WHAT I DID ON MY WINTER VACATION: Having already given my annual why-I-love-snow-in-Seattle speech in this space, I won’t tell you how thrilled and elated I was by the Boxing Day Blizzard. Instead, I’ll relate some other things I did for fun that day and on the other days surrounding the recent calendar change.

* Pondered that Times headline celebrating the planned Boeing/ McDonnell-Douglas merger for its promise to create a “Goliath of the Sky.” The metaphor just doesn’t sound like something all that airworthy.

* Visited the new Value Village. And a gorgeous palace of pre-owned merchandise it is, indeed. Found nine old LP records I had to get. Unfortunately, three of them contained different records than were advertised on the sleeves. So instead of naughty “party songs” from the early ’60s I instead now own three volumes of ’40s country classics–still great stuff.

* Ordered an evening of Spice Pay-Per-View. Before I did, I believed the only people who ought to suffer through the stifling formulae and monumentally awful production values of hetero hard-porn videos were straight men who needed to see other men’s genitalia in action–and that, therefore, the Spice channel (which shows those videos with all the phallic shots edited out) had no earthly (or earthy) purpose. But after a couple hours of ugly silicone implants, ritualized acrobatics, and laughable “tuff” facial expressions, I caught on to the mood of the thing.

All formula fiction offers “adventure” to its characters and predictability to its audience. Hard-porn is no different. Its strictly-followed rites of banality envelop the viewer in a fantasy universe of cheap surroundings, harsh lighting, crude emotions, unspoken-yet-universally-observed rules of behavior, no thinking, no spirituality, and no love. Sorta like old Cold War-era propaganda stories about life behind the Iron Curtain, but with fancier lingirie. It still turns me off, but I now understand how it could turn on guys who’ve never gotten over adolescent sex-guilt.

* Tried Sanpellegrino Bitter. It’s an import soft drink in an utterly cute 3-oz. bottle. Probably intended as a drink mixer, it tastes remarkably like a liquid version of Red Hots candies. Tasty and startling. (At Louie’s On the Pike, in the Market.)

* Read Downsize This! by Michael Moore. While I’m not always keen on some of his gags, Mr. TV Nation has his heart in the right (or Left) place. More importantly, Moore’s got one Great Idea, which he talked a lot about in his local promo appearances but barely mentions in the book–the idea that left-wing politics oughta be primarily concerned not with Counterculture separatism or theoretical pontification but with improving the lot of the non-upscale. A third of a century after the New Left declared working-class people to be its enemy, it’s refreshing yet sadly shocking to read Moore’s gentle corrective–that if us college-town “progressives” don’t work for civic and economic justice, it doesn’t really matter how well we can deconstruct texts.

* Was amused by the NYC media’s proclamation of “The Evita Look” (apparently just the thing for the millionaire “woman of the people” in your family). Weeks before the film opened, Bloomingdale’s put up an Evita boutique, near its already-established Rent boutique (selling what the NY Times’ Frank Rich calls “fashions inspired by the transvestites, junkies, and AIDS patients of the Broadway hit”).

Movie- and play-inspired fashion trends aren’t new (I’m personally waiting for the Annie Hall look to come back), but seldom before have adult-size, non-Halloween fashions been sold as officially-licensed movie merchandise (T-shirts and Starfleet uniforms excepted). While the Evita costumes are at least inspired by a past golden age of couture, a question lingers: If we’re supposed to now look to a military strongman’s wife as a role model, when will we see the official Imelda Marcosreg. shoe line?

* Intercepted the following note in a tavern men’s room, apparently left by a local music-biz bigwig: “I like TicketMaster when it makes my band money.”

MISC. WAS PLEASANTLY SURPRISED at the announcement that Diahann Carroll would star in the touring version of the Sunset Boulevard musical, coming soon to Vancouver. We’d previously written that “race-blind casting” traditionally means all the starring roles in big commercial theatricals go to white folks. So we’re happy to note an exception (even if it’s an exception that proves the rule).

SINGIN’ THE BREWS: If you remember when Bud Dry was hawked as “The Alternative Beer,” get ready for another contender to that dubious title. New management at Maxwell’s, that longtime rock club inside a former Hoboken, NJ coffee factory (on what that PBS Baseball miniseries claimed was the first site where baseball as we know it was played), has installed a brewpub on the premises, with its own “Alternative Brew” and “Percussion Ale.” If market conditions seem plausible (right now the business press claims there’s an impending microbrew glut), they might get sold at other outlets, perhaps even out here.

LIVING OFF THE LAND: Eat the State!: A Forum for Anti-Authoritarian Political Opinion, Research, and Humor is an often-clever li’l four-page lefty newsletter. So far it’s been consistently witty and has had a good mix of local and national topics, though it leans a bit too heavy for my taste on the side of self-righteous ranting, too lightly on organizing and solution-seeking. I also have troubles with the name. At a time when even pork-barrel senators now purport to oppose “Big Government,” that ol’ punk-anarchist concept of “The State” seems almost like nostalgia for yesterday’s problems. The old nation-states are indeed being eaten, but it’s Global Business that’s doing the digesting. (Free weekly at the usual dropoff points; online at speech.csun.edu/ben/news/ets/; or $24/year from P.O. Box 85541, Seattle 98145.) Speaking of social theorizin’…

YOU’RE SO VEIN: I also have problems with the political piece in issue #2 of the regional visual-art journal Aorta, relating the Clinton/Dole rivalry to “The Twilight of The Patriarchy.” For nearly a quarter-century now, the leftist labeling of mainstream American society as “The Patriarchy” has utterly failed to recognize the significant contributions individual women have made in service to reactionary politics and social stagnation. After all, if women are capable of doing anything, they’re certainly capable of doing things you or I might not approve of. A writer living in the state of Craswell and Dixy Lee Ray oughta know this. Still speaking of social theorizin’…

GRIN AND BARE IT: As instigator of the cable-access show Political Playhouse, Philip Craft was a master provocateur, attracting the wrath of bluenoses like Sen. Gorton for his on-camera nudity and protest-comedy skits. Toward the end of his show’s two-year run, Craft had begun to move beyond simple protesting and had started to articulate a vision of his ideal alternative society based on practical anarchism. Unfortunately, his new self-published book The Fool on the Hill doesn’t spell out that vision, beyond calling for political power to be recentered onto the county level (an idea similar to ones expressed by the militia cults). Instead, he offers an autobiographical tale about cheating on his wife, taking lotsa drugs, getting investigated by the Feds for advocating some of those drugs on his show, taking on paranoid delusions, and hiding out in the woods. It’s a long way from Craft’s introductory claim that it’s “a paranoid comedy that will forever change the way you view the world… that conspires to bring down the political, economic, and religious institutions that enslave us today.” Rather, it’s a downbeat story of personal loss and confusion, imbued with a sense of vulnerability and humility unseen in Craft’s TV work. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 17320, Seattle 98107.)

WHAT I’LL MISS ABOUT ERNST HARDWARE: The clashing aromas of freshly-cut flowers and freshly-cut lumber. The annual Show Me How Fair in the old Coliseum. The Sonics “In The Paint” promotion. The slogan, “We’ve got a warehouse too; we just don’t make you shop in it.” And, of course, The Fellow In Yellow.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, but MISC. is a bit leery about this week’s touring performances of The Wizard of Oz on Ice. When the witch melts, do they freeze over her remains before they resume skating? If they don’t, how do they finish the show?

UPDATE: Wallingford’s Fabulous Food Giant has indeed been taken over by QFC, but the only visible change so far is on the employee name tags. The signs, labels, bags, and product mix won’t change until the building’s remodeled and expanded in January. The big FOOD GIANT neon sign will then be replaced by an as-identical-as-feasible sign to read WALLINGFORD, if QFC can get the legal OK to exceed modern sign codes… Just a block away, an ex-Arco mini-mart has switched franchisors and now pumps Shell gas. Those who’ve wanted to protest Shell’s ties to the Nigerian dictatorship now have a place in Seattle to not get gas at. (The store’s independently owned, so you can still get your Hostess Sno-Balls there.)

SUDS ON THE SOUND: If the WALLINGFORD sign gets built, it’ll add to the parallels between Seattle and All My Children. We already have two businesses deliberately named after fictional businesses on the soap (Glamorama and Cortland Computer), plus institutions coincidentally sharing names with AMC characters (Chandler’s Cove restaurant, the band TAD). As longtime viewers know, when AMC dumps a character without killing them, they often get shipped to Seattle. A book by Dan Wakefield about the show’s early years had a passage noticing this and explaining how Seattle, with its nice-n’-civil rep, was the perfect place to send ex-Pine Valleyans. He didn’t add how Seattle, like Pine Valley, is sometimes referred to as a quiet little town but is filling up with morally-ambivalent entrepreneurs and weird criminals, while its old-money institutions remain in a few incestuous hands. If a soap had a family with as many political and media tie-ins as our ’80s Royer-James family, it’d be called a hokey plot device. Certainly the three new books about KING-TV reveal founder Dorothy Bullitt as a matriarch just as lively and outspoken as AMC crone Phoebe Wallingford (if less snooty).

WAVES: Broadcast demagogue Mike Siegel, fired from KVI for refusing to let trifles like the facts get in the way of his bullying, resurfaced a couple months back on Everett station KRKO, once the Top 40 station I grew up to. Back then, its slogan was “The Happiest Sound Around.” It could now be called “The Angriest Sound Around,” but instead is using the rubric “Talk Too Hot for Seattle.” I could say “they can have him,” but that would be not caring… KVI’s sister station KOMO-AM, longtime bastion of Ike-esque literate civility, now hawks its news-talk format with TV spots looking like KNDD rejects. Rave-flyer color splotches and snowboard-logo bleeding type exhort listeners to “Get Connected” and “Go Global.” It’s like seeing a golden-years relative suddenly sporting sideburns and driving a Miata; scary yet poignantly sad.

THERE GO THE BRIDES: In an economy move few years back, the Seattle Times stopped running free wedding pictures on Sundays, moving them to a once-a-month section in the lower-circulation weekday paper. That section, The Registry, will appear for the last time next month; to make the last installment, your ceremony has to be before Dec. 1. Because the section had a one- to two-month backlog, readers could amuse themselves by guessing which of the happy couples had already split up. After Dec. 2, if you want your nuptials remembered on newsprint, you’ll have to buy an ad.

SQUARE, INDEED: The demographic cleansing of Seattle continues with the Sam Israel estate’s plans to tear down the building now known as the Pioneer Square Theater (now we know why they refused to bring it up to code) for offices and the conversion of several other Pio. Square structures into “market rate” (read: only upscale boomers need apply) housing. The boomer-centric local media just adore the scheme, of course; just like they adored the Israels’ previously-announced plans to evict Fantasy (un)Ltd. for yet another blandly “unique” retail complex. It’d be funny if it weren’t so depressingly familiar.

MISC., YOUR NEARLY OMNIVOROUS pop-cult column, admittedly felt a tinge of guilty glee hearing about e. coli cases among drinkers of unpasteurized California apple juice (as if our own Washington juice wasn’t good enuf for ’em). But infairness, organic-heads don’t deserve violent illnesses any more than burger fans. It also means it’ll be a while before we can again tell our favorite “Odwalla Walla” jokes.

TUNING OUT: While I’m glad this electoral season’s done, I already miss the near-subliminal background music used in political “attack ads.” I know these relentlessly menacing synth tones come from professional stock-music libraries; some enterprising entrepreneur should license these 30-second alarms for use by ambient DJs looking to darken the evening’s mood. Speaking of which…

BRIDGEWORK TO THE 21ST CENTURY: So after all the rhetoric, mudslinging, corporate “soft-money” donations, pompous pieties, and general turn-offs, the political picture turns out just about where it was at the campaign’s start. With two exceptions:

(1) Three of Washington’s U.S. House Newtbots were sent packing (as of this writing, pending possible recounts), and a fourth almost was.

(2) And we’ll finally get something approaching a decent public transit system here in this metro area that so dearly loves to think of itself as environmentally concerned as long as it doesn’t have to get out of its single-user-occupancy import sedans. The new transit scheme doesn’t go far enough (the Everett-Tacoma commuter rail will only run during rush hours, the light-rail doesn’t cover enough of the city, and the Eastside still just gets buses). But it’s a start. It’ll get folks hooked on the transit life, on the idea of living (not just commuting) without dragging your own ton or two of sheet metal everywhere. The wannabe Manhattanites on Capitol Hill will finally get a for-real subway station, to become operational no later than the year 2003. And with the Monorail Initiative set for next November’s Seattle ballot, we can add to the light-rail part. Speaking of regionalities and car dependence…

UP AGAINST THE WAL: Like a storm system finally enveloping over the nation’s furthest reaches, Wal-Mart arrived in the Seattle metro area. It’s on Renton’s Rainier Avenue, one of those near-soulless strip-mall hells grown parasitically around the remnants of what was once a real town. Unlike the towns where Wal-Mart became the infamous Great Sprawlmaker, Renton was lost to chain stores and parking moats long ago. I got to the store its first weekend; it was expectedly swamped. The thing’s huge and imposing, even by hypermarket standards. While Kmart and Fred Meyer at least try for inviting atmospheres despite their size, Wal-Mart simply overwhelms. The fluorescent lights are somehow harsher; the shelves are taller and deeper; the ceilings are higher; the colors are colder; the signage is starker. And everywhere, posters and banners shout out what a dynamic, energetic, powerful outfit Wal-Mart is.

It’s easy to see how this formula worked in the south and midwest towns where Clinton’s late pal Sam Walton started the chain. To residents used to small-town humdrum, Wal-Mart barged in with the biggest retail-theater experience they’d seen, one with the spirit not of nostalgia or homeyness but of a company (and a nation) on the go-go-go. But in a community that already has big-time retail, the Wal-Mart formula seems just plain shrill. Even the (nearly deserted) Kmart up the highway felt like a cozy neighborhood boutique in comparison. And as for prices and selection, Wal-Mart’s endlessly-touted “buying power” might work against the indie stores in the small towns, but it can’t significantly undersell other hypermarket chains and can’t match the selection of specialty stores.

I finished my afternoon at the nearby Lazy Bee, a highly independent restaurant and Boeing workers’ hangout. With model planes hanging from the ceiling and booths made from surplus 727 seats, it’s a place no chain operator could conceive of. (Even my chalkboard-special meal was priced to come out, with tax, at $7.07!) I was reminded of zine editor Randolph Garbin’s Recipe for an American Renaissance: “Eat in diners, ride trains, shop on Main Street, put a porch on your house, live in a walkable community.”

Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Tabloid Dreams’:

Inquiring Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Williams’ Precision Angst:

Small Sacrifices

Book feature for The Stranger, 10/24/96

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KISS THE PICTURES! LICK THE PRINT! CHEW THE STAPLES!: After a seeming lull period, local zines and periodicals are again popping up. Here are a few that have slipped by lately:

* How to Tell If You’re Dead, by Michelle Beaudry and Lord Carrett: There are worse illustrated-joke books out there, but this at least qualifies for dishonorable mention. “You’re Dead If… Minnie Pearl’s price tag is on her toe.” ($6 from Laffbooks, 6201 15th Ave. NW, Seattle 98107.)

* The Movie Marquee. Somebody tries to start a self-published mainstream movie-review zine just about every year. This one’s from local freelancer Doug Thomas. It’s little better or worse than any of its ilk, desperately seeking artistic or at least financial significance the action thrillers made by the studios it wants to advertise. ($15/6 issues from 3015 NW Market St., #B115, Seattle 98107.)

* Replicant: A Journal of Seattle Area Industrial & Darkwave Musings. Small, personal, infrequent newsletter for Goth and industrial-dance music lovers. Recent issues have featured DJ Webb’s series “Name Calling,” offering handy intros about the confusing genres and sub-genres in recent dance music. (Pay-what-you-can from P.O. Box 48213, Seattle 98148.)

* ReAct: Practical Strategies for Ending Violence. Py Bateman ran the Alternatives to Fear self-defense school for umpteen years; her new monthly newsletter goes beyond the specific tactics of her classes, into larger issues of personal safety, power, and fear. In issue #3 she breaks with her profession’s traditions by including one story about a male assailee. ($25/year from P.O. Box 23316, Seattle 98102.)

* No Apologies: The Best of Real Change Poets, 1994-1996. I’ve never claimed to be a qualified judge of modern-day poetry, but this is the Real Thing with a capital RT. It’s not grad students sympathizing with (or slumming among) down-and-outers, it’s down-and-outers talking for themselves, with pride, anger, humor, wistfulness, nostalgia, and not a speck of malaise. The highlight is Dr. Wes Browning’s memoir “Art in Balance,” about (among other things) meeting Betty White at a USO show. ($6.95 from Real Change, 2129 2nd Ave., Seattle 98121.)

* Code: The Creative Culture Magazine. For some reason, this is the first issue I’ve seen yet it claims to be #5. It’s supposed to be the “Work Issue,” but at least half the 44 pages (on heavy-slick paper) seems to be about the personal life of the staff, particularly editor Lou Maxon. Squint past the sub-Ray Gun typography (hint: Adobe Courier is not a suitable magazine text face), and you read about how Maxon left the NYC rat race to end up working at a trauma center (presumably Harborview’s) while noblely struggling to get his friends’ names into print. You also get a lot of house ads, scattered around plugs for other people’s zines. ($3 plus postage from 2400 Westlake Ave. N., #21, Seattle 98109.)

* Steelhead: The Handbook of the Next Northwest. As ambitious as Code and more serious. Its 48 densely-packed pages are mostly devoted to cultural regionalism, to taking a hard look at the world directly around you and networking with like minds nearby; even though its second-longest piece is a semi-fiction story set entirely in California. I also don’t get the editors’ obsession with that dumb fashion mag George. Still, at least an attempt to ask some big questions about the Big-Big-Big Picture. ($3.95 from 4505 University Way NE, #420, Seattle 98105.)

* Slant. Issue #7 of the out-of-state zine that publishes more Seattle writers and artists than some local zines is about travel, foreign and domestic. The gargantuan newsprint rag includes words and/or pix by locals Charles Peterson (photos from Vietnam), Jan Gregor, Tom Kipp, Andy Cohen, Tim Midgett, Keith Bearden, and Leslie Talmadge Woodward, plus a visit to James Acord’s atomic art in Richland by Toronto writer Brian Freer. It’s free at Urban Outfitters (which publishes it), but if you subscribe you get a darling mailing label with the defiant slogan, “We Are Not An Alternative Publication.” ($4.50/3 issues from 1809 Walnut St., Philadelphia, PA 19103.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernstein Book Finally Appears:

Jesse Lives

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/19/96

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Van’s 105 Tavern (602 N 105th St.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISC. CAN’T DECIDE what’s more pathetic: The Weekly believing the media “grunge” stereotype really exists, or the P-I believing it used to but doesn’t anymore.

THE BIG WHITE-OUT: The news media love few things more than a huge, region-encompassing Act of God story. In the winter around here, that means either flooding (which tends to actually show up at the predicted times and places) or snow (which doesn’t). All the boomers I know hate snow (“How on earth will we get to that bed-and-breakfast we already made reservations for?”). All the squares I know fear snow (“How the hell do you expect me to commute to and from Woodinville in this goddamned weather?”). I, however, love snow. And I don’t mean but-only-in-the-mountains. Snow in Seattle is a rare and wonderful thing. It puts everyday life, and everyday reality, on hold for a day or two of diffused light, an eerie yet inviting silence, and the sharp contrast between grumbling grownups and ecstatic kids and kids-at-heart. It’s been a few years since we had a really good snow in town, so when the radio stations crank up their stern warnings of a Big White Peril today-or-maybe-tomorrow I can’t help but get excited. But invariably, like parents who keep promising that trip to the Grand Canyon but who take you to see the cousins in Topeka every summer instead, the snow-threatening announcers usually leave me with little but brief moments of joy and hopes for the next winter. So to me, for a few flurrying moments before and after the big football telecast, it really was Super Sunday.

BUBBLE TROUBLE: The Times sez “the blob,” the distinctive white Lower Queen Anne restaurant most recently known as 14 Roy, is slated for demolition by bankrupt owners. I say save it! It’s one of Seattle’s few works of individualistic PoMo architecture, as historically important as, well, as many other buildings that were also unfortunately torn down. Speaking of things that oughtn’t disappear…

DOES IT COMPUTE?: If all you know is what you read in the papers, you might believe the scare stories about Apple Computer, stories claiming the company’s into a “death spiral” on the basis of one unprofitable quarter (due largely to price wars in Japan). The Mac’s demise has, of course, been predicted almost every year since it came out. This time, the nay-sayers are citing everything from intensified price competition to over- or under-production to the hype machine over Windows 95 (Gates’s version of the old Ritz cracker recipe for “Mock Apple Pie”). Looking beyond Apple’s short-term numbers, however, shows a different story. The Mac’s selling better than ever (albeit at tighter profit margins). Its market share may be small in corporate back-office environs but it’s doing very well in homes, schools, and small businesses–the loci of most of that hot Internet action. More powerful operating software and a more easily cloneable hardware platform are coming this year, so the Mac’s presence should only increase.

Yet some want the Mac to die, and not just Gates loyalists. I think I know why. Umberto Eco once wrote that the Mac and MS-DOS worlds were like Catholics and Protestants–the former visual, sensory, and collectivistic; the latter verbal, coldly rational, and individualistic. (Windows, Eco wrote, is like Anglican spectacle atop a base of Calvinistic doctrine.) Others say the Mac’s intuitive approach and seamless hardware/software integration are more attuned to right-brain creative folks; Windows keeps users stuck in left-brain logic mode. Today’s centers of economic and political power, including the Wall St. analysts and the business press who quote them, are as left-brain-centric as any institutions in history. Many in these subcultures see Macs as artsy-fartsy playthings or as annoying symbols of Windham Hill/ NPR propriety, definitely not as accouterments for the Lean-n’-Mean mentality of Global Business. Yes, I’m a Mac loyalist. But more, I’m an advocate of creative thinking and of Stuff That Works. To millions like me, the Mac’s an extension of the mind, not just another overgrown calculator. It could be improved on, but there’s no real substitute in sight.

ONLINE EXTRA (More thots on Apple): Apple lost over $130 million in one quarter of fiscal 1993 and survived. It’s got about a billion in cash on hand, and theoretically could buy some of the companies rumored to be considering buying it. Even after losing 1,300 employees over the course of the next year, it’ll still have more employees than it had in Sept. ’94. The Mac platform’s relatively higher R&D costs should come down with the new Power PC Platform hardware setup and the new Copland operating system, which not only will make Macs cheaper to design and build but whose development costs have bloated Apple’s recent expenses and payrolls.

There are really only two software categories where the Mac lacks certain important products compared to Windows: Specialty business applications (i.e., accounting and inventory programs for specific industries), and Internet multimedia utilities (i.e., streaming video/audio, virtual-reality gaming, the Java programming language). To help solve the first discrepancy, Apple’s hired the distinguished third-party-development vet Heidi Roizen as its head of developer relations. The second discrepancy’s a bit tougher. The Net is a wild, anarchic place where all sorts of media developers are bringing out all sorts of new media and data formats; many of these developers, especially those working on Netscape helper applications and plug-ins, are rushing out Windows products and promising to get around to Mac versions one of these months. One of the reasons was Netscape’s slowness in bringing plug-in support and other features to its own Mac software. Netscape people have apologized for this on newsgroups, claiming they couldn’t find enough experienced programmers to properly staff their Mac development efforts until recently. I’ve corresponded with folks at other outfits who say similar things. Maybe Apple’s layoffs will help the overall Mac universe by sending some of the company’s best and brightest off to make not just Mac ports of all these media formats but to make newer and better Netstuff.

As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.

INSVILLE..................OUTSKI

Mac clones.................Windows 95

Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft

Gentlemen..................Guys

Pete & Pete................Friends

Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men

Bravo......................HBO

Flagship Ale...............Muenchener

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

Many-to-many...............One-to-many

Freedom....................Censorship

The City...................Melrose Place

Bizarro....................Dilbert

Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe

Curling....................Snowboarding

Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities"

Albuquerque................New Orleans

Rotterdam..................Prague

Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk

Steak houses...............Coffee houses

Puppetry...................Computer animation

Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s

Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline

Fedoras....................Baseball caps

African food...............Thai food

Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism

Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy

Citizens Utilities.........Green Day

Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks

Padded butts...............Silicone

DVD........................CD-ROM

ADSL.......................ISDN

Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes

Coal.......................Alanis Morissette

Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey

Lounge.....................Techno

Zog Logs...................Pog

H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson

Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics

Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody

Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource

Crossroads.................Bellevue Square

Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers

Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball

Poker......................Magic: The Gathering

Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs

Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets

Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex

"Return to civility"......."Return to elegance"

Mandalas...................Fractals

The power of love..........The love of power

Skepticism.................Cynicism

Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings

Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings

Black Jack.................Bubble Yum

Free Quebec................NAFTA

Percogesic.................Melatonin

Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven

Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone

ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view

Infobahn...................Wired

Phrenology.................Astrology

Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna

Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists