HERE AT MISC. we’re trying to make sense of Nike’s reported flat sales trends, after years of huge growth. Is it the shoes? Is it the controversy over sub-subsistence pay for foreign laborers? Maybe it’s the ads that don’t try to sell any products, just the logo (not even the name!).

SIGN OF THE WEEK (one of the “Rules of Conduct” at the Wizards of the Coast Game Center): “#6. We want our guests to feel at home in the Game Center, so please practice daily hygeine and tidy up after yourself.”

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #2 of the industrial-culture rag Voltage profiles three highly diverse Seattle bands–the ethereal Faith & Disease, the dark-techno Kill Switch… Klick, and the piously noisesome ¡TchKung! Even better is a piece on Project HAARP, the Army’s secret radiotransmitter base in Alaska. It’s equally skeptical of conspiracy theorists’ claims about the project and of the Pentagon’s denials. Free at the usual outlets or from P.O. Box 4127, Seattle 98104-4127.

FLAKING OUT: Never thought I’d see it, but even the beloved institution of cereal has fallen to the horrid force that is “collectibles” speculation. Fueled by a couple of shrewd promoters trying to turn box collecting into the next big hoarding boom (to be surely followed by the inevitable bust, when foolish hoarders realize they’ll never unload their hoards for profit onto bigger fools), manufacturers have been toying with limited-run box designs, using some of the same tricks (like foil embossing) already used on comic books and sports cards. Now General Mills has come out with a Jurassic Park Crunch cereal (really Lucky Charms with dino shaped marshmallow bits), actually shouting on the box “Limited Collector’s Edition!” At least with all the BHT “added to packaging material to preserve freshness,” any unlucky box-hoarders will eventually be able to eat their losses.

GINSBERG WITHOUT TEARS: The local aging-boomer litzine Point No Point just came out with an Allen Ginsberg tribute by Stephen Thomas, who claimed “every left-of-center social movement since the ’50s is traceable back through Ginsberg’s poetic vision.” For good or ill, Thomas might be right.

In the months since his demise, I only found one obit (in The Nation) that emphasized his writing instead of just how cool a dood he was. This may be how he’d want to be remembered. He exemplified many annoying hipster trends: the incessant self-promotion, the championing of celebrity above artistry, the simplistic Hip vs. Square dichotomy, the concept of culture as something created exclusively in NY/LA/SF and merely consumed elsewhere. No wonder the folks at MTV loved him. He had the same business plan!

But there was more to Ginsberg than his carefully groomed icon-hood. There was his actual work–writings, speeches, performances. He championed not just gay rights but gay life. During the post-McCarthy nadir of American discourse, he wrote about forgotten or suppressed details of U.S. history. His pieces often lacked craftsmanship and “quality control” but oozed with exuberance, and thus at least indirectly inspired the punk/ DIY universe.

RAMPING UP: We’ll always remember the long-awaited opening of Moe’s in 1/94 as a special night. After almost two decades of playing mostly in tiny bars, rundown ballrooms, and basements, the “Seattle music scene” had a veritable palace, expensively built just for it. But all scenes change, and so it is here, with Moe’s life as a rock club ending next week. On the upside, the formerly much less palatial Off Ramp club’s about to reopen (pending those pesky Liquor Board bureaucrats) as the Sub Zero. When last written about in this space, it was announced the joint’s sale, remodeling, and reopening would take a little longer than first expected. As it turns out, a year longer. But much was done–it’s clean, and (thanx partly to an all-new floor) no longer smells of stale beer! The cafe part’s open; drinks and bands might commence any week now.

(If you attend only one column-anniversary bash this season, let it be the fantabuloso Misc.@11 party Sunday, June 8, 7:30 p.m. at Ace Studios Gallery, 619 Western Ave., Third Floor.)

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the pop-cult column that just can’t think of any good jokes about the Eastside having its own area code. When the outer reaches of western Washington became “360,” at least one could joke about “going full circle” or “matters of degrees.” But there’s nothing worth saying about a nothing number like “425.” It’s the Bellevue of three-digit numbers.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (outside Bruegger’s Bagels in Pioneer Square): “Our salmon is smoked. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t compete.”

MEN ARE FROM MARS, WEIRD WEBSITES ARE FROM VENUS: Amid all the media coverage earlier this winter when the Deja Vu strip-club chain bought the Showbox building downtown (but not the nightclub operating therein), nobody mentioned how its retail spaces had been previously porn-related. First Avenue in the ’40s hosted a string of penny arcades, bowling alleys, and other inexpensive entertainments. One of these was the Amusement Center, operating in the Showbox building’s ground floor. By the ’70s, the Amusement Center had become a porn peep-show operation. In 1978, the peep show took on the name “The Venusian Church,” enveloping its attractions within a New Age-esque ideology of sexual freedom. (It got written up in national media as “the churchof the sacred sleaze.”) Besides the coin-op movies and live strippers, it advertised sex-ed classes and workshops, some of which were held at a camp-like compound outside Bothell. Those who paid for the workshops were invited to pay more to join the church, with assorted consensual “encounters” promised as a benefit. But by the early ’80s, one the group’s founders had died; its compound was razed for suburban sprawl; the peep operation was sold (eventually morphing into today’s Lusty Lady across the street); and the Venusian Church faded from public sight. Some members continued to practice group marriage and tantric-yoga sex rituals at a house on the Eastside, but offered no publicly-advertised programs.

But now, like disco, Qiana, and other ’70s relics, the Venusians are back. They’ve got a website which sells $50 “associate memberships” providing access to online porno stills, which (according to the free samples) appear to have be from pre-existing CD-ROMs. For $100, they throw in enrollment in a “divine sexuality” course called Pathway to Paradise, billed as a prerequisite for more advanced levels of involvement. These advanced levels are advertised on the web site as taking place on “The Isle of Eros,” and as including everything from revelations of eternal sacred mysteries to real sex rituals, the latter including “a mystical marriage” with “a divine priest or priestess.” The site’s vague about what the latter entails, but it’s not direct sex-for-money; the “priesthood” is billed as comprising advanced group members rather than hired help.

I knew people who were involved in the old Venusian operation and either loved what they learned from it or got bored and wandered away. Still, the new Venusian pitch rings off alerts in my Skeptic Zone. It combines the promise of relief from spiritual isolation with the promise of relief from sex frustration, two of the most effective come-on lines known to humanity–especially to lonely, isolated Net users of any gender. (The site includes many buzzwords from “sex positive feminism” as well as more traditionally male-directed orgy fantasies.) I’m fully in favor of spiritual exploration, and of finding safe ways to learn about your sexual nature. But I’d try to find out what a group’s really about, in plainer language than the Venusians’ sales hype, before plunking down big bucks. (Those without Web access can write the Venusians at P.O. Box 2607, Seattle 98111.)

‘TIL NEXT WE MEET, observe but don’t buy the Dennis Rodman fashion doll at FAO Schwarz, and consider these observations from Susan Sontag: “We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters.”

(Mark your calendars now for our grandioser-than-ever Misc.@11 anniversary party; Sunday, June 8 at Ace Studio Gallery, 619 Western Ave.)

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Issue #6 of Organ & Bongos, Russell Scheidelman’s quarterly cocktail-culture guide, includes a truly hilarious satire piece by D. Hume about Vegas casinos we’d like to see (a Vatican-theme casino with religious icons on the slots, a Kremlin-theme casino with mile-long lines for the buffet and hidden microphones in every hotel room). $3 at Fallout or from P.O. Box 20396, Seattle 98102…

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #1: W.A. Burgess’ new novel Cowards came into the office in an envelope festooned with “LOCAL AUTHOR” stickers. The only author blurb inside said Burgess “lives in Brooklyn, New York.” The dust jacket, a perfect example of NYC designers’ notions of “grunge” (complete with craggly, crooked type), lives up to St. Martin’s Press’s rep for excessively trendy art. The story’s a first-person journal of a heroin-addled Wallingford musician wannabe, with most of the incidents you might expect in a corporate novel of this premise (bands breaking up, couples fucking to avoid talking, a housemate OD’ing). It all comes off as dull and lifeless and meandering as, well, as a hopeless stoner’s monologue can be to a clean-‘n’-sober listener’s ears. Burgess attempts to make compelling reading out of characters who are near-fatally introverted, borderline catatonic, and in some cases barely verbal. He fails at this admittedly difficult task. His bigger failing is his inability to effectively evoke some of the more intense aspects of the punk-housemate life: the manic torment of the music itself, the weird-sick humor, the pseudo-profound beer-fueled philosophizing and political theorizing, the endless de- and re-construction of our pop-culture heritage. “Apathy is our greatest adversary,” sings local band John Q. Fascist on the 10 Things zine’s local-punk compilation CD. Maybe it’s more like dumb corporate books romanticizing apathy.

THE MISC. BOOKSHELF #2: If the NW music scene’s supposed to be passé these days, nobody told L.A.-via-Virginia author Jeff Gomez. His novel Our Noise is one big Northwest-band namedrop, starting with Cub and K Records in the first three pages and going on to mention Some Velvet Sidewalk, the Fastbacks, Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Hate comics, Kill Rock Stars, Fizz magazine, Sub Pop, and C/Z Records. None of these people or institutions appear in the plot, which involves some sad excuses for indie rockers in a Wal-Marted near-south town where the biggest remaining downtown retailer is a used-book store. Plot points include a guy trying to print his new zine (called “Godfuck”) via a stolen copier key. Appropriately for these going-nowhere characters, I found the book on the remainder shelves. (Available at Half Price Books while supplies last.)

MIKE ROYKO, 1933-1997: The venerable Chicago columnist was known as cantankerous, yes, and mostly in a good way. But in recent years he’d started to offend some people who weren’t on the high ends of power, where his barbs had usually been aimed. Like many silent-generation liberals who got successful, he spent too much of his later life bitching about gays and immigrants, the latter despite his own Polish heritage (or perhaps because of it; his was often the kind of ethnic pride that sits across a very fine line from me-first-ism). But his was also the kind of fightin’ liberalism that challenged readers to rise up, take charge, and challenge the crooks in high places. He had little sympathy for “progressive” ideologies that treated even whitebread college graduates as victims needing protection by a powerful social system. He’d seen enough of powerful social systems claiming to befriend the helpless, thanks to the machine politics of Chicago’s late mayor Richard Daley.

His basic philosophy of politics was inseparable from his basic philosophy of newspapering. As practiced over a lifetime of daily deadlines, he felt newspapers didn’t have to be complacent, smarmy mouthpieces for their local powers-that-be. They could instead be provocative and hell-raising and lotsa fun to boot. His approach to columning certainly influenced me. It also helped influence some of the upper-Midwest kids who came to Seattle six years ago to start a paper. There might have been no Stranger without Royko’s ink-and-beer-stained hand leading the way.

WELCOME TO A MAY-DAY MISC., the pop-culture column that believes if the Seahawks had been even half as incessant on the field as their pseudo-grassroots fan group has been in the political arena, the team would never have gotten into its current mess.

THE FINE PRINT (on separate sides of a King Edward Cigar box): “These cigars are predominantly natural tobacco with non-tobacco ingredients added”; “This Product contains/ produces chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, and birth defects or other reproductive harm”; “A Great American Custom: Ask for King Edward Birth Announcement Cigars.”

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: They’re billed as “Seattle’s Original,” despite actually coming from Darkest Bothell. Despite this labeling inaccuracy, Frutta Italian Sodas do have a certain bite all their own, combining assorted fruit and “cream” (vanilla) flavors with my personal all-time favorite soda ingredient, glycerol ester of wood rosin (it’s a thickening agent that gives fruit-flavored pop a “mouthfeel” more like that of real juice). At hipper convenience stores near you.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Iron Lung is Stephanie Ehlinger’s conversation and information zine for the bike-messenger community. Issue #2 includes a historical account of the Critical Mass rides, first-person stories of weirder-than-normal messenging runs, and an ad for a bicycle-injury attorney. Free at Linda’s and other outlets, or pay-what-you-can to 924 16th Ave., #204, Seattle 98122,

LIKE SWEEPS WEEKS ON THE SOAPS, real life often brings short fits of big changes in between long stretches of stasis. This might be one of those times, at least locally. First, Rice sez he won’t run for mayor again, opening up at least the possibility of a City Hall not completely owned by megaproject developers. Second, the Weekly, 21-year voice of the insider clique that gave us Rice, gets sold.

Third and least publicized of the trends, Nordstrom announces a flattening of its previously rapid sales-growth trend. Since the ’70s, Nordy’s has personified the philosophy of upscale-boomer consumerism and the aesthetic of obsessive blandness cultivated by the Rice administration, the Weekly, and other insider institutions. It’s the centerpiece of Rice’s whole downtown plan, as this paper has previously documented. Nordy’s troubles are partly due to national shopping trends away from the mainstreamed wares of department stores and mall shops, toward specialty boutiques and discounters. But I’d like to think this was also affected by changing customer tastes, away from the tired retrowear pushed lately by Nordy’s (and by corporate fashion in general). But industry trend-proclaimers insist retro’s still the way to go. For this fall, they’re planning to succeed the ugly-but-spirited ’70s revival with an ’80s power-suit revival. Everything you hated about Reagan-era dressing is slated to come back, from Dress for Success pomposity to women’s “menswear” with shoulder pads almost suitable for playing football in. I’m confident this won’t be nearly as popular as its pushers want it to be. What remains to be seen is how far down this gap between sellers’ and buyers’ tastes will drag Nordy’s and other companies.

It’s easy to tell why the industry loves the looks of the ’70s and early ’80s. They represent a time before DIY culture really took off, a time when a fashion industry at its peak of power felt it could dictate trends which the nation’s shoppers would ecstatically obey, no matter how homely or depersonalized. Similarly, Nordstrom’s business strategy has been heavily predicated on wringing sweetheart deals from cities and mall landlords. But with neighborhood and strip-mall shops now drawing business away from big malls, and online shopping arriving any year now, high-profile locations aren’t going to be as important. Nordy’s collection-of-shops store layout might help it weather this sea change into a post-mass-market era, if it doesn’t get caught up in trying to preserve a passing status quo.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, stock up on dented cans of marischino cherries at the Liquidator’s Outlet store in the old Sears basement, check out the new Tube Top record (splendiforously fresh!), and ponder these words attributed to Lilian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

If you get the chance, get to Uptown Espresso to view John Rozich’s utterly beautiful chalk paintings on the menu boards, commemorating next week’s 35th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair (a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition). Rozich’s exquisite works, modeled after original Space Needle ad art, engender a nostalgia for something once called the future. A mythical state, located in real space and unreal time, where most everything would be better.

I’ve been watching videotapes of KING-TV’s 25th-fair-anniversary telecasts from 1987, based on kinescope films of live fair coverage. The tapes show KING’s first news anchor, Charles Herring, hawking the fair as “A futuristic look into the future… How man will live and work and play in the year 2000.” In other moments, olden-throated announcers present incredible inventions-to-be: Sun power. A 200-mph pneumatic passenger train. An automated highway. Gas-turbine cars. Microwave ovens. Picturephones.

One scene takes viewers to the “World of Century 21” exhibit in the old Coliseum. As the camera closes in on scale models of domed cities connected by monorails, an unseen narrator booms, “We think and plan differently now. Science and technology are the twin architects of tomorrow’s homes… Our energy sources: solar or atomic. Climate control is automatic. Built-in vacuum systems keep our home spotless. The home communication center brings the world’s news, culture and entertainment to our homes in color and perhaps three dimensions… It’s not just any day. It’s tomorrow. The fine day you and millions like you plan and build. And it can be both beautiful and practical. City Century 21. The highest concentration of civilization. The ultimate expression of man’s collective endeavors… Home and work are closer to each other, and near to nature. Our transit-ring monorail provides commuters rapid and enjoyable mass transit. Electronic streets serve as safe, pleasurable secondary highways… Our city is a place men want to live in, not have to.”

But the mood of the Fair was more important than any specific predictions. As John Keister noted on one of KING’s retrospective shows, “It was a time of optimism, knowledge, and beauty. And I loved it.”

Within five years, the fair’s vision became popularly denounced as an empty promise, derived from a pro-industry, anti-environmental agenda. But it really represented something more complex: postwar liberalism, the world of the original Pro-Business Democrats. Our longtime U.S. Senators Magnuson and Jackson, who helped bring the fair here, sincerely felt America could and would be led forward into a Golden Age by Big Business, Big Government, and Big Labor working hand-in-hand-in-hand to ensure mass prosperity (without socialism), strengthen science, popularize education, advance minority rights, and promote artistic excellence.

There have, of course, been several futures since then. Various religious and military cults’ utopias fantasize vicious, vengeful doom for all guilty of not belonging to the right cliques. Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia sees Washington and Oregon becoming colonies of a San Francisco city-state, wihch in turn would be run by a plutocracy of the environmentally-enlightened. William Gibson and other cyberpunk authors dream of a dark, violent external world overshadowed by an internal world enhanced by virtual-reality software.

Today’s most intensely promoted future is that of cyber-futurists like George Gilder and Alvin Toffler. But instead of gleaming cities in the sky, these guys look forward to a day when the top-income-bracket folks will never need to leave their gated exurban compounds. Indeed, most currently-promoted futures are anti-city, if not anti-social. White-flighters, black separatists, eco-communalists, Bainbridge nature poets, right-wing mountain men: Most everyone seems to want to be around only their own sort. Perhaps not since the fair did professional visionaries forsee diverse peoples wanting to live among one another. Even the concepts of “urban villages” and “civil society,” at least as intrepreted by Seattle’s top political brass, invoke a definition of “the people” extending no further than Nordstrom’s target demographic.

Still, the Space Needle beckons as its promised century draws closer. Don’t just look on it as a relic of yesterday’s industrial optimism but as a call forward, encouraging us to imagine better, more inclusive tomorrows than the tomorrows we’ve been imagining.

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that groaned and laffed with the rest of you during the media’s recent sheep-cloning headlines, but didn’t see any magazine use the most obvious such headline: “The Science of the Lambs.”

CATHODE CORNER UPDATE: Cox Communications will now be buying KIRO-TV instead of KSTW. Viacom made a last-minute deal to grab KSTW instead, and will shift its UPN network affiliation to channel 11; thus freeing channel 7 to again run CBS shows. Sources at both stations claim to be at best bemused, at worst befuddled, by the actions of the various out-of-state parties in this mega-transaction (including KSTW’s current owner Gaylord Entertainment and KIRO’s current owner A.H. Belo Corp., which started this by dumping KIRO so it could buy KING). All the parent companies’ PR people vow nothing but total confidence in the stations’ local managements; but the way station staffs were pushed, pulled, and kept in the dark during the wheelin’ ‘n’ dealin’, don’t be surprised if a few heads start rollin’.

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE WEEK: Don’t know what to make of Klang (“A Nosebleed-High Journal of Literature and the Arts”), August Avo and Doug Anderson’s curious four-page litzine. The current issue (billed as “Vol. 3.14,” though I’ve never seen one before) purports to reprint an excerpt from a best-selling Russian novel; but the piece, “A Day in the Blood Line,” reads more like a smartypants American’s clever take on Russian lit, both of the classic and Soviet-era-underground varieties. (Of course, I could be wrong about this.) Free where you can find it or by email request to bf723@scn.com… 59cents (“The #1 Rock and Roll Magazine”) is an utterly charming photocopy-zine side project of the band Blue Collar. The current ish, officially #16 (though I’ve never seen a prior ish of this one, either), includes microbrew taste tests (juxtaposed with a screed warning “drinking till you puke or pass out is not rebellious”), an anti-Christian rant, and a brief rave for the Girl Scouts for removing the word “cheerful” from their pledge. Free where you can find it or from P.O. Box 19806, Seattle 98109…

ANNALS OF MERCHANDISING: Lilia’s Boutique, the fancy women’s-clothing store in Basil Vyzis’ condo tower next to the Vogue, started to hold a going-out-of-business sale. Soon after the SALE signs appeared in the windows, representatives of the real-estate company handling the building’s retail leases taped a “Notice to Comply or Vacate” paper to the store’s front door overnight. The notice told Lilia’s essentially to stop going out of business or be forced out of business. Apparently, there were terms in Lilia’s lease forbidding “distress sales” or any public acknowledgement that business conditions in the building were less than perfect. Anyhow, the dispute got quietly resolved, and Lilia’s got to continue going the way of 80 percent of new U.S. businesses.

YOU MAY ALREADY BE A FOOL!: Like many of you, I just got a bold postcard announcing I’ve become a Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winner–“pending selection and notification.” The postcard alerted me to watch the mail for the “prize announcement” soon to follow. What followed, of course, was yet another entry form with its accompanying sheet of magazine-subscription stamps. While I love much of the PCH program (the stamps, the Prize Patrol commercials, the cute interactive aspect of cutting and licking and pasting the entry forms), the just barely non-fraudulant pronouncements in its pitches has always struck me as unnecessarily taking us customers as gullible saps. A Time tote bag oughta be incentive enuf, right?

Then I realized who gets PCH mailings: People who’ve subscribed to magazines the company bought mailing lists from. In other words, readers. According to hi-brow commentators like Jerry Mander and Neil Postman, the very act of reading somehow mystically imparts taste and discernment onto the reader, regardless of content. Yet PCH became a national institution by treating folks who regularly pay for the writen word as potential suckers for weaselly-constructed promises of certain wealth. In this case, I’d believe money rather than ideology, and here the money loudly cautions against blind faith in The Word without specifying which words. (More on this topic next week.)

HERE AT MISC. we’ve always had fun whenever a local media property went up for sale, fantasizing how cool it would be if we could buy KING or KIRO or KTZZ or The End. But the Weekly? Can’t think of a thing we’d wanna do with it. And as for the trade-magazine rumors (republished in the P-I) about Rupert Murdoch wanting to own KIRO, all we can respond with is a deep, cold shudder.

CLARIFICATION: The Samis Foundation, planning to develop the late Sam Israel‘s downtown land holdings, is a nonprofit entity created in Israel’s will to benefit local Jewish organizations. Its leaders and beneficiaries include no Israel relatives, as implied in a Misc. item several weeks back.

UPDATE: The painful revamping of the bookstore biz in the wake of the superstore invasion, mentioned in these pages earlier this month, continues. Pacific Pipeline, the leading wholesale supplier to area indie bookstores the past two decades or so, is now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings, and will probably either fold or get merged into a national distribution firm. With superstores utilizing their own chainwide buying services, Pacific found itself with fewer clients, or rather fewer financially-stable clients. While retail customers never directly dealt with Pacific (except to read its regional-bestsellers list in the Times), its service and its commitment to regional publishers would be sorely missed.

SAY WHAT? (AP dispatch in the KIRO Radio News Fax, on a decline of Canadian shopping trips into Washington): “But another factor is tougher competition from retailers in Canada. Canadian retailers adopted innovations that were losing them customers–more retail space and better use of computers, for example.”

UNTIMELY SABBATICAL: The UW Experimental College will take the entire spring and summer quarters off. The idea is to get a restructured EC organization (including a fancy-schmancy computer registration and accounting system, to replace a notoriously failure-prone current setup) ready and debugged in time for the fall. So far, no word on what the college’s dozens of freelance instructors and thousands of course-takers will do without their weekly fixes of massage workshops, cooking classes, or forums on “New Ways to Meet New People.”

A UW Daily article said the shutdown was needed to keep the college from becoming a drain on the student-body budget, which has sunk $71,000 more into it than it got back out over the past 29 years. That doesn’t sound like much over time, especially when the new computer system’s gonna cost at least $50,000. But later reports give the EC net losses of over $20,000 in each of the last two years. And ya gotta remember how in the personality-driven, sometimes combative world of student-government politics, even small profits and losses can become points of contention–particularly since the EC attracts mostly non-UW students to its courses these days. Ultimately, the EC probably oughta be spun off into a separate nonprofit outfit, responsible for its own budget and operations, with maybe a UW-student presence on the board of directors. Maybe they could get the leaders of one of those courses on “How to Run a Successful Business on a Shoestring” to run the thing.

EVERYTHING RETRO IS NEO AGAIN: I used to spend some of the prime days of my childhood with rags, steel wool, formaldahyde, and ugly chemical products, removing grungy old varnish and otherwise “restoring” old furniture and picture frames to be sold in my mom’s antique shop. Little did I know in my grownup world I’d meet people who use “antique” as a verb, to mean the exact opposite of my old work. At three different art gallery openings this month, I overheard viewers talk about a trend toward contemporary artists “antiquing” their works with varnishes, patinas, old junk-store frames, and even cracked stains. I’m not sure what it all means, except maybe the artists are trying for instant posterity, that figurative “veneer” of respectability often ascribed to works that have lasted the ages. Either that or they’re trying to reduce the scariness factor in their work by making it seem more homey, more suitable for a collector with a neo-oldtime living room.

PASSAGE (attributed to the sometimes-interesting Fran Lebowitz): “Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.

MISC. IS ALWAYS BEMUSED when mainstream media outlets suddenly discover the existence of “youth scenes” that are nearly 20 years old, like the Times’ back-to-back exposés of Goth and hip-hop (at least the latter series, by Cynthia Rose, was somewhat respectful of the genre and its participants). By this track, we’re due for a two-page feature about, say, the ambient-dance scene sometime in 2011 (mark your calendars). Speaking of issues recently in the news…

SITE LINES: Your community-conscious column hereby offers an ingenious solution to the still-asmolderin’ controversey over Fred Meyer‘s desire to build a big new store on Leary Way industrial land (the retail giant was denied a rezone, but is appealing the decision). They oughta leave that site be, and instead take over the ex-Ernst space up the street by the Ballard Bridge. This way, near-North-enders will still get a place to buy their Levi’s and bicycle tires and My-T-Fine canned peas, and neighborhood activists can preserve the mid-Leary stretch for manufacturing jobs. The Ernst block’s closer to established traffic patterns (and is on more bus lines), but is far enough from other big stores that Freddy’s can still have the local dominance it likes. It’s smaller than the steel-plant site Freddy’s wanted to build on, but should be just the right size if the store’s built with rooftop and/ or basement parking (both of which Freddy’s uses at other locations). they wouldn’t even need to tear down the venerable Mike’s Tavern & Chili Parlor on the block’s southwest corner. Speaking of eatin’-drinkin’ establishments…

IN CLUBLAND: The opening of the Capitol Club, the new Blank Generation cocktail bar and fusion eatery on E. Pine, is a sea-change event for several reasons. First, it signifies the “Cocktail Nation” phenom as not just a slumming fad but as a bankable long-term trend. Second, its smart but non-aggressive style calls out for an end to generation gaps. Tasteful and comfy but still nonpretentiously elegant, it’s meant to appeal to everyone from neo-swingers to grand dames. It’s a force for community unity amid an increasingly fragmented society.

The aspect of the place that initially disturbed me was the lower-level dining area. Call me a traditionalist, but when I think of the restaurant half of a real Cocktail Culture restaurant-lounge, I think of either classic American fare (burgers, chicken), standard American expense-account fare (steaks, seafood), or that pseudo-Euro stuff dissed by author Calvin Trillin as “Maison de la Casa del House, Continental Dining.” Instead, the Capitol Club offers fancy-schmancy entrees (grilled eggplant, Saffron Seafood Rosetto) and appetizers (Grilled Chorizo, Sauteed Spinach). “What’re they trying to be,” I initially thought to myself, “another stuffy Cuisine-with-a-capital-C site for condo boomers?” I’ve since been reassured by management and early customers that that wasn’t the intention. I’d forgotten how many young-adult artists and musicians have spent years in restaurant work, much of it at joints with more exotic fare. I’d also forgotten how many of these folks, when they do come into money, prefer to dine on the fare of places like Il Bistro and Marco’s Supper Club. And besides, I’m told CC’s BBQ chicken is fine (haven’t tried it yet). Back in prole-fare land…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Fizzies are the reincarnation of a soda-pop-in-a-tablet product first tried out some years back. These flavored, medicineless Alka-Seltzer knockoffs turn a glass of water into an adequately-tasting diet beverage, though the dissolving experience is more fun than the drinking experience. According to rumor, General Foods was trying to invent a better version of this stuff when it accidentally invented Pop Rocks. Available at Bartell Drugs in assorted flavors, including “Chillin’ Cherry.”

‘TIL NEXT TIME, here’s some day-before-Valentine’s advice from Af-Am Stanford U. chaplain Floyd Thompkins, in his ’91 treatise Enemies of the Ebony Warriors of Love: “Love’s greatest enemy is cynicism. (Cynicism’s) power lies in the fact that it makes sense. The optimism that love requires does not make sense… Cynicism is based on the absolute facts of the world. Optimism requires one to accept a supposition difficult to affirm–that the facts are not always the truth.”

MISC. PROUDLY OFFERS the simple, elegant solution to the ideological quandry that’s gripped the American discourse for the past month: Both sides in it are right. Larry Flynt is a defiant First Amendment crusader and a shameless money-grubbing sleazebag! (He’s also an epitome of the late-century business libertarian, who promoted an even purer religion of unfettered capitalism than the GOP hypocrites who hounded him. His relentlessly anti-niceness approach toward lust, religion, and other base desires in the ’70s just might have indirectly helped influence the Trump/Murdoch ’80s aesthetic of unapologetic avarice and the Limbaugh/Gingrich ’90s aesthetic of unapologetic bullydom.)

DEAD AIR: The party may soon end for local pirate radio stations. Because the FCC’s triangulation trucks (needed to locate sources of unauthorized transmissions) travel a lot, pirates in any one place may enjoy several months of broadcasts before getting caught. That seems to have been the case here. But one volunteer pirate station in Bellevue was busted this month. That probably means the triangulation trucks are in town, ready for further busts. We might not know right away, since they sometimes lay low while gathering evidence. All the Feds have officially to say is pirate operators oughta be ready to get arrested any ol’ time.

WEIRD AD LINE OF THE WEEK (on an ad for a Vancouver video-editing firm in Media Inc., displaying an image of a breast-feeding infant): “When was the last time you had everything you needed in one convenient location?”

HAT TRICK: As devoted front-of-the-paper readers know, this column has always championed preserving Seattle’s declining stock of old-time short-order eateries. So I was both gladdened and worried when Hattie’s Hat on Ballard Ave., perhaps our best surviving classic populist eatery, was sold to a partnership including Tractor Tavern owner Dan Cowan, former Backstage owner Ed Beeson, No Depression magazine contributor Kyla Fairchild, and Fairchild’s husband Ron Wilkowski. While it was heartening to know the Hat wouldn’t go under, I was worried these hipsters might falsify the Hat experience, turning it into an upscaled, smartypants parody of its former self. I was especially worried when the new owners announced they’d hired a chef to redo the menu and were going to “restore” the interior. We’ve all seen too many examples of stores, buildings, streets, et al. “restored” into a yuppified “original elegance” they’d never previously had.

So far, though, the changes are well within the Hat’s pre-yup heritage. The wood partition in front of the cocktail lounge has been lowered by over a foot, but remains stoic and lusciously dark. The back dining room’s been modernized and prettified, but not excessively. The ’50s-era ski-lodge-scene mural behind the diner counter has been cleaned and brightened but not altered. If the mural’s mid-century realism looks familiar, it might be because creator Fred Oldfield also painted wall scenes for Village Lanes, the original El Gaucho, the Dog House (all gone now), and Ernie Steele’s (that mural’s still partly up at its successor, Ileen’s Sports Bar on Broadway).

As for the food, it’s only slightly fancier (and costlier) than that of the Hattie’s of old. It’s still burgers, omlets, soups, salads, sandwiches, and spuds. Nothing on the menu has that horrid “Market Price” notation. And yes, you can still order that Scandihoovian specialty lutefisk (with 24-hour advance notice)! So kudos to the new Hat squad for not doing too much, and long may this topper of unpretentious pleasure remain.

ELSEWHERE IN FOODLAND: I’d thought that silly “wraps” fad was a Cali import, but apparently others believe otherwise, or want people to believe otherwise. A former taco stand in Albany, OR has now changed its name to Seattle Wrappes. Beneath the Space Needle logo on the sign is the slogan, “Real Food for Real People.”

‘TIL OUR FIRST FAB FEB. column of the year next week, ponder these thoughts of John W. Gardner: “We must have respect for both our plumbers and our philosophers, or neither our pipes nor our theories will hold water.”

(Invisible Rendezvous, an anthology of collectively-written fiction pieces I’d contributed to in the ’80s, is now at the University Book Store remainder racks while supplies last. Other odd fictions of mine are online at Misc. World HQ.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Olen Butler’s ‘Tabloid Dreams’:

Inquiring Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Diane Williams’ Precision Angst:

Small Sacrifices

Book feature for The Stranger, 10/24/96

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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