyle wannabes), and Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly, designed by Mark Michaelson (who worked on the infamous summer ’79 UW Daily with Lynda Barry, John Keister, Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Mike Lukovich, and an underachieving writer who does some little newsletter about pop culture). And is it a mere coincidence that the mass media have become overtaken with chronicling the daily life of Spy’s most frequent satirical target, Donald Trump?
Hearts and Thorns: If Christmas is when everybody’s expected to be in a nuclear family, then Valentine’s Day is when every adult is expected to be in a couple. This is a reasonable if superficial conclusion from the newspapers and the self-help books. There are, at last, support groups for people who need to learn about getting out of bad relationships, but still none about getting into good ones. To admit one’s wish to share one’s life with another goes against the unisex rugged individualism of early-’90s America. To call a place a “singles’ bar” these days is to be insulting; to still be out looking is to be shut out of a lot of social activities and, despite insurance-institute reports that hetero AIDS may never take off in this country, even to be denounced as a menace to society. At least you can get candy really cheap during the following week.
My Nightmare: I dreamed of an old man with white hair whining, “Ever wonder why you can’t get your hooded robes white again after a night of cross burning? Nothing seems to get all the smoke and ash out, not even the old-fashioned real bleach with the sediment at the bottom of the jug.”… I also have dreams in which Denny Hill was never torn down, and had by now become Seattle’s most fashionable residential neighborhood.
‘Til next time, write your Senators to stop the ban against Silly String (we have only one party to spray for our country!), see Roger & Me, don’t buy from the itinerant street gang of perfume salespeople, beware of any self-proclaimed “environmental President” who came from the top of the oil industry, and heed these words of Tim O’Brien: “A real war story is never moral. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it.”
Factsheet Five, the Publisher’s Weekly of Xerox and desktopped literature, likes MISC. “Witty and interesting, even for those of us who live clear across the continent,” sez editor Mike Gundelroy. If you like it half as much, you might consider subscribing to MISC. (with one of Fait Divers’* funny mini-posters as a free gift).
(*Say “Fay Dee Vare”)
BEACON
Philosopher Elaine Pagels, interviewed in Bill Moyers’ A World of Ideas: “Guilt involves a sense of importance in the drama. To say that one is not guilty is also to acknowledge that one is in fact quite powerless.”
“Ataraxia”
2/90 Misc. Newsletter
LATIN DEBATE: IS THIS YEAR “MCMXC” OR “MCMLXL”?
Return with us now to Misc., the monthly information source that hopes one day to earn the phrase a Wall St. Journal headline (1/16) gave to Boeing’s Pentagon spy, “Loyal to Seattle to the End.”
More Than Meets the Eye?: We love to study the mysteries of the world, the unexplained phenomena that some discount as mere coincidence. One such mystery occurred with Ranger Charlie, the jovial host of KSTW’s morning cartoons for the past year. Sometime in December, he disappeared from the screen, leaving his puppet raccoon friend Roscoe in charge. Finally, in January, Roscoe again had Ranger Charlie to banter with — only the beloved ranger had become shorter, younger, and female. Now, that’s something you don’t see in cartoons, not even on The Transformers.
The Fine Print (from a P-I ad insert): “Safeway’s 1/4-inch trim is trimmed to 1/4-inch external fat excluding natural depressions in the contour of the underlying meat.”
The Not-So-Fine Print: A Crown Books in-store poster touts a discount dictionary as the “best in it’s class.” Never buy a dictionary from people who can’t spell. The book in question is a reprint of the ’83 version (since supplanted) of theRandom House Dictionary, inherited via a series of Random House subsidiaries by “Portland House, New York,” successor to the Oregon computer-book house dilithium press.
Local Publication of the Month: The Way of the Lover, a self-help book of sorts by West Vancouver, B.C. spiritualist Robert Agustus Masters. You might not immediately buy into the mythological or meditative content, but you’ve gotta love such chapter titles as “Releasing Sex (and Everything Else) from the Obligation to Make Us Feel Better.”… The Weekly-ization of the local press continues, as local media hype Hawaii tourism this winter as never before. The Times andWashington magazine even ran “editorial” sections trying to find local-angle stories about a place thousands of miles away…. Caverns, a “collaborative novel” by Ken Kesey’s Univ. of Oregon writing class, is a plain piece of commercial storytelling, recommended only for those interested in how it was made (like me) and Kesey completists (unlike me).
Cathode Corner: KING’s first ads after the flood-day (1/9) 11 pm news were two of those awful Infiniti spots wherein you don’t see the car, just a lot of water; followed by a spot with the opening line “drowning in a sea of high bills?”…. Ted Turner, who expects to lose millions on the Seattle Goodwill Games, tried to make a little of it back by colorizing Jailhouse Rock, a film made in ’57 (well into the Eastmancolor era) with a major star, at a time when the only major black and white films were done deliberately that way…. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was almost set in Seattle, instead of Minneapolis. According to a new book about the show, its producers felt that a show filmed before a live audience would need to be set in a town where people spent lots of their time in small indoor rooms. (As you recall, MTM went on in ’70, a year before All in the Family and after several years of sitcoms with outdoor scenes and canned laughter.) As the show coalesced, they decided Minnesota was more indoorsy than Seattle. Instead of Hüsker Du remaking the MTM theme (by old Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis), it could’ve been Capping Day or even Pure Joy.
A Classic Tragedy: Cable’s American Movie Classics channel seldom lives up to its name (most of its flicks are dated Don Ameche vehicles); but on 1/14 it ran one of the weirdest pieces of video ever shot: the Frances Farmer episode of This Is Your Life. The 1958 live telecast, made at the start of Farmer’s return to public life after her lobotomy, shows the Seattle-born actress staring into space while greasy-haired host Ralph Edwards (who also created Truth or Consequences) rattled off a summary of her sad life story. During her turns to speak, she looked offstage (possibly to a prompter). In an elegant but slurred voice, she slowly explained that “I did not believe and still do not believe that I was truly ill.” At the end, she was rewarded for her bravery with a new Edsel.
Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Lite! Thicker snack cakes, slightly less sweet, for “grown-ups.” Most of the reduction in calories is due to a reduction in size from the regular Hostess product…. Burger King announced new oat bran buns for its burgers, just before the gov’t. announced that the oat bran craze had been based on exaggerated claims…. Chateau Ste. Michelle has brought out a special bottling of ’86 Chenin Blanc to honor the UW’s 125th Anniversary. It would have been a more appropriate tribute if it had been a wine more UW people drink: cheap Chablis in a box. But then again, this grad can’t imagine what a UW frat was doing with a sheep during induction week, except perhaps to show it off as a role model.
Praying for a Space: Chicago’s Catholics are faced with declining attendance and a priest shortage, but one downtown parish is investing in a new church building, to be financed by a 20-story parking garage to be built above the sanctuary. They’re just following the lead of my childhood denomination: Chicago Methodists already have a downtown church-office tower and a neighborhood church with a Fotomat booth in its front yard.
The Severed Arm of the Law: A North Carolina firm’s selling a “lawyer doll,” the heads and limbs of which are attached with Velcro for easy mangling, apparently to place curses on lawyers for the other side of your case. Or, you could leave it headless to resemble your own attorney. Such quasi-voodoo rituals didn’t help Noriega, but who says they won’t work for you?
Reach Out and Severely Inconvenience Someone: The AT&T system crash, in which about half of the long-distance network simply refused to put calls through, shows that even the ex-Ma Bell is no longer a paragon of American technological supremacy. The big glitch was blamed on faulty software; just the admission they’d like to make while AT&T’s computer unit tries to wrestle control of its UNIX computer system software back from various licensees.
What’s With Utne These Days?: Utne Reader, the bimonthly digest of the alternative press, now has its very own Publishers’ Clearing House stamp, right between Stamps and Time. When you win your $10 million in the sweepstakes, you can read how to put the dough into socially responsible investments.
Those Phunny Phoreigners: This sign in a Northwest Trek-style wildlife park in Nara, Japan, is noted in the book Gems of Japanized English by Miranda Kendrick: “CAUTION: Everybody: Take care of Hind! It is the season Fawn is born about this time. It may be case if you approach him, his mother deer being full of maternal love gives you a kick by her forefeet.”
We’re Only In It for the Freedom: The first U.S. private citizen to meet with new Czech president Vaclav Havel wasn’t an industrialist or banker but Frank Zappa. Havel, it turns out, is a longtime Zappa fan; during his years as a banned playwright, he let banned musicians, such as the Zappa-influenced Plastic People of the Universe, record tapes in his country house. Zappa may use his friendship with this anti-authoritarian hero to bolster his fight against rock censorship. Zappa would probably be upset by managers of the new Yakima domed arena, who wouldn’t let the B-52s bring the Greenpeace info booth the band has had outside every tour date. The arena bosses claimed it would “set a bad precedent.”
Tomorrow Ain’t What It Usta Be: The Futurist magazine has published some wild ‘n’ wacky predictions for the ’90s. Among them: Flight from the Greenhouse Effect may make Canada more populous than the U.S. Cash money will become illegal for all but very small transactions. Computers with automatic language translation and voice synthesis will enable people to speak in one language that listeners will hear translated into another language. Computer chips will be in everything from houses to clothing. Household robots may be as common as refrigerators. Almost one-fourth of the world’s population will be Moslem. Self-propelled, computerized lawn mowers will be able to “see” where the grass needs to be cut and to avoid trees. Remember, these may be the same seers who said we’d now have home helicopters but not home computers.
‘Til March, you might as well abandon the Sonics this year and root for the Seattle-owned Portland TrailBlazers, thank the nondenominational dieties that there will be no Robert Fulghum sitcom (which would have starred John Denver), and review these words by author/educator John Gardner: “More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.”
Julio Cortazar in the “Love 77” chapter of A Certain Lucas (1979):
“And after doing everything they do, they get up, they bathe, they powder themselves, they perfume themselves, they comb their hair, they get dressed, and so, progressively, they go about going back to being what they aren’t.”
Tell your friends about Misc., the one piece of monthly first-class mail they’ll be glad to get. New subscribers will receive the humorous essay “God as I Understand Him” and first word on future Fait Divers products (the computer novel The Perfect Couple, special mini-posters).
“Descry”
1/90 Misc. Newsletter
Put Your Official Berlin Wall Souvenir on the Bookshelf,
Next To Your Jar of Mt. St. Helens Ash
Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS.
Welcome to the last 10 or 11 years of the millennium and to Misc., your monthly guide to applied sanity in a world where MTV’s decade-in-review show has more journalistic substance than ABC’s and NBC’s put together.
No Bucharest for the Wicked: I was going to open this first Misc. of the ’90s with some clever remark on the order of “Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a new era already?”. Leave it to the Reds to spoil a good sarcasm by actually starting a new era. Not that everyone here cared about all of it; the Times put the outbreak of revolution in Romania on the bottom of its 12/22 front page, beneath the story of one local traffic death. Some emigres interviewed in the U.S. credited Nadia Comaneci with helping inspire the revolt when she risked her life for love (even if that love already had a wife). The revolt might also cheer Romanian refugee Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute, who, according to a Wall St. Journal story published before the upheaval, has lived in a safe house somewhere in France, fearing an attack by Ceausescu’s spies. The slain tyrant was apparently called by many Romanians “Draculescu;” appropriately, it was in Transylvania that the fight to topple him began. Transylvania had been part of Hungary when a socialist revolt was crushed after WWI; one Hungarian leftist was a 39-year-old actor who fled to the U.S., changing his name from Blasko to Lugosi.
The Canal, The Banal: The Panama invasion was a cures worse than the disease. So much for peace on Earth at Xmas. Bush needed an argument for not cutting the Pentagon budget and for not turning over the canal on Jan. 1; thus, the escalation with Noriega to the point of getting him to declare war. Yes, hewas a creep, but was kept in power by the U.S. as a friendly creep. This mess (including perhaps 1,000 Panamanian civilian deaths) is the result of the cynics in our government installing criminals and calling them freedom fighters. Watch for the Nicaragua invasion by March, preceded by full restoration of ties with our friendly creep, Deng.
Plagiarism on Parade?: In this Age of Information, idea-theft suits are the rage. If only the ’80s could have produced Eddie Murphy, only the late ’80s could see a court seriously consider that Murphy would find appropriate comedic scenarios from Art Buchwald. A more plausible but unsuccessful suit was made against Prince by his sister over a song lyric (though the concept of Prince having a sister is mind-reeling enough).
Roll Over, Tugboat Annie: The transformation of Lake Union from working waterfront to preppy playground continues with a Marriott Residence Inn and the pending demolition of the St. Vincent de Paul store for still more restaurants. Most interesting is Jillian’s, a franchised “upscale billiards club” being built in the old Kenney Toyota building on Westlake. The developers’ plans include the original bar from NY’s Algonquin Hotel, bought from the hotel’s new Japanese owners. Imagine: Our own little piece of literary history, the watering stand of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and many other cool people.
The scent of gentrification (not unlike a knock-off perfume sold through multi-level marketing) is detectable in a plan in the city council to restrict adult entertainment to the industrial zone. Even if you don’t mind the prospect of dozens of young women having to commute at night through one of the most desolate, least policed parts of town, you have to recognize that this would make a zoning precedent for the replacement of industry by condo projects (which would also drive out the artists’ studios). Get ready for a boulevard of “luxury loft homes,” some built into the shells of the old warehouse buildings, from the Dome to Spokane Street.
Modulations: An Everett-based successor to KRAB, the late noncommercial radio station for aging Deadheads, may finally emerge this year. KRAB founder Lorenzo Milam has resurfaced as an editor of the Calif.-based Fessenden Review, a “quarterly — we come out two or three times a year” book magazine. Its last cover offers a masked Mexican wrestler and a long list of famous authors, none of whom are published or reviewed inside…. KEZX-AM (the old Country KAYO frequency) has turned over most of its airtime to the Business Radio Network, a satellite feed offering stock-market quotations and advice all day. It’s an advertiser’s dream come true: A station that only reaches people rich enough to have investments. No music, entertainment or general news that could threaten to attract us unworthy middle-class people (or worse).
Junk Food of the Month: The Hurricane Hugo Special at Puerto Rico’s Caribe Hilton. The recipe, from Food Arts magazine: 1 oz. lemon juice, 1 oz. mai tai syrup, 1 oz. Don Q rum 151, 1/2 oz. Grand Marinier, 1/2 oz. Bacardi rum; hand shake with ice, pour into 14 oz. glass, garnish with a cherry…. KIRO-AM and Millstone Coffee are sponsoring a “Coffee Cruiser” van, prowling high-foot-traffic events to distribute free cups-o-Joe promoting the station.
Cathode Corner: The Discovery Channel’s quest for cheap, informative programming makes for some astounding time-wasters. On Xmas morning they offered a years-old Alaska travel video. The late Lorne Greene narrated, calling it (as all regions in travel videos, films and articles are always called) “truly a land of contrasts.” As part of the tourist biz, every town Greene mentioned had a stage show or museum honoring frontier-era prostitution (“but at this saloon, only the beer’s for sale”). Alaska’s tourism division publicizes actresses who dress up as old-time floozies, while its police arrest anyone in the profession for real.
Local Publication of the Month: In Context is a quarterly “journal of sustainable culture” made by the Context Institute on Bainbridge. Its winter issue discusses how new communications media are changing the world. This is one post-hippie rag that doesn’t automatically condemn everything invented since ’70; it encourages its readers to become involved with the new media, that they may form communities around the distribution of ideas.
`Til our fabulous Feb. issue (with an essay on the lessons we can learn from our childhoods), look for Tacoma’s real-life street called Memory Lane, pray for peace and/or snow, read Penn and Teller’s Book of Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (the most successful work of deconstructivist literature ever made in North America), and ponder these words by the great Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”
John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1966): “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.”
All new subscribers to Misc. this month will receive a original essay, suitable for framing, God As I Understand Him.
Also from Fait Divers:Â The Perfect Couple, an interactive computer novel aout, among other things, two people’s search for romantic excellence ($10 in advance, requires Macintosh computer and HyperCard software).
“Multivalent”
What the `90s Have Given Us
Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution
We’ll Look Back and Laff At
Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated
We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without
Biggest Stories Not Covered in Most End-of-Decade Reviews
Democratic presidential nominations won by raising money from big corporate interests looking for the candidate most likely to lose to the RepublicansSources of Hope
Top Local Stories
12/89 Misc. Newsletter
Seahawks Keep Losing,
Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties
Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.
MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.
TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.
TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!
THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”
PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!
BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.
STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.
HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.
INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).
BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.
SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.
`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”
VOICES
Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:
“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”
FORUM
We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.
“Olefiant”
INS/OUTS FOR ’90
This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.
Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.
This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.
11/89 Misc. Newsletter
Empty Space Renovators Find Asbestos in Showbox Walls;
You Thought the Punks Looked Deadly!
Welcome to yet another ennui-packed edition of Misc., the column that wonders whether Monty Python’s Graham Chapman would have wanted to die on the same day as, and have his obituary upstaged by that of, the race horse Secretariat, and decides that he might well have. This is the special newsletter edition, containing (not much, but some) additional material, cut from the version in ArtsFocus. While that tabloid was on indefinite hiatus this summer, I put out a special newsletter version and solicited for subscriptions. Two people replied. This is for them, and anyone else who might end up applying for the mailing list.
NO JANE, NO PAIN: I do not mourn the impending departure of Jane Pauley, who has held her position on Today for 13 years despite a distinct incompetence. She was particularly bad in her early years, but still maintained a level of journalistic ineptitude to the end (we’ve already mentioned her interview with the Seattle Rep’s Dan Sullivan, in which she never “got” the idea that non-NYC theater is real theater).
STAGE OF DECLINE: The demise of the Pioneer Square Theater has been dissected elsewhere. I’ll simply note that at one time, a local theater company was able to support itself mostly on its own receipts, and might have continued to do so had its original team stayed in town. Another case of LA ruining everything.
SPECIAL INTEREST: The John Lennon purists (a bunch of gracelessly-aging ex-potheads) may scorn the memorial Visa cards authorized by Yoko, but I love ’em. There’s nothing quite like going over your limit as the receipt-stamper pulls across the face that sang “Imagine no possessions.”
THE WORLD SERIOUS: So the A’s, thanks to Mike Moore and their other ex-Mariners, finally won. “But where in all this,” you haven’t asked, “is ex-A’s owner Charles O. Finley, the man who wanted to give us orange baseballs?” He’s still dabbling in sports. While Oakland was in mourning over the quake, Finley was safe up here, giving a public demonstration of his new glow-in-the-dark footballs. Their fluorescent green stripes are supposed to make them more visible at night in dimly-lit high school stadia; which would ruin one of the joys of the high-school game. O well, at least they’ll still have under-the-bleachers fights and the sound of both schools’ bands simultaneously playing “On Wisconsin” as their own fight song.
COME BACK, SAM! ALL IS FORGIVEN!: Am still trying to learn whether the Samuel E. Schulman credited as publisher of the new magazine Wigwag is the illustrious ex-Sonics owner and B-movie mogul of the same name. The mag is subtitled “A Picture of American Life;” it looks a bit like Spy and reads a lot like the last half-hour of All Things Considered. Lotsa smug Ivy League “populism” and pretentious cuteness. It does have one nice item on loneliness from the only single black woman in Tucson.
THE PLANE TRUTH: At this writing, the Boeing strike is going strong. It’s a novelty among recent U.S. strikes: it’s against an industrial manufacturer that’s been doing well enough that the usual pleas that the battered workers “sacrifice a little more” to keep management comfy just don’t work. If successful, this may be the turning point in American labor. People at Boeing and other firms may be getting tired of being pushed around, of getting sick from hazardous chemicals only to have management claim it’s just psychosomatic or “hysterical,” of being treated as a mere “cost” to be “contained,” of having any disagreement with any of this denounced as disloyalty to the corporate “family.”
MEANWHILE, Martin Selig’s fall from the heights of local office development should not surprise. In an ongoing attempt to cut corners from the costs of his big projects, he’s been late on payments to smaller suppliers for years. He got caught when he tried to slow down his payments to outfits big enough to fight back: first City Light, then some big creditors. In the end though, an ex-strip-mall-builder in an overbuilt market was no match for the big guys from LA and Toronto, now poised for total dominance.
TOY BOY: The first Xmas product with promise is the Heartthrob game by Milton Bradley, the years-late answer to Mattel’s Mystery Date game (circa 1962). It’s for girls ages 8-12, who draw and trade cards pertaining to their ideal boy’s traits, trying to assemble the most attractive guy possible.
GAS PAINS: The great oil slump continues, as Chevron sells or demolishes some of its most prominent locations (Ballard and Market, Evergreen Point) while the independent Gull sells all its Seattle stations. Gull, along with Mobil, thus joins these other long-gone brands from town (how many do you remember?): American, Carter, Douglas, Enco, Flying A, General, Gilmore, Gulf, Hancock, Hudson, Payless, Phillips 66, Red Crown, Richfield, Rocket, Signal, Standard, Time, USA, Valvoline, Vickers, and Wilshire. Seattle never had any outlets, however, for Clark Oil (no relation), the Midwestern brand that sold premium gas only.
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Belgian waffle snacks at Gaufres (“gauf”), a storefront at 106 James with the shortest menu of any restaurant in town. For a buck, you get a small cup of coffee and a hot, glazed waffle on a sheet of wax paper. No butter, syrup, or whipped cream; this is finger food. Eat too many, though, and you’ll have a “gauf figure.”…Seattle’s Starting Right Co. now has the first gourmet frozen dinners for babies – strained, pre-cooked mounds of rice/squash/cod, zucchini/potatoes/beef, and pasta/carrots/turkey.
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Miscellania Unlimited (again, no relation) is launching a new line of Northwest-produced comic books. The starting lineup ranges from the funny-philosophical Morty the Dog (who was “killed off” during his previous series from Starhead Comics; how he returns is the chief mystery) to the all-too-typical Rhaj (a female warrior in ancient Egypt with big eyes, a big knife, and a bigger bare bosom)…. I wish somebody here had a paper as lively as the Portland Free Press. It’s a monthly left-anarchist broadsheet concerned with toxic dumping, deforestation, and particularly with the Citizens Crime Commission, a panel of Oregon’s wealthiest and most powerful people who lobby for more prisons and fewer civil rights using the “drug emergency” for a justification….Every two months Factsheet Five, a national directory of small-press and self-published matter, includes several listings of Seattle-area “zines” available only by mail. As space permits, I’ll occasionally reprint one of these listings. This time it’s The Whetstone, described by FF (haven’t seen it myself) as “a new ‘magazine for independent people’ on news ignored by the major media…the alleged A-bomb test at Port Chicago in 1944, the AIDS-syphilis connection and alternative high-energy sources.” Available for $15/4 issues from FIFE Publications, Box 45792, Seattle 98145-0792.
THE KING AND THEM: Yul Brynner, according to one of those son-of-star-tells-all books, had steamy affairs with many of your favorite Hollywood leading ladies, and also with the actress who later became Nancy Reagan. It’s a gruesome thought, I know, but not as shocking as a pic published last year in the French Photo magazine, a full-frontal nude of a pre-stardom Brynner — with hair on his scalp!
COLOR ME BLUE: COCA recently held a performance by NY artist Mike Bildo. Three local women walked onstage and spent the next 10 minutes brushing bright blue paint on their nude selves. Occasionally, Bildo instructed the models to tastefully flay themselves on one of two large paper “canvases.” A group calling itself the Gorilla Girls picketed outside, calling the work an “appropriation” of women. The Gorillas’ literature drew heavily on quotes from Alice Walker, a writer who has dismissed any criticism of her work with the all-damning phrase “white male attitude.” The Bildo piece did NOT advocate male power over women. It questioned the valuesof originality and individualism, a topic frequently covered in feminist art writing. The models, the six clothed musicians, and Bildo were all re-enacting roles devised in 1960 by conceptual-art pioneer Yves Klien, who in turn was commenting on both French ooh-la-la exhibitionism and on the role of the nude figure in art. (Bildo’s enactment was closer to Klein’s concept than was the re-edited version of Klien’s event in the exploitation film Mondo Cane ). Body painting is an old tradition in other cultures, and has oft been used in Western alternative art. Weeks before Bildo, Karen Finley appeared on the same stage, her nude self covered in chocolate syrup, giving a charged lecture on bodies and body images. The chocolate motif had been used in ’74, with similar metaphors, in Dusan Makajayev’s Sweet Movie. The UK female punk band The Slits once posed for an album cover in mud and loincloths (as re-created this fall by the Seattle male punk band Mudhoney). Had the Gorilla Girls overcome their own stereotypical notions about gender and power, they’d have been treated to a spectacle full of images worthy of smart criticism. (Something like this section may appear in the KCMU Wire).
IN CONCLUSION, copies of the special “What I Did This Summer” report are available by sending a SASE to Box 203, 1630 Boylston, Seattle 98122, as is information on my novel The Perfect Couple (currently available only as Macintosh computer software). Until our next report, vote for Rice (claiming you’re “too hip to vote” is just the same as voting for Jewett), see the Art of Music Video Festival at 911 (no, I won’t bow to the current fashion and call it “the 911 space,” though I might start calling my home “the Clark space”), and remember this quotation from Goethe: “Everything that needs to be found out has been found out.The hard part is finding it again.”
10/89 Misc. Newsletter
(the first self-contained newsletter edition)
Welcome one and all to the never-say-die return of Misc., the only column in town that wonders why “original flavor” toothpaste doesn’t taste like “original flavor” bubble gum.
This is a successor to a column that ran monthly in ArtsFocus magazine for three years. For those who weren’t with us before our summer hiatus, this is a compendium of things that usually aren’t official art events, but are still part of the world in which we and our arts live. Much of this edition happens to consist of corporate mating and decompsing rituals; other months have dealt with politics, books, religion, music, mass behavior, fine food and wine.
WHAT I DID THIS SUMMER: I celebrated the 15th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation (far more important than the 20th anniv. of Woodstock) by meditating on the “herald of impeachment” still displayed at the Comet Tavern and reminiscing about those pre-Reagan days, when fewer people mistook corruption for a virtue. I finished a novel, to be put out somewhere within the next year. Saw the opening of the first segment of the bus tunnel, a slick brown shopping-mall-of-transit designed to make suburban commuters feel at home. Also saw the construction of the Outlet Mall, now open with complete designer stores by Liz Claiborne, Evan Piccone and others, right on the Burlington exit to the north Sound’s Calif.-colony “getaways.” The annual Popllama Records Picnic was censored by anti-rock forces in the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Dept., but promoter Conrad Uno may have kept happy by pretending he was the guy all this summer’s headlines from Japan were about. This second greenhouse-effect summer ended on a stunning autumnal equinox day (even to me, not a weather person). The Ave’s venerable Cafe Allegro was closed for the wedding of two longtime employees (the reception there, the alternative ceremony at the U’s Medicinal Herb Garden). Later that night, Broadway’s Gravity Bar stayed open all night for performances and tarot readings.
DENTAL FLOSS TYCOONS: According to a Wall St. Journal piece, two guys in a New York jail spent months quietly trading cigarettes for dental floss, then hand-weaving the nylon thread into a sturdy rope. They used it one night to carefully climb down from their fourth-floor window. They were still seen by a passerby and got caught.
THE EMPEROR’S NUE CLOTHES: Robert Campeau was forced to turn over control of his dept. store empire to bankers. For a clue to his possible mismanagement, note Campeau’s Bon Marché and its slogan, “The Nue Hits for Back to School.” You’d think a Quebeçois would know better than to sell clothes via the French feminine word for “nude.” (Of course, it’d fit if the promotion includedGuess? jeans.)… Nordstrom might buy Marshall Field of Chicago, which owned Frederick & Nelson for over 50 years. If so, then Frederick’s will be paying Nordy’s for the right to make Frangos (Frederick’s invented them, but Field’s kept the copyright when it sold Frederick’s).
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (Times, 8/12): “Incarceration for man called too short.” Runner-up (P-I, 8/30): “Margo St. James wants to see a prostitute for president” (haven’t most of them been?).
JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Frosty Paws are imitation ice cream treats for dogs, made with no harmful lactose. “Not harmful to humans, but made for dogs.” For humans, meanwhile, there are the new Trix Pops, by General Mills subsidiary Vroman Foods, in the three classic Trix colors (including Orange Orange!)…. Ralston Purina’s new Barbie cereal is the same recipe as its Nintendo cereal; only the shapes and boxes are different. If boys and girls can’t be taught to play with the same toys, at least they can eat the same sugar puffs.
DIRTY DANCING ON MY GRAVE: Just a few months after Vestron Pictures flayed itself all over the Seattle International Film Festival, it went under. Still undetermined: the fate of Vestron’s unreleased products like the fake-DePalma ripoff Paint It Black and of Dan Ireland, whose onetime beloved Egyptian Theater was, at time of Vestron’s first layoffs, showing a cultured, sophisticated James Bond shoot-em-up…. Meanwhile, thanks to Sony’s buyouts, Columbia Pictures and Columbia Records are finally owned by the same company; while Disney’s acquisition of the Jim Henson organization was probably inevitable. Henson’s recent shows have gotten mired in the worst Disneyesque cutesy-wootsies.
WHOLE LOTTO BLUES: A Portland man killed himself in early Sept., thinking he’d lost a $3 million lottery ticket. In fact, he never had it, since the lottery computer registered no winner in that drawing. Undaunted by the bad PR, Ore. still plans to start legal football betting.
HOW WE DOIN’ ON TIME?: David Letterman turns out to be a shareholder and board member of one of the companies buying baseball’s own stupid human trick, the Mariners. He’s said how much he loves Seattle during segments with ex-locals George Miller and Lynda Barry, but that alone wouldn’t stop the majority owners from moving the team. We’ll know their intentions the next time they have to choose whether to keep a star player (Argyros got rid of anybody who got good enough to become expensive).
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: National Boycott News. Far from the amateur rabble sheet depicted in a recent Lacitis column, it’s a very long, well-researched compendium on who in corporate America is doing what and why we should care. Editor Todd Putnam keeps revising his listings to reflect changes in commercial behavior or new information, leading to fascinating sagas about the evolving notions of “good business.”
END OF THE ’80S ( #1): David Horsey’s Boomer’s Song, proclaimed “the worst comic strip in the papers” by our first Misc. column in ’86, has gone out with a whimper. No big Gary Larson/Berke Breathed sendoff; the P-I buried the strip’s discontinuation in a notice about the return of Andy Capp (formerly in the Times).
END OF THE ’80S (#2): That American institution, the convenience store, is in deep trouble. Circle K tried to make up for disappointing national sales by raising prices, a counterproductive move. Plaid Pantry is in bankruptcy, after trying to strike an alliance with Arco. Even the mighty 7-Eleven is reeling in debt from a buyout, and is raising short-term cash by turning company-owned outlets into franchises.
END OF THE `80S (#3): Cuisinarts Inc. declared bankruptcy. Only major asset: unsalable inventory. Has it been so long since its food processors were so scarce, you could only buy a certificate for one?
NO MORE MEAN GREEN?: The gov’t’s thinking of redesigning our money, officially to make cash transactions more traceable. They’d be the first changes since the exchange-for-silver guarantee was dropped. They could change the colors or even print Universal Product Codes with each serial number! This society sorely needs to de-mystify money; turning it into just another ugly official document might help.
’90S PREDICTION #1: The “drug war” is replacing the cold war as the official excuse to stage military adventures abroad. By strange coincidence, the only countries to be targeted will just happen to be countries where U.S. business interests seek more control over the local governments.
NORTHERN BYTES: If you haven’t been to Vancouver lately, you haven’t seen a city “go big time” and do it right, with some big exceptions. The downtown East End, a collection of residential hotels and pubs that some feared would be eradicated with Expo 86, has been preserved as a neighborhood and as a film site. It’s the unnamed city in 21 Jump Street; the downtown-underground portion of the light-rail system (above-ground elsewhere) was a murder site in the last Friday the 13th film. Expo itself is now a vacant concrete slab winding along the waterfront, except for three buildings: the Science World museum (check out the “Music Machines” room, sounds just like Throbbing Gristle playing Charles Ives); the 86 Street disco (where any slam dancing is punished with a thorough beating by the most fascistic bouncers in the west); and the floating McDonald’s. The BC gov’t sold the the rest to Hong Kong developers, whose predatory developments elsewhere in town have led to unfortunate racial attacks against the established Chinese-Canadian community. But the best sight in today’s Vancouver is a stencil-painted graffito downtown, “Jesus Saves,” modified by the spray-painted addition, “Gretzky scores on the rebound.”
YES, THERE WILL be another of these reports, and it will feature our own ’80s nostalgia review (get your nominations in now for what’s worth remembering and what’s lest-we-forget). `Til then, read the haunting comic book Beautiful Stories for Ugly Children, listen to Car Talk on KPLU, and heed these words of the immortal Irving Berlin: “You’re not sick. You’re just in love.”
Published monthly. Subscriptions: $6 per year by check to Clark Humphrey, 1630 Boylston #203, Seattle 98122. Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS. (c) 1989 Fait Divers Enterprises.
6/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
C.A.P. WINS, WESTERN
CIVILIZATION DOESN’T END
(latter-day note: That was a city initiative measure to instill mild zoning controls on new high-rise office towers, fought bitterly by developers who are now bankrupt ‘cuz with today’s corporate downsizing they can’t fill the buildings they’ve already built.)
Welcome back to Misc., the column for a world where three AA-level pitchers are called a “good trade” and a million Chinese protesters are called a “tiny minority.” We do know why Willard Scott called Starbucks Coffee “almost as good as Maxwell House” on a recent location shoot. He’s got an ad contract with that product of General Foods (founded by Seventh-Day Adventist C.W. Post to sell health foods, now owned by a cigarette firm).
Three Men and a Pillow: A Seattle firm has invented the Empathy Belly, a 35-pound prosthetic tummy with Velcro outside and lead weights inside. It’s to help expectant fathers empathize with their wives, by sharing some of pregnancy’s discomforts. I wonder if its makers saw the Bewitched where Endora made Darren kinder to pregnant Samantha by making him crave rich foods and feel queasy in the mornings.
Prosaic Paroxysm: We’ve been amused over the years at the creation, practically from scratch, of a mythical “Northwest Lifestyle.” Less amused have been residents of hick towns rechristened as “romantic getaways.” Some of these oldtimers have formed Citizens for Lesser LaConner. Their ads in Seattle papers warn of traffic jams and inadequate facilities for the tourist hordes. It’s so rare to see an ad pleading you not to buy. Businesses there, of course, would remake the place to meet the tourist demand. It’d destroy thetown’s “rustic charm,” but that might not matter to those visitors who came here five years ago for the “lifestyle” invented by people who came here 10 years ago.
Cathode Corner: Joe Guppy, the Mark Langston of local TV, helped make Almost Live into a contender, then jumped to HBO. Another ex-Off-the-Wall Player, Dale Goodson, is now at MTV, writing comedy material for fellow Seattlite Kevin Seal. Then there’s Ross Shaffer’s ABC show, Day’s End. He mostly narrates clips from other shows, telling the late-night audience how much they’re missing by not watching more prime-time TV. As the TV nation keeps diffusing, expect desperate self-promotions like movies used against TV in the ’50s. Already, NBC’s “Come Home” slogan both plugs its living-room comedies and extols prodigal viewers to return from cable and VCRs.
Body Politics: The Christian Science Monitor’s become the nouvelle cuisine of newspapers (exquisite but too small to satisfy), but still has a good item now and then. It recently noted that teen beauty pageants are returning to Nicaragua (first prize: a trip to Melledin, Colombia). Some of the all-male leadership of the Sandinista Youth League grumbled that there should be intelligence pageants instead. A typical “male feminist” attitude, to slag feminine behavior as an irrelevant frill. A generation that’s faced so much work and self-denial (due largely to our hypocritical ideology) deserves a taste of healthy individual pride…. On a similar note, Poland’s first Bennetton store was announced. Maybe Walesa will start wearing nicer sweaters.
Junk Foods of the Month: The Nintendo Cereal System gives you the sugar rush to keep playing; the clever packaging lets you munch it from the box while keeping your joystick hand free…. Champs de Brionne in George, WA would rather be known for outdoor concerts than for Scarlet, a blend of reisling and cherry wine. It’s the same shade of pink as the dress on the label mascot (who looks more like a Barbara Cartland heroine than Scarlett O’Hara). She asks us to “look for my message on the back of the label”; I couldn’t find any…. The trade mag Restaurant Business sez the next eatery fad will be Mom Food — meatloaf, creamed corn, mashed potatoes. “Paying money for something you probably didn’t even like that much as a kid will lose its appeal, but we are reassured that it’s OK to enjoy comfortable food.”
Grinding Down: Many of Seattle’s 10 burlesque joints are feeling financial goose pimples. They’re cutting hours, raising prices, and even bringing mud wrestlers. The problem: overexpansion. Too many entrepreneurs want to make big bucks by keeping all cover and drink charges, making the performers live off tips. You often see the same scam in music and comedy clubs (though comedy clubs don’t offer “table jokes”).
That Last Hurrah Thang: In 1980, I was a student reporter on Sen. Warren Magnuson’s last campaign tour. He chartered an Amtrak train (a symbol of Magnuson’s belief in the benefits of federal spending) to the Tri-Cities (ditto). In stops at Seattle, Tacoma and Wenatchee, he spoke about the influence and privilege our state had achieved with Henry Jackson and himself (they’d been our senators since before I was born). But nationally, the Demos were too busy fighting each other to stop the Reagan stampede. That fall, Demo control of the Senate would be interrupted for six years and Maggie’s career, built on getting people to work together, would end.
Positive Steps: Until further notice, Seattle’s best window displays are at Church’s Shoes on Pike. Some of the displays have less to do with product than with cultural causes (saving the Admiral Theater in W. Seattle and the Spafford murals in Oly).
Local Publication of the Month: Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot. John Callahan, everyone’s favorite paraplegic, recovering-alcoholic cartoonist, expands his Clinton St. Quarterly essays (“The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life”) into a fascinating memoir. With the CSQ on apparent hiatus (editor Jim Blashfield is now a videomaker for Michael Jackson and others), it’s good to keep seeing one of its stars.
How Randy Is It?: The Rep’s mounting a revue of Randy Newman’s songs. I’d prefer a tribute to his Hollywood-composer uncles Alfred and Lionel, but there is some potential in dramatizing his better songs like “Cleveland.” I just hope they don’t re-create the “I Love LA” video (is any Seattle actor homely enough to impersonate Tommy Lasorda?).
‘Til July, visit the Karaoke Lounge at Tatsumi Express on the Ave, ask your bank for a memorial Salvador Dali MasterCard, and ponder these words of John Lydon: “Imitation is not the sincerest form of flattery. It’s damn annoying.”
3/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
CAT STEVENS JOINS RUSHDIE MURDER CALL,
LEAVES EMPTY SEAT ON PEACE TRAIN
Welcome back to Misc., where we only wish Billy Tipton, the deceased Spokane jazz “man” who wasn’t, had recorded a duet with Wendy Carlos.
The Great ’89 Snow turned everything beautiful and made everyday life a temporary adventure. Monitoring the news coverage, KING gave hourly updates on wind-chill conditions, while KIRO interrupted the very interruptible CBS This Morning for the ritual reading of school closures. KOMO, whose news gets more Murdochian every year, ran promos saying they had the latest forecast but wouldn’t tell it until the regular news time.
Cathode Corner: MTV replaced its Closet Classics Capsule with Deja Video: clips from 1980-85. What a concept! ’80s Nostalgia!…David Lynch is shooting an ABC pilot in area logging towns. Lumberton on your TV every week! We can only hope…. The newGumby show is pleasant and surprisingly funny for a show for the primary-grade crowd. In one episode, Gumby’s “rock band” (more like a clunky jazz fusion) is chased manically by some grandma-age “wild girls.” In another, the jolly green one comes out of a box of fun costumes in an Eddie Murphy mask.
Hearts and Wallets: I saw the “Single’s Festival and Trade Fair.” The Trade Center’s labyrinth of booths was full of merchants. Some insisted that I’d find the love of my dreams if I’d spend hundreds on dating services “for quality, professional people.” I told them I was an amateur person but was trying to break into the pros. Others claimed that my life was really missing the satisfaction that’d come with their “mind control” seminars, or the security that’d come with their network marketing plans.
“It’s,” A Crime: The Times noted the poor grammar in the title “Single’s Festival;” the apostrophe indeed seems to be a lost art. There’s a big supermarket poster that reads, “Fresh Produce: Safeway Is Picky About It’s Quality.” I wish the company was pickier about its punctuation.
Local Publication of the Month: Seattle Reporter, a biweekly newsletter trying to cover the whole progressive community. In its inclusiveness, it may avoid the fate of the old Northwest Passage tabloid, which kept narrowing its definition of “politically correct” until almost nobody qualified.
(latter-day note: This remark was written at least two years before it became so damn fashionable to boast of being “politically incorrect.”)
Your Little Landmark: Local firm Archimedia makes a lovely Space Needle Paper Model Kit, available at Peter Miller Books. Unfortunately, it comes with the 100′-level restaurant; but at least with no interior, it can’t get a “new look” inside like the real Needle just got. Also, your 40′-tall Needle will never have a plastic crab on it unless you put it there.
Philm Phacts: The monthly Media Inc. (formerly Aperture Northwest ) sez Seattle cops are choosing film projects to cooperate with on the basis of script content. Stallone’s Cobra, which wound up shooting elsewhere, was one victim of this de facto censorship. (Stallone might have been trying to make it up to the Northwest, after filming First Blood in Hope, B.C. and calling it Washington). If the selective OK of police help (needed for most any major production) is true, the citymight be trying to avoid the fate of New York, where they worked to lure films only to get all those films about how awful New York is.
Big Storewide Sale: Mark Sabey’s become a major retail mogul by buying Frederick & Nelson and setting himself up as middleman in a proposed sale of Sears’ store and ex-warehouse (a beautiful building which should be saved) to the Sonics. One big thorn in F&N’s financial recovery has been its site at Aurora Village, the Mall that Time Forgot. Almost a third of the spaces there are boarded up, with few prospects for new tenants. The closest thing we have to that in town is Broadway, where landlords’ve become too greedy for even trendy restaurants to afford.
Bank Shots: Pacific First Federal is going to Toronto’s Royal Trust, as a gateway into the U.S. market. By some accounts, the Canadians don’t even care about doing business here, just as establishing a beachhead for a move into California. Expect home-loan funds to dry up as PFF becomes a cash cow.
Junk Food of the Month: Marilyn Merlot by Monticello Vineyards, with a cleavage portrait of Monroe on the label. It could be the first wine named after somebody who died from a drug addiction…. It’s bye-bye to Carnation Dairies, a locally-founded firm that got rich selling canned milk to the western frontier, expanded, moved its HQ to LA and got bought by Nestlé. To help finance the buyout, Nestlé sold the local dairy division, as announced in the papers by an appropriately-named spokesperson, Dick Curd.
A New Gear: Japanese cars are now on the cutting edge of creative design, but in models sold only at home. Nissan has a shockingly cute little delivery vehicle, the S-Cargo (almost as tall as it’s long). But it’s Mazda that’s taking a hesitant plunge in the US, with a British-inspired sports car that’ll fit two small people snugly. Also coming here, alas, is a Lamborghini 4 x 4: leather & mahogany inside, VW Thing-ish outside, $124G. Wake me if anybody ever drives it off-road.
It’s spring-training time, when Mariner fans briefly dream of glory. I’m just hoping the real M’s can be as entertaining as the fictional M’s game in The Naked Gun — or as dramatically tragic as the Vancouver mega-production of Aida coming to the Kingdome.
(latter-day note: Aida ran out of funds before it could get to Seattle.)
‘Til April, be sure to see Julie Cascioppo mid-week evenings at the Pink Door, watch or tape Sunday Night at midnite on KING, and heed the words of rapper KRS-One: “The new fad is intelligence.”
2/89 ArtsFocus Misc.
EVEN WITHOUT 3D GLASSES,
THIS COLUMN IS AS SHARP AND CLEAR AS EVER
Here at Misc., we’re still wondering how soon a Mercury Scorpio is going to crash into a Ford Taurus and a Dodge Aries because the driver didn’t read his signs.
Goodtime Charley’s Got the Blues: Royer chose to quit rather than face a re-election referendum on his move from neighborhoods’ champion to developers’ patsy. Instead of dwelling on it, let’s just remember what his sister-in-law Jennifer James might say: that we must “cut the losses” from relationships that have become unworkable, acknowledge the pain of betrayal, and then move on.
No No-Host Bar: Alcoholics Anonymous’ world convention is coming to Seattle next year, but the best news is the appropriate name of AA’s site-selection consultant: Slack, Inc.
21 Luscious Shades of Red Ink: Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman, after buying a string of bankrupt savings and loans, just added Marvel Comics as a “cash cow” to support the S&Ls. Will America’s financial security be ruined if kids don’t buy enough copies ofShe-Hulk one month? Will folks get handsome Ultima II tote bags with every $10,000 deposit?
Holds Up Longer Than You Do: The Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology and Health’s received a major federal grant to study the shelf life of condoms exposed to heat, cold, humidity, light, and air pollution. It could be another case of a package that’s more durable than the contents.
Junk Food of the Month: Seattle’s Hilton Seafoods is trying to develop the world’s first sexless clam, which presumably would be larger and/or better tasting. But would it still be an aphrodisiac?
Local Publications of the Month: For a major writing project, I’ve been researching local New Age papers. Preeminent is Seattle’s New Times, a monthly broadsheet with stories on everything from ethics for the ’90s to meditation helpers that you put on like goggles and that send pulses of light into your brain. The same publisher also does Spiritual Woman’s Times; other local journals include Olympia’s The Light (with the syndicated psychic-comic Swami Beyondananda), Bellevue’s Common Ground (items on a new locally-designed tarot deck and on “Love, Fear and Linear Thinking”), and Federal Way’s Universal Entity (the tabloid chronicle of “Zanzoona the Old Warrior” as channelled through Vancouver, WA’s MariJo Donais, who is also the reincarnated wife of Ulysses S. Grant)…. Elsewhere in the print world, the second Placebo, an occasional journal of downtown writers, has an extensive, fascinating interview with a mercenary-turned-cab-driver.
Cathode Corner: Matt Groening has made his first commercial, a Butterfinger ad with his Tracey Ullman Show characters. Too bad it wasn’t Abkar and Jeff for Doublemint…. Geraldo Rivera and Cheech Marin have gotten together to buy TV stations. I can just see their “Point-Counterpoint” segments on the nation’s drug menace.
Dead Air: KLSY now has a fax request line, so you can use the newest technology to hear the most archaic music of any non-oldies station. I was recently force-fed two hours of the station in a dentist’s chair and can define one version of hell as sitting under bright fluorescent with a stranger of the same sex in your mouth and George Michael on loud. (Even worse, I got gold put in me the same month I called gold “outski” for ’89.)
Boox & Bux: For too long, bibliophiles have overrated the written word as more honest than other media. That myth should be retired now that we have “product placements” in novels (Maserati paid to be mentioned in Power City by Beth Ann Herman). So that’s what all the brand-name-dropping in the Literary Brat Pack has been about. The book’s publisher, Bantam, is one of three US publishing giants now owned by Germany’s Bertlesmann, who also bought RCA/Arista Records (yes, Spike Jones’s classic song “In Der Fuhrer’s Face” is now owned by the Germans).
Graphic Details: The new Pogo is almost as good as the old. It’s even done what Doonesbury never really has: slam the newspaper biz (though its target was USA Today, considered the young hussy of the industry by the genteel journalism establishment)…. TheTimes has deservedly awarded Calvin and Hobbes the highest honor a comic strip can get: the top Sunday space, displacing Peanuts after more than 20 years.
Bend Over, Johnny Depp: A 25-year-old Dallas undercover cop, posing as a high school student, was spanked by an assistant principal for tardiness. (He could have alternately faced detention.)
Shifting Into “D”: The Democratic Party has finally done something smart in getting ready to pick ex-Jesse Jackson aide Ron Brown as its new national chair. Brown’s strategies for Jackson (healing rifts between races and interest groups, attracting previous nonvoters) are just what the party needs. The Demos’ve lost two presidential races with the “Lite Right” policy of shunning the party’s heritage and most faithful followers to aim slick marketing at some mythical conservative “swing voter.” That policy will not work with any future candidate, as some Demo bigwigs are figuring out at last.
Hershey’s Kisser: Barbara Hershey, for reasons explicable only by vanity and Hollywood trendiness, has had silicone implants put in her lips. This is the same person who, when she was married to one of the Carradine boys, was such a Natural Woman that she briefly changed her last name to Seagull.
`Til the March column (which may include a report from the First Annual Singles’ Festival and Trade Show), beware of films about the Black Struggle in which no black actor’s billed higher than fifth, read Dictionary of the Khazars, and ponder this appropriate-for-Valentine’s line from local writer Theodore Roethke: “I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?”
12/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
WE’LL SUPPORT UNITED KEEPING THE TOKYO ROUTEONLY IF THEY’LL CUT THE “DISCO GERSHWIN” ADS
Look: I’m not “just kidding folks.” When I say something here in Misc., I MEAN IT. (OK, the call for a crackdown on violent opera music was a bluff, but nothing else.) The louder I state that these are my sincere opinions, the more some people brush me off with a smug wink. If I were the uncaring, insincere cynic I’ve been cracked up to be, I’d be a Republican, or at least the Good Company producer who put a Gamblers Anonymous show on election day.
Anyhow, this month’s column is dedicated to Seattle’s newest grocery chain, Shop-Rite. Shopping, of course, IS a rite, especially in December. Hot Xmas gifts this year include the new plastic teen makeup kit (for plastic teens?) that looks just like a fishing-tackle box (“date bait” indeed). Those going east can get that special gift at NYC’s new Soap Opera Furniture Store, selling surplus room settings from daytime dramas. Sign up now for a bar stool from Ryan’s Hope. The 13-year-old show, which launched the career of sometime Seattle actress Kate Mulgrew, is being axed to give more time to local legend Sandy Hill’s Home show.
Unlisted: Washington mag’s list of “100 Washingtonians Who’ve Changed the World” left out Ray Charles, Judy Collins, David Lynch, Mary Livingstone, Dyan Cannon, Carol Channing, Lynda Barry, Martha Graham, John Cage, Quincy Jones, Steve Miller, Willie Nelson (once a Vancouver, Wash. DJ), the Sonics rock group, Robert Culp, Dawn Wells, Patrick Duffy, Mark Tobey, Mark Morris, Larry Coryell, Robert Cray, Chet Huntley, John Saul, etc. My biggest beef is leaving out Spokane-born Chuck Jones, perhaps the greatest maker of animated films ever. Any list to leave him out must have been edited by Elmer Fudd.
Towering Achievement?: In a rare show of minor courage, the City Council voted a temporary, slight restriction on new highrises (with exceptions for some well-connected projects). In all other recent cases save one, the city’s succumbed like a lapdog to the developers. Will it really serve the public interest at last? (Personally, I like the Wash. Mutual Tower and some of the others, and realize that office-building is inevitable in an economy gone from making stuff to pushing paper. But that’s no excuse to do it as poorly and inconsiderately as it’s too often been.)
Space Exploration: You may know that the name of the new AFLN gallery-cafe on E. Madison stands for “A Frilly Lace Nightie.” You may not know that the bldg. was the shrink’s office in House of Games (one of the few sites in the film still standing, just two years later). The nearby Bagel Deli on 15th now has keen art shows of its own.
Faulty Femmes: I submit that Robin Givens IS NOT the “most hated woman in America,” as charged by some paper. But who is? Imelda Marcos, the likeliest prospect, is just a resident alien here. Others frequently disliked, often undeservedly, include Phyllis George, Tammy Bakker, Tipper Gore, Yoko Ono, Linda Ronstadt, Phyllis Schlafley, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Burford, and Springsteen’s new girlfriend. Pretty slim pickings, but once more women achieve positions of real power, more will emerge who truly deserve our loathing.
Music Notes: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Posse on Broadway, with great shots of Dick’s and Taco Bell, made the MTV rap show, but became “Stir Mix-A-Lot” in the credit…. Yuban Coffee is sponsoring this year’s performances of The Nutcracker. If the girl had had the coffee, she wouldn’t have slept and there’d be no show.
Local Publication of the Month: Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. To Vancouver, B.C.’s Brian Fawcett, Pol Pot’s crimes are just an extreme form of what the media/corporate culture’s doing to us: fostering passive obedience by destroying history, memory, community and individuality. I don’t buy all of it, but admire his passion and technique, cross-referencing St. Paul, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Conrad, Malcom Lowry, Homer, satellite dishes, Expo 86 and Reggie Jackson…. On the Bus,Metro’s newest newsletter, gives driving but not bus directions to a bus-base open house.
Graphic Details: Fantagraphics Books, America’s premier publisher of alternative comics (including Seattleite Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff ), is moving here from LA. It’s not a big boost to the local economy (its prestige title, Love and Rockets, sells under 20,000 copies), but is a clear sign of our emergence as a graphic-arts mecca. In another positive move, the UW’ll now require arts credits by incoming frosh. Maybe that’ll stop state school districts from killing arts classes.
Disappearing Ink: As you know, we believe in reading everything. Now, that “everything” may shrink. Two vital news sources, theChristian Science Monitor and Mother Jones magazine, are reportedly switching to yuppified formats with less political and foreign news, and in MJ even “upscale” lifestyle features. MJ, which prides itself as the biggest left-leaning rag since WWI, ought to know that the Yuppie media aesthetic, selecting a rich minority as the only people worthy of attention, is inherently reactionary.
The REAL Skinhead Story: After a tragic murder in Portland, the media have branded every kid with a shaved head a racist thug. Not true. The few who are thugs specifically follow 10-year-old UK grooming fads and the “ethnic-purity” policies of the British and French “National Front” movements (and the most virulently pro-apartheid groups in South Africa). Purity, of course, is for geeks. Anybody who goes killing or bashing people to prove how superior he is obviously isn’t.
Until we next meet in the new year, with our annual In/Out list (your suggestions still solicited), help fight to save the Music Hall and the Hat n’ Boots gas station, and heed the words of VH-1 VJÂ Ben Sidran: “War is never as much fun as a good piece of music.”
8/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
‘ANY CITY THAT CARES MORE FOR
ITS ART MUSEUMS THAN ITS BALLPARK
CAN’T BE ALL BAD’ –Â JIM BOUTON
Welcome back to Misc., the column that always knew that column writing is a fine art, long before a Seattle actor proved it by forging a one-man show out of old Mike Royko columns. What’s next, you ask? A performance-art piece of collected personal ads? A choral chant based on TV listings?
News Item of the Month (NY Times “Correction,” 7/21): “Because of a mechanical error, an article on the Business Technology page yesterday about quality control appeared in some editions with a paragraph misplaced.” In a similar event, many copies of the 6/28Â Time magazine bound the same eight pages twice — including a feature story on poor industrial design.
Junk Food of the Month: Health Valley Blue Corn Flakes. Proof that not all health-food-store junk foods are heavy exercises in carob masochism, they make the dinner-spoiling afternoon cereal a more colorful tradition. No word on whether they’re the breakfast of George Carlin, who once claimed there were no blue foods.
The B.A.T. Channel: BATUS, the UK-based tobacco company that formerly owned (and nearly killed) Frederick & Nelson, is placing newspaper ads to support its hostile takeover attempt against Farmers Insurance. They don’t mention BATUS’ plan to destroy explicit anti-smoking brochures made by Farmers’ Mercer Island office, firing anyone up to the board of directors who refuses.
Yes, But Is It Crime?: By now you’ve heard the legend of Lawrence McCormick, the commercially unsuccessful artist who entered the Linda Farris Gallery on 7/7 and poured red paint on four large glass works. You may not have seen his written statement, posted at Broadway’s Espresso Roma: “I enacted my Art Action: Iranian Blood Deposited on American Art Commodities because of the cold abstract middle-class elitist art establishment mentality of American commercial art galleries and the Linda Farris Gallery as the Seattle `avant garde’ example of degenerative decoration.” Farris, by the way, did not see the act, being in Moscow at the time. I was there, and will remember the large, stern visage of McCormick, waiting outside to be arrested, while the petite gallery ladies stood in near-shellshock.
(Latter-day note: McCormick committed suicide after this column was written but before it hit the streets.)
Demo Tapes: The Democratic Convention was a fascinating attempt to “clean up” the ritual aspect of American politics. It was like a funky old store or building trying for a trendier image. The good news is that much of the old spirit survived, between the major speeches and conductor John Williams’ heavy use of Sousa (including the “Liberty Bell March,” known to younger viewers as theMonty Python theme). The United Auto Workers ran ads with Y-word dads talking trade policy while playing with their sons (and with Danish Lego toys). The GOP responded to the whole tasteful love-in by launching a campaign of attack against Jackson, Carter, Mondale, Ted Kennedy and just about every other Democrat who isn’t actually running. At the same time, the Vancouver Sun sent a reporter out for a week to cover an event as important to Canada as the convention was to us: Wayne Gretzky’s wedding.
Local Publications of the Month: Aperture Northwest is the bible of regional film, TV and stage production. Like its national counterpart, Variety (America’s greatest newspaper), it goes beyond the raw data to be as lively as the business it covers….The same cannot, sadly, be said for Exposé, which purports to cover local fashion and style but whose only apparent idea of editorial content is to plug its advertisers.
Star Trysts: Bruce Springsteen hires a young woman for his band, gives her a prominent spot, then is rumored to be leaving his wife for her. Is he trying to live out Willie Nelson’s movie Honeysuckle Rose or what?…When Lionel Richie’s girlfriend was confronted by his wife, did she just quietly ask, “Hello? Is it me you’re looking for?”
Le Nyuk, Le Nyuk: The Frisco Chronicle claims the following is from a respected French journal, Cinema et Mort: “The lack of respect in America for the high art of The Three Stooges, and the unfortunate consignment of their masterworks to the vulgar medium of television, is perplexing to the French critical community. The impressive body of film work left by Les Trois Imbeciles resounds with the Jungian notion of the male’s painful struggle to come to grips with his own unconscious, specifically with the deeply repressed feminine side of his nature…. In short, Moe must become Curly, by way of Larry, to achieve his full human potentiality.”
Cathode Corner: Residential areas are being innundated by extra-large junk mail in the form of independent Yellow Pages. The latest twist is “The Yellow Pages That Talk.” It just means that the front cover plugs a phone number where you can get KING’s program highlights. Now you don’t have to buy a paper to learn that next Saturday’s ball game will be yet another Dodgers snooze…. The same station had our ol’ pal John Keister promoting caution with home fireworks this past July 4. Back in ’79, Keister wrote aUW Daily editorial condemning “Safe and Sane” fireworks as wimpy, proclaiming, “I regret that I have only ten fingers to give for my country.”
Update: The Beef Marketing Board, already beleaguered with poor publicity by spokesperson James Garner’s health troubles, learned that its poster of a beef-eating yuppie looked like an old Hitler Youth banner. Given the ad business’s recent obsession with young, white, blond, cheekboned visages in smug, aggressive poses, it’s a wonder such a mix-up didn’t happen sooner.
Let Us Make a Pledge to meet in September, and ’til then contemplate the aluminum roof on the Son of Heaven exhibit, beat the heat, and recall the words of playwright George C. Wolfe at the Group Theatre: “America is a continent composed completely of mongrels, and the only way someone can prove that they are pure is by pointing out someone else who’s a mongrel.”
7/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
The Reds Will Never Get Our Military Secrets —
They Can’t Outbid the Private Sector
Ahh, what better reading for the Age of the Greenhouse Effect than Misc., the column that always keeps its cool?
STUFF: Now that we’re through booing the Lucking Fakers for another year, we can examine Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen’s purchase of the Portland TrailBlazers. Will fancy computer analysis come to basketball? Will it result in increased throughput?
THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE continues, with Union St.’s beautiful Post Office Grocery and the legendary Market Theater the latest victims (of development and Reaganomic monopolization, respectively). The next front is the Music Hall Theater. Allied Arts is striving to keep the Clise Agency from razing the ornate movie palace for yet another cheap “luxury” hotel. Other interests are trying schemes to keep the Paramount standing. But don’t look to Royer Roi for any help; the onetime “people’s mayor” now acts as a stooge for those who would destroy Seattle in order to save it. (Speaking of hotels, the finally-done Convention Center won’t rent space to local people unless they’ll bring at least 1,000 out-of-towners to area hotels.)
MODULATIONS: The local airwaves are now safe for cool music. KJET is apparently sticking around for a while, and has added more hours of live programming. And the FCC declined to let the Jack Straw Foundation knock KNHC off the air. Straw, whose old KRAB devolved from beatnik eclecticism to hippie senility before it made a quick buck selling its frequency, will now start a small station in Everett, where people talk almost as slowly as the old KRAB announcers did.
CATHODE CORNER: The CBS special on the plight of local Vietnam vets was a great piece of filmmaking, marred at the end by an obscene promo for the network’s newest Joy-of-Violence cop show…. The long-announced Boris & Natasha movie is now in production, with #1 hoser Dave Thomas recently cast opposite Sally Kellerman. Variety ads, made to lure investors while only Kellerman was signed, show a male model in a Boris suit with a hat over his face…. MTV’s Museum of Unnatural History was an amazing lesson in the contradictions of commercial surrealism, even more bizarre by being in the recursive maze that is Bellevue Square. The exhibits scattered along the mall (and decorated in Late Pee-wee) included two banks of 24 video screens each. One had Pontiac ads, the other a montage of MTV promo spots including a shot of singer Mojo Nixon (but, alas, not his great song “Burn Down the Malls”).
UPDATES: The end of the ’80s (discussed in a prior column) was celebrated in a mock funeral by NYC performance artists The Blue Man Group, cremating a deconstructivist print, a model of a postmodern office building, and a yuppie doll…. The ’70s revival continues, as dinosaur rock and neo-disco race up the charts while several late-’70s celebs stage publicized comebacks (Devo, Patti Smith, Jimmy Carter)…. The Monthly, a local ad trade paper, asked 10 ad-biz experts about the new Rainier Beer ads. The only guy who liked them works for the brewery.
NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (USA Today, 6/21): “Wives of economic summit leaders wave as they leave on a boat tour Monday… Absent: Denis Thatcher.” Runner-up (P-I “Correction,” 6/10): “The relish tray (at Le Petit Prince) comes with an original dip made on the premises, not a sort of Green Goddess dip as suggested by the reviewer.”
LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Hardball, best of the many local sports rags, takes the familiar “literary fan” approach to baseball, covering the three local pro teams and assorted other aspects of the game…. Pacific Northwest’s cover on films made and/or set in the Northwest is astounding. Richard Jameson included many memorable NW movies but did neglect my favorite, Ring of Fire (1961). Long unavailable, it featured Mason County deputy David Janssen abducted by three teen hoodlums led by Frank Gorshin. They wander the woods and inadvertently start a raging forest fire, but not before Janssen and seductive hoodette Joyce Taylor share a quiet embrace, followed by shots of a tall tree and rolling hills.
JUNK FOODS OF THE MONTH: Linda’s Lollies are “hand made lollipops” in many sophisticated flavors, including Samduca (a licorice taste with three real coffee beans inside). At Paper Moon in the Market…. Godfather’s now has a “Bacon Cheeseburger Pizza,” complete with pickles.
ON A ROLL: By the time this comes out the Suzuki Samurai jokes may have come and gone (dealers with high turnover, the teal-blue car it takes a real man to drive, etc.). The best and most real comment is that Univ. Village uses a Samurai with “Security” boldly painted on the side. Just don’t ask me to go after shoplifters across speed bumps in it.
LEFTOVERS: As usual, there’s just too much going on in Our Wacky World to fit the column, so we can’t talk much about Reagan vs. the Native Americans (only a movie cowboy with a mistaken sense of reality could call massacres and the reservation system “humoring”); George Bush (sez he’s less elitist ‘cuz he only went to Yale, not Harvard); the plan to put casinos in Detroit (buying their cars is a gamble enough); the censoring by US West and the state of phone sex and porn books, respectively (threatening all expressions of politically incorrect lifestyles); and the Mariners’ latest woes (why couldn’t they at least be lovable losers?).
‘TIL OUR AUGUST EDITION (our first ever), see Baghdad Cafe and the Burke Museum’s Far Side of Science, don’t see The Morton Downey Jr. Show (not even to “love to hate it”), see the Ivar’s fireworks (accept no substitutes), and register to vote. See ya.
4/88 ArtsFocus Misc.
Despite All Attempts to Preserve the War,
Peace Still Threatens to Break Out
At Misc., the column that says what it means and means what it says, we’re getting awfully bored by America’s glut of lame parody. It’s in movies (Dan Aykroyd’s Dragnet), TV (Moonlighting, public-access cable), music (Buster Poindexter), and now billboards. The car-dealer sign telling us to “Surrender to the Germans” treats WWII as a mere cliché taken from old movies (as did Aykroyd’s 1941). If we’re offended by the sign we’re dismissed as old fogeys, not the cool young dudes of the dealer’s target audience.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Washington Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts newsletter. With the oversupply of parodic works mentioned above has come a complementary supply of lawsuits. Craig C. Beles’s piece on “Parody as Fair Use; or When Can Minnie and Mickey Be Placed in a Compromising Situation?” drolly covers the cases of Disney v. Air Pirates Comics, Pillsbury v. Screw Magazine, and Dr Pepper v. Sambo’s. For your copy send a small donation to WVLA, 600 1st Ave., #203, Seattle 98104.
FINDING MR. WRIGHT: A major exhibit of architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s work is coming to the Bellevue Art Museum. Talk about going where you’re needed most. Sure, Bellevue could use the inspiration of someone who believed in spaces to enhance human life. But these days, so could Seattle. To call the Disney Co. plan fir Seattle Center “Mickey Mouse” isn’t enough. Our chief public gathering place is not a theme park and should not be controlled by theme-park people. It should not be a sterile, slick monument, but a living world for living people. It should embody the joy and hope of the World’s Fair that created it — just as the waterfront, also targeted for what a citizen-advocate calls “tacky yuppification,” should stay a working dockside, not a Friscoid tourist trap.
CLARIFICATION: You may have been misinformed about the recent flap at UW Women Studies. Activists there aren’t trying to get rid of a guy student because he’s a guy, but because they believe he’s a right-wing troublemaker, out to disrupt the class via heckling. If true, then he’s simply following the Jerry Rubin school of politics, wherein anyone who felt righteous enough was free to act like a jerk, since he was above the behavioral rules of square people. It’s the same method by which egotistical liberals become admired by (or become) egotistical conservatives.
BOOZE NOOZE: The Big Restaurant Protection Committee, a.k.a. the Washington State Liquor Control Board, is lowering the food-to-drink sales ratio that an eatery needs to keep a drink license. Think it’ll lead to saner liquor laws overall? Ha! This unelected body never works for increased competition or live entertainment except grudgingly, years too late.
THOSE PHUNNY PHOREIGNERS: The lights on Vancouver’s Lion’s Gate Bridge suddenly started flashing on and off on the night of 3/11. A resident detected that the lights were going off in Morse code, which he translated as “UBC Engineers Do It Again.”
SEZ WHO?: Will someone please tell me where these “reports of a Nicaraguan incursion” that led to the latest Reagan pro-war charade came from? How do we know the CIA didn’t just make it up? None of the interminable analyses on the affair mention this, or if they did I fell asleep before I found it.
SHAME: Masters & Johnson almost seem to want the hetero AIDS epidemic that still hasn’t happened but which they promise any time now. (Masters holds experimental-vaccine patents, and might profit if lower-risk groups thought they were more vulnerable.) If so, they join the soaps and other media trying to exploit it while ignoring anything really controversial like the existence of gay people. It’s worse in Europe, where magazines use AIDS as an excuse to put forlorn, nude straight women on their covers. All this does is heighten fear about the disease without raising sympathy or help for those who do have it.
CATHODE CORNER: Ed Beckley, the self-titled “Millionaire Maker,” is in bankruptcy. Victims of Beckley, who promised viewers they could get rich buying real estate for no money down, are working with other creditors to keep his show on the air. It’s the only way he can pay off everyone demanding refunds from his expensive courses…. Merv Griffin wants to buy Resorts International in Atlantic City. I know I’d pay $20 for a spectacular floor show starring Charo, Prof. Irwin Corey and Helen Gurley Brown.
UPDATES: The Wonder Years is just as awful as I’d feared. The ’68 junior-high clothes are accurate, though…. The plan to re-color Metro buses seems to have been just a stunt, with a phony-looking “groundswell of support” for keeping the blecchy browns.
THE BYTE BIZ: Apple Computer’s suing Redmond’s Microsoft, claiming MS Windows (a key program in the next generation of IBM software) rips off the Macintosh’s “look and feel.” Can Apple, which has always avoided fighting MS, expect to beat what the Wall St. Journal calls “the real controlling firm in computing”?… The hype over an Aldus program being inadvertently “infected” with a hidden world-peace message bears the marks of an orchestrated rabble-rousing by those who’d use “data integrity” to deny public access to major data bases.
HAPPINESS IS A BIGGER SPACE: Peanuts has suddenly switched from four small panels a day to three larger ones. It’s the first major structural change ever to Charles Schulz’s comic. Four square panels every day, six days a week, was a perfect metaphor for the chilling purgatory of characters stuck at the same presexual age for 38 years. (To see Schulz on adolescence, look for his rare ’60s paperback “Teen-Ager” Is Not A Disease. All the kitsch of Peanuts, none of the charm.)
CLOSE: ‘Til May, see the Seattle Filmhouse’s French New Wave series at MOHAI, catch the Weekly piece on local cartoonists, take lotsa pix of the Pine St. hole while you can, and remember the words of Sydney Smith: “I have no relish for the country; it is a kind of healthy grave.”
