Friday, August 24, 2001

WHAT WE NEED FROM YOU NOW (besides your subscriptions, ads, and merchandise purchases, of course: The next MISC print zine will be the "Happy Birthday Seattle" issue. It will contain a suitable-for-framing big collage image caricaturing as many of the people, places, things, and events that have made this city great as we can fit in.

We need your suggestions as per who and what oughta be in it--historical names, fictional characters, artsy types, archtypical figures, landmark buildings past and present, etc. etc. Send your ideas via email to clark@speakeasy.org. When you write, let us know if you're willing to have your email texts posted publicly on this site. (Even if you don't want others to read your suggestions, we'll still appreciate them.)

UNPLUGGED: The Gibson House on 2nd, another of downtown's last surviving dive bars (after 30 years) and a live-music club where the G-word was still spoken without irony, suddenly closed. MISC correspondents were at one of the place's last shows and saw such spectacles as a man stripping from overalls to nada in under five seconds. Its loss leaves Zak's Fifth Avenue as Seattle's last real raunch-rock venue.

posted by clark 12:35 AM

GATES OF HELL: If Microsoft's legal tactics in the ongoing antitrust action weren't arrogant and pathetic enough, its phony "grassroots" lobbying campaign to politicians and newspaper editors (conducted by a hired PR firm) is even sillier. Utah's state attorney general has even reported getting pro-MS form letters "from" dead people and from towns that don't exist. As far as we've been able to discern, nobody's written in favor of Microsoft who's not being paid by Microsoft (except for business-is-sacred Libertarians).

posted by clark 12:19 AM

Thursday, August 23, 2001

GREY IS GOOD: In the usually-brightest part of an unusually glaringly bright year, three days of rain and low overcast made a most welcome appearance this week. So comfy, so refreshing, so fresh-scented. The diffused light, the soft colors of everything, the relaxing heaviness of the air. Don't like it? Go to Albuquerque.

ELSEWHERE:

Rock stars reviewed according to their reported sexual prowess. (Found by Pop Culture Junk Mail.)

posted by clark 10:12 PM

A NEW LEAF: Last weekend's Seattle Hempfest crowded Myrtle Edwards Park more successfully than the Fourth of Jul-Ivar's did a month and a half previous, for a familiar mix of music, handicrafts, facial hair, and political speechifying.

What was new this year: A reinvigorated message.

Hempfest used to be about, or pretend to be about, promoting the non-THC-related uses of the marijuana/hemp plant. Speakers and flyers made all manner of inflated claims for hemp as the miracle substance that would save the planet, as the ideal basic material for everything from paper and fabrics to foods, plastics, and motor fuels.

As one who believes in the ingenuity of North American agribusiness, I believe such claims should be thoroughly investigated for possible practical use. But the '90s Hemp Movement seemed comprised only of True Believers, with no interest in plant research beyond what they'd read in Hemp Movement books. (Placing True Belief above scientific impartiality is what doomed Soviet agricultural research back in the Lysenko era.)

In any event, it's hard to sustain an ongoing political-cultural movement on the premise of a potential rival to flaxseed fiber. So the event's organizers did the smart thing and admitted what everyone's known all along--that Hempfest is really a public celebration of recreational pot smoking and a call for its rightful legitimacy. The event's name officially became an acronym for "Help End Marijuana Prohibition."

It was a two-afternoon-long statement of defiance against the brutal hypocrisy of the War on Drugs, which has arguably hurt more lives in recent years than drugs themselves have. It became a more vigorous and more important event.

I've long scoffed at pot, pot aesthetics, pot humor, and particularly pot-influenced politics. I don't orgasm at the terms "420" or "chronic." Arguing politics with pot smokers usually frustrates, with all the sanctimony and square-bashing involved.

But Hempfest 2001 showed a path out of that trap. It asked thousands of users and sympathizers to stop wallowing in their self-perceived superiority and to start working to change things. It asked the mainly-white victims of pot busts to join up with the mostly-black victims of coke busts.

I'm still indifferent to pot and the pot culture. But the only way this society's ever gonna get sane about the issue is to get over the phony righteousness of both pot-lovers and pot-haters, fueled by its outlaw status.

posted by clark 12:01 AM

Wednesday, August 22, 2001

PROPHECY IN OUR TIME: Thanks to Comedy Central, I just realized the perfect fictional portrayal of George W. Bush, decades before the fact--Charles Grodin's act as a Saturday Night Live guest host who, in a running-gag storyline, didn't realize it was live and didn't show up until the day of the show. The gag climaxed with Grodin stumbling through a fake public-service ad, "Hire the Incompetent."

ELSEWHERE:

"Instant Ramen--The Invention That Changed the 20th Century World" (found by Larkfarm).

The amazing breadth and scope of Yugoslav cuss words....

posted by clark 12:08 PM

Tuesday, August 21, 2001

THOSE WACKY LAWS: Hard to believe, but in seven states, unmarried cohabitation can still get you in trouble with the law.

posted by clark 1:23 AM

Monday, August 20, 2001

THE TEASY AND THE CHEESY: Teenage girls across North America are snapping up T-shirts with risque slogans on them, including assorted variations on the number 69, Playboy, and declarations of general naughtiness.

Parents, journalists, and even a few politicians are getting predictably perturbed. (My, aren’t these grownups just so immature?)

News flash: Adolescents have hormones, and love to make a big tease among their peers. Adolescents also love to proclaim their independence and impending grownuphood, and there are few better ways to do that than by publicly announcing one’s sexual arrival.

What’s new? Just the particular pride and explicitness in these T-shirt statements.

Three years ago, one of my ex-Stranger colleagues tried to get a deal to write a book about high school girls who were really virgins but were branded as sluts by other girls, merely for looking or acting insufficiently ladylike. Three years, of course, is the standard turnover rate for teen trends; so the younger sisters of those ‘90s shunned girls are now proudly proclaiming slutdom as a status symbol.

(Of course, today’s assertions of slutdom probably have as little to do with reality as yesterday’s accusations of slutdom.)

posted by clark 4:41 PM

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