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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bernstein Book Finally Appears:

Jesse Lives

Book feature for The Stranger, 6/19/96

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Van’s 105 Tavern (602 N 105th St.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Community syndicalism......Global capitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HERE AT MISC. we adore the new Seattle Center fountain–it squirts higher and more voraciously than the old one, and new recessed nozzles inside a steeper center bulge mean folks are less likely to try climbing it, slip, and get their crotches ripped into (it happenned to someone I knew and it wasn’t fun). We also like (save for the name and sign) the KeyArena, a.k.a. Coliseum II–plenty of comfy seats to watch the T-Birds play the Brandon Wheat Kings. But in other ways, Seattle Center remains a relic of a long-ago futurism, bypassed by brasher monuments like Las Vegas’s fake Space Needle (the Stratosphere Tower, topped off last week). At 1,149 ft., twice the Needle’s height, it’s now the west’s tallest structure (displacing, I believe, a TV tower in the Dakotas).

THE SAME WEEKEND Coliseum II opened, thousands other Seattleites were at the first NW Book Fair. Loved the fair; loved most of the booths; loved the speakers I was able to get to (if Sherman Alexie or his publishers read this, I’d love to hear more sometime about his remarks on shoddy Indian-reservation public housing.) The lack of an empty parking space within five blocks of the event oughta be enough proof that smug elitist rants about a “post-literate society” are at least somewhat exaggerated. Folks are indeed reading these days. It’s what they’re reading that can sometimes be disturbing.

FOR PROOF THAT “The Book” is not the universally progressive-n’-prosocial force the elitists crack it up to be, look no further thanThe Seattle Joke Book III by Elliot Maxx (the comedian formerly known as the other Gary Larson). Not just another round of bland latte gags, it may just be the single worst book ever published here, even worse than those endless whale-poetry chapbooks put out by the Heron Presses (you know: Pink Heron, Chartreuse Heron, Polka Dot Heron). Maxx’s slim volume is crammed with the vilest racist “jokes” disguised as “neighborhood humor;” along with homophobia, sexism, and Keister bald jokes. All it lacks is Wayne Cody fat jokes.

THE NTH POWER: In recent months, even before Annex Theater’s Betty In Bondage, I’ve had trouble with the mainstreaming of S/M culture. Then at the Halloween parties I was at along the downtown/ CapHill arty circuit, seemed like half the attendees wore some variation on fetish garb. There were four hetero couples where one partner dragged the other around on a leash (three of the leashees were guys). I finally figured it out. Today’s S/M isn’t “transgressive.” It’s sure not “rebellious,” save in the minds of those who get off on imagining themselves hated by a stereotyped “Mainstream America.” These days, S/M IS mainstream America, a distillation of the modern American zeitgeist. The newly commodified S/M celebrates power, domination, victimization, ruthlessness–your basic hypercapitalist values. As for politics, I’ve already written comparisons between “pro-business Democrats” and the consensual bottom position.

JUST SAY `NON’?: You realize if Quebec ever does leave Canada, it’d mean no more bilingualism in the rest of Canada? What would we do without bilingual Canadian food packaging, such as Diet Coke with “NutraSuc”? Without CBUF-FM and the great way its announcers pronounce words like Chilliwack and Okanagon? Maybe Vancouver could go bilingual English/ Mandarin, but it wouldn’t be the same.

On the other hand, a Christian Science Monitor commentary by Washington, D.C. corporate lawyer Mark Schwartz called the Parti Quebecois one of the world’s last “hard-line leftist” movements. Schwartz’s piece trembled with fear that an independent Quebec might attempt “a new social order” that’d neglect the proper coddling of foreign investors and instead pursue “full employment, a more equitable society for all citizens, and a lessened role for the marketplace in people’s lives.” He was agog that the separatists’ “64-page vision of an independent Quebec fails to mention a single word about the private sector’s role in creating jobs.” A place where 49.4% of voters declared humanitarian and cultural values more important than business? Alors!

I’m speaking and signing books this Friday at 3 p.m. at the renowned University Book Store. Be there or lose your chance to collect NW music history while earning a Patronage Refund.

AGAIN THIS WEEK, my early deadlines prevent me from commenting on the Ms/ Cleveland series. But I can talk about the strangely hostility-free jubilation after the four home victories that led to it. The outside-the-Kingdome postgame celebrations were described by one eyewitness as “loud and happy, not obnoxious or rude. It wasn’t like New York after a championship or Detroit after a championship. It was like Seattle after a championship.” Also of note: Fans who remembered the Sonics’ 1979 championship year found a new reason to hate sportscaster Brent Musburger. He dissed the Sonics then, and this time peppered his ABC anchor duties with East Coast-patronizing swipes at our “no name team” that he thought only got this far ‘cuz California folded. It’s no news to his distant cousin, local utility drummer Mike Musburger, who’s used to apologizing for the actions of a relative he’s never met.

‘ROUND THIS TIME previous years, the Kingdome used to host the annual Manufactured Housing Expo. It’s now held at Cheney Stadium in Tacoma. Last year’s Kingdome closure had something to do with the move, but it’s wiser for what used to be the “mobile home” industry to have its showcase closer to the path of new suburban development. Here in town, only a few small areas are zoned for factory-built housing, and they’re threatened by redevelopment. One of Seattle’s last big mobile home parks on Aurora was razed this past summer for a Home Depot, that shrine to the stick-built house. Still, the Kingdome was a great site for the show. They used to build a mini-neighborhood on the AstroTurf, with walkways lined with plastic landscaping. ‘Twas a fantasy world reminiscent of the domed cities in which, according to the World of Tomorrow exhibit at the ’62 Seattle World’s Fair, we’d all be living by now.

DEAD AIR DEPT.: It’s been about a month since the censorship-by-firing of Jim Hightower by ABC Radio, the people who have no qualms about bringing you avowed white-supremacist Tom Grant. Hightower’s now looking for another syndicator to revive his show. Besides being a hoot-and-a-half to listen to, the Austin sagebrush sage had the only national talk-radio show that dared question Big Money’s stranglehold on public policymaking. He probably wouldn’t have gotten into trouble with the network brass had he limited his barbs to politicians. In the corporate-media world, you can be more or less as “political” as you like, as long as you never challenge the sanctity of business. Speaking of pro-business “political” media…

DEPT. OF AMPLIFICATION: When I dissed George magazine recently, I neglected to mention the two good parts of its “Inagural Issue.” First was a comprehensive report on Krist Novoselic and the JAMPAC anti-censorship crusade. The other was a short piece by ex-Rocket scribe Karrie Jacobs about a proposed Women Veterans’ Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery, drolly undertstating how its architects plan a main rotunda area with a glass ceiling.

HOME BODIES: Remember a few months back when we printed a call for volunteer models for some nude Seattle greeting cards? They’re finally out. Anecdote Productions’ $2 cards feature black-and-white tableaux posed at or outside Moe, the Mecca, the Wildrose, Rosebud Espresso, Cafe Paradiso, Glamorama, the Triangle Tavern, Urban Flowers, the Comet, Dick’s on Broadway, and (natch) the Pike Place Market and the Fremont Troll. They depict a variety of young-adult ladies and gents going about their everyday business, oblivious to the camera and unaware that there’s anything un-everyday about public threadlessness. They’re sexy in a wholesome, clean-cut-American sorta way. But they also invoke a deeper longing for a currently nonexistent way of life, one more “free” and unpretentious yet still totally social and urbane, not hippy-dippy “natural.” Available at M. Coy Books at 2nd and Pine.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, check out the low-key, lounge-y Charles Grodin talk show on CNBC, visit the Candy Barrell store in Pio. Sq. (one of the few places in town where you can still get Clark’s Slo-Poke suckers), and ponder these words of Wm. Blake from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1790-93: “Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”

Unabombs Away:

F.C.’s Dreams for Agrarian Authoritarianism

Manifesto review for the Stranger, 10/4/95

Industrial Society and its Future (a.k.a. The Unabomber Manifesto) was published as a supplement to the Washington Post and as a “virtual book” at the Time website. Because the daily Post is unavailable outside the Eastern Seaboard, this anti-technology tract is accessible to most readers only via computer. [NOTE: The uncopyrighted work has since been issued in an unauthorized paperback edition, available thru this link.]

Its author is known popularly as “the Unabomber,” but he (the FBI believes it’s a lone male) uses the unexplained pseudonym F.C.

While F.C. doesn’t cite ideological inspirations, he stands in a long line of anti-tech thinkers from William Blake to Gerry Mander. Many of these authors are slicker and more coherent than F.C., but that’s part of F.C.’s point. Early reviewers described F.C.’s writing as stilted and dry, detracting from his persuasiveness. I disagree. Any work of criticism carries the aesthetic of its ideal alternative. F.C.’s stodgy, authoritarian pronouncements express his wish for a stodgy, authoritarian future. His rambling arguments visualize his dream for a slower-paced world. His overgeneralizations about human nature reveal a utopia where most people would be treated as “masses,” placed in socially-useful labor.

F.C. believes “the industrial-technological system” is a social, psychological and environmental “disaster for the human race.” He believes people have become slaves to a system working for its own growth, not for human betterment; a system too complex and powerful to ever be “reformed;” a system which, unless overthrown, will eventually destroy the planet. Plenty of non-murderers have said things like that. In his way F.C. essentially says he’s tired of talk and wants action. He’s tired of college leftists because they just talk, and also because Marxist ideals of collective “progress” and planned economies would require the industrial state he wants to smash.

Most dystopians are utopians at heart, and most utopians seek a society in which people like themselves would rule or at least fit in better. While his prescriptions for the world are far more vague than his condemnations, F.C. clearly pines for a society guided not by the “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith’s marketplace, nor by the impersonal demands of production and consumption, but by the force of muscle and will — presumably other people’s muscle and his will.

He doesn’t mention that modern experiment in a planned neo-agrarian society, Pol Pot’s Kampuchea. Here was a philosopher-activist who, like F.C., was willing to sacrifice other people’s lives to bring about a more “natural” state; except his system couldn’t feed an industrial-age population base, and the industrialist Communists of Vietnam had a stronger army. In F.C.’s utopia, there wouldn’t be heavy machinery or internal-combustion engines (he fantasizes about “burning all technical books” so these things can’t be brought back), hence no armies capable of reversing his revolution. Cold Warriors used to rant about the Reds’ ability to “bomb us into the stone age.” F.C. would settle for bombing us into the Bronze Age.

WELCOME, POST-BUMBERSHOOTERS (and post-Ellensburg Rodeoers) to the fabulous fall preview edition of Misc., the column that knows satire is useless in a world where the Seattle Times discovers straight edge punk almost a decade after the genre’s heyday, a woman can get banned from Disneyland for excessive wheelchair speed, poultry processors can legally call frozen chickens “hard chilled” (sounds more like an ad slogan aimed at mall-rat homeboy wannabes), and jazz-vocal grande dame Nina Simone turns out to be a piece-packin’ threat to any young punk who gets in her way! (About a year ago I predicted rap would one day become as tame as jazz. I may have been wrong.)

A HEARTY GET-WELL WISH goes to art-music promoter Larry Reid. He and sometime partner Tracey Rowland were sideswiped by a car on 8/25 while driving their classic Italian scooters near Eastlake (Reid and Rowland helped run Seattle’s first scooter club in ’84). Reid hit the pavement head-first and was rushed to the hospital, where he was originally diagnosed with broken neck vertebrae. The next day an MRI scan showed just a few compressed discs. He’s home now but will have to take things easy for a while.

AD VERBS: Washington Mutual’s “Free Checking” billboard shows a checkbook with human female legs jogging at dawn. That’s not freedom, that’s rigorous discipline (which itself could be a positive metaphor for a bank, but that’s a whole other issue).

CATHODE CORNER: Harry Anderson, a member of the growing Hollywood colony out on the Puget Sound islands, wants to move production of his sitcom Dave’s World to Seattle after this upcoming season. It would be the first three-camera filmed sitcom shot outside LA since the ’50s. You can guess I don’t love the show, since I find nothing particularly amusing about the real-life Dave Barry (at least the show’s dropped the Billy Joel theme song). But after years of Florida trying to take away the Mariners (presumably over, now that it looks like Tampa’s getting an expansion team), it’d be fun to have a show set in Miami but made here.

WEBSITE OF THE WEEK: Dallas kid Scott Glazer’s Page of Evil, <<http://rampages.onramp.net/~scottgl/index.htm>>, contains an almost Shavian lambaste of fantasy-novel hack Piers Anthony: “Some (fantasy) authors start with the germ of a good idea in the first book of a series and grind it down to pure crap as the books wear on…. (Anthony) has the courage and wisdom to eliminate the hard work that comes along with coming up with that good idea, instead skipping to unmitigated smegma from book one, page one…. The number of books in the Xanth series has been proven to be equinumerous with aleph-zero; in other words, infinite. This is possible because it actually takes a negative amount of time to produce a Xanth novel.”

ALL YOU’LL EVER HEAR ME SAY ABOUT WINDOWS 95: Leno really was the perfect choice to emcee the Windows hypefest in Darkest Redmond (the talk-show host who’s almost as good as Letterman but not really, shilling for the operating software that’s almost as good as the Mac OS but not really). Still, I understand why Windows 95 could be considered a significant introduction in some quarters. So many people have been suckered into using Windows, and have been so frustrated by it over the past five years or so, that the promise of a Windows version that sucks even a little less is cause for celebration among ’em…. In other MS news, the company denies its talks about pouring money into Turner Broadcasting have anything to do with Turner’s desire to raise cash for a raid on CBS. Some observers called MS’s statement a retraction worded so it could itself be retracted later.

GROCERY UPDATE: You’ve got another week to send your recommendations for Seattle’s best food stores, in the convenience, small-supermarket (under 10,000 sq. ft.), regular-supermarket, superstore (over 20,000 sq. ft.) and ethnic categories. More info is at the Misc. World HQ website. Organizers of the mass letter-writing campaign on behalf of a certain gourmet boutique in Madrona may stop now.

MISC. WANTS TO THANK all the attentive readers who wrote, emailed or faxed in to confirm the flyer I wrote about warning Yellowstone visitors against head-butting buffalo is real. One reader even claimed “I’m still alive today thanks to that advice;” another said park employees maintain a tote board every tourist season saying something like “Buffalo 6, Humans 0.”

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (from the front page of Murdoch’s notorious London tabloid News of the World): “My Sex And Smoked Salmon Romp.” Ahh, the two great tastes that taste great together…

AMERICAN ENTERPRISE AT ITS FINEST: Pee-On-It is a urinal sanitizer-deodorizer by the Ohio-based Anthem Inc., with one of seven pictures on it: A guy holding an umbrella with the caption “And you thought you were having a rough day,” a woman with her mouth open, another woman laughing “What’s That, A Joke?”, a bull’s eye with the caption “If You Don’t Have Length Try For Aim,” a guy getting a “shower,” another guy holding his nose and ranting “You Drank THAT?,” and an opened beer can with the caption “Ecology project: Recycle Your Beer Here.”

META-FICTIONS: Seems that not only is there already a real Gramercy Books, the fictional Gramercy Press of the MCI ads will put out a sort-of real book, Apocalypse of the Heart. Romance queen Barbara Cartland’s allegedly been contracted to pen the tome, to be issued under the pen name of “Marcus Belfry,” a fictional writer in the commercials. Speaking of the word. It’s not the first time a “fictional character” has written a book. Many early Brit novels were written in the first person and presumed by some readers to be true stories. The Ellery Queen mysteries listed the hero as author, tho’ they were written in the third person. Then there’s Venus on the Half Shell, a sci-fi spoof attributed to one Kilgore Trout, a hack-writer character in several Kurt Vonnegut novels. (To this day most folks don’t know Vonnegut didn’t write Venus; real-life sci-fi hack Philip Jose Farmer did.) Speaking of the word…

MANLY READING: It’s common in semiotics texts these days to ascribe homoerotic meanings to the archtypal adult-male heroes of boys’ adventure fiction, from the old Pee-wee’s Playhouse gang to today’s Batman Forever cast. What these texts haven’t mentioned as far as I’ve seen is how all those PR campaigns to sell “Books” to kids as one generic commodity always trot out past generations’ boy-adventure heroes (pirates, knights in armor, your basic Pagemaster cast). I’m sure something could be done with that, maybe something scandalous about how Barbara Bush and the American Library Assn. are propagating homoerotica to children. Speaking of the word…

SEGREGATED SENTENCES: The Times quoted an 1853 Old Farmer’s Almanac homily as warning householders to keep books by male and female authors (unless married to one antoher) stocked on separate shelves. Finally: An explanation for the fiction racks at Left Bank Books. Still speaking of the word…

VOLUME SELLING: The arrival of one of them huge Barnes & Noble book emporia at U-Village points out the perception/reality thang re: the alleged non-popularity of the written word in PoMo America. If nobody were buying these paper artifacts, huge corps. wouldn’t be spending proudly to install great print palaces (and potentially drive the li’l folks outta the biz). Still speaking of the word…

IT’S ONLY WORDS: Thanks to your diligence in reply to our recent solicitations, we have a veritable bevy of non-“surfing” words for Internet use: gigging, looking around, skimming, roamin’, ramblin,’ and my favorite of the week, that ol’ Situationist Internationale term “dérive.” I’ll try using some of these in sentences over the next few weeks, to see how they work.

NOW I HAVE ANOTHER FAVOR to ask of you, to enter your suggestion in our drive to find the best grocery stores in Seattle. Base your nominations on atmosphere, attitude, cool products, and price, and place them under one or more of these categories: convenience store, small supermarket, regular supermarket, superstore, and ethnic. Mail them here to the paper or leave them at the Misc. website.

A happy post-7/4 greeting to all Misc. readers who, thanks to draconian govt. crackdowns against even “Safe and Sane” home fireworks, still have all their fingers. You can use those fingers of yours to pick up free postcards from the racks popping up at “hip” spots around town. The cards themselves are impeccably natty-looking, but they turn out to really be flyers inexplicably advertising L.A. hair salons. Speaking of snazzy graphics…

DESIGN FOR LEAVING: Graphic design magazines have been abuzz recently about attempts to form a “professional” association that would “accreditate” graphic designers like architects and somehow keep non-members out of top-paying markets. Besides being a monopolistic restraint-of-trade move, it’s not needed. Architects need to be accredited; a badly-designed building can fall down and hurt people. A badly-designed magazine ad can do no worse than waste its client’s money. Speaking of corporate centralization…

MY BONNIE: In today’s corporate climate, even success can lead to trouble. Case in point: the Bon Marché, the dept. store of the masses (old, anti-upscale slogan: “Where All Seattle Shops”). In 1929 it was a founding member of Allied Stores, a combine of local stores whose owners banded together for financial reasons. In the recent years of merger madness, Allied became part of Federated Dept. Stores, which did what merged companies often do: it shed pieces of itself (including the Seattle I. Magnin) and consolidated what was left into new operating groups. In the process it’s retired such classic store names as Magnin and Abraham & Strauss. Now the Tacoma News Tribune sez upper Federated management wants to replace the Bon name with another of its acquired brands, Macy’s West. Bon managers in Seattle were quick to deny the report. The L.A.-based May Co. has owned Portland’s Meier & Frank for years, but has wisely kept the M&F name. Let’s hope Federated knows enough to keep the Bon Marché appellation, derived from Paris’s original 1-stop-shopping palace of the late 19th century. Otherwise, the parent co. would surely qualify for the modern colloquial French interpretation of the phrase “bon marché” (look it up). Speaking of chain-store shenanigans…

ANOTHER DRUG WAR: The local pharmacy biz has also been consolidating, with chain operations rising and independents falling. The one constant has been regional management at most of the chains: Bartell has remained locally-owned, and the Oregon-based Pay Less absorbed the formerly Seattle-owned Pay n’ Save. That’s changing. Walgreen, the Illinois-based giant, is about to invade Seattle in a big way. Work has begun on locations in Greenwood and the Central Area; the chain’s reportedly applied with the state pharmacy board to open as many as 60 sites. Some of the new Walgreen stores reportedly will even have that onetime drugstore staple, the lunch counter (Walgreen claims to have invented the milk shake, at a Chicago luncheonette in the ’20s). Speaking of refreshments…

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Hero lemon soda (available at the Hillcrest deli-mart on Cap. Hill) is a tasty tarty carbonated substance with a friendly yellow color and a cute, space-saving eight-and-a-half-ounce can. Even better, it comes from that new global junk-food mecca, Breda, Holland (hometown of that ultimate postmodern cultural icon Mentos, The Freshmaker!). Speaking of PoMo icons…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: If you enjoy Steve Shaviro’s occasional appearances in these pages, you’ll enjoy Doom Patrols, his collection of essays (he calls them “theoretical fictions” for no readily apparent reason) on PoMo heroes and heroines ranging from Kathy Acker to Bill Gates and, yes, ex-Doom Patrol comic book writer Grant Morrison. It’s even got the Dean Martin essay he first published here. Doom Patrols isn’t yet available on paper, but the entire text can be downloaded from the Web at <<http://dhalgren.english.washington.edu/~steve/doom.html>>. Speaking of the Web…

UPDATE: I’m still looking for a term for Internet/World Wide Web use that isn’t “surfing.” Suggestions so far include “trolling” (found out it has a Net meaning already, a derogatory one), “waltzing,” “meandering,” “strolling,” “courting” (my favorite so far) and even “geoducking” (please!). Got anything better? Lemme know.