Far from imminentizing the “Death of Writing,” the new electronic media are replenishing our language with new words, phrases and genres. Among these is the “FAQ List” (for “Frequently Asked Questions”), a handy format to bring new users of bulletin boards and newsgroups up to speed. In our quest to be first to steal a good idea, here’s Part 1 of our Misc. FAQ. Part 2 follows in a week or two.

1. How do you pronounce Misc.?

Just like it’s spelled.

2. How do you spell your name, Humphreys or Humphries?

It is, and always has been, Humphrey–no “s.”

3. Is Misc. a parody of ____ (Frisco gossip columnist)?

Absolutely not. If anything, it’s a revival of the classic prewar three-dot column, still practiced by Army Archerd in Daily Variety and Irv Kupcinet in the Chicago Sun-Times.

4. Do you write “I Love Televison”?

No. Wm. Steven Humphrey isn’t even my relation. I’m from Olympia-via-Marysville; he’s from Alabama. My real younger brother’s studying to be a naturopath. I sometimes make him mad by eating all three of naturopathy’s forbidden foods (meat, wheat, and dairy) in front of him.

5. Does the Stranger have a beef against the Times?

Absolutely not. In fact, we’re now printed by a Times subsidiary.

6. Is there a “PC Police” at the Stranger, like the Weekly alleged? Do you all have to agree on everything you write?

Absolutely not. In fact, just last month local film scholar Steve Shaviro claimed a “Disney ideology” in which “artistic or aesthetic experiences… are supposed to be nice” was “the official American dogma.” My ol’ acquaintance Steve appears to be another victim of that academic “radical” construct that imagines U.S. society as consisting of two and only two cultures: The Mainstream (whitebread right-wingers) and The Alternative (whitebread left-wingers). Certain people, especially certain film scholars, might argue that the unique American aesthetic is really one of Camaros screaming down the open road, hot music playing in sleazy dives, and bikini babes posing for calendar pictures with power tools.

Besides, the heart of the Disney ideology isn’t in inoffensive content but in the control and planning behind that content; what the company calls “Imagineering.” Disneyland is a real-world place created from the logic of an animation producer, who used a sense of intense order to create the illusion of spontaneity–a logic perfectly suited to today’s Age of Marketing.

7. When you wrote ____, you were really just kidding right?

Absolutely not. The only time I wrote something completely facetiously was when I called for a crackdown against violence and immorality in opera music.

8. Why do people think Dave Barry’s funny?

Wish I knew. Probably it has something to do with the ingrained reflex of the ethnic joke, adapted for a baby-boomer audience. Instead of treating people of other races as subhumans, Barry gives the treatment to non-boomers, allowing his readers to still think of themselves as The Superior Generation.

9. Doesn’t it seem weird that the politicians and the news media claim everybody’s a flaming right-winger these days, but MTV and the fashion magazines are full of punk and alternative attitudes?

Absolutely not. Corporate “alternative” music, fashion, et al. is a calculated attempt to short-circuit people’s innate cravings for a culture more “real” than that associated with corporate entertainment, while still keeping these people as consumers feeding the business trough. Right-wing “empowerment” rhetoric operates exactly the same way. It persuades people they’re “rebelling” against The Establishment (bureaucrats) when it’s really getting them to suck up to the real power elite (corporations and their PACs). Disgust at politics-as-usual and at entertainment-as-usual are related and both valid. A left that worked would reach out to both frustrations.

10. But wasn’t there a headline in Fortune, “Today’s GOP to Big Business: Drop Dead”?

Yeah, but the meat of that story was that Republican leaders care more about certain businesses (western land and resource exploiters, financial speculators) than others (the Northeast industrial infrastructure). Neither side is appreciably on “our side.” The story also claims what’s really best for business is long-term economic and social stability, not the Newtzis’ scorched-earth policy. That’s a point worthy of more serious debate than I can offer here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Short History of the Seattle Comics Scene

Based on an essay for The Stranger

by Clark Humphrey and James Sturm

3/15/95

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

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

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

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

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

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

History of local cartooning

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

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

More recent roots

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

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

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

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

The coalescing of it all

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

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

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

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

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

The current scene

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UPDATE: In our In/Out List a few weeks back, we listed “tribute albums” as an Out. More evidence: Duran Duran’s recording a CD tribute to bands that “inspired” them, including a cover of Public Enemy’s “911 Is A Joke.”

THE FINE PRINT (at the bottom of a billboard on a Snohomish County Community Transit commuter bus, selling houses in my ol’ hometown of Marysville by showing a whitebread yuppie nuclear family picnicking in all-white clothes): “Models do not represent any race or family formation preference.”

DAY OF DISCOVERY: I finally realized why I have so much trouble understanding post-adolescent obsessions. It’s because I never really had a post-adolescence. I can love cute childish things, silly adolescent things, and certain mature adult things. But there’s a certain stage of development some people pass through, some people never get over, and I skipped–the stage of the “educated fool” (the dictionary definition of “sophomore”). It’s the moment of a romanticized first awakening to the complications of grownup existence. Not real understanding, but just the initial shock. My late adolescence and early adulthood were times of constant emotional and frequent financial turmoil. I didn’t move from a sheltered suburban upbringing to a swinging college town and suddenly discover how complex life was. To me, life always was complex. So I didn’t get, and still don’t get, a lot of post-adolescent (or post-adolescent-retentive) compulsions, such as (in no particular order): Terrence McKenna, Anais Nin, Naomi Wolf, Charles Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, the yuppie Hendrix cult, the Grateful Dead, Timothy Leary, neopaganism, “serious” science fiction, raves, pot, acid, semiotic analyses of Madonna, J.D. Salinger, Allen Ginsberg, Joni Mitchell, &c., &c. It may also be why I still love the ’60s Batman but am bored by the ’80s Batman.

RE-TALES: Chain stores are dropping on Broadway while indie merchants survive: first Burger King turns off its broilers after Xmas, now Crown Books has suddenly shuttered without even a clearance sale. In the District, Cellophane Square’s experiment with an all-vinyl store at its old 42nd St. location failed; now the original Cello2 is gone (ah, the memories…) and everything’s being consolidated at the new site.

Meanwhile, Seattle’s other surviving original-punk-era record shop also shutters this month. Time Travelers was to have been demolished for the new library that failed on last November’s ballot; the current owners decided to close anyway. In recent years it’s been less of a record than a comic-book store, a hard business with nonreturnable merchandise of very unpredictable popularity, with two much larger competitors downtown.

ARS GRATIA ARTIS DEPT.: ArtFBI (Artists For a Better Image) is a Maryland-based group devoted to preserving arts funding by attacking perceived ideas about the arts and artists spread by politicians, the media, and by artists themselves. The group’s Internet site (gopher.tmn.com) includes articles and other materials about the necessity for artists to reclaim their role at the center of the community.

I and other Stranger writers have written in the past that federal arts funding has too largely served to subsidize formula entertainment for the rich. The entities doing most of the real creative endeavors here and across the country still live and work on the fringes, while the biggest cries to stop the NEA’s demise come from institutional theaters and museums that serve the Haves with slick nonthreatening material. While I still believe the upscale should be able to support their own leisure pursuits, I also oppose Newt’s crusade against arts funding–because it’s really a crusade against art, against what art ought to be. The Right is trying to silence all opposition, real or potential, to its societal vision of greed and obedience. To fight this, we’ve gotta do what ArtFBI suggests, and reassert the role of art at the heart of society. Art has to communicate a meaning to people, and not just to liberal-arts grads either. Part of the legacy of modernism is the way the upper classes used newfangled “sophisticated” art forms and genres to define its own difference from the masses. This alliance between modernism and elitism gave Stalin and Hitler their excuses to wage war against expressionistic, surrealistic, nonrepresentational, or oppositional artists, while mandating life-denying kitsch art (cf. The Unbearable Lightness of Being). Newt doesn’t want to kill artists or destroy their works; he’ll settle for isolating them into the margins of discourse by smear campaigns disguised as political funding debates.

As has been our practice since 1988, this year’s list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not necessarily what’s big now. If you believe everything already big will just keep getting bigger forever, we’ve got some Northern Exposure and Barney merchandise to sell you.

1/95 Misc. Newsletter

(the last newsletter edition)

(incorporating expanded versions of three Stranger columns

and one Stranger zine review)

ALL LIFE TO THE LIVING! (FRANKLIN ROSEMONT)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

PASSAGE

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

REPORT

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

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

WORD-O-MONTH

“Altricial”

ZINES I NEVER GOT AROUND TO REVIEWING

I used to cover zines regularly in Misc.,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Suckers Moon

Book review for the Stranger, 11/13/94

Portland ad agency Wieden & Kennedy is one of your classic Northwest success stories. Its Nike spots established it as the agency that knew how to give a hip, wiseguy image to an inanimate object. It became the sort of agency ripe to be sought by a company down on its luck–especially if that company wanted to change an unhip public image, like Subaru of America.

Where the Suckers Moon (Knopf) is former New York Times business writer Randall Rothenberg’s extremely long but laff-a-minute account of the resulting misadventure. Rothenberg follows W&K’s go-getters (some of whom openly hated cars and car ads) as they spent other people’s money to create slick, oh-so-clever artistic statements about how Subaru makes back-to-basics cars for back-to-basics people. At a couple of points, Rothenberg implies (but doesn’t overtly allege) that the ads may have been intended more to increase the agency’s rep inside the ad world than to move units.

Rothenberg uses 463 pages to discuss the making of a handful of 30-second commercials and another handful of print ads. With that much available verbal roadway, he covers every conceivable angle of his topic, from the lighting and editing tricks used in modern commercials to the ideological roots of W&K’s trendy approach to image-making, from the history of Japanese automaking to the corporate-culture clashes between Subaru in Japan, Subaru of America (until recently a separate wholesale company started by a Philadelphia furniture salesman), and their branch offices and dealers. Add a recessionary, industrywide sales slump and some Oregon ad whizzes smugly telling everyone that everything they’ve heretofore done to sell cars was wrong, and you get a fascinatingly-described series of turf conflicts among people who often don’t seem to be trying to do the same thing (i.e., push the sheet metal off the lots). You also get a great glossary in the back for further reading about the wacky world of marketing.

You also get a few tidbits of regional history — how Portland’s business culture of New England Brahmin descendents differs from Seattle’s ex-Minnesotans, and how there’d been a dark side to Oregon’s pure-living ideology long before anti-gay crusader Lon Mabon (it was once a center of Klan activity, and passed a law to prevent blacks from moving to the state).

Rothenberg doesn’t, however, mention the ad that most completely encapsulated W&K’s desperation to be hip, the infamous “It’s like punk rock, only it’s a car” ad that aired a few months before the carmaker fired the agency.

Now, Subaru’s gone back to low-budget, low-profile advertising with clunky slogans like “The Beauty of All-Wheel Drive.” The cars are selling not significantly better or worse than when W&K ran its pretentious “Lack of Pretense” ads. W&K went on to make self-referential PoMo ads for Black Star beer (another campaign now discontinued) and OK Soda (ditto).