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A ROSS FOR WORDS
November 1st, 1995 by Clark Humphrey

CORREC: Sorry for misstating the first name of syndicated talk-radio goon Bob Grant a few weeks back. Incidentally, an out-of-town reader of the Misc. World HQ website emailed to say he’d followed Grant’s local NYC show for years, and he believed Grant’s racially-charged demagoguery wasn’t based on organized white-supremacist ideology but on simple obnoxiousness–as if that makes it any better.

DUDS: The new downtown Ross Dress for Less is all done up inside like a mall store, with all the old Woolworth magic gutted out of the building. And they don’t have my favorite Woolworth apparel section, the $17 fedoras. But the new store’s something downtown’s needed since the demise of the Bon Budget Floor in the late ’80s. It’s a place where non-yups can actually buy useful products. And I do like the Giant Wall Of Sox downstairs. As Seattle’s business establishment and the politicians it owns keep striving to turn this into a city By The Upscale, Of The Upscale and For The Upscale, I invite all of you to regularly visit the Wall Of Sox and meditate on its deeper meaning, representing what residents really need from a city. (Now if we could only get a store that brought back some of the key Woolworth features: the fedoras, the bins of bridge-mix candy, the shelf of easy-crossword and confessions magazines.)

JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Squeeze Cone, made by the Amurol unit of Wrigley’s, is a chocolate-flavored corn syrup concoction in a toothpaste-like tube. The experience is akin to gorging on the gooey insides of off-price assorted box chocolates without the milk-chocolate outsides.

A GREAT GIFT IDEA: Out-of-town readers in search of more non-mall maniacal media now have another option. The WFMU Catalog of Curiosities, put out by a college radio station that somehow survived the mid-’80s demise of the college that owned it, has gone national. It comes from the same North Jersey suburbs where Nickelodeon films The Adventures of Pete & Pete, and displays a similarly Petean attitude toward defining what others would call “weirdness” as the stuff of everyday reality. You know you’re reading the right catalog when the first page offers an import CD of William Shatner’s infamous spoken-word LP The Transformed Man, followed on the very next page by a Sun Ra retrospective. But there’s more: Music from legendary amateurs theShaggs and the late Pere Ubu co-founder Peter Laughner! The Mondo Cane and Forbidden Planet soundtracks! Tapes of Mexican border-radio announcers hawking scrotum implants made from goat glands as a supposed cure for impotence! Books of “outsider art” and conspiracy theories. I could tell immediately WFMU’s my kinda people; and I’ve never even heard their station. The catalog’s free from P.O. Box 1568, Montclair, NJ 07042, or online at <<http://www.wfmu.org>>.

DUNNO ‘BOUT YOU, BUT: LOVE that salad-in-a-bag. Green leafy vegetables as a convenience food, who’da thunk it?… Overheard at Tower Records: “I normally don’t care for alternative music, but I like Candlebox…” It’s just so dang fun to re-use America Online’s freebie floppy discs to store files downloaded from the Internet… If you seek the next stage in the lounge-music revival, check out the Sazerac Sextet. They carefully straddle that delicate cusp between that safe tongue-in-cheek lounge sensation so popular these days and the naked despair of Edith Piaf/ Billie Holiday territory… Great to see The Baffler back after an interminable absence for another carefully thought-out treatise on the survival of human values in the Age of Marketing. This one takes particular aim at the Gingrich/ Toffler “promise” that in the CyberFuture everybody will live in the suburbs, as if we all wanted to… I normally have little nice to say about media mega-mergers, but the possible Time Warner-Turner deal will mean Warner Bros. will finally regain control of all the Warner cartoons, allowing for more complete home-video collections (but also more latter-day censorship of classic violent gag scenes)…

(Those who missed my prior promos for Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story can attend a free talking/ signing event next Friday afternoon, Nov. 10, 3-4 p.m., at the University Book Store.)


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