SCARY POST-ELECTION, post-Halloween greetings from MISC., the popcult report that, on the night MTV aired the last episode of The Real World: Seattle, was at Pier 70, in an ex-retail space right next to the ex-Real World studio, where two campaigns (No on 200 and Yes on Libraries) held election-night parties. You’ve seen enough TV coverage of such parties to know how they went down. The KCPQ news crew there even had a script prepared for both contingencies: “The crowd here cheered/groaned when the first returns were announced.”
As it turned out, just about every progressive stance won, with one extreme exception. The anti-affirmative-action Initiative 200 won big. Why? At the bash, the main explanation handed about was the initiative’s clever ballot wording, which, by purporting to oppose racial/gender discrimination in public hiring or education, may have confused anti-racist voters. My old personal nemesis John Carlson, I-200’s official leader, is politically sleazy enough to have promoted such confusion, but not clever enough to have thought it up. For that the credit/blame has to go to the Californians who actually drafted the measure. Hard to believe, but some well-meaning friends still ask why I’ve never moved to the fool’s-golden state. After Nixon, Reagan, Pete Wilson, the “English Only” initiative, the anti-bilingual-education initiative, and the original anti-affirmative-action initiatives now being cloned in assorted states, it’s way past time we all stopped believing the hype about Calif. as some sort of borderline-pinko progressive paradise.
Adding to the confusion, anti-200 campaign leaders apparently feared racial divisions in Wash. state had gotten so bad, white voters wouldn’t vote to keep affirmative action unless it was marketed as helping white women. So all you saw in anti-200 ads were white-female potential victims of the measure. The pro-200 forces (who wanted to restore old white socioeconomic privileges) flew in out-of-state black conservatives to speak for the measure (and even flew in paid out-of-state black signature gatherers), while the anti-200 forces (who wanted to preserve the legal remedies that had jump-started workplace diversity) presented a public face of soccer moms and blonde kindergarten girls.
HALLOWEEN ROUNDUP: Only one Monica Lewinsky in sight, at least among the parties seen by me or reported on by readers.
Misc.’s crack team did report sighting a few South Park costumes, several Spice Girls quartets and quintets, a couple adult Teletubbies, a lot of devils and vampires and waitresses and scullery maids, several construction workers and Catholic schoolgirls, two male Hooters Gals, and one Linda Smith.
My second favorite sight was at Champion’s a couple days before, where a real policewoman stood doing crowd-control duty right next to the life-size cardboard cutout of Xena.
My first favorite sight was outside Sit & Spin, when a guy in an Edvard Munch “Scream” mask started to converse with his pal dressed like Steve Urkel–in sign language. A deaf “Scream”! More perfect than perfection!
NEIGHBORHOOD OF MAKE-BELIEVE DEPT.: Why haven’t any reviews of that awful new movie Pleasantville mentioned the title’s connection to Reader’s Digest? For decades, the now fiscally-embatteled RD has trucked its mail from the post office in Pleasantville, NY to the town 10 or so miles away where its offices really are. It’s quite possible Pleasantville writer-director Gary Ross created his fantasy of a fetishized ’50s sitcom town less from the sitcoms of the period (none of which resemble it) than from a non-RD reader’s received ideas about the hyper-bland, ultra-WASP, problem- and temptation-free Real America RD is supposed to have championed, particularly as the ’60s came along and conservatives’ rant targets moved from Commies and labor unions to the sort of unwashed bohemian types who’d grow up to make dumb fantasy movies.
In reality, of course, RD‘s editorial stance was more complex than its rigorously-enforced simple writing style. It was running improve-your-sex-life articles years before GQ, and has run more anti-smoking articles than most other big magazines (it’s never accepted cigarette ads). For that matter, as film reviewers have pointed out, those TV sitcoms weren’t really as “postively” life-denying as Ross suggests. Anything that has to explore the same characters week after week, in formats light on action and heavy on dialogue and close-ups, will by necessity come to explore the characters’ inner and outer conflicts, torments, and sexual personalities–even if the shows scrupulously avoided what used to be called “blue” material.
So Ross’s fantasy world is really about today’s nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’50s, not directly about those original fictions. Already, we’re seeing nostalgia/fetishized memories of the media-mediated visions of the ’80s, via nostalgia picture-books that claim Ronald Reagan really was universally loved and brought America together again. There are now plenty of movies exposing the dark side of the ’50s (from Parents to Hairspray and even JFK), but will future fetish-nostalgia filmmakers depict the ’80s as exclusively a time of Rambo and Risky Business? Speaking of filmic fantasy worlds…
PLACE OR SHOW: The PP General Cinema elevenplex means, even with the permanent closure of the UA 70/150 (the “200 penny opera house”) and the temporary closure of the Cinerama, there are now a whopping 39 commercial movie screens in greater downtown Seattle (including Cap. Hill and lower Queen Anne), plus the Omnidome, IMAX, and 911 Media Arts. No more the days when high-profile new films would premiere no closer to town than the Lake City, Ridgemont, or Northgate (still open!) theaters…. Lessee, what would have been the movie for me to see in this giant multiplex, on the top two floors of a massive, climate-controlled environment totally dedicated to commercialism and with no visible exits? Hmm, maybe–The Truman Show? (To update one item on last week’s list of things Seattle needs,” the elevenplex will indeed have a cocktail lounge in its upper lobby level once the permits come through. No booze will likely be allowed in the theater auditoria themselves, tho…)
As for the mall itself, a tourist overheard on opening day of Pacific Place said, “It reminded me of Dallas.” I can imagine the likes of J.R. Ewing and Cliff Barnes hanging amid the huge, costly, gaudy, yet still unsophisticated shrine to smugness. This penultimate major addition to downtown retail (the last phase of downtown’s makeover will occur when the old Nordstrom gets permanent new occupants) constitutes one more shovelful of virtual dirt on the old, modest, tasteful Seattle. The PP management even kicked out a branch of the Kay-Bee Toys chain the day before it was to open, solely because Kay-Bee’s Barbies and Hot Wheels weren’t upscale enough for the tony atmosphere the mall wants everything in it to have!
At least one good thing you can say about PP is it makes the 10-year-old Westlake Center (also built with partial public subsidy) look comparably far more egalitarian, with its cafeteria-style food court and its Beanie Baby stand and its “As Seen on TV” cart selling your favorite infomercial goodies: Ginsu knives! A “Rap Dancer” duck doll! Railroad clocks that whistle on the hour! Magna Duster! Citrus Express! EuroSealer! Gyro Kite! Bacon Wave! EpilStop Ultra! And Maxize, $39.95 Chinese-made foam falsies (“Avoid risky, expensive, ineffective surgery”)!
STACKED ODDS: Pacific Place’s Barnes & Noble, more than any other book superstore I’ve seen, clearly displays the book-superstore concept’s tiers of priorities–literally. On its small main-floor storefront level, B&N displays a few tables and shelves of highly advertised new releases, plus audio books, coffee-table picture tomes, and magazines. For everything else (including the everything-for-everybody, indie-bookstore-killing miles of midlist titles), you’ve gotta take an escalator to the basement. Of course, most big bookstores have a special display area front-and-center for a few dozen highly advertised or “recommended” titles. Big publishers will routinely cut deals with superstore chains for these prominent spots. Powell’s City of Books in Portland makes it more explicit than most, with a separate room for the up-front goodies. The University Book Store makes it less explicit than most, almost hiding its prime-display tables in the store’s geographic center, past the remainder tables.
(Also in the B&N basement: A small but selective CD department, including preprinted divider rack-cards for “Tributes” and “Benefits.” And the ground-floor magazine rack’s the first place downtown to sell British Cosmopolitan, still the raunchiest mainstream women’s magazine in the English language.)
‘TIL NEXT WEEK, presuming no heretofore-charted comets hurl toward Earth, welcome the early sunsets, and watch the Seattle Reign instead of complaining about any lousy NBA lockout.
