1/88 ArtsFocus Misc.

How Do You Mend A Broken Hart?

Time to ring in the new year with style with Misc., the current-events column that spent the leap second between ’87 and ’88 wisely and productively and hopes you did too.

XMAS ’87: America’s top selling toys were the Seattle-invented Pictionary board game and the Redmond-distributed Nintendo video game. A sports-merchandise distributor reported the Seahawks were selling more T-shirts, mugs, etc. nationally than any other NFL team (at least before the Kansas City game). Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas Celebration was the first prime-time network TV show to be entirely produced (not just location-filmed) in the Northwest. Still, despite this fine news I can’t help but sigh that the holiday season just hasn’t been the same since Ronco folded.

FAREWELL: We must say good-bye to many things this month: B.F. Goodrich tires, G.O. Guy drug stores, Peoples and Old National banks, and perhaps most poignantly Vespa scooters. The Italian manufacturer had closed its US distribution network in the late ’70s, just before a new generation of American riders discovered scooting (with old or specially-imported Vespas the choice of the two-wheeled elite). With a possible revival irrevocably lost, Vespas will now no longer be sold anywhere in the world.

CONSTRUCTS: The legendary Wm. Penn apartments may be reopened, the Sonics will have a privately-owned but publicly-subsidized arena (if we’re lucky, maybe it’ll have decent concert acoustics for once), and the legendary Turf restaurant is moving into an ex-Burger King space. McDonald’s, alas, has moved into the ferry terminal restaurant space; I fondly recall long evenings in the old Bruccio’s bar there, watching the traffic on the docks via two black-and-white TV monitors. Meanwhile, the UW wants to clear out all the marinas and other funky buildings along Portage Bay, south of its campus, for some imposing structures only a grant-giver could love. Rumors put the Last Exit coffeehouse, also on U-owned land, at risk as well.

MORE CONSTRUCTS: If you think Seattle’s got it screwed, just peek at my old hometown of Marysville. Nearly the entire downtown business district, save for a couple of holdout merchants, has been razed for a Lamonts/Albertsons strip development. The surrounding countryside’s now strewn with fancy mobile homes and cheap regular homes (the only visible difference is that the regular homes have garages).

ART: The existence of the recent punk photo exhibit at the Frye Art Museum, alongside the still lifes and landscapes, proved punk is now just another human-interest oddity. In America, most every serious challenge to the social order is either commercialized into irrelevance, fossilized by its own emerging orthodoxy, or ignored into oblivion. The first of these happened to punk dress, the second to punk attitudes, and the third to punk music. Besides, what’s the point of acting rude as an anti-Establishment act when it’s now standard behavior for more and more leaders in business and government? (For what’s coming and going this year, see our attached lists.)

LOCAL PUBLICATIONS OF THE MONTH: Arcade, the magazine of Northwest architecture and design, has a special issue on Portland’s new architecture. Once again, it seems that Rip City may have fewer people and less money than the Queen City, but much more taste…. The casual browser might dismissThe Ballad of Beep Burlap as just another self-published collection of homespun corn, but cartoonist Ron Udy’s got some sly social commentary hidden within a deceptively simple premise.

JUSTICE: A 77-year-old Florida man, convicted in the mercy killing of his Alzheimer’s-ridden rife, was ordered to watch It’s A Wonderful Life to learn that life was always worth living. The Constitution-anniversary year thus ends with a clear example of cruel and unusual punishment.

CULTURE WARS: That tireless champion of the Bellevueization of Seattle, city attorney Doug Jewett, is out to eliminate a major contributor to public ugliness — no, not Martin Selig or Harbor Properties, but the struggling local musicians and theater groups who put up street posters. Art Chantry’s book Instant Litter (recently excerpted in a national book on rock posters) proved that poster art, by bringing new ideas by “outsider” artists to the public, can raise the visual literacy of a city. This has helped lead Settle to national leadership in graphic design. Local designers are working for corporate clients throughout the world; the success of our teen-fashion companies is firmly based in their bold “street” graphics. A vibrant cacophony of posters helps bring a truly cosmopolitan air to a city, something the makers of sterile towers hate almost as much as they hate housing advocates. If all the city wants is to reduce wear and tear on light poles, it should coordinate a kiosk-building program, with lumber companies donating surplus wood and merchants donating wages for young workers.

CATHODE CORNER: KSTW may have the lowest news ratings of any TV station in town, but it has the best reporters’ names. The monikers of Dave Torchia, Cal Glomstead, Terri Gedde and Didgie Blaine-Rozgay are often more interesting than the stories they announce. The same station showed a great sense of irony playing Under the Volcano on the hangover-strewn night of Jan. 1.

SHOWBIZ UPDATE: I’m so glad Sean & Madonna may be making up, just so the gossip columns won’t be filled with Bruce Willis & Demi Moore. Just thinking of their marriage reminds me of an evening I spent in a multiplex theater next door to About Last Night, hearing Moore’s moaning orgasm through the wall and wanting to yell at her to go to sleep already…. In the new Heart video, all shots of Ann Wilson are filmed in wide-screen then “squeezed” to disguise her real width. It’s a sad piece of denial, far more disfiguring than an honest portrayal of her true self would be.

CLOSE: ‘Til February, resolve to see The Garden of Earthly Delights at the Rep, avoid that nasty flu bug going around, work for peace, and join us again next time.

INS AND OUTS FOR ’88

12/87 ArtsFocus Misc.
Cheer Our UW in the
Mediocre-Team-From-Big-TV-Market Bowl

INTRO: Welcome to a special condensed version of Misc., the column that hated yuppies long before USA Today said it was in to hate them. Yes, it’s now officially OK to say there must be something more to life than greed, smugness, defiant immaturity, emphatic bad taste, and all those other model behaviors modern society’s been encouraging us to aspire to. More on this as we go along.

FASHION: Don’t let your friends think you foolishly paid $30 for that new shirt or top (especially if you did). A common office paper punch will turn you from a fashion victim to a wise consumer by adding that “cut-out look” seen in the best clearance stores…. Themini-skirt look, spawned by designers determined to rip-off teen street fashion into a product for older (richer) women, shows a generation finally coming of age in terms of attention from the marketing culture, the dreaded Yups finally getting their comeuppance. O how great this spring will be, with all these self-proclaimed “grownup children” embarrassingly walking around trying to look like real kids.

UPDATES: Have heard the PiL song “Seattle” a few more times and like it much more…. I said The Bon would never revert back to “Bon Marche” (meaning “cheap” in modern French) under its new French-Canadian owner. It is. It’s also replacing Seattle’s last bargain basement with a floor of gaudy boutiques as part of a massive remodel, set to be done by the 1990 centennial of its first store at 1st and Cedar — a building slated to be razed for Yup apartments.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Tunnel Times is Metro’s weekly newsletter of tunnel-construction progress, tunnel trivia and advance word of the next street closures. Free at the tunnel info stands outside the Courthouse and Frederick’s. Note that I used no puns about “underground newspapers.”… Emmett Watson’s Lesser Seattle Calendar goes beyond the one-joke concept of Watson’s old anti-tourist columns into a nifty little collection of Seattle history and folklore, ranking alongside the works of Murray Morgan and Paul Dorpat in helping establish a common mythology for this, the world’s youngest real city. Only complaint: he doesn’t go far enough in his barbs against developers, now that some of their most diabolical plots are coming true. (The calendar exists because Watson, as a Times freelance contributor, isn’t prey to the paper’s rule against outside work by its regular staffers.)

ECOLOGY: Puget Sound Bank’s promising to donate part of each bank machine fee toward “cleaning up Puget Sound.” The ads don’t say that the money’s really all going to a documentary film about the Sound — a film in which the bank’s bound to get a big plug.

CRIME: At press time it’s too early to tell who set fire to the Strand Belltown Cafe, but activist Bob Willmott has made a lot of enemies, some in very high places. Alternately, could there be any connection with the officially non-arson fire at the Trade Winds?… Kudos to Bill’s Off Broadway restaurant, set to reopen 7 months after a robbery-fire.

ART is certainly not the object of the anonymous (natch) buyer of the Van Gogh for $53 million — many times more than Van Gogh made in his life, even more than it cost to make Ishtar. It’s the ultimate example of the “big boy’s toy” syndrome that’s turned conspicuous consumption into a mass neurosis. In a saner world, at least a portion of any art sale over $10,000 would go into a trust fund for living artists.

MUSIC: CBS sold Columbia Records, the world’s oldest and largest label (founded on patent licenses granted by Edison himself) to Sony. Michael Jackson will not honor his new bosses by having plastic surgery on his eyebrows…. Bono Vox, caught spray-painting on a Frisco fountain, might have had to do public-service work cleaning city buses. If U2 had played here, where they’re saving water by keeping buses dirty, he’d have gotten off.

CLOSE: While you put down your deposit on a home in Japan’s proposed new underwater city, be sure to use John Stamets’sGravity 1, U.W. 0 for all your Xmas cards, read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (now at the U Book Store remainder tables), and join us again in the year of piano keys and Oldsmobiles for our second annual alternative Ins/Outs list (send your suggestions in early).

11/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

To comply with the water shortage, your favorite column, Misc., has made its wit even drier this month.

Earlier this year, I predicted a ’70s revival. While wide ties, brown polyester and dope jokes aren’t back, we have seen the return of some of the decade’s worst musical acts (Boston, Fleetwood Mac), plus video games, environmental activism, whale-mania, and economic stag-flation. And with water supplies so low, electricity cutbacks can’t be far off.

One great thing from the ’70s we’re losing is the classic Starbucks Coffee mermaid. The chain’s new logo, previewed in flyers for its first out-of-state store (in Chicago), not only covers up the mermaid’s bust but makes her look like the “international-style” symbol of some Swiss bank or Danish tractor company.

Meanwhile, that late-’70s relic John Lydon and his latest incarnation of Public Image Ltd. have a very slick song called “Seattle,” full of lines about barricades and how “What goes up/Must come down/On unfamiliar/Playing ground.” The video, full of shots of fish and construction cranes, was all shot in London; I’ve played it 10 times and still can’t fully discern what inspired Lydon about Seattle, which he last visited two PiL lineups ago. Still, no local angle can hide the fact that Lydon, who’s now as old as the hippies were when he was slagging them as a Sex Pistol, is becoming the sort of rock dinosaur he’d denounced.

The prospects for the ’70s revival, however, may be dimmed by another decade seemingly anxious to come back — the ’30s. We’ve already got homeless legions and a plunging stock market; now comes a new twist on that nutty ’30s sport of flagpole sitting. Actor William Weir plans to continue living in a tiny room built onto a Millstone Coffee billboard at 45th and Roosevelt until Nov. 12, for a total of 32 days. “I feel like a Woodland Park Zoo exhibit,” he told the UW Daily. A Northwest Harvest collection truck is parked under the billboard…. In other ads, Alaska Airlines had two Gold Lion awards in the Cannes Goods commercials festival recently seen at the Neptune…. Joanne Woodward’s appearing, but not speaking, in Audi ads. Here’s what she might say: “My husband Paul puts his life on the line when he gets in his race car. Now I can experience that same thrill every day.”

The most telling moment at The Transit Project performance piece came at the end. I stayed at the start-finish bus stop, waiting for a real bus to take me home. The rest of the audience all left by car. For all I know, perhaps nobody at any of the performances had ever ridden a Metro bus before. They’re missing a lot of real-life drama, much more interesting than the Yuppie angst of The Transit Project, though not as well choreographed.

Local publication of the month: An anonymous flyer posted on light poles around town. For a title, it has a graphic symbol that looks like computer-punchcard lettering in Arabic. #6 has an essay on “The Freedom to Give Away Freedom,” a chart comparing gorilla and human cranial cavities, an Einstein quote, four brief poems, drawings of goddesses and half a dozen other items — all on one legal-size page.

Pioneer Square’s bicycle police unit’s gained major press attention lately. Nobody’s mentioned that Seattle didn’t have the idea first. On an early Letterman show, Harry Shearer did a skit showing still photos he claimed were from a pilot for a bicycle-cop TV show. Shearer on his bike was shown aiming a gun at some bad guys, “but of course we can’t shoot them because we’d fall off the bikes from the recoil.”

An independent convenience store in town recently displayed a life-size cardboard stand-up display of a slickly made-up woman in a low-cut evening gown. Anyone with real taste, she asserts, will treat her to a bottle of Thunderbird — one of the horrible fortified wines the county may soon ban. The idea that any Thunderbird drinker could still have enough self-control left to accurately put on eyebrow pencil is just its most obvious improbability.

Imagine the gall of the developers who announced a 150-acre theme park (similar to California’s Knott’s Berry Farm) to be built near LaConner, perhaps the only place in the state besides Port Townsend where a promoter of such a thing’s likely to get thrown into an acid-filled hot tub.

Philm Phun: William Arnold said the Union St. locations used for House of Games should be declared an historic landmark. He’s a bit late; the buildings are all slated for demolition or fatal remodeling…. Have you ever met anybody in Seattle who talks like the people inA Year in the Life?…. Vital film series to attend include Kenneth Anger’s Magick Lantern at SAM, A (Samuel) Fuller Frenzy at the Phinney Neighborhood Center, and 911’s Open Screening of local films and videos the second Monday night of each month at the New City Theater.

As you ponder the mixed messages of the Honda Spree scooter seen on Queen Anne with a “no-55” sticker (it can’t go faster than 30), be sure to watch Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures Sat. morns (the first consistently good thing Ralph Bakshi’s ever made), see The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle at the Seattle Children’s Theater, don’t buy cheap stocks just because the certificates make elegant wallpaper, and return here next time.

7/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

Time again for Misc., the column that didn’t enter the contest to replace Ann Landers, co-won by a Wall St. Journal writer who entered just to do a story about it. Of course, the Chicago Sun-Times might not appreciate the sort of advice we’d give: “Protect yourselves, but go for it. You’re both only going to be 17 once, you know.”

It’s summer, and Seattle is like a bombed-out ruin as the tunnel goes down and all the towers go up. It’s great! Central downtown has finally become a place of excitement and activity. The Westlake Mall controversy has brought public activism back into city planning (the ’70s live again!). And the best part is Pine St. at the Roosevelt Hotel, reopened just in time to give a great view of the biggest current street hole. For future scholars, the old mid-downtown wasn’t a great place. A few islands of human energy (the 211 Club, the Turf Restaurant) were isolated among block after block of dull 5- to 10-story brick buildings, whose only character came as they were allowed to deteriorate before they were torn down. The cheap new buildings will age much faster. Since they’re so “contemporary” in design, they’ll also look really odd to future generations.

On May 1, Frederick & Nelson ran full-page ads with a special offer to new charge customers: charge $50 or more during May, June, July or August and get a $25 credit. The ad didn’t say the store didn’t mean the real months but its in-house billing cycles. Depending on the first letter of your last name, that could end as soon as the first week. Many customers were surprised to get undiscounted $49 bills in mid-May. Adjustments have been promised but, as of this writing, have not all been delivered.

TROUBLE AT THE MALLS: Southcenter’s new owners promptly, sharply raised rents, a move seen by some as a ploy to drive out the last local, independent stores…. University Village kicked out the troubled, formerly-locally-owned Pay n’ Save chain after getting a better offer from the thriving, still-local Bartell Drug. Mall mgmt. then wouldn’t let Pn’S move into part of sister-chain Lamonts’ space, causing legal disputes that may be resolved when you read this. The new Bartell’s, meanwhile, is several times larger than any of their other stores. From its look, they seem perplexed on now to fill all that space.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: The Space Needle chocolate bar on a stick. It’s made by an entrepreneur in Bozeman, Mont., under the name Space Needle Phantasies. His number’s on the wrapper, in case you’d like to share Space Needle obsessions. At Ruby Montana’s, near 1st on Cherry — one of this column’s all-time fave stores.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The 100th Boyfriend, one of the rare “women’s books” that treats men as human beings with complex emotions, not mere plot devices. Its vignettes (all purported as true to compilers Janet Skeels and Bridget Daly) are being excerpted in at least two national magazines.

No “rap riot” occurred at the Run DMC/Beastie Boys concerts, in a major disappointment to cops, KOMO-TV and other reactionary forces. The youth of Seattle have proven themselves unworthy of the disrespect they’ve gotten. The city should apologize for this bad rap by repealing the teen-dance prohibition law NOW…. Meanwhile, what extremely popular Black performer, with no earlier ties to this city, is building a digital recording studio in Seattle?

(latter-day note: I forget who this was supposed to have been about.)

In world news, the guy who flew his private plane into Moscow’s Red Square may get off lighter than the guy who parachuted into New York’s Shea Stadium…. A clue to the Korean crisis may be found in a recent Sharper Image Catalog, boasting of great values to US consumers made possible by Korea’s near-slave wages.

Bantam Books is promoting the paperback release of His Way, Kitty Kelly’s shattering Sinatra bio, with a Sinatra CD giveaway. Hear the songs of love, read the stories of backbiting and sleaze, all in the comfort of your own home.

PHILM PHUN: The Witches of Eastwick contains a major plot flaw: Real witches don’t worship Satan. To believe in the Devil, you have to believe in the Christian God first. Witchcraft is a tradition completely separate from (and older than) Christianity…. Variety sez sex is the hottest marketing ploy in independent films, proving not only that America has respectfully declined the “new Puritanism,” but that highly personal subjects are best handled outside the Hollywood bureaucracy….

NEW CARTOONS to anticipate include a Garbage Pail Kids TV show and The Brave Little Toaster, a feature about kitchen appliances on a quest to find their missing owner.

The Harry and the Hendersons crew discovered the new Pacific Northwest Studio isn’t soundproof. Important takes were ruined by freight trains on the Fremont spur track or even rain on the ex-warehouse’s roof.

Nice to hear Bill Reid back on KJET, but won’t they ever trash or fix that tape system so we actually hear the same songs the DJs introduce?…

Other congrats from this corner to UW grad and ex-colleague Mike Lukovich, a Pulitzer Prize runner-up for his New Orleans Times-Picayune editorial cartoons.

CATHODE CORNER: Lifetime now has Our Group, a daily, fictional group therapy session with a real shrink and actors as patients. It’s almost as entertaining as the cable channel’s “medical-ed” shows for doctors with slick prescription-drug ads…. As the Telephone Auction Shopping Program deservedly goes under, another firm is staring Love and Shopping, a soap opera/shopping combo with characters shown using products that are then offered to viewers. It’s a change from the traditional soap universe, where characters put away groceries with white tape stuck all over the brand names…. Using John Lennon music to sell sneakers is no worse than Gershwin for Toyota or Sondheim for stuffing mix.

Cabaret chanteuse Julie Cascioppo is back from NYC gigs with the Mark Morris dancers. “Tommy Tune said I was wonderful, and Mikhail Barishnikov asked me to hold court with him; it was great,” says the world-traveling vegetarian from a family of Ballard butchers. Her shows (ranging from romantic standards to “The Woody Woodpecker Song”) continue Wednesdays at the Pink Door in the Pike Place Market.

Finally, Maxwell House wants people to write songs about their hometowns to the tune of their current jingle. Winners from Seattle and other participating cities will compete in LA for big prizes. “It’s the way we burn up restaurants / It’s the way we tear up Pine / It’s the clocks at 4th and Pike / Telling you three different times.” No, don’t think we’ll enter this one either.

‘Til September, be cool, avoid the flu goin’ around, see Greeks at the Pioneer Square Theater, don’t pay $21 to see Madonna at the Dome, and live for love. Toodeloo.

4/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

Greetings, pop-culture followers, to the 10th edition of Misc., the column that knows how to solve two of the city’s architectural dilemmas in one bold stroke: Simply move the twisted remains of the Husky Stadium project to Westlake Mall. Instead of yet another unfillable office/retail complex, we’ll have the world’s largest piece of found art at our core. It’ll be a beautiful, shimmering amalgam of bent steel, creating a fascinating pattern of lights and shadows throughout the day. With the proper supports, it can become a popular spot for climbing, eating lunch, watching musicians and performance artists, and (in the more obscure alcoves) developing new romances. Alternatively, the wreckage could go atop the Convention Center, in place of the planned rose garden dropped several budget cuts ago.

JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Sourdough Chips. Each tiny piece contains a powerful dose of flavors and seasonings, nearly enough to produce a profound centering experience. Habit forming; not for the wheat-sensitive.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Reflex, from the 911 Contemporary Arts Center (now desperately needing a new space). At last: A paper that treats the Seattle visual-art scene as worthy of serious criticism. By resoundingly eschewing the “It’s Not New York So Who Cares” attitude toward Seattle artists, it challenges artists and the art bureaucracy, leaving no excuse for mediocrity. Issue 2 has a long, good piece on the new Seattle Art Museum (the dawn of a new artistic consciousness or the same old snuff bottles in tourist trappings?) and a pack-page collage by one of this column’s favorite illustrators, who signs her work only with a logo of a triangle with a line through it. (She’s not related to the local band whose printed name was two diamonds with wings and whose spoken name was a growling scream.)

You already know I usually hate pro wrestling, but Britain’s The Face has a great section on Japan this month, highlighted by pix of top female wrestlers Dump Matsumoto and Bull Nakano, in punk kneepads and punk/samurai/KISS makeup, engaged in a typical real bodyslam, having finished their pre-match set of pop songs. The audience is mainly teenage girls; this is the refreshing overdue reaction of a generation raised on Hello Kitty kitsch. (In the same issue: an account of the Sankai Juku tragedy in Seattle.)

In other violent mythological spectacles, the end of the annual Ring Cycle could be a great blessing for local performing arts. Now we can put some of that money and effort into something fresher, something with more contemporary relevance than an interminable succession of tired ol’ proto-Fascist imageries. (The Ring was begun here as the centerpiece of a scheme to move the Seattle Opera out to Federal Way, something we can all be glad didn’t happen.)

Anyhow, there’s a second Richard Wagner leaving Seattle. This Wagner, he of the Anglicized pronunciation, opened the CBS NewsSeattle bureau less than two years ago. Now the network’s closing the bureau, as part of massive cutbacks orchestrated as an excuse for union busting, and Wagner has been reassigned overseas. Ex-KING anchor Bob Faw, meanwhile, is more prominent than ever at CBS as a national affairs reporter.

CATHODE CORNER: Could anyone have imagined the Beach Boys special with Brian Wilson, everybody’s favorite obese burnout case, resurfacing as slim, energetic and even cheekboned? It’s as if he totally regenerated, a la Doctor Who….

The “news” segments on the UHF Fundamentalist channel are really just more evangelism, with Reagan portrayed as God and the “liberal media” (even the aforementioned CBS) as Satan. The political agenda of Fundamentalism, to foster fear and mindless loyalty, is nowhere else as nakedly shown.

The local Sanctuary movement might be helped by a Supreme Court ruling making it far easier for candidates for asylum to prove they can’t safely return to their homelands. Ironically, it was a Nicaraguan’s case which may help the refugees of “friendly” genocidal governments.

Five members of the Jazz Section, a Czech underground music society, have been convicted of cultural treason for performing unauthorized types of music. It can’t happen here, though perhaps the politicians fighting Michael Spafford’s state Capitol mural and trying to keep all under-21 Seattlelites with no live entertainment would like it to happen here.

Merger mania, totally manufactured by Federal “regulators,” marches on. Now we must say goodbye to American Motors, the last little guys in the car biz and the inspiration to people in many other fields struggling to stay independent. Maybe if they’d brought back the Nash Metropolitan….

Kudos from here to KCMU, the volunteer-run new music station, on its powerful new 90.3 signal. Now people from Duvall to Bainbridge Island can get Ground Zero Radio — or at least hear it….

Further congrats to the Center on Contemporary Arts. Just as its ’87 season was starting (with the California Natural Foods gazebo on First Ave.), it found a new office space in the building where Trouble in Mind was filmed. May COCA keep troubling area minds for many years to come.

One side effect of the film Platoon’s success is in sportswear. Last year, area designers tooled up for the War-Is-Fun Look, inspired by the success of Rambo and Top Gun. Now that the candy-colored camouflage has arrived from the Asian factories, the attitudes that were supposed to have made it a hit have changed. Look for it all at your local close-out store real soon.

‘Til next month, remember this quote from A.M. Maslow: “A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting.” Ta ta.

3/87 ArtsFocus Misc.

Hi again, pop-culture fans, and welcome to Misc., the only column that ate at the Silver King, drank at the Trade Winds, and lived to tell the tale.

The building that until recently housed the Lesbian Resource Center and Seattle Women’s Gym is about to become a bridal shop. This trivium is offered merely for the sake of irony, and is not in any way to be considered an encouragement of the new homophobia. (Ever notice how many of the mass media only talk about AIDS when straights get it, or how the new soft-focus-scare condom ads never mention the existence of gays?)

In business news, B. Freshman’s in Wallingford, the noble experiment in drawing the hypertasteful Nouveau Riche to mark prices on groceries with great pencils inside a cramped basement, somehow failed. (More closures in our handy sidebar.)

In new business activity, Razz-Ma-Tazz on Denny offers all the essential elements of a topless bar without toplessness or a bar. For a small fee, you can enter a room with flashing lights and blaring Bon Jovi where legally-dressed young women will smile, touch your shoulder and request additional fees for a soft drink, a conversation or a 2-minute “table dance.”… Could that ’80s nostalgia landmark, the Showbox Theater, really be slated for conversion into a movie multiplex?

(latter-day note: Razz-Ma-Tazz went topless and is now all-nude, at least on stage; its table dances are still less explicit than those described in police reports about suburban strip clubs. And the Showbox became a comedy club with an ugly interior remodel.)

CATHODE CORNER: Continuing our theme of antisexploitation, KSTW is following the lead of the USA Network in running cheap sex comedies with the sex scenes all cut out. What’s left makes less sense than the Spanish channel makes if you don’t know Spanish….

Hope you didn’t watch Amerika. Remember: The networks don’t care if you love or hate a show, as long as you keep watching. The only effective protest is to turn it off….

The most fascinating show on the Discovery Channel’s week of Soviet TV was Serious and In Jest. Segments on the value of satire in increasing industrial productivity were intercut with film of degrading police interrogations of vodka scalpers and a melodramatic sketch in which a boy suffers a total breakdown after learning his parents met while dealing in the black market….

The CBC this month is presenting not only the curling championships but also the return of Seeing Things, the offbeat mystery show about a clairvoyant crime reporter. It can descend into corn, but at its best blows the slick US crime shows out of the water.

Now that Bob Barker has successfully used the Miss USA pageant to campaign against furs, maybe he’ll now talk about the way humans are treated in the countries where he MCs Miss USA’s parent show, Miss Universe. I don’t remember him commenting when Imelda Marcos raided the Philippines’ public-housing budget to build an auditorium in Manila, which opened by hosting that year’s Miss Universe show. (By the way, the introduction of computerized scoring to Miss USA may encourage those who criticize pageants for the wrong reasons. A pageant queen is not the idealized lover but the idealized daughter. The spectacle does not objectify the start of the breeding cycle but its final result.)

I keep telling people computers can be our friends. Now it turns out that a White House mainframe, which preserved even “erased” files, may become the best witness to the Iran-Contra scheme and a whole network of other potentially illegal acts organized under the doublespeak moniker “Project Democracy.” As the nation takes what John Chancellor has called a “trip down memory lane,” the Reagan Discs may prove more useful in uncovering abuses of power than the Nixon Tapes.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: The Amazing Adventures of Mighty Mole, a comic book distributed to elementary schools by Metro. Our tunnel-digging hero exclaims that the downtown bus tunnel is “a totally rad concept,” excavating equipment is “totally awesome,” and that “digging a tunnel is really exciting work.” And I always thought it was boring. (For our slower readers, that was a pun.) (For our early readers, more local publications will be featured at the Underground Press Convention, Feb. 28 here at Lincoln Arts.)

The Globe Radio Theater production of Gogol’s Dead Souls, produced in Seattle by Jean Sherrard and John Siscoe, will soon be available on cassettes for repeated nuance-hunting. KPLU has aired the mini-series right after Bob and Ray Sunday evenings, for a whole hour of consciousness-bending, low-key humor. With great intellectual entertainment like this on public radio, who’ll miss Garrison Keillor (who ran out of ideas three years ago anyway)?

DUMB AD OF THE MONTH (in the P-I): “If it’s true that automatic transmissions are capable of unintended acceleration, then all cars with automatic are suspect. Audi is the only manufacturer to date who has addressed the problem to protect their owners.” A local dealer thus attempted to depict as the leader in responsibility a manufacturer who refused to do anything about the problem until it could not hide from the evidence any more….

Several more respectable cars are on display in a great new book, I’ll Buy That: 50 Big Deals and Small Wonders. It’s published by Consumer Reports as a 50th-anniversary celebration, and covers 50 major contributions to American life, including not just consumer products (the Mustang, the Beetle, the minivan, detergents, frozen foods), but such other innovations as the Salk vaccine, the birth control pill, the credit card and the suburban housing tract.

EARLY WARNING: With spring coming soon, the New City Theater Directors’ Festival is also coming soon, and then the Seattle International Film Festival. Only a few weeks of winter remain in which to stare at your Video Aquarium tape from the How-To-Do-Anything Store. ‘Til then, let’s return to Soviet TV for this closing thought, from its equivalent to CBS’s Morning Program: “If we entertained you, made you smile, and did not make you late for work, then our job here has been a successful one.”

DOWNTOWN BUSINESS WHICH HAVE CLOSED

SINCE THE START OF CURRENT CONSTRUCTION JOBS

Seattle Design

Kentucky Fried Chicken

Florsheim

Weisfield’s

Town Theater

Music Box Theater

Golden Crown

Bernie’s

TJ’s Men’s Wear

The Frankfurter

J.K. Gill

Pipelane Ltd.

ABC Corral Western Wear

Walden Books

Leed’s Shoes

Lindy Shoes

Copper Kitchen

J. Spencer Books

11/86 ArtsFocus Misc.

Welcome again to Misc., the regional pop-culture column with the same non-aspirin pain reliever as the prescription brand Motrin.

The astounding playoff and World Series performances by ex-Mariners Dave Henderson and Spike Owen, now in Boston, prove there really has been some Big League Stuff in the Kingdome, if not in the team owner’s box.

Twenty-four percent of the Forbes 400 richest Americans got their fortunes in entertainment or publishing. You’ll notice the name printed at the top of this column was not on that list.

The long nightmare is over: Expo 86 closed. Even with almost as many visitors as there are Canadians, the thing still lost hundreds of millions of dollars (Canadian dollars, but it’s still a lot). The deficit will be paid from BC lottery revenues which normally support charities.

Speaking of what BC politicians call “megaprojects,” seen (or better yet driven under) the Convention Center yet? That thing’s a monster! It’s already totally out of scale with the surrounding First Hill neighborhood, just a few months into its four-year construction cycle. It’s fun looking now as a Paul Bunyan-sized Erector set, but once it gets walls it’ll be a horrible monolith — at least until the graffiti artists get to it, we can only hope.

HUGE STOREWIDE SALE DEPT.: Frederick & Nelson is now under local management and I’m sure they’ll do well, particularly if they follow these few suggestions: bring back the fabric and pet departments, the lending library, the Men’s Grill, and especially the Paul Bunyan Room. The big Paul & Babe mural and the serpentine counter may need to be rebuilt from scratch, but it’ll be worth it….

The Bon may be bought by a Canadian company. If it happens, don’t expect the name to ever revert to The Bon Marche. The original name, borrowed from a Paris store, originally means “good buy,” but in colloquial French has come to mean “cheap” in the demeaning sense — not the best image to promote to the French-literate Canadians who drive to Seattle to shop….

The Heart of Pay n’ Save, that great section with discount imported trinkets of all sizes, colors and uses, has been dropped by that chain’s new out-of-state owners. They concluded shoppers here aren’t as bargain-driven as elsewhere. Much of the “Heart” merchandise will remain in the stores — but at higher prices….

Three of the U District’s best stores and one of Broadway’s have been replaced this year by candy-colored sweatshirt stands. Can the horror be stopped before it devours us all?

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Market Tab. This photocopied sheet contains gossip, items of interest around town and pithy comments, much like another writing product I know of.

LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Cheese sticks at the Gourmet Thrift Shop. Each fresh batch is made with a food processor full of real cheeses. Like everything at the quaint little shop in the old Rubato Record space on Broadway, it’s amazingly good and amazingly cheap. Now if they’d only stop playing that same Steely Dan tape over and over….

In other junk food news, the Dr Pepper Co. just bought the 7 Up Co. Upon hearing the news, I used a can of each product and one drinking glass to determine just how well the companies will merge. Results: a definite clash of corporate cultures.

FILM CLIPS: Jumpin’ Jack Flash isn’t a big hit; audiences are comparing Penny Marshall unfavorably to the three other directors in her immediate family. I still may see it, ‘cuz Whoopi Goldberg’s bank-telecommunications job in it is the same job I used to have. Never got involved w/any spies or killers like she does, ‘tho….

Children of a Lesser God raises some interesting questions. Will Hollywood ever find another starring role for hearing-impaired star Marlee Matlin? And the special subtitled screenings for the hearing impaired are nice, but why don’t studios make similar prints for other domestic films? Deaf people are interested in other things than just deafness, ya know.

Foreign films come with subtitles, of course, like the ones shown by The Cinematheque, which I associate-direct, at the University Cinemas on 55th and U Way. This month a new Cinematheque series begins weekends at noon, with (non-subtitled) horror, cult, comedy and other specialty films. Like the foreign films, these are for the viewer who wants an active, adventuresome film experience.

EARLY WARNING: A local theater company is planning a musical based on a certain very popular cartoon property. High-level rights negotiations are underway between the theater’s fearless leaders and a Mr. Big in LA.

Industrial art takes on a new meaning as construction begins on 6th Ave. S. for a new office-warehouse for the Frye Art Museum. How the Industrial District’s loft photographers, painters and video artists will react to the pastoral oils and watercolors moving in is anyone’s guess.

We all know the local literary scene generally won’t accept anything too far removed from free-verse nature poetry, the written equivalent of a Frye painting. Other writers give me flack for not hating technology (writing this on Lincoln Arts’ word processor instead of in longhand, watching TV). Our local Luddite authors, however, have a ways to catch up to the reactionary behavior of a Chicago group, Writers Without Phones.

There’s one piece of electronics I do despise: The compact disc. They don’t give you big cover art or colorful labels. You can’t make a scratch mix with them. They sound sterile, flat, too clean for any of the music that made this country great: Hot jazz, swing, bebop, bluegrass, gospel, folk, blues, R&B, country, and their mongrel child rock n’ roll. What’s worse is that the record biz is realigning itself to favor the high-priced spread. Already Motown has dropped 82 oldies albums, which henceforth will be sold only on CD. Those records, like most good non-classical music made since 1950, owe their original existence to the low cost and mass market created by cheap vinyl discs. If CDs take over, all you’ll get is slick, bland product (like the current Motown roster). CDs suck real big.

CATHODE CORNER: Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the undisputed Best Show on TV this year, is now on at 9 a.m. Saturdays, despite what the papers say. Don’t miss it, or the rest of the day people will scream when you inadvertently say the Secret Word and you won’t know why.

Maybe I’ll see you at the next Ballard Market Singles Night. If not, keep stroking your miniature replicas of Waiting for the Interurban until next month. We’re in touch, so you keep in touch.

6/86 ArtsFocus Misc.

(the first Misc. ever)

This “At Large” column will mainly discuss things that don’t fit into the other ArtsFocus departments, but which are still a part of the culture in which we live. All opinions are my own, not necessarily those of the Lincoln Arts Association or its affiliated artists, supporters or advertisers. This column does not settle wagers.

I keep expecting one of the student DJs on KCMU or KNHC to mispronounce the name of the current Bathhouse Theater production as “A Day in the Life of Vic and Shar-day.” Hasn’t happened yet, though.

LOCAL SMALL PRESS PUBLICATION OF THE MONTH: Manzine, from Tom Grothus’s Function Industries Press. If you’ve ever seen the droll humor of Function’s little cartoon books (Errata, Land of the Cynical Dog-Men), you’ll enjoy this tiny collection of comics and stories. Available at Art In Form in Belltown, 2nd Story in Wallingford and other better book outlets.

LOCAL JUNK FOOD OF THE MONTH: Vernell’s Gummy Transformers. Not only can you make them do robot aerobics by twisting them around (they never snap apart), but the very concept of violent Japanese robot toys depicted as colorful, chewy candies made in Bellevue contains almost Zen-like ironies.

Until further notice, the worst comic strip in the newspapers is Boomer’s Song. David Horsey, the P-I editorial cartoonist (now on sabbatical in Britain) and progressive Christian, obviously feels offended by ex-radicals now engaged in airheaded materialism. Unfortunately, Horsey’s contempt for his characters is too heavy-handed, his gags more bludgeoning with an unfunny punchline lettered in boldface italic with an exclamation point. While Horsey’s in Britain, he should get some lessons from Andy Capp cartoonist Reg Smythe in making unsympathetic characters appealing.

On the national scene, National Public Radio had a tribute to the late folk singer Phil Ochs a few Saturdays ago. It finally made this liberal understand what other people have against liberals. The show featured a number of Ochs’s fellow folkies. They all embodied, but didn’t discuss, the dilemma of how to love the Common Man and hate the Great Unwashed at the same time. One of them interrupted his off-key dirge to The People by remarking, “In the old days everyone would be singing along by now.” There was a lot about Us vs. Them, Them consisting of Ronald Reagan and Jerry Falwell. You can tell when a liberal has it all wrong when s/he pays too much attention to the paper tiger Falwell and not the real bigwigs in DC.

Elegant posters were up around town last month for “Elan 86, An Expression of Self-Assurance,” a fashion show by design students at Seattle Pacific University. Didn’t make it to the show, but the clothes on the poster were quite sharp. It’s nice to see a sense for good looks among the Free Methodists, operators of SPU and known as one of the most modesty-obsessed religions this side of the Mennonites. (SPU used to send recruiting brochures to high schools with a cover photo of the Phinney Ridge traffic sign pointing in opposite directions for Zoo and Seattle Pacific University. The comparison was intended, not just with big universities, but with other little religious schools.)

You certainly wouldn’t have seen any Free Methodists among the corps of tract-passers seen downtown recently. They held colorful red-and-white flags with a Gothic crest and were dressed like refugees from a Renaissance Faire. Their big two-page tract proclaimed that Halley’s Comet was a sign from the prophet Jacob, signalling the impending punishment of “tyrants and despotisms,” leading to the victory of the true believers. The whole thing is beautiful, with shocking pink headlines and 1940s-style graphic design. It even has small-print sheet music to a non-rhyming hymn: “Co-met comes to destroy / Kingdom of beasts and tyrants / Christ the Lord shall come soon / To build up Cosmic Republic.” I’m not passing judgment on the theology of this Grace of Jesus Christ Crusade, based in Taiwan; I just like their style.

The style of humor on KING-TV’s Almost Live has improved greatly in recent weeks due to a new crop of writer-actors, including former Off the Wall Players Andrea Stein and Joe Guppy. One of their ex-colleagues, Dale Goodson, has recently turned from comedy to music with the Dick Everson Trio; another, Mary Machala, was, at last report, part of the off-season staff at the Grand Canyon National Monument.

In other video events, Frito-Lay has a commercial in which the suave Tostitos man converses, through the miracle of film editing, with Addams Family stars John Astin, Carolyn Jones, Jackie Coogan and Ted Cassidy. The fact that all but Astin are no longer with us just adds to the macabre aura associated with their beloved characters. I’m sure the posthumous endorsements are approved by the actors’ heirs; Frito-Lay once got into big trouble with the W.C. Fields estate over the unauthorized use of a “W.C. Fritos” character.

The 17th University District Street Fair was almost identical to the 7th, the earliest one I saw. The rainbow candles, seascape prints, brown leather sandals and wooden duck toys were just as trite then as now. It’s hard to imagine merchandise like that ever having been fresh. Since the fair has always been tightly controlled by a screening committee employed by a Chamber of Commerce, I suspect it may have been this stale from the beginning, an attempt to tame the hippie spirit into a tourist attraction. It’s sad to see all these aging craftspeople who might have become innovative artists save for the need to please committees.

CLOSING THOUGHTS:

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.”– Albert Einstein

“The mediocre mind you encounter may be your own.” — Gilbert Hernandez