Welcome to a new ever-lovin' fun-filled year with Misc., the pop-culture
report that doesn't follow trends and doesn't really lead them either, but just
stays out of their way.
Philm Phun: After I saw Slacker, I stepped out of the theater and
into a whole scene of street bohemians. After I saw Prospero's Books on
11/28, I stepped out of the theater and into a sudden tempest. I don't think
I'm going to see The Rapture.... There appear to be two Addams
Family movies: the lousy one all the critics saw, and the delightful one I
saw. Maybe it's like the different versions of Clue. If any of you saw
the critics' edition, tell me what it was like.... This year's best-of list by
Rocket film guy Jim Emerson (who moved to LA some years back and
never bothers to check what's playing in Seattle) only lists 2 films (out of
14) that didn't show here, down significantly from previous years.
Cathode Corner: KING may be slowly recovering from tabloidmania. The 11
p.m. newscasts feature real news stories (sometimes more than one) alongside
the typical crime/disaster tedium. The station's next owner, the Providence
Journal, was one of the papers that didn't run the Doonesbury strips
about Quayle's possible past. It also enforced its syndicate contract to
prevent any other Rhode Island paper from running them... Almost Live
might go national next fall. Worldvision's offering a syndicated weeknight
version (with local jokes to be only partly toned down). It should give the
gang a better showcase than they got on Fox`s mercy-killed Haywire.
Box Full-O-Art: The Seattle Art Museum, on the outside, is a standard
low-rise box with a gaudy false facade; a perfect PoMo reincarnation of western
frontier architecture. All the papers had special sections for the opening, but
the best was in the Daily Journal of Commerce. It had headlines like
"Some subs [subcontractors] charge design was flawed" and "Complex, condensed,
SAM tough to build." It had "thank you Seattle" vanity ads from Acme Iron
Works, Mosler Security, Lone Star Concrete, Star Machinery Rentals, and the
Carpet Resource Center. It's more proof of how much easier it is to get
politicians to spend for the arts when it goes to campaign-contributing
contractors, instead of uncouth artists.
Mouths-O-Babes (two eight-year-olds on the bus, 12/11): "What's that up
there?" "It's a gas station." "No, that's a flower. Don't you know, flowers are
bee pee stations." The real BP has a kids' book promotion with G.
Burghoff saying it's important for children to read, so "you can become
anything you want to be." No -- it's important so America can regain a capable
workforce and keep our industries from being taken over by foreign companies
like BP.
No "Willie" Jokes: The Smith trial had too many weird parallels.
First, the grotesque attempt to brand the alleged victim as a slut (why do guys
who insist they're not rapists have lawyers with the mentality of rapists?) by
noting that she owned licensed Madonna clothes; CNN's electronic masking made
her look like Madonna's "Blank" character in Dick Tracy. The defendant's name
is too close to Willi Smith, NY fashion designer and Madonna pal who
died several years back. The media kept calling him Ted Kennedy's nephew but
seldom mentioned his lineage from one of the JFK sisters, the true forgotten
Kennedys.
Ad Slogan of the Month: "It's not your mother's tampon." I should hope
not...
Good Buy, Baseball!: So let's get together and buy the Mariners.
Granted, it's not as important as saving Frederick's, but it's still a good
cause. At $100 million, it'll only take 20 guys with $5m each, or 10,000 fans
with $10,000 second-mortgage loans. I'm reminded again of Jim Bouton's words at
the end of Ball Four, the book about Seattle's first attempt to keep a
team: "Any city that cares more about its museum than its ball park can't be
all bad."
Junk Food of the Month: A colorless Pepsi is being tested,
presumably to compete with Original New York Seltzer (really from Calif.)...
The Seeds of Change exhibit at the Smithsonian shows how the conquest of
the Western Hemisphere influenced diets of the world. You know about corn,
potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco and coffee, but you might not realize that a lot of
the slave trade was supported by the sugar industry, providing Europeans with a
sweet treat provided thanks to the subjugation of human life. It's appropriate
that Roald Dahl's Willie Wonka hired low-wage immigrants for his
chocolate factory, depicted in true colonial fashion as carefree, hard-working
semi-humans (albeit from an imaginary foreign land).
Xmas '91: Frederick's save-the-store campaign worked so well that for the
first time they ran out of Frangos. Whether that's a sign of confidence to the
store's bankers remains to be seen... Hasbro had a near-monopoly on toys
this season, having absorbed such greats as Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers,
Kenner, Selchow & Righter, Coleco, Playskool, and Tonka. Its only big
competition, besides video games, came from the Ninja Turtles. A giant segment
of Hasbro's product comes from Chinese sweatshops via its own Seattle
dock.
Local Publication of the Month (just one this time): Victoria artist Nick
Bantock's Griffin and Sabine, An Extraordinary Romance is a short story
in 19 original postcards (painting and collage on the fronts, mysterious
correspondence on the back. Think of it as a one-man mail art show in
hardcover.
None Dare Call It Schlock: Warner Bros. ads shout, "David Ansen of
Newsweek says JFK is `Impressive. It holds you by the edge of
your seat.'" Quite different from what the cover of the magazine says: "The
twisted truth of JFK: Why Oliver Stone's Movie Can't Be Trusted." But
the last word, as always, goes to Oliver ("Fuck me, rock god!") Stone: "I think
a president was illegally killed."
The Real NW: A further explanation is due of my assertion that the
Northwest is not Paradise. There's this whole mystique that gets more
exaggerated every year, more divorced from reality. One guy who got off the
plane from No. Cal. two months ago was talking about how Wash. voters "turned
conservative" in the last election. I tried to explain how we keep turning down
progressive tax plans and bottle bills, how the near-loss of the women's-choice
initiative was due more to opponents' well-funded lies than any deep
anti-choice sentiment, how we kept sending the build-more-bombs Scoop Jackson
to the Senate, how we're no more or less conservative than ever. It's just
getting harder to live up to this fantasy of Laidbackland, invented in the
early '70s by the hippie diaspora who redefined every place they moved
to according to late-hippie priorities. (Bon ad, 12/15: "Northwest Style: Laid
Back with Dockers.") The reality of pre-1970 Seattle (and its kids) is that our
"tolerance" was more like apathy. We're not mellow, we're cold and sullen. The
real spirit of the Northwest isn't in aPoulsbo bed-n'-breakfast, it's in the
acerbic Dog House waitresses and the bland Boeing corporate culture. (The
syndrome's worse in my birthplace of Oly, historically a town of
bourbon-guzzling lobbyists but rechristened as an even purer Laidbackland by
folks who think our State Reps are called "assemblymen.")
Bulldozers of the Spirit: The real political history of Wash. and the
non-Frisco west in general is a few crackpots, a few innovators, and a lot of
fiends. The ugliness of the American landscape matches the ugliness of American
politics, for a reason. The GOP is now controlled by the western land/resource
industries, who made strip mines and strip malls and and tract houses and
shrillily demand the right to destroy the few "real" spaces left.They built the
S&L biz to pump money into subdivisions and then, with Reagan's
deregulation, into all forms of swindles. George (in oil) and Neil (S&L's)
Bush are insiders in this gang. The religious right is a mere tool, callously
used by the moneybags to barter for votes and promote an authoritarian culture.
Charles Keating, who financed anti-porn drives with loot from S&L frauds,
was a pivot man in the scheme. The guys who made southern Calif. what it is
today have no qualms about what their hirelings Nixon and Reagan did to the
nation's social terrain.
Mixed Signals: A great NY Times story on 11/27 discussed lawsuits
and death threats among the heirs of the inventor of the "rabbit ears" TV
antenna (and lesser ideas like a water-driven potato peeler). Marvin P.
Middlemark died in '89, leaving a Long Island mansion surrounded by vinyl tube
fencing stuffed with used tennis balls, housing eight dogs, "nine miniature
horses and eight miniature donkeys, 18 Chinese tractors, dozens of cement
statues of Greek gods, stained glass windows of Marilyn Monroe and Albert
Einstein, and 1,000 pairs of woolen gloves (one size fits all)." Sounds like my
kinda guy.
'Til our fab Feb. ish, make a '92 resolution to petition KCTS to show
The '90s before midnight, force members of the Patsy Cline cult to
listen, at least once, to any other country singer (Ranch Romance doesn't
count), and join us again.
PASSAGE
Dave Kendall on MTV's 120 Minutes, 12/1: "The Red Hot Chili Peppers have
a definite attitude, a stance, this kind of love-funk, aggressive peace sort of
thing."
IMPORTANT NOTICE
I don't have a business checking account at this time. Please make all
subscriptions payable to "Clark Humphrey."
WORD-O-MONTH
"Synecdoche"
THE ONLY RELIABLE IN/OUT LIST FOR '92
I don't claim any hot trend will keep getting hotter forever. That's the logic
of bad sci-fi writers and high school counselors. I note what's peaking,
declining, about to cause a backlash, and what nobody else realizes yet. I
previously predicted the rise of Estonia, '70s music, and nose rings, as well
as the fall of He-Man, Lisa Bonet, and certain dictators.
