9/90 Misc. Newsletter

NORTHGATE BACK-TO-SCHOOL SLOGAN:

“DO THE BRIGHT THING”

Welcome to Misc., since 1986 your honest source about the weird, the gross, the fresh, the beautiful and the damned. One reason take pop culture seriously is that the “serious” media don’t. The NY Times did a long profile of actor Paul Benedict, mentioning his roles on Broadway and in such films as The Goodbye Girl, but completely ignoring his 11 years on The Jeffersons. The New Republic, the opinion mag that recently decided it would rather be rich than liberal, did an interminable essay about Madonna as Image, as Marketing Machine, as Sociological Phenomenon — as everything but an entertainer.

IRAQI AND HIS FRIENDS: Saddam Hussein used to be a U.S. ally. We were asked to pity his poor government in its long hard war against Khomeini’s Iran, not quite realizing that each leader was ruthless in his own way. Again, “realpolitik” (unquestioned support for strategically-convenient dictators) has backfired. There are no democracies in that region to support, only monarchies or other dictatorships which treat their women, dissidents, and intellectuals with greater or lesser severity. Even Israel, the lone multi-party state in the area (besides the powerless govt. of Lebanon), is not the example of tolerance and human rights that it still could become. Among the frozen Kuwaiti assets are the oil ministry’s 6,500 gas stations in Europe, bearing the genuinely cute name of Q8.

KOMO SAID IT: “Bush is laying down an iron curtain on Iraq.” Thirty years ago, we condemned the immorality of E. Germany trying to starve West Berlin. Now we do the same. The would-be Oil War fulfills 11 years of accumulating U.S. warlust, incompletely satiated by the conquests and skirmishes in Latin America and the Caribbean; all as the long-lead-time monthlies still displayed think pieces about the possibility of a post-Cold War, post-military nation. Was this conflict escalated so sharply, so swiftly, as a way to keep the Pentagon and its suppliers in business at current levels?… Meanwhile, a Sony-owned theater chain in NYC changed its marquees to promote the temporarily-renamed IRAQNOPHOBIA. There will, of course, be movies about all this. Unlike Vietnam movies, these films could all be made in the close-to-Hollywood Mojave desert; like Vietnam movies, they’ll likely depict conflicts between different American characters, with no Arabian people in sight.

ROSEANNA ARQUETTE IN PLAYBOY: What would her grandfather Charley Weaver have thought?

RUSTLE THEM SOYBEANS: B.C.’s own k.d. lang has based her career around appropriating the music and the images of the cowboy culture, as filtered through kitsch art over the years. Now she speaks out against the industry that all the real cowboys were in – meat — and gets flack from country radio stations afraid of offending today’s cowboys, not to mention fast-food advertisers. It leads one to wonder what country music would have been like with no burgers, no cattle drives, no branding irons, no rodeos. k.d. may be the Angel with a Lariat, but with nothing to lasso.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: MU Press’ Balance of Power comic book is mostly the same old stuff about corporate assassins and ninjas jumping around, but the futuristic Seattle setting does give us one cool panel: a sign on Broadway, “Dick’s 60th Anniversary: 1954-2014.”

THE LAST LAFF: The Improvisation, a national chain of comedy clubs, is moving into the Showbox. Now, where the leather-jacketed vegetarians used to pogo and fight, where the Police and Psychedelic Furs once played to under 800 people, now generic yups will pay a big cover charge to sip cocktails and hear well-dressed smartasses tell insults about all the rest of us.

GOODWILL GAMES LOSE $44 MILLION: Did the official theme of the “spirit of goodwill,” of international friendship and pulling together, diminish the spirit of ruthless battle TV sports viewers have been used to?

WHAT’S IN STORE: The Bon had this really strange Goodwill sculpture by the main-floor elevators. Three male figures held up a large sphere, while wearing bottom-baring loincloths over what from a side view clearly showed as hemispheric, one-part bulges. The Bon also quietly closed the 62-year-old Budget Store, a refuge not so much for moderate prices as for moderate styles, an island of calm in a sea of fashion victims. Now we’re all expected to go to chains in the far suburbs to get cheaper clothes.

ELEVATOR MUSIC IN ONE-STORY BUILDINGS: A Tillicum 7-Eleven store drives teens away by blasting easy listening music into the parking lot. This music was scientifically engineered, based on 40-year-old principles, to be as inoffensive as possible; but to today’s generation, this is the most offensive thing imaginable (with the possible exception of worldwide environmental disaster or Ed McMahon). But the Muzak company is now trying to reshape its image. It’s getting the rights to make easy-listening versions of contemporary hits by such artists as P. Abdul and even U2. Maybe if 7-Eleven could get a tape of the Muzak “Pride in the Name of Love” and play it over and over, they’d never worry about anybody under 35 showing up within half a mile of the place.

THE FINE PRINT: “At Kellogg Company, we are committed to making the highest quality toaster pastries available. We do not make generic or store-brand toaster pastries. To insure Kellogg quality inside the box, make sure there is a Kellogg’s label outside.”

WASHINGTON MAGAZINE R.I.P.: It tried to do nothing but make money, and failed at that. The next people to try a regional magazine should learn from Washington‘s mistakes and, instead of just running lavish but bland peans to scenery, pay some attention to covering people.

ADS OF THE MONTH: The McDonald’s commercial in which a white guy, shaving, sees a black female singer in his mirror (with shaving cream on her face!), exhorting him to start his day with an Egg McMuffin…A Wild Waves amusement park commercial shows a teenage boy in swim trunks sliding into a tunnel section of a water slide, intercut with shots of bikini-clad females. Honest, this really aired! . . . Frito-Lay‘s youth-bashing ads, which alternate between condescendingly depicted kids and childishly acting alleged adults only prove how smugly out-of-it the yups really are (or at least the role-model yups who may be more populous in advertising than in actual existence).

HOW INFOTAINING: KIRO is actually running those commercials disguised as talk shows, in the former Pat Sajak slot. Those “shows” belong on the chintzier cable channels, if even there (though, I must admit, most of them are funnier than Sajak ever was). . .

HOW COME?: King Broadcasting is about to be sold; bringing an end to its status as the largest women-owned company operating in Washington (with the possible exception of the Sisters of Providence). KING is a Seattle institution, one of the few network-affiliate stations in the country that has its own strong identity. The papers have talked about KING’s documentaries and editorials, about its Seattle magazine of the ’60s (still perhaps the best thing published here). They haven’t talked about its great movie The Plot Against Harry, or about KING’s once-great arts coverage, or about The Great American Game (the first public-affairs game show, where all the contestants had to be volunteers in community organizations) Or about Wunda Wunda, the TV kiddie star who was this sort of harlequin character, and her potted flower Wilting Willie. When she watered it every day and sang the Wilting Willie song, you never knew whether the flower would proudly rise up to become Stand-Up Willie (with appropriate fanfare from the organist) or stay Wilting Willie and lie there drooped over the edge of the flower pot. God, don’t let GE buy the station.

AUTO MOTIVES: Chrysler is offering cash payoffs to any of its 60,000 union employees who retire early. Or, as Joe Garagiola might say, “Quit your job — Get a check!”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Chicago’s Viskase Corp. will supply any company with hot dogs containing an advertising message printed in edible inks. So far, no takers… A Dallas-area company that already makes Miracle Smile teeth bleach, is now entering the soft drink field with Cool Cola, a drink that’s not only caffeine-free and preservative-free but vitamin-enriched.

READERBOARD AT MEAD MOTOR CO. on Roosevelt: WE PAY CASH FOR ARS. If Roosevelt Way were in England and this were the new Ms. magazine, you’d be reading this on the “No Comment” page.

BREMERTON, MOST LIVABLE CITY?: Maybe in the past, when there was a cool, compact downtown with Bremer’s Dept. Store and one of the nation’s last classic 3-story Montgomery Ward units. But not these days. Other Money ratings: Seattle 2, Tacoma 4, Eugene 6, Olympia 8. Michael Moore would love to hear that Flint, Mich. is no longer last on the list of 300 metro areas; it’s not even in bottom 10. Why does Money’s list so often favor the Northwest? Could be that a Portland consulting firm, Fast Forward, does the research and makes the judgements.

YOUR CHEATIN’ MAYOR: In the city that made adultery the stuff of gold records, Nashville, Mayor Bill Boner (no jokes please), 45, has been appearing in public with aspiring country singer Traci Peel (ditto), 34. He’s calling her his fiancée, even though he hasn’t yet divorced his third wife (whose $50,000 salary from a defense contractor had led to a House ethics committee investigation of him, before he left Congress to be mayor). A local newspaper reporter said they’d told him he’d called them “at a bad time,” with Peel adding that they’d gone at it with one another for as long as seven hours.

BUT AREN’T ALL POLITICIANS LIKE THAT?: Illone “Cicciolina” Staller, the ex-porn star in Italy’s parliament, offered to sleep w/Hussein to persuade him to make peace. Perhaps she was inspired by the New Age book, The Woman Who Slept With Men to Take War Out of Them, about ancient “sacred prostitutes” who performed spiritual rituals (of which sex was merely a part) to initiate returning soldiers back into the community.

NAKED TRUTH: If I may overgeneralize, the women at the Silver Image Gallery‘s Nudes show seemed much more comfortable with looking at women’s bodies than the men were with looking at men’s bodies. It’s odd, considering that men pay big money to look at men’s bodies that are dressed in athletic uniforms.

UNTIL OUR BRISK AND COOL October ish, demand the saving of the Boeing Supersonic Transport mockup plane (now in a Fla. church), read Willie Smith’s Oedipus Cadet (an odd little novel about troubled boyhood), and work for peace.

QUOTATION

An El Camino with major dents, parked outside Temple de Hirsch Sinai, bears white press-on lettering on the driver’s door: “Graduate of the Dale Ellis Driving School.”

REPORT

Still no ads in Misc., still no bigger size, Probably won’t be unless some generous reader’s willing to help out (selling space, distributing copies, etc.).

More of my writing can be seen in The Comics Journal (a magazine available at better comics shops; accept no substitutes) and occasionally in the Times arts section.

WORD-O-MONTH

“Celerity”

PRESS RELEASE OF THE MONTH

“Jimmy, the dominant male of the Seattle Aquarium northern fur seal colony, has died of congestive heart failure. Jimmy had been receiving medical care for the bast month from Drs. Joslin and Richardson of the Woodland Park Zoo. Jimmy was collected in the Pribilof Islands in November 1976, at the age of two years. In his 13 years at the Aquarium, Jimmy fathered two pups — Baabs, born in 1988, and Woodstock, born in 1989 — and was enjoyed by thousands of visitors. One of the Aquarium’s females is currently pregnant and, if all goes well, will deliver Jimmy’s third pup this summer. At age 16, Jimmy was indeed an ‘oldster,’ having lived a normal lifespan for males of this species.” (Thanx and a hat tip to Sunny Speidel)

7/90 Misc. Newsletter

LITHUANIA, LATVIA, NOW QUEBEC.

WHO SAYS THE DIVORCE RATE’S DOWN?

Welcome to the July edition of Misc., not the official cultural newsletter of anything, where we’re still trying to figure out why the pay-TV channels save all their worst movies for the free-preview weekends.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Subtext, a handsomely-made tabloid collecting syndicated articles about third world issues not widely seen in other media. Fresh, new info, not pre-digested “analysis” of the same information base in the regular papers and on TV.

OFFENSIVE RUSH: First, Ken Behring buys the Seahawks and becomes an instant “community leader.” Now he shows his true colors, quickly buying up much of the last big tracts of rural (or, as he mistakenly calls them, “underdeveloped”) land left in King County for massive-scale development. Block this.… Am also reminded of a horror-movie fan writer, Forrest J Ackerman, who often called himself “the Ackermonster.” Could there be somebody here in town who deserves the name more? Could there?

IN THE BUY AND BUY: A discount “supermall” is planned for Auburn (known to local ’60s TV viewers as Little Detroit of the West), with 175 stores, an entertainment complex, a day-care center, and four entrances with different “Northwest themes” (just to let people imagine there’s a real place left after all the paving and malling is done). Also planned: a kiddie miniature train ride past miniature Northwest landmarks, including an erupting Mt. St. Helens replica.

ONLY 177 SHOPPING DAYS LEFT: We used to report the date of each year’s first Xmas displays in stores. This Misc. tradition has been rendered useless by the opening of the Christmas Shop in the Market, open year-round for your own Xmas in July party. (No live trees.)

THE FINE PRINT (sign on a cigarette machine at an International House of Pancakes): “No refunds. Use at your own risk.”

SIGN AT LAST EXIT: “Effective Monday, under 17 please go elsewhere.” I’ve seen a lot of aging ’60s hippie-radical types grow increasingly intolerant of other people’s lifestyles, but I always had this image of the Last Exit coffeehouse as a haven for diversity, where the only unthinkable attitude was that of blanket discrimination. With this new bigoted policy, I apparently was wrong.

UPDATES: There are still more official Goodwill Games services than we mentioned last time. Diamond Parking, for example, is the official parking consultant; Pay Less, the official drugstore….The real-life Tina Chopp really was a Bellingham student who broke the heart of a graffiti-crazed musician. Or so report three separate sources, all of whom heard it from that urban-legend staple, a “friend of a friend.”

AD OF THE MONTH (slogan on a banner for a beer sale at Plaid Pantry): “When you need it bad, get it at Plaid”…Don’t blame John Fogerty for the Olympic Stain ad with a Creedence song (retitled “We’ll Stop the Rain”). The band lost all rights to its old songs in an investment scam run by its label, Fantasy Records. When Fogerty finally re-entered the music biz, Fantasy sued him for allegedly basing one of his new songs on one of his old ones.

O NO CANADA!: As the world’s third largest nation (in area) threatens to break up, it also disappears from our TV screens. The CBC, a model for public-service broadcasting with popular appeal, has been on local cable systems long before today’s fancy cable networks existed. But no more, at least on TCI. No more Coronation Street, the UK soap with those ingratiating Manchester accents. No more of the unique CBC perspective on the news (you mean there are things to say about countries besides how they affect U.S. business interests?). No more Canadian sports (hockey, five-pin bowling, 110-yard football, and my personal #1 all-time fave,curling). No more David Suzuki nature shows. No more Switchback, the (still superior) model for Nickelodeon’s live-audience kids’ shows. B.C. cable systems will still carry all Seattle-Tacoma channels (KCPQ was the “hometown station” for the Vancouver crews of21 Jump Street and Booker). The cable people can go ahead and take off KVOS, which went totally downhill after a Seattle basketball owner took it over.

CATHODE CORNER: KIRO is finally airing CBS’ Rude Dog and the Dweebs, the first Saturday-morning cartoon series based on locally-created characters (owned by David Sabey’s T-shirt company). It began nationally last fall, and has already been cancelled. One look and you can see why….Gloria Monty, best known as producer of General Hospital, promises to build a world-class video studio in the suburbs of Portland, if she can get a zoning waiver and other “incentives.” She vows to make all her non-GH productions there (including three as-yet unsold series pilots).

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (from the Oregonian, 6/17): “Most new jobs will pay better than average.”

ORGAN-IC DECAY: We must say goodbye this season to the Pizza and Pipes chain. The Bellevue restaurant is closing; the Greenwood location has already become a Blockbuster Video store, where children now sit quietly in the Children’s Video Lounge instead of dancing around the bubble machine. I don’t know what will become of the mighty Wurlitzer organs.

WOODSY OWL DIED FOR YOUR SINS: The Feds take their halfway-courageous environmental stance in a decade and take more heat than a forest fire. I’m amazed at how successfully timber-company management, whose automated logging and robotized mills are responsible for most industry layoffs, have gotten workers to blame “enviro-snobs” for tough times in mill towns.

GONE FISSION: With the potential collapse of the nuclear-weapons business, the electricity side of the atom biz tries to restore past momentum with a hilariously ironic PR push — that nukes somehow are the most environmentally benign energy source. It started with “Every day is Earth Day with nuclear energy” newspaper ads, followed by a hype-laden article in Forbes that claimed “It is hypocritical to claim to be in favor of clean air and water but against nuclear power.” Nuclear power uses radioactive materials (strip-mined and expensively processed) to boil water to turn turbines. The only “clean” aspect of nuclear power is that its waste products aren’t pumped out of smokestacks; they’re stored for future burial someplace where, it’s hoped, the radiation won’t leak out for the next few centuries. There are much better ways to spin some turbines around, including the wind. There are other ways to generate electricity, including solar cells (yes, work continues on those things, though research capital has been slow during the current temporary oil glut).

SPEAKING OF FORBES, its Egg magazine just did a two-page puff piece on what to see in Seattle (Ballard, Uwajimaya, the Dog House). It follows a similar piece in a Coke-sponsored ad section within Rolling Stone (publicizing the Two Bells Tavern and the OK Hotel, among other spots). Both were written by Weekly staffers. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Elizabeth Perkins on her treat at attending the Seattle Intl. Film Festival and being delighted to shower with “Seattle’s fresh, clean water” instead of the substandard, scarce LA H2O.

ANY PURPLE ONES YET?: Genetically engineered cows are now here, designed to lactate as no cow has ever lactated before. Maybe soon we’ll really get the brown cow that gives chocolate milk, or the cow that grazes on Astro-Turf and gives non-dairy creamer….Naturally fermented milk with 2 percent alcohol is planned for the Australian market. The idea is to appeal to the legendary “Australian macho men” who disdain anything widely considered to be 1) for children and 2) healthy.

HOT, WELL, YOU KNOW: CNN told of an Electric Incinerator Toilet, invented for US long-range bomber crews, now adapted for use on Japanese high-rise construction sites. Plug it in and it burns its deposits, preferably after the user has stood up from it.

DRAMATIC LICENSING: The Marriott Corp. is starting a chain of Cheers bars. Planned for 46 cities, the first is to open in November at the Minn./St. Paul Airport. “We’ll try to hire people who look like Woody and Sam Malone and the different characters,” says Marriott spokesman Richard Sneed. The company is also working on robotic replicas of Norm and Cliff to sit at the end of the bar and chat with customers. It’s the biggest TV-themed hospitality chain since the Johnny Carson-licensed Here’s Johnny’s restaurants folded. A Chicago chain has eateries with the licensed names of Oprah Winfrey and Cubs TV announcer Harry Carey. The New York City Opera, meanwhile, is tentatively planning a Star Trek opera. Can they compose music that re-creates the off-rhythm cadence of Wm. Shatner’s speech patterns?

SCHOOL DOZE: The Province of Ontario, home of Marshall McLuhan, requires media literacy as part of all high-school English curricula. Somebody should do that here. But first, they’ll have to sell the need for this to school administrators and especially teachers. If the schools are like they were when I worked for them in ’83, there are too many ex-hippie teachers out there who sneer in class at students who admit to watching TV or to liking any recent music.

KULTURE KORNER: The NY Times ran a piece on artworks stolen by Nazis, kept in E. Germany, and maybe finally getting returned to their previous owners. The paper illustrated it with a reproduction of a Baroque male nude, the sort of image King County didn’t want gallery patrons to see. I think a lot of the macho attitudes and fear/loathing of such would be reduced if we were all reminded a little more often of just how silly looking most men’s bodies really are.

OMMM, SWEET OMMM: A “TM City of Immortals” is tentatively planned for somewhere in Pierce County (as if having TV’s two most famous male chefs living there isn’t enough of a claim to fame). The Maharishi Heaven on Earth Development Corp. wants to start building in ’94, according to KSTW; Transcendental Meditation devotees would probably get first crack at home ownership. What many don’t know is that the TM university in Iowa has been host to several real-estate schemes, including the now-disgraced Ed Beckley, who sold his Millionaire Maker cassette tapes (on how to get rich in real estate for no money down) via a corps of young, clean-cut, fiercely loyal, TM-practicing salespeople.

CHARLES “UPCHUCK” GARRISH, R.I.P.: He was in one of Seattle’s very first true punk bands (the Fags); but he was no black-clad nihilist. He was inspired by the glitter of Bowie, the glamour of Roxy Music. He believed that lighthearted pop music didn’t have to be mindless, that it could celebrate pride and personal liberation. He made a pass at me, at a time when I was falsely rumored to be gay; I turned him down as politely as I could. I couldn’t help him then, and I couldn’t help him when he came back from New York to spend his last months among friends.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, read Doug Nufer’s 1990 Guide to Northwest Minor League Baseball, avoid the “Velvet Ghetto” (a phrase used inUSA Today to describe career women sidetracked into such “feminine” departments as community relations or personnel), and visit a Portland art group’s 24-Hour Church of Elvis (coin-op weddings just $1).

PASSAGE

Gore Vidal, quoted in the underground newspaper East Village Other (10/68): “Novels, except as aids to masturbation, play no part in contemporary life.”

REPORT

Changing my day job has gotten me to thinking about how to make this a more potentially solvent venture. Later this year, you might start seeing ads in the giveaway copies of Misc. (subscribers’ copies would still be ad-free). I’d love to hear your suggestions.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Plectrum”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH SPECIAL EDITION

The new Cost Plus Imports on Western Ave.

features a fascinating array of regional “gourmet” products

(junk food for people with too much money).

Some highlights:

* Chocolate relief moldings of downtown Seattle and Mt. Rainier (with a white-chocolate icecap) by the Topographic Chocolate Co. of Edmonds

* Paradigm golden orange and oatmeal-currant scone mix (Lake Oswego, Ore.)

* Pasta Mama’s flavored fettucine, in chocolate, café Irish cream, blueberry, and cinnamon-nutmeg (Richland)

* Heidi’s Original cottage cheese pancake mix (Spokane)

* Chukar dried bing cherries, with the disclaimer “An occasional pit may be found” (Prosser)

* Walla Walla brand jarred, pickled green beans and asparagus spears (a brand once known for value-priced canned veggies)

6/90 Misc. Newsletter

Look Out, Tuna Boats!

The Incredible Mr. Limpet’s Got A Gun!

Welcome back one and all to the fourth anniversary (and still ungraduated) edition of Misc., the essential news source for all local“Posties” (a term used in a silly KING report about all of us who are postmodern, posthippie, postpunk, etc.).

UPDATE: The Blue Moon Tavern lives; while the shell of the old Rainbow Tavern next door will be sacrificed to luxury condos. In the midst of all the fuss, developer Scott Soules (a bystander in the dispute) said about the western U-District, “The area is prime for redevelopment.” Tell that to the folks who lost affordable housing to massive apartments supported by steel posts over ugly street-level parking, or to anyone driving on NE 45th during Safeco rush hour.

AXL ROSE MARRIES DON EVERLY’S DAUGHTER: “How we gonna tell your pa?”

LOCAL BOOM #1: The 10th anniversary of Mt. St. Helens was a lot of fun. I know full well that the eruption killed 57 and could have killed hundreds more. Still, seeing the old blast footage on the endless TV retrospectives brought back fond memories of a spectacular, exciting event that affected most everybody here. My memories are also all tied up with general memories of 1980, a year when it began to look like things were getting hopeful in music, in fashion, in world affairs (the start of Solidarity, the fall of Somoza) — until the end of the year brought the rise of Reagan, the fall of Lennon, and all the stupidity that followed. Now it’s another “zero year,” and things are again looking cautiously hopeful in most areas of the world culture (except, for now, in U.S. partisan politics). This time, let’s hope it sticks. (Also loved a Spokane candy firm’s chocolate mountain with a powdered-sugar middle that you can “erupt” with a tiny plastic air pump.)

LOCAL BOOM #2: In 1980, Seattle was still (mistakenly) perceived by many people here and elsewhere as some backwater burg, an overgrown town instead of a city. Some loved the image, some hated it, but few disbelieved it. But in 1990 I’m preparing myself for the expected onslaught of Northwest Chic. Twin Peaks has turned a tiny cafe seen in two minutes of the first show (re-created in an LA studio for later episodes) into a tourist/reporter mecca. It’s going to get worse when the show appears in Europe (at last word, UK documentary crews were still prowling the streets of Dallas for anything reminiscent of J.R.). After that, throw in all the national hype over the local coffee, those flashy local sportswear companies like Generra and Nike, the Nordstrom labor flap that still helps publicize Nordy’s “uniqueness,” the increasing sight of local landmarks in national car commercials, the acclaim over local cartoonists, rappers and thrash-rock bands, and a certain upcoming cable-TV sports event. Responding to this and other activity, Newsweek almost opened a Seattle bureau this past winter, but then decided to save its money. Can such a sparsely-peopled region (only 10 million including B.C.) deserve or survive much more limelight? Well, that’s more people than N.Y.C. and much more than other places that get far more attention in the U.S. as a whole, places like Nicaragua and Israel, so why not let it be our turn (preferably without warfare).

CATHODE CORNER: While the eruption footage on the St. Helens TV specials still looked spectacular, some of the news tape from the weeks before the blast was washed out and bereft of many “scan lines”. Will current video footage last? When high-definition TV comes along, will current video images look so bad in comparison that they’ll be retired from common viewing? If so, that’d make filmed shows and news footage from the ’50s and ’60s eternal but leave taped stuff from the ’70s and ’80s to rot. The Beverly Hillbillies would live forever, while Married With Children becomes a trivia question. Many shows now shot on film are still edited on tape, and would also look decidedly low-definition on HDTV…. Graham Kerr is taping a new syndicated series at KING. The ex-Gallopping Gourmet still lives in Tacoma, across town from the Frugal Gourmet’s house.

AD VERBS: Those spots touting Puget Sound Bank as the last home-owned big bank also display an anti-city bias. The outside-owned banks are represented by urban scenes of LA, SF, Portland and NYC (for Key Bank, actually based in Albany), while the narration about the good home boys accompanies country and suburban scenes….The Home Club hardware warehouse stores are running commercials with The Addams Family theme song (“Yes!, I wish they said, “your house can look just like theirs!”)….Those cable commercials for Mace for women, in tasteful pocketbook-size applicator cans, exploit fear of the opposite-sex, opposite-race stranger in the parking garage (while most violent crimes against women are actually done by acquaintances).

THE FINE PRINT (small sign posted in downtown library): “Title Change: Switch Fund Advisory has become Mutual Fund Investing.“

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Tina is the typewritten/photocopied journal of the Church of Tina Chopp in Bellingham. It’s a variant on the Church of the SubGenius fun and games, built around the “Tina Chopp is God” graffiti that was everywhere in B’ham and Seattle in the early ’80s. Like real churches, it has a detailed philosophy and an us-vs.-them demarcation (in the “Tinite” worldview, to “go Safeway” is to become that most unforgivable of sinners, a suburbanite). Don’t expect any facts about who Tina Chopp is or was (various rumors peg her as a male WWU student’s unsuccessful love pursuit or as a Seattle rock groupie). If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.

Latter-Day Note: On 9/28/99, I received the following email:

the little blurb about The Church finished with the request “If you’re really out there, please write and tell us the true story.”

now i realize that this article was originally written in 1990, and someone may have directed you towards our web site since then (it has been online since 1995), but if not, you can read “the true story” for yourself at http://www.aa.net/cotc/

if you would like any further information about the church, please feel free to write.

Praise Tina Chopp!

Rev. Guido S. DeLuxe, DD, LDD, OGG, OHS, ST, MSU

High Priest – The Church of Tina Chopp

deluxe@marijuana.com — http://www.aa.net/cotc/

CUCKOO’S NEST CUISINE: Officers at the Oregon Correctional Center in Salem can now resume their experiment in disciplining inmates while reducing waste. A state appeals court ruled that Nutra Loaf, baked ground leftovers served to disobedient prisoners, was not cruel or unusual punishment.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Envir-O-Mints are little chocolate mint wafers from Seattle’s Environmental Candy Co. Each mint is stamped with the image of a different endangered species; each wrapper also holds a tiny photo-card of another threatened animal, plus an address on the back for your own Wildlife Action Kit (free) or Endangered Species T-shirt ($3 and 20 wrappers).

IN A JAM: Like most tots in the (then) farm and sawmill town of Marysville, I served my penance as a summer strawberry picker at Biringer Farms, a large operation that sold fresh fruit to traditional wholesale markets. It also had a U-Pick operation and shortcake stands at county fairs. Now my past has risen, in the form of a Biringer store and shortcake stand in the Pike Place Market. Besides breakfasts and desserts (with local fruit when in season), it sells its own new line of gourmet jams, fruit taffy, honey, tea, cocoa, dessert pasta, rum cake, and “Ecstasy” ice cream toppings. They package many of the items in gift sets; they take mail, phone, and fax orders. I know they had to do something like this or lose the farm to tract houses. Still, there’s an ol’ loss-O-innocence about it all, like a nice homely old building “restored” with gaudy paint.

PHILM PHACTS: The most belovedly odd hit of this year’s Seattle Int’l Film Festival could be The Documentator, a 3.5-hour Hungarian orgy of re-cut video (action and sleaze films, TV commercials, socialist economic speeches), interspersed with the story of three people illegally amassing western currency by selling pirated videocassettes. This decidedly peculiar attraction sold out (though several dozen left the Harvard Exit at the start of hour 3).

SONIC DOOM?: It’s quite appropriate that Barry Ackerly’s proposed basketball arena, for which city taxpayers would directly and indirectly bribe him not to move the Sonics, is on the site of a former railroad yard, near the old terminus of the Great Northern and Northern Pacific. These and other lines received massive tracts of free land by the U.S. government and decades of virtual land-transportation monopoly in their operating regions, in return for “opening” the American west to white settlement.

BORN TO HUSTLE: Convicted swindler Ivan Boesky has deducted his fines from his income tax, and even bribed fellow prisoners to do his laundry. Did he ever see the last scene ofThe Producers ?

CENSORY OVERLOAD: Dennis Miller got to perform at the White House, but all his jokes were pre-screened for questionable content (can’t have any obscenities in earshot while you’re working on strengthening our friendship with the Chinese government). Locally, the King County Arts Commission put part of an exhibit in its upstairs Smith Tower gallery behind black butcher paper, later replacing that with a partition. The hazardous image? A male nude.

O NO CANADA!: My favorite foreign country may be irreversibly headed toward dissolution, yet the U.S. media virtually ignore it. If the confederation fails, will it be considered a sign of the inherent weakness of the North American capitalist system?…In lighter news, the new Toronto Skydome has hotel rooms overlooking the stadium, where one guest couple made their own show with the curtains wide open during a Blue Jays/M’s game.

UNTIL OUR NEXT EXCITING CHAPTER, get all the plastic postage from cash machines that you can (bound to be a collector’s item), avoid the espresso bar at University Ford (inferior lattes fail to protect against thermal breakdown of viscosity), get those neato Graffiti Gear jackets that you can decorated with marking pens then wash clear, see the Russian constructivist art at the Henry Gallery, and join me in celebrating the 25th birthday of the Lava Lamp.

PASSAGE

Author-social critic Barbara Ehrenreich (Fear of Falling ) in New York mag: “I left my exercise session after I’d only done one leg. I risked asymmetry.”

HYPE

The Weekly seems to like Misc. “The best one-page read in town,” sez their Bruce Barcott. All Weekly readers are invited to subscribe to Misc. this month for $6 and get a bonus sample from my forthcoming novel. Age, height, race not important.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Optative”

HOW OFFICIAL ARE YOU?

In order to be a true Goodwill Games fan,

you must consume as many Official Products and Services as you can.

Use this handy checklist.

4/90 Misc. Newsletter

IN MEMORY OF BOB & RAY

(THE BRAND YOU’VE GRADUALLY GROWN TO TRUSTOVER THE COURSE OF THREE GENERATIONS)

Damn. I was so looking forward to a baseball lockout. But at least we get to have an April edition of Misc., the pop-culture report that can hardly wait the five years it’ll take to build the proposed bullet train to Moses Lake. The concept is to have international air travelers to Seattle stop there, at an abandoned Air Force base. If we’re lucky, we’ll have a lot more surplus military and military-industrial plant to recycle, so we’d better start thinking of such inventive re-uses for them now. Besides, they could carry the rail line further east, for romantic getaways in Spokane (or even Wallace, Idaho).

GREAT STUFF: We in Seattle may have seen, thanks to the UW, the launching of women’s basketball as the hot new sport of the early ’90s. It’s competitive but not violent (so far), wholesomely sexy, and more down to earth than the men’s game (by about a foot). It’s also a frontier sport, not yet smothered under commercial endorsements and TV time-outs (again, so far). But will interviewers ever ask coaches of men’s teams how they juggle coaching with raising a family.

THE TRUTH ABOUT NICARAGUA: So, after 10 years, some folks got tired of Ortega, his teenage military draft, his Castro-inspired corporate culture, and his rhetoric (not to mention the contras and the US economic blockade). Ortega has proven his commitment to democracy by allowing himself to lose, something you don’t see in some of those anti-Communist dictatorships the US government loves. The Sandinistas remain the single largest party in the parliament, and might one day make an informal coalition with the non-Sandinista leftist parties that campaigned as part of the diffuse UNO coalition. And we must still remember that before Ortega, there was no democracy in that poor, tiny (fewer-people than Washington state), dictator-brutalized land.

FISH OR FOUL: UW art student Horace Luke made a sculpture incorporating 75 goldfish in a plexiglass tube, surrounded by neon lights. The fish were supplied with oxygen from an air pump, fresh water every three to four hours, and regular meals; but they still began to die, on full display in the Art Building. Then somebody, perhaps one of the piece’s several critics, stole the whole contraption on 3/7, except for the air pump. Without that, Luke told the Daily, any “rescued” fish probably died within 15 minutes.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Seattle Radio Guide, an ambitious effort to provide free weekly listings of everything on every station. Publisher Bruce Buckner (“Having never worked on a magazine before…”) is apparently appealing to the few of us who cruise the dial on futile searches for something that’s not bland, old, or excessively market-segmented; but it’s no threat yet to Soundings Northwest….

The local black community could use a more professional, dignified newspaper. The Skanner (new branch of a Portland-based chain) isn’t it. It does, however, have a boxing column by Geek Love author Katherine Dunn.

TATTLE TALES: Mark Goodson and his late partner Bill Todman are famous for producing TV game shows. But, it turns out in the Malcom-memorial issue of Forbes, they made the bulk of their fortune owning a string of suburban papers in Pennsylvania (subcontracting the papers’ management to another chain). I don’t know if the reporters ever vowed to tell the truth, or whether they were stopped by the sound of a bell after asking a few questions (or if they had to stop if they got a no answer).

UNFAVORABLE IMPRESSIONS: The Nov. issue of American Printer carries the sad tale of printers stuck with worthless inventories of fad products whose times passed or never came: Michael Jackson posters, Trivial Pursuit game boards, books on Agnew, Dukakis, Gerald Ford and Oliver North. In the weirdest story, a small print shop invested in costly hardware to stamp photo-engravings of Elvis onto chocolate bars. (Thanx to Fred Woodworth of The Match, a Tucson political journal, for the tip.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Power Burst, an “advanced performance beverage” that vows to “beat Gatorade 7 ways.” All I know is you can prove your toughness by finishing an entire serving of the stuff….

A new line of oat bran English muffins is offered by a local outfit called Broadmoor Bakery. To the English, of course, Broadmoor is not known as an exclusive Seattle neighborhood but as a London psychiatric hospital.

SLOGAN OF THE MONTH: B.F. Goodrich T/A Tires, “The Athletic Shoes for Your Car.”

STAGES OF LIFE: The Coliseum Theater, last of the downtown single-screens, finally went RIP. Possible future uses for the historic building include yet another tacky upscale mall. Its death is directly due to 15 years of physical neglect by the misnamed Luxury Theaters, but can be related to the Reaganomics of the multiplex age, giving us (as noted in a recent Atlantic article) just long commercials, exercises in heavy emotional manipulation with little interest in storytelling or acting, let alone the “glamour” of the old Hollywood….

In happier news, Seattle promoters are trying to start an arts center in Concrete, Skagit County. They hope to set up shop in an old moviehouse this year or next, pending the success of a corporate fund drive.

NOSE FOR NEWS: I’m always defending USA Today from my fellow pseudo-intellectuals. One reason I like it: its recent national survey of urban smells. It printed a letter from Cedar Rapids, Iowa complaining about the local Quaker Oats plant (though “Thursdays aren’t too smelly because they make Cap’n Crunch”), from Wichita (where “the putrid smell of gas from the gas wells and crude oil from the oil wells was bad enough I wanted to brush my teeth”), and one from Milwaukee about the brewery and slaughterhouse smells (the mayor responds, “Milwaukee smells like a thriving city”).

BELLEVUE RICH KID DEAD IN C.D. CRACK SALE (3/20): Perhaps the only lesson from this tragedy is a reminder of the affluent who have abandoned the cities, their schools and industry, for a “quality” (euphemism for all-white) life in the suburbs, while serving as the customers who make the drug scourge possible. People are dying in the Rainier Valley and in Latin America so Eastside power-dressers can have their alleged fun.

SINGER FOR MOTHER LOVE BONE DEAD FROM HEROIN: Perhaps the only lesson from this tragedy is not to take ’60s revisionism too far. Back then, heroin was used by the Mafia/CIA to keep undesirable groups (first blacks, then radicals) under control. Besides, intense artificial “highs” are not the making of true cutting-edge art (especially in the age of Spielberg).

SWEET NOTHING: You know I don’t care for most commercial sentimentality, but I am wistful at Bartell Drugs’ centennial commercials showing an old drugstore soda fountain. The Northgate and old Westlake Bartells were just about the last drugstore soda fountains in town, but they were out by the late ’70s. (The last Seattle soda fountain was in an independent pharmacy on Broadway, replaced by a fancy restaurant that didn’t last five years.) I know they need room to stock all those high-tech prescription drugs and all those different shampoos containing “organic and other ingredients,” but they oughta find room in their bigger stores to bring the fountain treats back. Just don’t make it cutesy-wootsey, OK?

CATHODE CORNER: KIRO’s Aaron Brown has established himself as the nudge-nudge irony of modern TV adapted to local news. You know, the Lettermanian “We both know this is stupid but watch anyway” attitude that lets viewers think they’re too smart to be manipulated while continuing to be manipulated….

CBS has become an industrial dinosaur. Like GM and the Democrats, its attempts to revive itself fall back on the faulty practices that got it into its mess. Every “new look” show is over-researched, over-compromised and over-acted. When Moon Unit Zappa becomes a spouter of non-gag likes, you know something’s wrong.

PHILM PHACTS: The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle was cool and quite the nostalgia trip, especially for the kids in the audience who were still in grade school when the Sex Pistols happened. It was fun to look back at England before Thatcher (the next European dictator to fall?), when it still had a veneer of respectability to rebel against. But punk was more grass-roots than Malcom McLaren still will admit. None of the hundreds of other bands were mentioned in the film. For example, the women of punk were not a wife/mistress auxiliary whose own works waited for discovery by historians (as in surrealism or the beats), nor the later second wave of an established genre (as in stand-up comedy or even rap). Punk’s women were out front from the start with X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie Sioux, Deborah Harry, Deborah Iyall, Au Pairs, the Slits, and dozens of others. Their legacy is to credit for the recent dominance of women on the pop charts (six of a recent Billboard Top 10).

‘TIL THE MERRY MONTH OF MAY, don’t wear a leather jacket to anti-fur rallies, enjoy the handmade Word of the Week signboard on Corliss Ave. N. heading north from 44th to 45th (a recent display: “Piscatorial”), read The Quayle Quarterly, consider private chess lessons from our own world champ Elena Donaldson-Akhmiloskaya ($25/hr.), try to figure out Lee Iacocca’s statement that “it’s time to peel off the Teflon Kimono,” and visit the Cap. Hill antique store with the simple name “OLD!” See ya.

THE MISC. LIST

Some still think I’m “just kidding,” that beneath the facade of an Angry Young Man there’s a carefree, apathetic party boy. There isn’t. I’m really like this.

Things that make other people laugh but just make me puke

Christian TV, professional wrestling, supermarket tabloids (especially the Weekly World News, made expressly to be laughed at), spoof movies, any movie with an ex-Saturday Night Live or SCTV star (except Strange Brew).

Things that make other people puke but just make me laugh

The flag nonsense, Nintendo, Milli Vanilli, Channel One, Smurfs.

Things people expect me to adore but I don’t

Science fiction, sword-and-sorcery (especially sword-and-sorcery disguised as science fiction), speed metal.

Things people expect me to just loathe but I don’t

Idaho Spud candy bars, designer sneakers, working-class people.

OFFER

No new Misc. subscribers signed up last month, so everyone who signs on this month will get a special bonus: A special frameable essay and two random pages from my forthcoming novel.

PASSAGE

Francois Campoin in the short story “Things That Made It Possible”: “I lost control of the video portion of my life. I kept fading in and out.”

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Aborescence”

3/90 Misc. Newsletter

Russia’s Getting A Multi-Party System!

(Wish We Had One.)

Spring, they say, is just around the corner, but you don’t have to wait any longer for Misc., the info-mosaic that wonders why you can now get a Big Mac in Moscow, but you still can’t get one in Winslow. You call that American freedom of choice? And hey, you vegetarians and epicurean snobs out there, stop scoffing long enough to consider the years of preparation McDonald’s undertook in making food ingredients in the USSR with the quality control needed for modern agribusiness. Most USSR food is still “natural” (as in less-processed), scarce and often rotting. Their system never developed efficient production and distribution; ours perverted those virtues into for-their-own-sake obsessions.

Giving Workers the Rack: I was set to write this month about the imminent closure of Nordstrom’s U-District branch (which has been there in various forms and addresses since the days of raccoon coats), but more important news came in the state’s $30-million decision in favor of employees stuck working extra hours for free. It took the pro-business but out-of-town Wall St. Journal to print the workers’ side of the labor dispute (kudos to reporter Susan C. Faludi, who uncovered not just mandatory volunteer overtime but a corporate culture of bullying, treachery, bigotry, and forced “happiness”). The local media have been as one-sided as they could get away with, taking the angle of “Bad news for Nordstrom” (Times headline, 2/16), never “good news for Nordstrom employees.” I can believe the worst stories and still understand the pro-management employees leafleting outside the stores. Some sincerely believe in the total-hustle policy; others just might be into the “defender” role familiar to analysts of dysfunctional families. What the cracks behind the mandatory Nordic smile mean to Nordstrom’s “service” reputation remains to be seen (computer magazines regularly publish columns suggesting it as a customer-relations role model to computer companies). Even more importantly, many facets of the scandal relate back to the laid back/mellow reputation of the Northwest, whose consumers madethe Big N. what it is today. Nordstrom is one of a handful of institutions that mean the Northwest to the rest of the world (along with the Nordstrom-founded Seahawks, Boeing, The Far Side, Heart, and Ramtha). What does it say when so many of us prefer to buy from a place that hires people on the basis of their conformity to the corporate “look” (a nebulous criterion that could be used against those with too-kinky hair or too-dark skin), and apparently treats them like well-dressed little Oliver and Olivia Twists?

Snow Wonder: You can tell real Seattlites by their attitude towards a big urban snowstorm. To them, it’s a source of childlike wonder and merriment. To suburbanites and Easterners, it’s a nuisance. To Southern Californians, it’s a mix of terror and shock that the weather they love to talk about to prove their “adopted native” stance can do something this big. I loved it, even if it didn’t last longer than four days. I almost got to see a Samurai turn over, live and in person!

The Fine Print (sticker affixed to the back cover of Ernie’s Postcard Book, funny-cat photos by Tony Mendoza, published by Capra Press): “The captions on the back of each postcard are unauthorized and not the work of the author.”

Local Publication of the Month: Adbusters Quarterly, a newsprint magazine on how we are all prisoners of the North American ad culture and even what we can do about it. A sort of radicalized McLuhanism, from the apparent capital of anarchist thought in the western hemisphere, Vancouver.

Modulations: The KZOK-AM frequency, long known as KJET and more recently as KQUL (which played moldie-oldies automation tapes inherited from the old KUUU), is playing new (or at least recently-recorded) music again, mass-market metal under the slogan Z-Rock. If the quintessential KJET song was Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime,” the quintessential Z-Rock song is Guns n’ Roses’ “Paradise City.” It’s nice that the new format also has room for local acts, though a lot of it sounds like KZOK sounded in 1979.

Cathode Corner: I’m trying to decide whether The Simpsons is the best TV show of the past 10 years or the best ever. From Bart’s different weekly chalkboard affirmations (“I will not instigate revolution”) to the gags you need a pause button to get (the nuclear-plant entrance sign, “Unauthorized Visitors Will Be Shot”), every second is packed with sharp humor and social commentary. And to think that it all comes from an ex-Olympian, Matt Groening (whose Life in Hell list of Forbidden Words for the ’90s alone qualifies him as world-class). The show’s setting, Springfield, is, of course, the name of the most famous “hick town” in Groening’s native Oregon; the nuclear plant where Homer Simpson works looks a lot like the one north of Portland on the Columbia. Am pleased to report that Bart T-shirts are being visibly displayed as far away as Federal Way, with Bart-head-shaped bubble gum due in June.

Everything’s Not Coming Up Roses: Oregon has a lot to cheer about this winter, between The Simpsons, the TrailBlazers and the OSU men’s basketball team. But there’s no pride in the governor’s race, in which incumbent Neil Goldschmit was forced out when rumors of a marital split came true (apparently we can have a divorced man in the White House but not in Salem). The rumor about the rumor claims it was started by GOP candidate Leon Frohmeyer, state attorney general and self-proclaimed environmentalist (really, say more radical eco-activists, an architect of compromise deals with logging and mining interests).

Power Politics: Downtown Blackout II lasted four hours, while its ’88 predecessor lasted four days. Could City Light have worked harder knowing that the thousands of Lotto players in three counties were losing their chances at becoming $6 million men and women (Lotto’s dedicated computer-phone lines are routed through downtown)? Ehh, probably not….

Tourist Trappings: Some multinational has started a mini-cruise ship, the Spirit of Puget Sound. Its ads promise “three hours of live entertainment and fabulous food” along with the usual seaside scenery. Don’t they know what the phrase “a three-hour tour” has come to mean?

Junk Food of the Month: Frozen dinners for kids. Banquet and others have devised microwave versions of all the classic kiddie meals (hot dogs, chicken, chili, etc.) with stereotyped kiddie graphics on the boxes. They’re presumably intended for the growing numbers of offspring with all-working parents, who must fend for themselves after school. Wish I had those things back when I was in that situation.

End of the ’80s Item #4: Perrier water can be bad for you!

Street of Silence: It’s sad to witness the death-by-installments of Broadway, the Aurora Village of urban business districts. Speculators would rather see buildings go empty than lower unrealistic rents. Hence, over a dozen major storefronts are now empty, from the venerable Broadway Theater to the Benneton sweater stand that replaced the cool Different Drummer bookstore. Even Sir Mix-A-Lot doesn’t cruise there much anymore, now that he’s got a house in Kent. Only Keeg’s remains of thesix furniture stores that had made Broadway Seattle’s furniture row back when E. Pike was its auto row. (But the long-pending Dairy Queen finally opened, that venerable chain’s first in-town Seattle store since the mid-’70s.)

(latter-day note: Broadway again thrives, with indie businesses replacing downsizing chains (including an ethnic restaurant where Dairy Queen was). Aurora Village got demolished. Keeg’s closed, leaving no more furniture stores on Capitol Hill except used office furniture outlets.)

Street of Noise: The Pike Place Market authorities are all a-flutter over what they claim are semi-secret plans by the NYC speculators who may or may not own the buildings to turn the Market into a high-priced, chain-stored parody of itself. What they’re not saying is that this would only accelerate a process the Market leaders already instigated, starting with sweatshirt stores and tourist-oriented parking projects. The promotion of the Market as a sight rather than a marketplace has already affected the remaining farmers, who see Saturday after Saturday of crowded walkways full of sightseers but bereft of actual food purchasers.

Ink Inc.: Just as we declared Spy magazine “outski” for 1990, imitations began to sprout. If the real Spy’s quaint we’re-from-New-York-and-you’re-not attitude doesn’t quite get your soul afire, you can enjoy self-conscious prose, retro art and graph-chart stories inWigwag (for the Garrison Keillor audience), Forbes Publishing’s Egg (for the most emptyheaded lifestyle wannabes), and Time Warner’s Entertainment Weekly, designed by Mark Michaelson (who worked on the infamous summer ’79 UW Daily with Lynda Barry, John Keister, Pulitzer-nominated cartoonist Mike Lukovich, and an underachieving writer who does some little newsletter about pop culture). And is it a mere coincidence that the mass media have become overtaken with chronicling the daily life of Spy’s most frequent satirical target, Donald Trump?

Hearts and Thorns: If Christmas is when everybody’s expected to be in a nuclear family, then Valentine’s Day is when every adult is expected to be in a couple. This is a reasonable if superficial conclusion from the newspapers and the self-help books. There are, at last, support groups for people who need to learn about getting out of bad relationships, but still none about getting into good ones. To admit one’s wish to share one’s life with another goes against the unisex rugged individualism of early-’90s America. To call a place a “singles’ bar” these days is to be insulting; to still be out looking is to be shut out of a lot of social activities and, despite insurance-institute reports that hetero AIDS may never take off in this country, even to be denounced as a menace to society. At least you can get candy really cheap during the following week.

My Nightmare: I dreamed of an old man with white hair whining, “Ever wonder why you can’t get your hooded robes white again after a night of cross burning? Nothing seems to get all the smoke and ash out, not even the old-fashioned real bleach with the sediment at the bottom of the jug.”… I also have dreams in which Denny Hill was never torn down, and had by now become Seattle’s most fashionable residential neighborhood.

‘Til next time, write your Senators to stop the ban against Silly String (we have only one party to spray for our country!), see Roger & Me, don’t buy from the itinerant street gang of perfume salespeople, beware of any self-proclaimed “environmental President” who came from the top of the oil industry, and heed these words of Tim O’Brien: “A real war story is never moral. If a war story seems moral, do not believe it.”

REPORT

Factsheet Five, the Publisher’s Weekly of Xerox and desktopped literature, likes MISC. “Witty and interesting, even for those of us who live clear across the continent,” sez editor Mike Gundelroy. If you like it half as much, you might consider subscribing to MISC. (with one of Fait Divers’* funny mini-posters as a free gift).

(*Say “Fay Dee Vare”)

BEACON

Philosopher Elaine Pagels, interviewed in Bill Moyers’ A World of Ideas: “Guilt involves a sense of importance in the drama. To say that one is not guilty is also to acknowledge that one is in fact quite powerless.”

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Ataraxia”

2/90 Misc. Newsletter

LATIN DEBATE: IS THIS YEAR “MCMXC” OR “MCMLXL”?

Return with us now to Misc., the monthly information source that hopes one day to earn the phrase a Wall St. Journal headline (1/16) gave to Boeing’s Pentagon spy, “Loyal to Seattle to the End.”

More Than Meets the Eye?: We love to study the mysteries of the world, the unexplained phenomena that some discount as mere coincidence. One such mystery occurred with Ranger Charlie, the jovial host of KSTW’s morning cartoons for the past year. Sometime in December, he disappeared from the screen, leaving his puppet raccoon friend Roscoe in charge. Finally, in January, Roscoe again had Ranger Charlie to banter with — only the beloved ranger had become shorter, younger, and female. Now, that’s something you don’t see in cartoons, not even on The Transformers.

The Fine Print (from a P-I ad insert): “Safeway’s 1/4-inch trim is trimmed to 1/4-inch external fat excluding natural depressions in the contour of the underlying meat.”

The Not-So-Fine Print: A Crown Books in-store poster touts a discount dictionary as the “best in it’s class.” Never buy a dictionary from people who can’t spell. The book in question is a reprint of the ’83 version (since supplanted) of theRandom House Dictionary, inherited via a series of Random House subsidiaries by “Portland House, New York,” successor to the Oregon computer-book house dilithium press.

Local Publication of the Month: The Way of the Lover, a self-help book of sorts by West Vancouver, B.C. spiritualist Robert Agustus Masters. You might not immediately buy into the mythological or meditative content, but you’ve gotta love such chapter titles as “Releasing Sex (and Everything Else) from the Obligation to Make Us Feel Better.”… The Weekly-ization of the local press continues, as local media hype Hawaii tourism this winter as never before. The Times andWashington magazine even ran “editorial” sections trying to find local-angle stories about a place thousands of miles away…. Caverns, a “collaborative novel” by Ken Kesey’s Univ. of Oregon writing class, is a plain piece of commercial storytelling, recommended only for those interested in how it was made (like me) and Kesey completists (unlike me).

Cathode Corner: KING’s first ads after the flood-day (1/9) 11 pm news were two of those awful Infiniti spots wherein you don’t see the car, just a lot of water; followed by a spot with the opening line “drowning in a sea of high bills?”…. Ted Turner, who expects to lose millions on the Seattle Goodwill Games, tried to make a little of it back by colorizing Jailhouse Rock, a film made in ’57 (well into the Eastmancolor era) with a major star, at a time when the only major black and white films were done deliberately that way…. The Mary Tyler Moore Show was almost set in Seattle, instead of Minneapolis. According to a new book about the show, its producers felt that a show filmed before a live audience would need to be set in a town where people spent lots of their time in small indoor rooms. (As you recall, MTM went on in ’70, a year before All in the Family and after several years of sitcoms with outdoor scenes and canned laughter.) As the show coalesced, they decided Minnesota was more indoorsy than Seattle. Instead of Hüsker Du remaking the MTM theme (by old Buddy Holly sideman Sonny Curtis), it could’ve been Capping Day or even Pure Joy.

A Classic Tragedy: Cable’s American Movie Classics channel seldom lives up to its name (most of its flicks are dated Don Ameche vehicles); but on 1/14 it ran one of the weirdest pieces of video ever shot: the Frances Farmer episode of This Is Your Life. The 1958 live telecast, made at the start of Farmer’s return to public life after her lobotomy, shows the Seattle-born actress staring into space while greasy-haired host Ralph Edwards (who also created Truth or Consequences) rattled off a summary of her sad life story. During her turns to speak, she looked offstage (possibly to a prompter). In an elegant but slurred voice, she slowly explained that “I did not believe and still do not believe that I was truly ill.” At the end, she was rewarded for her bravery with a new Edsel.

Junk Food of the Month: Hostess Lite! Thicker snack cakes, slightly less sweet, for “grown-ups.” Most of the reduction in calories is due to a reduction in size from the regular Hostess product…. Burger King announced new oat bran buns for its burgers, just before the gov’t. announced that the oat bran craze had been based on exaggerated claims…. Chateau Ste. Michelle has brought out a special bottling of ’86 Chenin Blanc to honor the UW’s 125th Anniversary. It would have been a more appropriate tribute if it had been a wine more UW people drink: cheap Chablis in a box. But then again, this grad can’t imagine what a UW frat was doing with a sheep during induction week, except perhaps to show it off as a role model.

Praying for a Space: Chicago’s Catholics are faced with declining attendance and a priest shortage, but one downtown parish is investing in a new church building, to be financed by a 20-story parking garage to be built above the sanctuary. They’re just following the lead of my childhood denomination: Chicago Methodists already have a downtown church-office tower and a neighborhood church with a Fotomat booth in its front yard.

The Severed Arm of the Law: A North Carolina firm’s selling a “lawyer doll,” the heads and limbs of which are attached with Velcro for easy mangling, apparently to place curses on lawyers for the other side of your case. Or, you could leave it headless to resemble your own attorney. Such quasi-voodoo rituals didn’t help Noriega, but who says they won’t work for you?

Reach Out and Severely Inconvenience Someone: The AT&T system crash, in which about half of the long-distance network simply refused to put calls through, shows that even the ex-Ma Bell is no longer a paragon of American technological supremacy. The big glitch was blamed on faulty software; just the admission they’d like to make while AT&T’s computer unit tries to wrestle control of its UNIX computer system software back from various licensees.

What’s With Utne These Days?: Utne Reader, the bimonthly digest of the alternative press, now has its very own Publishers’ Clearing House stamp, right between Stamps and Time. When you win your $10 million in the sweepstakes, you can read how to put the dough into socially responsible investments.

Those Phunny Phoreigners: This sign in a Northwest Trek-style wildlife park in Nara, Japan, is noted in the book Gems of Japanized English by Miranda Kendrick: “CAUTION: Everybody: Take care of Hind! It is the season Fawn is born about this time. It may be case if you approach him, his mother deer being full of maternal love gives you a kick by her forefeet.”

We’re Only In It for the Freedom: The first U.S. private citizen to meet with new Czech president Vaclav Havel wasn’t an industrialist or banker but Frank Zappa. Havel, it turns out, is a longtime Zappa fan; during his years as a banned playwright, he let banned musicians, such as the Zappa-influenced Plastic People of the Universe, record tapes in his country house. Zappa may use his friendship with this anti-authoritarian hero to bolster his fight against rock censorship. Zappa would probably be upset by managers of the new Yakima domed arena, who wouldn’t let the B-52s bring the Greenpeace info booth the band has had outside every tour date. The arena bosses claimed it would “set a bad precedent.”

Tomorrow Ain’t What It Usta Be: The Futurist magazine has published some wild ‘n’ wacky predictions for the ’90s. Among them: Flight from the Greenhouse Effect may make Canada more populous than the U.S. Cash money will become illegal for all but very small transactions. Computers with automatic language translation and voice synthesis will enable people to speak in one language that listeners will hear translated into another language. Computer chips will be in everything from houses to clothing. Household robots may be as common as refrigerators. Almost one-fourth of the world’s population will be Moslem. Self-propelled, computerized lawn mowers will be able to “see” where the grass needs to be cut and to avoid trees. Remember, these may be the same seers who said we’d now have home helicopters but not home computers.

‘Til March, you might as well abandon the Sonics this year and root for the Seattle-owned Portland TrailBlazers, thank the nondenominational dieties that there will be no Robert Fulghum sitcom (which would have starred John Denver), and review these words by author/educator John Gardner: “More people fail at becoming successful businessmen than fail at becoming artists.”

PASSAGE

Julio Cortazar in the “Love 77” chapter of A Certain Lucas (1979):

“And after doing everything they do, they get up, they bathe, they powder themselves, they perfume themselves, they comb their hair, they get dressed, and so, progressively, they go about going back to being what they aren’t.”

OFFER

Tell your friends about Misc., the one piece of monthly first-class mail they’ll be glad to get. New subscribers will receive the humorous essay “God as I Understand Him” and first word on future Fait Divers products (the computer novel The Perfect Couple, special mini-posters).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Descry”

Art of Music Video

Review for Wire, 1/9/90

I will hear no grumblings about whether the 911 Contemporary Art Center was proper in running The Art of Music Video, five Saturday nights of video clips screened in 911’s new, beautiful but as-yet unheated room. Yes, you hippie Luddites and punk purists out there, the music video is an art form. And, yes, most of it isn’t worth the magnetic media from which it can be erased. But the existence of Patience does not diminish the power of Accidents Will Happen, just as Harlequin Romances do not nullify the work of Daphne Du Maurier.

It’s an older art form than most people realize. Even in the silent era, animators Max and Dave Fleischer made sing-along cartoons, accompanied in theaters by an organist. The first experimental sound films were musical shorts. The images in Busby Berkeley’s 1930s musical numbers often held no relation to the narrative of the films surrounding them. Through the ’50s, top singers and bands made shorts for theaters and “movie jukeboxes”. By the ’60s, TV channels in Europe ran clips by the Beatles, the Stones and others. In the early ’70s, the Residents and Frank Zappa were setting their idiosyncratic identities down on film. Devo made videos before they made a record.

Since The Art of Music Video was a series of clips that themselves were sequences of momentary images, it may be best to review it with some random highlights:

* Bruce Conner has pioneered the collage film almost since the first mushroom-cloud stock footage became available. He’s worked with Devo and David Byrne, but back in ’61, he put together Cosmic Ray, using Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say” as the rhythm for intercut shots of burlesque dancers and explosions. Typical music-video cliches, done first and more intense.

* The Residents, in a medium known for self-aggrandizement above all else, have been making videos since 1972 without showing their faces. They may even work better on video than on record, since images and narrative give a greater immersion into their refracted universe.

* Megadeth’s Peace Sells But Who’s Buying? proves that art and art-pop bands aren’t the only ones who can do good video. Director Robert Longo succeeds with these guitar antiheroes by cutting image after image into a visual assault as aggressive as the band’s aural one. (Longo was also represented with Tonight Tonight Tonight, a one-minute dialogue sketch done entirely in song titles. That was shown in a selection of MTV Art Breaks, little fillers commissioned from avant filmmakers, a concept whose logical extreme lies in G. Brotmeyer’s colorized version of Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou.

* Jim Blashfield of Portland may be the first great Northwest filmmaker. Blashfield (co-founder of Clinton St. magazine) uses an unmistakable “cut-out” animation technique with still photos. Whether the artist in question is Paul Simon or Byrne (or even Tears for Fears or Michael Jackson), they’re but tourists, traveling in the form of hand-painted matte shots through Blashfield’s world.

* Two contractual-obligation videos, made with as little participation as possible by bands still scorning video (at the time), proved to be among the best. Noted UK filmmaker Derek Jarman supplied the Smiths with appropriately moody, slowly-moving visual wallpaper. Bill Pope and Randy Skinner gave those back-to-basics Replacements about the ultimate in back-to-basics video: just a throbbing bass speaker on a stereo system playing the song on a vinyl record. (It’s one of a series of Replacements clips with slight differences; in one, a Young Fresh Fellows LP can briefly be seen.)

* La La La Human Steps’ modern-dance film only vaguely qualifies as a music video, but it was a great clip and may be the final filmed record of the great Showbox (whose fate is open again, the Empty Space Theater having decided not to use it after finding asbestos in all the walls).

In conclusion, a good video DOES NOT turn your mind to mush, obliterate the imagination or overpower the music. It adds another dimension to the ideas being communicated. Of course, acts with no ideas in their music tend to have none in their videos either; as video became more popular, more formulatic people made them. The trick now is to reclaim the creativity behind the best of both sight and sound media, to insist that music and music video can and should be wonderful.

1/90 Misc. Newsletter

Put Your Official Berlin Wall Souvenir on the Bookshelf,

Next To Your Jar of Mt. St. Helens Ash

Contributions and suggestions are welcome but cannot be returned. All statements of fact in this report are, to the best of our knowledge, true; we will gladly retract anything proven false. All statements of opinion are the author’s sincere beliefs, NOT SPOOFS.

Welcome to the last 10 or 11 years of the millennium and to Misc., your monthly guide to applied sanity in a world where MTV’s decade-in-review show has more journalistic substance than ABC’s and NBC’s put together.

No Bucharest for the Wicked: I was going to open this first Misc. of the ’90s with some clever remark on the order of “Gosh, doesn’t it seem like a new era already?”. Leave it to the Reds to spoil a good sarcasm by actually starting a new era. Not that everyone here cared about all of it; the Times put the outbreak of revolution in Romania on the bottom of its 12/22 front page, beneath the story of one local traffic death. Some emigres interviewed in the U.S. credited Nadia Comaneci with helping inspire the revolt when she risked her life for love (even if that love already had a wife). The revolt might also cheer Romanian refugee Zamfir, King of the Pan Flute, who, according to a Wall St. Journal story published before the upheaval, has lived in a safe house somewhere in France, fearing an attack by Ceausescu’s spies. The slain tyrant was apparently called by many Romanians “Draculescu;” appropriately, it was in Transylvania that the fight to topple him began. Transylvania had been part of Hungary when a socialist revolt was crushed after WWI; one Hungarian leftist was a 39-year-old actor who fled to the U.S., changing his name from Blasko to Lugosi.

The Canal, The Banal: The Panama invasion was a cures worse than the disease. So much for peace on Earth at Xmas. Bush needed an argument for not cutting the Pentagon budget and for not turning over the canal on Jan. 1; thus, the escalation with Noriega to the point of getting him to declare war. Yes, hewas a creep, but was kept in power by the U.S. as a friendly creep. This mess (including perhaps 1,000 Panamanian civilian deaths) is the result of the cynics in our government installing criminals and calling them freedom fighters. Watch for the Nicaragua invasion by March, preceded by full restoration of ties with our friendly creep, Deng.

Plagiarism on Parade?: In this Age of Information, idea-theft suits are the rage. If only the ’80s could have produced Eddie Murphy, only the late ’80s could see a court seriously consider that Murphy would find appropriate comedic scenarios from Art Buchwald. A more plausible but unsuccessful suit was made against Prince by his sister over a song lyric (though the concept of Prince having a sister is mind-reeling enough).

Roll Over, Tugboat Annie: The transformation of Lake Union from working waterfront to preppy playground continues with a Marriott Residence Inn and the pending demolition of the St. Vincent de Paul store for still more restaurants. Most interesting is Jillian’s, a franchised “upscale billiards club” being built in the old Kenney Toyota building on Westlake. The developers’ plans include the original bar from NY’s Algonquin Hotel, bought from the hotel’s new Japanese owners. Imagine: Our own little piece of literary history, the watering stand of Dorothy Parker, James Thurber, and many other cool people.

The scent of gentrification (not unlike a knock-off perfume sold through multi-level marketing) is detectable in a plan in the city council to restrict adult entertainment to the industrial zone. Even if you don’t mind the prospect of dozens of young women having to commute at night through one of the most desolate, least policed parts of town, you have to recognize that this would make a zoning precedent for the replacement of industry by condo projects (which would also drive out the artists’ studios). Get ready for a boulevard of “luxury loft homes,” some built into the shells of the old warehouse buildings, from the Dome to Spokane Street.

Modulations: An Everett-based successor to KRAB, the late noncommercial radio station for aging Deadheads, may finally emerge this year. KRAB founder Lorenzo Milam has resurfaced as an editor of the Calif.-based Fessenden Review, a “quarterly — we come out two or three times a year” book magazine. Its last cover offers a masked Mexican wrestler and a long list of famous authors, none of whom are published or reviewed inside…. KEZX-AM (the old Country KAYO frequency) has turned over most of its airtime to the Business Radio Network, a satellite feed offering stock-market quotations and advice all day. It’s an advertiser’s dream come true: A station that only reaches people rich enough to have investments. No music, entertainment or general news that could threaten to attract us unworthy middle-class people (or worse).

Junk Food of the Month: The Hurricane Hugo Special at Puerto Rico’s Caribe Hilton. The recipe, from Food Arts magazine: 1 oz. lemon juice, 1 oz. mai tai syrup, 1 oz. Don Q rum 151, 1/2 oz. Grand Marinier, 1/2 oz. Bacardi rum; hand shake with ice, pour into 14 oz. glass, garnish with a cherry…. KIRO-AM and Millstone Coffee are sponsoring a “Coffee Cruiser” van, prowling high-foot-traffic events to distribute free cups-o-Joe promoting the station.

Cathode Corner: The Discovery Channel’s quest for cheap, informative programming makes for some astounding time-wasters. On Xmas morning they offered a years-old Alaska travel video. The late Lorne Greene narrated, calling it (as all regions in travel videos, films and articles are always called) “truly a land of contrasts.” As part of the tourist biz, every town Greene mentioned had a stage show or museum honoring frontier-era prostitution (“but at this saloon, only the beer’s for sale”). Alaska’s tourism division publicizes actresses who dress up as old-time floozies, while its police arrest anyone in the profession for real.

Local Publication of the Month: In Context is a quarterly “journal of sustainable culture” made by the Context Institute on Bainbridge. Its winter issue discusses how new communications media are changing the world. This is one post-hippie rag that doesn’t automatically condemn everything invented since ’70; it encourages its readers to become involved with the new media, that they may form communities around the distribution of ideas.

`Til our fabulous Feb. issue (with an essay on the lessons we can learn from our childhoods), look for Tacoma’s real-life street called Memory Lane, pray for peace and/or snow, read Penn and Teller’s Book of Cruel Tricks for Dear Friends (the most successful work of deconstructivist literature ever made in North America), and ponder these words by the great Samuel Beckett in Worstward Ho: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

PASSAGE

John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1966): “Innocence artificially preserved becomes mere crankhood.”

OFFER

All new subscribers to Misc. this month will receive a original essay, suitable for framing, God As I Understand Him.

Also from Fait Divers: The Perfect Couple, an interactive computer novel aout, among other things, two people’s search for romantic excellence ($10 in advance, requires Macintosh computer and HyperCard software).

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Multivalent”

What the `90s Have Given Us

Positive in Concept If Not Always In Execution

• USA Today, music video, performance art, personal computers, Nordstrom Rack, rap, punk, world beat, self-help movements, Pee-Wee Herman

We’ll Look Back and Laff At

• The Brat Pack, Reagan, Gary Hart, Lionel Richie, power breakfasts, whale music, Jimmy Swaggart, L.A. metal, The Last Temptation of Christ, Black Monday, tanning beds, cosmetic surgery, Tom Clancy, herbal energy pills, U2, the Suzuki Samurai, George Peppard, big-budget B movies

Our Kids Will Wonder How We Tolerated

• Watt/Burford/Meese/North/etc., Joan Rivers, Joan Collins, Wrestlemania, cocaine, wine coolers, “blue-eyed soul,” Robert Palmer, Donald Trump, Tipper Gore, Mergermania, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” all-oldies radio, Albert Goldman,15-second commercials, Bill Cosby, homelessness, Exxon

We’ll Wonder How We Ever Did Without

• Futons, styling mousse, anti-smoking policies, NutraSweet, VCRs, CNN, vitamin stores, oat bran, Roseanne Barr, C. Everett Koop, Spike Lee, 976 lines,trade paperbacks

Biggest Stories Not Covered in Most End-of-Decade Reviews

• Bell System break-up

Democratic presidential nominations won by raising money from big corporate interests looking for the candidate most likely to lose to the RepublicansSources of Hope

• New communications technologies available to individuals, from the computer programs that make this document possible to the fax machines that helped give the world the real news from Beijing
• The end of economies of scale favoring big business over independent business, as merged corporations make consumers and employees pay for the misadventures of the speculation parasites
• The whole Eastern Europe thing
• A progressive, aware populace that doesn’t know how big it is compared to any era except ’67-’70
• A slowly-growing realization that the sins of the Nixon-Reagan era shouldn’t be mistaken for virtues

Top Local Stories

• Few noticed in ’80 when tiny Seattle Software sold a computer operating system to a slightly bigger company, Microsoft. MS-DOS made King County the world leader in making computers work for people. It was this leadership that led an obscure Japanese toy company to put its U.S. HQ here, leading to the Nintendo video games now sharpening the hand-eye coordination of so many pre-adolescents.
• In ’82, I was among those who scorned the new official nickname “Emerald City.” It was totally inappropriate to the Seattle I knew and loved. In the eight years since, large portions of the city and its suburbs have been rebuilt to fit the name. The bus tunnel, the Bagley Wright Theater, Westlake Center, 10- and 11-cornered office towers, “luxury townhomes,” candy-colored Archie Bunker houses in the north end and the fake chateaus on the eastside, the planned gussying-up of Seattle Center — all these reflect the dangerous idea that this is some fantasy paradise where all will be mindless nirvana. This is a real place, with real people and real problems. The sooner we all realize this, the sooner we can start working on real solutions.

12/89 Misc. Newsletter

Seahawks Keep Losing,

Preventing Those Costly Fan-Noise Penalties

Welcome to the decade-ending edition of Misc., the monthly newsletter that tells you what’s hot and what’s lukewarm. What’s hot includes, as you’ve been hearing, the American flag, recently declared by an act of Congress to be a sacred image, incapable of being legally destroyed or tampered with. Since the flag and, presumably, all representations of the flag now must be preserved at any cost, we should test its efficacy by painting its inviolate image on the exterior walls of the otherwise-doomed Music Hall and Broadway theaters.

MOON PICTURES: Meanwhile, the drive to save the Blue Moon Tavern continues, despite misleading articles in the police-blotter newspapers about its landlord’s scheme to build a “new” Moon in a proposed office building on the Moon’s site. It’d be a gentrified, beatnik-nostalgia theme bar, not the real thing at all. Next door on the same threatened parcel, the Rainbow was reincarnated for one week as the Saturn Music Club, before the strip-show operator paid up some back rent and came back.

NEWS ITEM OF THE MONTH (P-I, 11/3): “A smorgasbord of pants for women to choose from.” We’ll be sure to keep you posted in the event of any great pun headlines involving new UW Symphony conductor Peter Eros.

TROUBLE A-BREWIN’: Rainier Beer boss Alan Bond, whose legal problems over his Australian TV network (now under appeal) we discussed earlier, can also be accused of legal but still nefarious crimes against art. The $37 million or so he bid for a Van Gogh helped to permanently escalate the price of masterpieces, preventing museums from acquiring any more for public viewing while decreasing the amount of private-collection money available to living artists. All that, and he might not even get to keep the thing. He borrowed half the purchase money from the auction house (which was eager to increase speculation prices), and might not be able to pay it back.

TRUTH IS STRANGER DEPT.: Longtime arms negotiator Paul Nitze sez the US and USSR negotiating teams often sat within an unbuggable plastic “bubble” for secrecy during the most delicate phases of their dealings. And you thought Get Smart just made up the Cone of Silence!

THE FINE PRINT: This comes from the credits to Married With Children: “ELP Communications is the author of this film/motion picture for purposes of Article 15(2) of the Berne Convention and all national laws giving effect thereto.” It’s good ‘n’ bureaucratic, but not the best credits disclaimer. That’d have to go either to The Hollywood Squares’ old explanation of how “the categories of questions and possible bluff answers are discussed with the celebrities prior to the program. During the course of the briefing, actual questions and/or answers may be given or discerned by the celebrities.”

PLANE SCARY: A Seattle inventor has announced his plans for a “flying car,” a 2-passenger VTOL plane. In a few years, he sez, commuters could take to the air for their daily travels. Flight could become a routine way of life for millions. You already know what this means: Get ready for drunk drivers in the sky, crashing not into ditches or other cars, but into your roof!

BOUNCING CZECHS: From here, looks like the turmoil in the USSR and Eastern Europe might mean not the end of Socialism but of the generation of yes-man leadership left after Stalin’s purges. Columnist William Safire, obviously bereft at the loss of the Cold War’s simplicities, has been predicting the imminent end of Glasnost for so long that he’s sounding like a frustrated revival preacher forced to announce postponed dates for the second coming. I, though, compare today’s Eastern chaos to the high school counselor who, when a new teenage mother asked when things are going to go back to normal, replied, “From now on, this is normal.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Bisquick Shake n’ Pour Pancake Mix. Just pour water into the plastic bottle of powder, shake vigorously, and squeeze out the batter onto your hot griddle. Just add a pat of imitation margarine and some lo-cal syrup, and you’ve got an authentic ersatz lumberjack meal.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS DEPT.: Jim Bakker and Lyndon LaRouche are being incarcerated in the same low-security prison. As it’s well known that criminals learn their trade best from colleagues, expect some massive scams when they get out. You’ll be cryingly asked to support nuclear power in the name of God, to fund evangelistic missions towards the “heathen” land of Britain.

STOVE TOP GRUFFING: An anti-wood-stove lobby, Citizens Against Woodstove Fumes, has bought bus billboards asking folks to think about the consequences of their cozy little fires. They claim that home heating by wood, one of the back-to-nature fads that survived past the end of the ’70s, releases more pollution into the environment per home served than hydroelectricity, gas, or even oil (not counting spills). I don’t know if that’s true, but it does increase the deforestation of the Northwest. I also know that in the third world, wood for home heating is used chiefly by those too poor to use more efficient schemes.

HAPPY RETURNS: So Seattle elected a mayor named Rice, and a city councilwoman whose mom owns a Chinese restaurant. Norm Rice deservedly got national press for his achievement, though the stories didn’t mention a big part of the victory, the fact that Seattle voters politely but affirmatively refused the divide-and-conquer tactics Doug Jewett learned from Reagan, Bush and Ed Koch. It shows there are people here who reject not just the new towers and condos, but the political mentality that goes with them.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Belles Lettres are little gift books, each containing one classic short story and elegant Po-Mo illustrations. While two NYC companies are credited, the books are really the work of local designers and photographers, headed by Seattle editor Jana Stone.…The Whole Toon Catalog is a mail-order collection of almost every animation video and book available for sale (if only they’d add a rental store). $2 from Box 1604, 4739 University Way NE, 98105….Washington Songs and Lore is the one state-centennial book to bring the pioneer days of noble fur trappers (long before Bob Barker) and Victorian matriarchs to something approaching life. It’s full of Old West clichés, but it’s still a step forward from most the nature-tourist orientation of most “regional” books, which seem to ignore the existence of humans or of social institutions.

INFO ATTAINMENT: Pledge of Resistance, a local pro-Sandinista group, visited hundreds of newspaper boxes throughout Seattle in the wee hours of 11/14, wrapping its own two-page Seattle Past-Intelligencer: Special Citizens’ Edition around copies of the real P-I. The result would make for a semotician’s field day: All the normal local crime stories and human-interest fluff inside, while the front page spoke exclusively of Contra and El Salvador Army atrocities (with an “Editors’ Apology” for not having reported them sooner). The desktop-published type made the new cover an obvious phony, but the split-second illusion of a local paper with a backbone inspired a hope that more political advocates will make active, accessible attempts to truly communicate with the populace (as opposed to shouting worthless buzzwords).

BOUND FOR DOOM: NY Times and Wall St. Journal articles predict big anguish for the book biz, due not to any lack of sales but to conglomerate mismanagement. Companies and writers were bought for more than they were worth. An elaborate system of advertising and chain-store promos failed to make guaranteed bestsellers. The ensuing shakeout may disprove the claims of “synergy” used in promoting media mergers.

SHOP RITE: Among the local products being hawked this Xmas are such board games as Nordstrom’s Nordopoly and Struggle,which promises to “teach kids the challenges of living in the real world.” U-Men Brand jackets and sweatshirts are being sold by an area firm, but aren’t authorized by the now-dormant punk band that created the name. Musts-to-avoid include the Bon’s $20 home video on proper scarf tying.

`TIL OUR NEXT REPORT at the start of the ’90s (can’t you just wait for 10 years from now, when everybody’s going to count the top 10 movies of the last millennium?), complete with our annual and only accurate In/Out list, read Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, don’t see Back to the Future Part II, and cognate on these timely lyrics by the Soviet rock group DDT: “I don’t like life. I want it.”

VOICES

Anias Nin in The All-Seeing:

“Two people who love the dream above all else would soon vanish altogether. One of them must be on earth to hold the other down. And the pain of being held down by the earth, that is what our love of others shall be.”

FORUM

We’re still looking for your suggestions for our annual In/Out list, to be published in January. Send your suggestions in now, before somebody else does.

WORD OF THE MONTH

“Olefiant”

INS/OUTS FOR ’90

This list covers trends that will be emerging and submerging over the next year.

Last year we successfully predicted the return to the public eye of waffles and Brigitte Bardot.

This is not a substitute for professional psychographic analysis.

11/89 Misc. Newsletter

Empty Space Renovators Find Asbestos in Showbox Walls;

You Thought the Punks Looked Deadly!

Welcome to yet another ennui-packed edition of Misc., the column that wonders whether Monty Python’s Graham Chapman would have wanted to die on the same day as, and have his obituary upstaged by that of, the race horse Secretariat, and decides that he might well have. This is the special newsletter edition, containing (not much, but some) additional material, cut from the version in ArtsFocus. While that tabloid was on indefinite hiatus this summer, I put out a special newsletter version and solicited for subscriptions. Two people replied. This is for them, and anyone else who might end up applying for the mailing list.

NO JANE, NO PAIN: I do not mourn the impending departure of Jane Pauley, who has held her position on Today for 13 years despite a distinct incompetence. She was particularly bad in her early years, but still maintained a level of journalistic ineptitude to the end (we’ve already mentioned her interview with the Seattle Rep’s Dan Sullivan, in which she never “got” the idea that non-NYC theater is real theater).

STAGE OF DECLINE: The demise of the Pioneer Square Theater has been dissected elsewhere. I’ll simply note that at one time, a local theater company was able to support itself mostly on its own receipts, and might have continued to do so had its original team stayed in town. Another case of LA ruining everything.

SPECIAL INTEREST: The John Lennon purists (a bunch of gracelessly-aging ex-potheads) may scorn the memorial Visa cards authorized by Yoko, but I love ’em. There’s nothing quite like going over your limit as the receipt-stamper pulls across the face that sang “Imagine no possessions.”

THE WORLD SERIOUS: So the A’s, thanks to Mike Moore and their other ex-Mariners, finally won. “But where in all this,” you haven’t asked, “is ex-A’s owner Charles O. Finley, the man who wanted to give us orange baseballs?” He’s still dabbling in sports. While Oakland was in mourning over the quake, Finley was safe up here, giving a public demonstration of his new glow-in-the-dark footballs. Their fluorescent green stripes are supposed to make them more visible at night in dimly-lit high school stadia; which would ruin one of the joys of the high-school game. O well, at least they’ll still have under-the-bleachers fights and the sound of both schools’ bands simultaneously playing “On Wisconsin” as their own fight song.

COME BACK, SAM! ALL IS FORGIVEN!: Am still trying to learn whether the Samuel E. Schulman credited as publisher of the new magazine Wigwag is the illustrious ex-Sonics owner and B-movie mogul of the same name. The mag is subtitled “A Picture of American Life;” it looks a bit like Spy and reads a lot like the last half-hour of All Things Considered. Lotsa smug Ivy League “populism” and pretentious cuteness. It does have one nice item on loneliness from the only single black woman in Tucson.

THE PLANE TRUTH: At this writing, the Boeing strike is going strong. It’s a novelty among recent U.S. strikes: it’s against an industrial manufacturer that’s been doing well enough that the usual pleas that the battered workers “sacrifice a little more” to keep management comfy just don’t work. If successful, this may be the turning point in American labor. People at Boeing and other firms may be getting tired of being pushed around, of getting sick from hazardous chemicals only to have management claim it’s just psychosomatic or “hysterical,” of being treated as a mere “cost” to be “contained,” of having any disagreement with any of this denounced as disloyalty to the corporate “family.”

MEANWHILE, Martin Selig’s fall from the heights of local office development should not surprise. In an ongoing attempt to cut corners from the costs of his big projects, he’s been late on payments to smaller suppliers for years. He got caught when he tried to slow down his payments to outfits big enough to fight back: first City Light, then some big creditors. In the end though, an ex-strip-mall-builder in an overbuilt market was no match for the big guys from LA and Toronto, now poised for total dominance.

TOY BOY: The first Xmas product with promise is the Heartthrob game by Milton Bradley, the years-late answer to Mattel’s Mystery Date game (circa 1962). It’s for girls ages 8-12, who draw and trade cards pertaining to their ideal boy’s traits, trying to assemble the most attractive guy possible.

GAS PAINS: The great oil slump continues, as Chevron sells or demolishes some of its most prominent locations (Ballard and Market, Evergreen Point) while the independent Gull sells all its Seattle stations. Gull, along with Mobil, thus joins these other long-gone brands from town (how many do you remember?): American, Carter, Douglas, Enco, Flying A, General, Gilmore, Gulf, Hancock, Hudson, Payless, Phillips 66, Red Crown, Richfield, Rocket, Signal, Standard, Time, USA, Valvoline, Vickers, and Wilshire. Seattle never had any outlets, however, for Clark Oil (no relation), the Midwestern brand that sold premium gas only.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Belgian waffle snacks at Gaufres (“gauf”), a storefront at 106 James with the shortest menu of any restaurant in town. For a buck, you get a small cup of coffee and a hot, glazed waffle on a sheet of wax paper. No butter, syrup, or whipped cream; this is finger food. Eat too many, though, and you’ll have a “gauf figure.”…Seattle’s Starting Right Co. now has the first gourmet frozen dinners for babies – strained, pre-cooked mounds of rice/squash/cod, zucchini/potatoes/beef, and pasta/carrots/turkey.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Miscellania Unlimited (again, no relation) is launching a new line of Northwest-produced comic books. The starting lineup ranges from the funny-philosophical Morty the Dog (who was “killed off” during his previous series from Starhead Comics; how he returns is the chief mystery) to the all-too-typical Rhaj (a female warrior in ancient Egypt with big eyes, a big knife, and a bigger bare bosom)…. I wish somebody here had a paper as lively as the Portland Free Press. It’s a monthly left-anarchist broadsheet concerned with toxic dumping, deforestation, and particularly with the Citizens Crime Commission, a panel of Oregon’s wealthiest and most powerful people who lobby for more prisons and fewer civil rights using the “drug emergency” for a justification….Every two months Factsheet Five, a national directory of small-press and self-published matter, includes several listings of Seattle-area “zines” available only by mail. As space permits, I’ll occasionally reprint one of these listings. This time it’s The Whetstone, described by FF (haven’t seen it myself) as “a new ‘magazine for independent people’ on news ignored by the major media…the alleged A-bomb test at Port Chicago in 1944, the AIDS-syphilis connection and alternative high-energy sources.” Available for $15/4 issues from FIFE Publications, Box 45792, Seattle 98145-0792.

THE KING AND THEM: Yul Brynner, according to one of those son-of-star-tells-all books, had steamy affairs with many of your favorite Hollywood leading ladies, and also with the actress who later became Nancy Reagan. It’s a gruesome thought, I know, but not as shocking as a pic published last year in the French Photo magazine, a full-frontal nude of a pre-stardom Brynner — with hair on his scalp!

COLOR ME BLUE: COCA recently held a performance by NY artist Mike Bildo. Three local women walked onstage and spent the next 10 minutes brushing bright blue paint on their nude selves. Occasionally, Bildo instructed the models to tastefully flay themselves on one of two large paper “canvases.” A group calling itself the Gorilla Girls picketed outside, calling the work an “appropriation” of women. The Gorillas’ literature drew heavily on quotes from Alice Walker, a writer who has dismissed any criticism of her work with the all-damning phrase “white male attitude.” The Bildo piece did NOT advocate male power over women. It questioned the valuesof originality and individualism, a topic frequently covered in feminist art writing. The models, the six clothed musicians, and Bildo were all re-enacting roles devised in 1960 by conceptual-art pioneer Yves Klien, who in turn was commenting on both French ooh-la-la exhibitionism and on the role of the nude figure in art. (Bildo’s enactment was closer to Klein’s concept than was the re-edited version of Klien’s event in the exploitation film Mondo Cane ). Body painting is an old tradition in other cultures, and has oft been used in Western alternative art. Weeks before Bildo, Karen Finley appeared on the same stage, her nude self covered in chocolate syrup, giving a charged lecture on bodies and body images. The chocolate motif had been used in ’74, with similar metaphors, in Dusan Makajayev’s Sweet Movie. The UK female punk band The Slits once posed for an album cover in mud and loincloths (as re-created this fall by the Seattle male punk band Mudhoney). Had the Gorilla Girls overcome their own stereotypical notions about gender and power, they’d have been treated to a spectacle full of images worthy of smart criticism. (Something like this section may appear in the KCMU Wire).

IN CONCLUSION, copies of the special “What I Did This Summer” report are available by sending a SASE to Box 203, 1630 Boylston, Seattle 98122, as is information on my novel The Perfect Couple (currently available only as Macintosh computer software). Until our next report, vote for Rice (claiming you’re “too hip to vote” is just the same as voting for Jewett), see the Art of Music Video Festival at 911 (no, I won’t bow to the current fashion and call it “the 911 space,” though I might start calling my home “the Clark space”), and remember this quotation from Goethe: “Everything that needs to be found out has been found out.The hard part is finding it again.”

5/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

PENTAGON BRASS PREDICT

GLASNOST WILL FAIL

(THEY CAN ONLY HOPE)

Here at Misc., where we’ve always brought disparate elements together, we don’t understand this “cold fusion” fuss. As a scientific discovery, it’s far less important than the new technique to remove old tattoos with lasers.

With this installment, Misc. has graced Seattle’s more open-minded restaurants, theatres and retailers for three years. That’s longer than the Ford Administration or the original run of Star Trek! Alice Savage, who ran what was then the PR paper for the Lincoln Arts Association, said I could write anything I wanted to. As ArtsFocus has grown under Cydney Gillis into this fiercely-independent sheet, that policy’s stayed. Another policy iterated in the first edition still holds: This column does not settle wagers (not that we’ve been asked to).

Eat Your Heart Out, Updike: The Brasil restaurant on 1st showed scenes from the latest Rio samba parades as part of its Sunday-night film series. Among the 18 “schools” (each with at least 3,000 amateur performers) were several save-the-rainforest parades and one in honor of Brazilian author Jorge Amado (Dona Flor and her Two Husbands, et al.). Can you imagine giant floats, musicians, singers, children, feather-headdressed men and topless women parading for a living American writer? Brazil has serious problems, but at least it has people who actively participate in their own culture.

This participation is largely what Abbie Hoffman fought for. During his heyday and on his death, the media’ve depicted him as an ego freak, no more sincerely subversive than John Belushi. (The radicals who really were ego freaks became Republicans.) Hoffman’s `68 Demo Convention protest and his square-people-bashing at the subsequent trial might have set back support of the anti-war movement, letting Nixon and Reagan vow to protect “real Americans” from “those kooks.” Still, especially in his books, he had much to say on real democracy vs. money-power whoring and how folks must stop being easily led.

Dead Air: KJR’s resident reactionary Gary Lockwood became Millstone Billboard Man #2, standing in a giant “coffee cup” downtown for an airshift (if I only had some tomatos to throw, some ripe, young tomatos). Lockwood’s “those kids today” commercials, denouncing anything recorded since 1970 and anybody born since 1950, are just like the Mitch Miller/Lawrence Welk defenders during the so-called “classic rock” era. To think KJR was once co-owned by Danny Kaye, who worked to bring attention and respect to youth. Also on the retro beat, the speculating Floridians who bought into Seattle radio promptly sold KZOK (to KOMO) and KQUL, née KJET (to Viacom’s KBSG). I’m heartened, though, by the formation of an anti-nostalgia lobby, the National Association for the Advancement of Time. Corporate America’s obsession with 1956-69 resembles the religious “Age of Miracles” doctrine, in which great things are said to have really happened but cannot happen anymore. The only way to really preserve the spirit of the ’60s is to stay fresh, to live in what Flip Wilson called “what’s happenin’ NOW.”

Update: New Cannon Film owner Giancarlo Parretti’s bids for the New World and DeLaurentiis studios collapsed. Maybe he should’ve sent Chuck Norris to see some dissident shareholders.

Local Publications of the Month: Twistor is a “hard science fiction” book by UW prof John Cramer, in which a machine in the UW Physics Bldg. becomes the portal to a parallel universe…. Lawrence Paros’s The Erotic Tongue is back in print. The area’s foremost expert on word origins (and briefly the best columnist in the P-I) gives fascinating histories on our terms for sex and/or love.

Cathode Corner: Rude Dog, the T-shirt mascot owned by Frederick & Nelson’s David Sabey, will have his own Sat. morn cartoon on CBS this fall (produced by Marvel)…. Bombshelter Videos resurfaced on KTZZ, where even Soundgarden’s an improvement over get-rich-quick and save-your-hair “shows.”

Ad of the Month (on a 76 banner): “Our three unleaded gasolines: Cleans fuel injectors best.” Runner-up (in the N. Seattle Press): “Since 1984, Gibraltar Savings: Serving families for over 100 years.” Then there was the Ross Dress for Less clearance ad with the “Men’s” listings printed between the jumping female model’s legs.

News Item of the Month (Times, 4/22): “A letter writer suggests that car-pool lanes should be open to cars with two drivers.” Let’s hope they’re driving in the same direction.

Politix: Veteran ad man David Stern, whose mom’s on the county council, is running for mayor. His best qualification is having invented the Happy Face, the quintessential politician’s stance. (It’s also become a symbol of neo-psychedelia, ironically since he made it to give Univ. Fed. Savings a wholesome family image in contrast to the image of the U-District in `69)…. Let’s try to get this straight: Our state’s Tom Foley’ll be House Speaker if Jim Wright has to quit over moneymaking schemes, including his wife’s unspecified work for our state’s Pacific Institute (the success-seminar outfit whose payroll also includes Emmett Watson and legend-in-his-own-mind DJ Bob Hardwick). It’s almost as juicy as the discovery of a real Texas oilman named J.R. Ewing, implicated in the Iran-Contra cash flow. After involving so many guys with cartoon names (Casper, Poindexter, Felix), it’s fitting the scandal include other parts of the American mythos.

Junk Food of the Month: White Castle Frozen Burgers. After following the elaborate heating instructions (involving foil and paper towels), you get something that looks and vaguely tastes like the food at an East Coast restaurant chain of undeserved reputation…. WSU’s launching a “distinguished professorship in fast food management,” underwritten by Taco Bell.

‘Til June, wear lotsa Parfum Bic, visit the Speakeasy café on Roosevelt (latter-day note: No relation to the later Speakeasy Cafe in Belltown), and try to be patient during the remaining 14 months ’til the Goodwill Games.

4/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

THIS MONTH: ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE FINAL FOUR

Here at Misc., the slickest column around, we think Exxon ought to go back to one of its former names, Humble (though a name with a double cross in the middle is also somewhat appropriate).

Confessions of a Critic: In December, I wrote a Times book review of Marianne Wiggins’s stunning novel John Dollar. I couldn’t have known that her husband would be marked for death for writing a book that questioned mindless obedience to (any) authority. When the review appeared, the Times thankfully didn’t add a lead calling Wiggins Mrs. Rushdie. It may have been the last time Wiggins was discussed for her own work (recently displayed at a Crown Books with the handwritten sign, “It’s By HIS Wife”).

Astral Plane: Twice a year, enlightenment comes to a warehouse-like space in a lonely Kent industrial park, next to the Domino’s Pizza plant. It’s the Boeing Activity Center, home of the Boeing Employees’ Parapsychology Club Psychic Fair. A bazaar of merchants offered tarot decks, crystals, astrological charts, and motivational tapes on everything from attracting a soul-mate to improving your vocabulary (sample affirmation: “The dictionary is my friend”). Local company Loving Spoonful (not the ’60s band) sold a kids’ success tape with cartoon squirrels promoting the fun of obeying your parents. A guy who channels information from dolphins cancelled a scheduled appearance, but over 60 psychics and palm readers gave 10-minute consultations. The big room was crowded with eager true believers — the opposite of the stuffed-shirt image outsiders have of Boeing. To find engineering types, you had to see the UW Computer Fair earlier in March. With the PC now commonplace, the fair’s mainly returned to industrial-design applications — except for the Seattle software company peddling a program called Bowling League Secretary. Now that’s personal productivity.

Mixed Media: The Time-Warner merger is only possible because the US antitrust dept. is acting less like Warner’s DC Comics heroes and more like Warner’s Police Academy cops. Meanwhile, Italian financier Giancarlo Parretti’s assembling Cannon, New World, DeLaurentiis and France’s once-mighty Pathé (the United Optical building on 3rd was originally a Pathé distribution office). Parretti’s move may save London’s historic EMI-Elstree Studios, which Cannon bought then threatened to turn into an office park. It’s also an epitaph for the boomtown ’80s film biz, which made hundreds of unwatchable films believing home video’d eat up anything with a halfway exploitable theme…. Tim Matheson liked National Lampoon so much, he bought the company. After a long takeover food fight and a Fundamentalist-led ad boycott, Matheson may need spunk and resourcefulness to bring the Lampoon back — a small challenge for the original voice of Jonny Quest.

Cathode Corner: Bainbridge author Aaron Elkins created the Gideon Oliver character in books without imagining he’d be played on TV by Lou Gossett (finally, TV cast a black actor in a role that didn’t specifically call for one). The show’s marred by clumsy post-writers’-strike scripts, but is better than Sable, the last series from a local writer (Mike Grell)…. The Coca-Cola Co. pledged to pull ads from Married… With Children. Since Coke’s the biggest shareholder in the show’s producer, Columbia Pictures, it may be the first conglomerate to boycott itself.

Smell of Liberation: Debbie Gibson has signed with Revlon to market an Electric Youth fragrance. Where I’m from, many gals were forbidden to wear perfume at her age.

That Drafty Gust: The “voluntary” youth service program proposed by Sen. Sam Nunn is really a scheme to keep working-class kids out of college, at least temporarily. Federal student loans would be available only to those who put in two years of low-pay, low-skill labor, perhaps far from home. This quasi civilian draft would leave less school and job-ladder competition for affluent kids, while leaving the country even less prepared for a future of global hi-tech competition.

News Item of the Month (NPR, 3/9): “The measure would raise the minimum drinking age to $4.61 an hour by 1990.” Runner-up (NY Times, 3/28, on the worldwide spandex shortage): “The market is very tight.”

Local Publications of the Month: Continuum, a slick arts quarterly from KidsProject at Metrocenter YMCA, has a kid’s own true pot story, a woman who imitates Patrick Nagle’s art, and an insightful comment on Royer’s KidsPlace hype. Get it at Bulldog now before a complex funding dispute kills it…. Northwest Extra is Olympia’s low-budget answer to the Clinton St. Quarterly. It’s mostly compiled from syndicated material, but the April ish has a magnificent Peter Bagge graphic on the Reagan legacy…. Geek Love, from Portland novelist Katherine Dunn, is a tale of people genetically bred to be circus freaks. It’s the perfect antidote for the Reagan/Teutonic image of “The” Family.

Unconstructive Criticism: Martin Selig, like many natural-born hustlers, has little sympathy for anyone who isn’t. At a recent City Club forum, Selig scoffed at the homeless problem his developments helped create, saying the poor just weren’t being productive. He seemed to sincerely not understand people born without his privileges or advantages. People like him should NOT be allowed to control the destiny of the city.

‘Til next month’s lovely 3rd anniversary edition, see Manifesto and Baron Munchausen, and ponder these telling words from everybody’s role model Pete Rose: “I’m a great father. I bought my daughter a new Mercedes Benz last year.”

2/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

EVEN WITHOUT 3D GLASSES,

THIS COLUMN IS AS SHARP AND CLEAR AS EVER

Here at Misc., we’re still wondering how soon a Mercury Scorpio is going to crash into a Ford Taurus and a Dodge Aries because the driver didn’t read his signs.

Goodtime Charley’s Got the Blues: Royer chose to quit rather than face a re-election referendum on his move from neighborhoods’ champion to developers’ patsy. Instead of dwelling on it, let’s just remember what his sister-in-law Jennifer James might say: that we must “cut the losses” from relationships that have become unworkable, acknowledge the pain of betrayal, and then move on.

No No-Host Bar: Alcoholics Anonymous’ world convention is coming to Seattle next year, but the best news is the appropriate name of AA’s site-selection consultant: Slack, Inc.

21 Luscious Shades of Red Ink: Revlon CEO Ronald Perelman, after buying a string of bankrupt savings and loans, just added Marvel Comics as a “cash cow” to support the S&Ls. Will America’s financial security be ruined if kids don’t buy enough copies ofShe-Hulk one month? Will folks get handsome Ultima II tote bags with every $10,000 deposit?

Holds Up Longer Than You Do: The Seattle-based Program for Appropriate Technology and Health’s received a major federal grant to study the shelf life of condoms exposed to heat, cold, humidity, light, and air pollution. It could be another case of a package that’s more durable than the contents.

Junk Food of the Month: Seattle’s Hilton Seafoods is trying to develop the world’s first sexless clam, which presumably would be larger and/or better tasting. But would it still be an aphrodisiac?

Local Publications of the Month: For a major writing project, I’ve been researching local New Age papers. Preeminent is Seattle’s New Times, a monthly broadsheet with stories on everything from ethics for the ’90s to meditation helpers that you put on like goggles and that send pulses of light into your brain. The same publisher also does Spiritual Woman’s Times; other local journals include Olympia’s The Light (with the syndicated psychic-comic Swami Beyondananda), Bellevue’s Common Ground (items on a new locally-designed tarot deck and on “Love, Fear and Linear Thinking”), and Federal Way’s Universal Entity (the tabloid chronicle of “Zanzoona the Old Warrior” as channelled through Vancouver, WA’s MariJo Donais, who is also the reincarnated wife of Ulysses S. Grant)…. Elsewhere in the print world, the second Placebo, an occasional journal of downtown writers, has an extensive, fascinating interview with a mercenary-turned-cab-driver.

Cathode Corner: Matt Groening has made his first commercial, a Butterfinger ad with his Tracey Ullman Show characters. Too bad it wasn’t Abkar and Jeff for Doublemint…. Geraldo Rivera and Cheech Marin have gotten together to buy TV stations. I can just see their “Point-Counterpoint” segments on the nation’s drug menace.

Dead Air: KLSY now has a fax request line, so you can use the newest technology to hear the most archaic music of any non-oldies station. I was recently force-fed two hours of the station in a dentist’s chair and can define one version of hell as sitting under bright fluorescent with a stranger of the same sex in your mouth and George Michael on loud. (Even worse, I got gold put in me the same month I called gold “outski” for ’89.)

Boox & Bux: For too long, bibliophiles have overrated the written word as more honest than other media. That myth should be retired now that we have “product placements” in novels (Maserati paid to be mentioned in Power City by Beth Ann Herman). So that’s what all the brand-name-dropping in the Literary Brat Pack has been about. The book’s publisher, Bantam, is one of three US publishing giants now owned by Germany’s Bertlesmann, who also bought RCA/Arista Records (yes, Spike Jones’s classic song “In Der Fuhrer’s Face” is now owned by the Germans).

Graphic Details: The new Pogo is almost as good as the old. It’s even done what Doonesbury never really has: slam the newspaper biz (though its target was USA Today, considered the young hussy of the industry by the genteel journalism establishment)…. TheTimes has deservedly awarded Calvin and Hobbes the highest honor a comic strip can get: the top Sunday space, displacing Peanuts after more than 20 years.

Bend Over, Johnny Depp: A 25-year-old Dallas undercover cop, posing as a high school student, was spanked by an assistant principal for tardiness. (He could have alternately faced detention.)

Shifting Into “D”: The Democratic Party has finally done something smart in getting ready to pick ex-Jesse Jackson aide Ron Brown as its new national chair. Brown’s strategies for Jackson (healing rifts between races and interest groups, attracting previous nonvoters) are just what the party needs. The Demos’ve lost two presidential races with the “Lite Right” policy of shunning the party’s heritage and most faithful followers to aim slick marketing at some mythical conservative “swing voter.” That policy will not work with any future candidate, as some Demo bigwigs are figuring out at last.

Hershey’s Kisser: Barbara Hershey, for reasons explicable only by vanity and Hollywood trendiness, has had silicone implants put in her lips. This is the same person who, when she was married to one of the Carradine boys, was such a Natural Woman that she briefly changed her last name to Seagull.

`Til the March column (which may include a report from the First Annual Singles’ Festival and Trade Show), beware of films about the Black Struggle in which no black actor’s billed higher than fifth, read Dictionary of the Khazars, and ponder this appropriate-for-Valentine’s line from local writer Theodore Roethke: “I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss?”

1/89 ArtsFocus Misc.

WHAT’S MORE PATHETIC:

JAMES BROWN IN JAIL

OR LITTLE RICHARD ON HOLLYWOOD SQUARES?

Welcome to the first `89 edition of Misc., the column that celebrates the end of the eight-year Age of Reagan and awaits the end of the 13-year Age of Cocaine. That’s about how long American attitudes and behavior have reflected those of coke users (aggressive euphoria, delusions of omnipotence, an insatiable need for more money). In what drug experts call “co-dependency,” these traits have spread to non-users, even to many who officially oppose the drug itself. It’s clearly shaped the power madness of much of the Reagan Administration. Reagan himself is a coke-addicted filmmaker’s stereotype of a statesman, a “high concept” hero. As violent as today’s coke gangs are, the big damage done by the drug is that done to our economy, culture and social fabric by business and government leaders who, often unknowingly, take the coke rush as their model for success.

This derangement is most visible in the obsessive speculation that’s captivated big business, exemplified by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. Besides its recent gobbling of RJR Nabisco, KKR now controls Safeway and Fred Meyer (for a near-monopoly of the Oregon grocery biz), plus Dillingham-Foss Tug, Red Lion Inns, Motel 6, Playtex, and the onetime icon of corporate appetites, Beatrice.

International House Style: The next phase of drug-inspired behavior may be a return from effrontery to withdrawn introspection. Seattle’s Happy Face symbol and Seattle’s big sweatshirts are keystones of the Acid House style now popular in UK discos. The fad, which also involves Chicago-invented dance music and Swiss-invented LSD (or at least visuals inspired by it), should reach these shores in toned-down form this year. By then the Brits’ll be into something else.

Brought to You by the Letter “X”: Roscoe Orman, the kindly Gordon on Sesame Street, has celebrated the show’s 20th year by settling on child support for a viewer he helped create in Oregon in 1985. Some who grew up with the show may gasp at the thought of Orman and his therapist lover singing “Which of These Things Belong Together,” but I knew there was another side to him since the time he challenged the “exclusive” terms of his contract by moonlighting as a pimp on All My Children.

From Pawn to Queen: This was the first American Xmas for Elena Akhmilovskaya, now settled in Seattle after suddenly marrying US National Team captain John Donaldson. You’ll find our fair city far different from Moscow. Here, jeans are plentiful and chess players rare. And please go to more restaurants than just the Last Exit.

Cathode Corner: Filming PBS’ Ramona in Toronto destroys the thing I loved most as a kid about Beverly Cleary’s books: that unlike anything else in kid-lit, they took place in a land I’d actually been to (Oregon)…. The new baseball TV deal means more $$ to the owners, fewer games to the viewers (12 instead of 30). More games’ll be on cable, but at what price? At least we might have to see fewer racist Joe Piscopo commercials.

Stamp Act: The US Postal Service is retouching a stamp honoring the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution, removing a bare nipple from the goddess of Liberty. Maybe we could use a revolution of our own.

Local Publications of the Month: ‘Twas a big season for local nonfiction (Boz, Knox, Robert Fulgham). I was more impressed by a well-made if kitschy fantasy, Frederick & Nelson’s Freddy Bear’s Favorite Christmas, a combined book-music box with text by our ol’ buddy Gretchen Lauber… Portland’s Northwest Computer News has started a Washington edition to compete with Puget Sound Computer User. The first News is full of cracks at User for reprinting a lot of material from its Minnesota parent paper…. The Real Comet Press plans to start a quarterly anthology of local comix, to be sold nationally.

Update: Last Jan., I told of changes in my hometown of Marysville. Now it’s a whole different place. Half the downtown’s been razed for a mall. The north side of town has two huge discount stores and a full compliment of middlebrow chain stores. Running between the two retail areas is a bus made up to look like a trolley (talk about a Neighborhood of Make-Believe). The countryside’s almost all gone from farming to tract houses. There’s even an indoor movie house (all we had was the Thunderbird Drive-In, still there). Still, some aspects of the old mill-town lifestyle remain: the video stores have such titles as Cut Your Own Deer At Home.

`Til our fab Feb. edition, visit the CT&T Gift Shop in Wallingford, admire the McDonald’s-sponsored hologram cover on National Geographic’s centennial edition (an issue all about our threatened Earth, not discussing the danger from foam boxes or razing forests for beef grazing), and ponder whether Shelley was predicting oldies radio when he wrote, “The world is weary of the past/Oh, might it die or rest at last.”

INS & OUTS FOR ’89

As always, this list might not reflect what’s hot now, but what will become hot in the year. This is not a substitute for professional tarot reading.

12/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

WE’LL SUPPORT UNITED KEEPING THE TOKYO ROUTEONLY IF THEY’LL CUT THE “DISCO GERSHWIN” ADS

Look: I’m not “just kidding folks.” When I say something here in Misc., I MEAN IT. (OK, the call for a crackdown on violent opera music was a bluff, but nothing else.) The louder I state that these are my sincere opinions, the more some people brush me off with a smug wink. If I were the uncaring, insincere cynic I’ve been cracked up to be, I’d be a Republican, or at least the Good Company producer who put a Gamblers Anonymous show on election day.

Anyhow, this month’s column is dedicated to Seattle’s newest grocery chain, Shop-Rite. Shopping, of course, IS a rite, especially in December. Hot Xmas gifts this year include the new plastic teen makeup kit (for plastic teens?) that looks just like a fishing-tackle box (“date bait” indeed). Those going east can get that special gift at NYC’s new Soap Opera Furniture Store, selling surplus room settings from daytime dramas. Sign up now for a bar stool from Ryan’s Hope. The 13-year-old show, which launched the career of sometime Seattle actress Kate Mulgrew, is being axed to give more time to local legend Sandy Hill’s Home show.

Unlisted: Washington mag’s list of “100 Washingtonians Who’ve Changed the World” left out Ray Charles, Judy Collins, David Lynch, Mary Livingstone, Dyan Cannon, Carol Channing, Lynda Barry, Martha Graham, John Cage, Quincy Jones, Steve Miller, Willie Nelson (once a Vancouver, Wash. DJ), the Sonics rock group, Robert Culp, Dawn Wells, Patrick Duffy, Mark Tobey, Mark Morris, Larry Coryell, Robert Cray, Chet Huntley, John Saul, etc. My biggest beef is leaving out Spokane-born Chuck Jones, perhaps the greatest maker of animated films ever. Any list to leave him out must have been edited by Elmer Fudd.

Towering Achievement?: In a rare show of minor courage, the City Council voted a temporary, slight restriction on new highrises (with exceptions for some well-connected projects). In all other recent cases save one, the city’s succumbed like a lapdog to the developers. Will it really serve the public interest at last? (Personally, I like the Wash. Mutual Tower and some of the others, and realize that office-building is inevitable in an economy gone from making stuff to pushing paper. But that’s no excuse to do it as poorly and inconsiderately as it’s too often been.)

Space Exploration: You may know that the name of the new AFLN gallery-cafe on E. Madison stands for “A Frilly Lace Nightie.” You may not know that the bldg. was the shrink’s office in House of Games (one of the few sites in the film still standing, just two years later). The nearby Bagel Deli on 15th now has keen art shows of its own.

Faulty Femmes: I submit that Robin Givens IS NOT the “most hated woman in America,” as charged by some paper. But who is? Imelda Marcos, the likeliest prospect, is just a resident alien here. Others frequently disliked, often undeservedly, include Phyllis George, Tammy Bakker, Tipper Gore, Yoko Ono, Linda Ronstadt, Phyllis Schlafley, Andrea Dworkin, Anne Burford, and Springsteen’s new girlfriend. Pretty slim pickings, but once more women achieve positions of real power, more will emerge who truly deserve our loathing.

Music Notes: Sir Mix-A-Lot’s Posse on Broadway, with great shots of Dick’s and Taco Bell, made the MTV rap show, but became “Stir Mix-A-Lot” in the credit…. Yuban Coffee is sponsoring this year’s performances of The Nutcracker. If the girl had had the coffee, she wouldn’t have slept and there’d be no show.

Local Publication of the Month: Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow. To Vancouver, B.C.’s Brian Fawcett, Pol Pot’s crimes are just an extreme form of what the media/corporate culture’s doing to us: fostering passive obedience by destroying history, memory, community and individuality. I don’t buy all of it, but admire his passion and technique, cross-referencing St. Paul, Marshall McLuhan, Joseph Conrad, Malcom Lowry, Homer, satellite dishes, Expo 86 and Reggie Jackson…. On the Bus,Metro’s newest newsletter, gives driving but not bus directions to a bus-base open house.

Graphic Details: Fantagraphics Books, America’s premier publisher of alternative comics (including Seattleite Peter Bagge’s Neat Stuff ), is moving here from LA. It’s not a big boost to the local economy (its prestige title, Love and Rockets, sells under 20,000 copies), but is a clear sign of our emergence as a graphic-arts mecca. In another positive move, the UW’ll now require arts credits by incoming frosh. Maybe that’ll stop state school districts from killing arts classes.

Disappearing Ink: As you know, we believe in reading everything. Now, that “everything” may shrink. Two vital news sources, theChristian Science Monitor and Mother Jones magazine, are reportedly switching to yuppified formats with less political and foreign news, and in MJ even “upscale” lifestyle features. MJ, which prides itself as the biggest left-leaning rag since WWI, ought to know that the Yuppie media aesthetic, selecting a rich minority as the only people worthy of attention, is inherently reactionary.

The REAL Skinhead Story: After a tragic murder in Portland, the media have branded every kid with a shaved head a racist thug. Not true. The few who are thugs specifically follow 10-year-old UK grooming fads and the “ethnic-purity” policies of the British and French “National Front” movements (and the most virulently pro-apartheid groups in South Africa). Purity, of course, is for geeks. Anybody who goes killing or bashing people to prove how superior he is obviously isn’t.

Until we next meet in the new year, with our annual In/Out list (your suggestions still solicited), help fight to save the Music Hall and the Hat n’ Boots gas station, and heed the words of VH-1 VJ Ben Sidran: “War is never as much fun as a good piece of music.”