As we’ve done since 1988, this list reflects what will become big over the next 12 months, not what’s big now. If you believe everything big now will keep getting bigger, we’ve got Power Rangers movie videos to sell you.
INSVILLE..................OUTSKI
Mac clones.................Windows 95 Sun/Netscape...............Intel/Microsoft Gentlemen..................Guys Pete & Pete................Friends Pinky & the Brain..........X-Men Bravo......................HBO Flagship Ale...............Muenchener Community syndicalism......Global capitalism Many-to-many...............One-to-many Freedom....................Censorship The City...................Melrose Place Bizarro....................Dilbert Sophia Loren...............Marilyn Monroe Curling....................Snowboarding Condo-izing office towers..Exurbs and "edge cities" Albuquerque................New Orleans Rotterdam..................Prague Avant-Pop fiction..........Cyberpunk Steak houses...............Coffee houses Puppetry...................Computer animation Electric cars (finally)....Luxury 4 x 4s Kitty Wells................Patsy Cline Fedoras....................Baseball caps African food...............Thai food Rosicrucianism.............Neopaganism Opium tea..................Herbal ecstasy Citizens Utilities.........Green Day Sherman Alexie.............bell hooks Padded butts...............Silicone DVD........................CD-ROM ADSL.......................ISDN Dr. Laura Sleshinger.......Limbaugh and his wannabes Coal.......................Alanis Morissette Leonardo DiCaprio..........Jim Carrey Lounge.....................Techno Zog Logs...................Pog H.L. Mencken...............Hunter Thompson Raconteurs.................Stand-up comics Virgin Megastore...........Sam Goody Shoe Pavilion..............Payless ShoeSource Crossroads.................Bellevue Square Indian musicals............Special-effects thrillers Women's basketball.........Beach volleyball Poker......................Magic: The Gathering Boa constrictors...........Pot-bellied pigs Union jackets..............Gas-station jackets Co-ed strip clubs..........Cybersex "Return to civility"......."Return to elegance" Mandalas...................Fractals The power of love..........The love of power Skepticism.................Cynicism Braided pubic hair.........Genital piercings Garcia sightings...........Elvis sightings Black Jack.................Bubble Yum Free Quebec................NAFTA Percogesic.................Melatonin Ang Lee....................Paul Verhoven Lili Taylor................Sharon Stone ESPN2......................Sonics pay-per-view Infobahn...................Wired Phrenology.................Astrology Aldous Huxley..............Terence McKenna Hypertexts (finally).......In/Out lists
Their Gang Fiction piece by Clark Humphrey 12/23/95
A regular suburban gang of five to seven ten-year-old girls, most of whom are holding onto their pre-pubescence with fear disguised as defensiveness disguised as pride, are in their semi-secret hideout, the garage of an unfinished and unsold tract house.One of them has “found” a hardcore porno magazine. They’re all gawking at it and discussing it, each searching her soul for the direct emotional response she thinks the others will find most acceptable.
They unspokenly agree to speak about the way the women in the pictures look. By the standards of the female nudes they’d seen repeatedly in fashion magazines, the girls immediately agreed these women were U-G-L-Y.
Fake tits that don’t even look like organic matter (one girl said they looked like her mom’s nicotine patches only on steroids). Big teased bleached hair.
Train-wreck-looking makeup jobs, and lipstick that looked like it belonged on Ronald McDonald.
The most ridiculous looking high heels, worn even when the women were wearing nothing else.
And weirdest of all, wide waists and hips like you only see on real women like their moms and sisters, not on anybody cool enough to be in a magazine. If they knew what bad lighting and photography meant they would probably have mentioned that too.
None of them dare speak out loud about the men and especially not about the erections; none will admit to being even the slightest bit interested in that particular horror/mystery. Each pretended she was worldly enough to already have known what was inside boys’ pants, but too worldly to care about it.
Each girl carefully measured her staring time, making sure not to be seen as unduly interested in those odd-looking things with their ridiculous bulbous dangling extensions. One girl made the silent conclusion that when a guy’s pants bulge looked big it was probably just the size of those extensions; in other non-words, nothing to get excited about.
Then Sharee turned the page to be confronted by the first “uncut” male human in her limited experience. She turned her eyes away one second too late; she immediately knew all the other girls knew where she’d been looking. Sharee knew she’d failed to play the game by the unspoken rules.
In an instant, she felt estranged from her friends, even ostracised. She wondered whether she was doomed to become boy crazy, and if boy-craziness meant she’d forever be driven away from real friendship with the girls.
Seven years later, she remembered this incident while she was directing her best girlfriend’s boyfriend towards her, Sharee’s, bra clasp. As the boy’s nervous hands found their way around her, Sharee also realized what the fashion magazines used to say about how Being A Woman meant Making Tough Choices, and how sometimes the choices weren’t so tough to make after all.
MISC. WAS AMUSED at the fine print beneath Doppler Computer’s Times ad on Dec. 6: “Prices and offers good through Tuesday, Dec. 5, 1995.” Reminds me of one of those art grants that only gets widely publicized after its deadline.
SIGN O’ THE TIMES (Marquee at the Varsity): “1-900, Seven, To Die For.” If you call 1-900-7-TODIE-4, by the way, you get the psychic hotline run by Sly Stallone’s mom.
KANADIAN KORNER: Last week we raved about the new NW Cable News channel. But we didn’t mention that it’s replacing the CBC in TCI Cable neighborhoods. It’s not the least popular channel on TCI now, but (according to TCI’s market research) it’s the least-popular channel TCI isn’t forced to carry by law or by parent-company contracts. At a time of big political doings in Canada (which just might lead to B.C. breaking off and creating the “Cascadia Nation” some regional think-tankers advocate) and Hollywood’s drive to monopolize all culture in the world, a channel devoted to Canadian news and entertainment’s more important than ever. (Besides, it’s the only place to see the venerable Brit soap Coronation Street.)
In recent negotiations with the county over a new franchise, TCI claims it’ll consider putting the CBC back when it gets done installing a new 70-channel system over the next year or three. But even then, TCI might not seriously consider adding a channel that doesn’t offer additional subscription or advertising revenue to the cable operator. The ultimate answer is an Internet video dialtone system (which could grow from the cable-modem system TCI says it’ll install eventually). That’ll let you get any programming anyone makes available anywhere, even Canada, without cable-company gatekeepers deciding for you. Speaking of people deciding what to let you see…
THE REAL INDECENCY: By the time you read this, Congress may have already passed the big-media-monopoly act (a.k.a. the “Telecommunications Reform Bill”) with its draconian, unconstitutional Internet censorship add-on (a.k.a. the “Communications Decency Act”). The latter is essentially the dreaded Exon/Gorton Amendment passed in the Senate version of the “reform” bill but omitted from the House version. The House-Senate conference committee convened in November to resolve differences between the two versions of the bill. Rep. Rick White (R-Bainbridge), a member of the conference committee, offered up his own Net censorship proposal; it would have been slightly more tolerant of certain words and images that a court might decide was “indecent” but not “harmful to minors.” But instead, the conferees sucked up to the Pat Robertson lobby and sent just about the worst bill they could to the floors of both chambers.
To use Newtspeak, the self-proclaimed GOP revolutionaries are really engaged in a reactionary “second wave” endgame. They’re trying helplessly to rein in not just an uncomfortably new technology but a cultural movement that threatens the very premises of centralized, authoritarian society. Under it, anybody who uploads a public newsgroup message, web page, or bulletin-board file containing anything the forces of hypocrisy don’t like (rap lyrics, fine-art nudes, Ulysses, Greek statues), even if labeled “Adults Only,” could potentially get two years in jail and a $100,000 fine.
While the censorship amendment attacks one of the most freedom-based mediums ever invented, the main part of the “reform” bill attempts to prop up a centralized, authoritarian culture on another front, by letting big media corporations own all the broadcast stations they like and control both print and broadcast outlets in the same town, and by letting phone companies charge customer-gouging rates (though cable rate-gouging was taken out during the conference process). Clinton’s previously threatened to veto the “reform” bill with or without a censorship amendment, but he might be tempted to sign it anyway to avoid offending Big Media at the start of his re-election drive.
For more info on how you can get involved to fight this, call the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression’s local offics (622-3486), or access the Electronic Frontiers Foundation website, or the Activism Online site run by the RealAudio folks.
YOU’D BETTER ALSO ACT SPEEDILY to send your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List. Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email .
THANKS FOR THE GENEROUS WORDS about my book in the past two Weeklys. In the holiday spirit I’ll forgive Fred Moody, who wrote one of the pieces, for misspelling my name.
E-MISSIVES #1: As you’ve seen, the paper’s staked out email addresses under the domain name “thestranger.com”. That’s ’cause “stranger.com” was already taken by a Calif. software firm. Still, it could be worse; the World Wide Web address <<www.therocket.com>> takes you to a porn site in Rhode Island.
E-MISSIVES #2: Kelly Humphries writes, “I work as a messenger in the Sea-Ev-Tac area and see a lot of odd things. Friday I saw Hal’s Meat-Seafood-Cheese on 140th and Lake City Way, the marquee offering `Dry Ice 95.’ Is this supposed to replace the outdated `Dry Ice 3.x’ product? If we wanted to take advantage of all the features found in `Dry Ice 95,’ would we have to upgrade all the frozen foods in our freezer?”
INFOTAINMENT WITHOUT THE TAINMENT: King Broadcasting’s new NW Cable News channel launches this week, tho’ some cable systems won’t see it right away. I got to tour the studio, on the top floor of KING’s building. It’s a set-up a videomaker would die for. It’s all run on Avid video decks for nonlinear digital editing, connected to a Silicon Graphics server computer storing 24 hours of footage online. With robot cameras and preprogrammed graphics, it takes only three people to handle the studio production. The channel will launch with only eight reporting teams; most of its 100 staffers will rewrite reports from KING and its Portland, Spokane and Boise sister stations into Headline News-type newscasts running all day. For big regional stories, it’ll turn into the All-Flood Channel or the All-Packwood Channel. They promise something I’ve longed for: a local (or at least regional) TV newscast where the info’s more important than celebrity fluff, sleazy murder trials, plugs for the station’s prime-time shows, snappy anchor-banter, or Mr. Food. (Next week: We complain about TCI Cable dropping the CBC for NWCN.)
KHOLERIK KORNER: Bruce Chapman, whom I’d always thought to be one of that increasingly-rare breed of respectable, thoughtful conservatives, wrote in a P-I op-ed column a few weeks back, “Is the conservative revolution running out of steam? No–not to hearJohn Carlson tell it on his KVI talk show. Indeed, the jovial Carlson, who infuriates liberals, is even more gleeful than usual these days.”… “I have enjoyed John’s company ever since he was a delightfully irreverent college student at the University of Washington, assaulting the choleric dogmas of the UW Daily.”
(1) As I’ve said before, if KVI said it was raining outside I’d still want it confirmed by a credible source. (2) Carlson’s not so much “jovial” as snide, his snickers more like the sneers of a comic-book-movie villain or schoolyard bully. (3) “Infuriating liberals” is a mark of laziness at the art of offense. It’s almost as easy as offending Christians. (4) Carlson’s really quite reverent toward the three things in which he’s publicly demonstrated sincere beliefs–power, money, and ego. (5) I was editor of the Daily when Carlson, then a member of the Board of Student Publications, tried to censure me for editing a “humor” piece by a friend of his about Ted Kennedy, similar to modern OJ “jokes.” If Chapman wants to call me “easily angered; bad tempered” (the Am. Heritage Dictionary definition of “choleric”), I can take it. If somebody called Carlson something like that, the rich pretty boy would probably whine about the Big Bad PC Thought Police trying to stifle his daring voice of rebellion. People who can raise out-of-state capital to start newspapers and think tanks are not helpless silenced voices. And people who suck up to the real centers of power in this society are not rebels, no matter how big their Harleys are.
AS WE DO EVERY TIME the sunset creeps up toward 4:15 p.m., we seek your suggestions for the annual Misc. In/Out List (not to be confused with any other listing which may or may not appear in a newspaper such as this). Send hard copy c/o The Stranger, or leave email at the Misc. World HQ website (that URL once again: <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>).
THANKS TO ALL who went to my two most recent reading/ signing gigs. I’m not sure, tho’, what to make of the Elliott Bay Book Co. blurb calling me “an ardent supporter of books and reading.” That sorta language usually describes either terminally mellow NPR-heads or closed-minded videophobes who hate all non-book media formats. Mind you, I love books in general, though there are many, many specific books I’m either nonplussed about or absolutely abhor. And they’re not always the books someone in my position’s expected to hate. F’rinstance, I have nothing against formula romance novels. The early Harlequins, originally imported from Britain, can be read as object lessons in how pre-feminist young women could move ahead in the British class system, by marrying money and calling it love.
KITSCH N’ KABOODDLE: Longtime Misc. readers know we don’t go in for camp-for-camp’s-sake, so we shuddered as fearfully as you may have when we heard about a new TV talk show to start next month, co-starring Tammy Faye Baker and washed-up sitcom actor JM J. Bullock (Ted Knight’s bumbling son-in-law on Too Close for Comfort). No further comment is necessary.
ONLY ANOTHER NORTHERN SONG: The Beatles Anthology has left TV and we’re thankfully in the eye of the associated PR storm, before the hype campaign for longer home-video version of the miniseries starts up next month. During “A-Beatles-C” week, the hype (culminating in the release of two old Lennon demo tapes with schlocky new backing tracks tacked on) got so hot, even Monday Night Football got in by unearthing a 1974 halftime chat between Lennon and Howard Cosell. The corporate media’s completely manufactured re-Beatlemania was a nostalgia for a time when the corporate media’s power was at its height. Despite what the boomer-biased media have proclaimed, there have been many, many joyous, intricate pop, post-pop and power-pop bands since. Bands like the Jam, Pere Ubu, the Posies, and Shonen Knife. It’s just none of those folks had the full-on marketing assault the Beatles enjoyed (or suffered from).
And none of those folks, luckily, found themselves profitable commodities for the truly pathetic hyper-spectacle that is the boomer nostalgia industry. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d fantasize about the Powers That Be working to prevent any rebellion among current or future young generations by smothering them with a disinformation campaign “celebrating” The Sixties while mentioning nothing but the wild-oat-sowing of upper-middle-class college kids–leaving out any mention of the environment, the Cold War, or the Black Struggle, and thus turning off any kids who might have silly notions of wanting to change the outside world. Speaking of retooled boomer fads…
THE-GRASS-IS-GREENER DEPT.: After reading last week’s Stranger piece about the bloated save-the-world claims made by the hemp movement, I finally understand the motivations of the wheeler-dealers in the Oakland Hills who thought up the whole hemp-mania in 1990-91. The hemp movement revises the pot aesthetic to seem less pathetically complacent, more in tune with the brash go-for-it dynamism of the ’90s. It does this by deliberately never mentioning pot smoking (except as a potential prescription painkiller), even though pot smoking is what it really wants to legalize. Eschewing the popular association of long-term cannabis use with sleepwalking fogheadedness, it instead markets the drug as an investment commodity, as the best potential friend capitalism didn’t know it had. More sky-high claims are being made for hemp today than were made in the early ’60s for the schmoo (a little bowling-pin-shaped animal that threatened to solve the world’s food problems and thus upset the global economy) in Al Capp’s comic strip Li’l Abner.
AD VERBS I (ad headlines in the 12/95 Wired): “At this mall, you can even shop naked” (MarketplaceMCI)… “Shop for CDs without the inconvenience of getting dressed” (MusicNet)… “If you’ve never been shopping while eating Mu Shu pork in your underwear, then you’ve never really been shopping” (éShop Plaza)… “Put our jeans on” (The Gap).
AD VERBS II (electronics-store slogan found in The Irish Times): “Harry Moore–Bringing you the future for more years than we care to remember.”
HERE AT MISC. we’re disappointed but not surprised to hear the B’vue Square FAO Schwarz store held a name-the-bear-statue contest and couldn’t come up with anything better than “Latte.” Speaking of names…
DREAM OF FIELDS I: Now that the building what replaced the Coliseum is now called KeyArena, what’ll we call the old Seattle Center Arena? The Thunderbirds’ pocket schedule simply calls it “Old Arena.” I’ve heard others call it the “RockArena,” its temporary name for the past few Bumbershoots. Its original, pre-World’s Fair name, the Seattle Ice Arena, is now inappropriate since the T-Birds will play all future games at KeyArena (unless any playoff games conflict with Sonics home dates). Cobain’s last local gig was there, but it might be tacky to rename the place after him. If you’ve any other ideas, lemme know at the Misc. World HQ website, <<http://www.miscmedia.com>>. Speaking of second-string sports sites…
DREAM OF FIELDS II: The Seattle Sounders want their own $25 million, 20,000-capacity, natural-turf soccer stadium. The unofficialSounders website shows a picture of a grand old UK soccer field and waxes on about the dream of a “natural turf soccer pitch in Seattle,” then quietly notes that the team’s only looked so far at potential sites in Bellevue, Kent and SeaTac, where the team and private investors could put up a whole complex of adult and youth soccer facilities. I always say, if it’s not in Seattle it’s not “in Seattle.” Let’s scatter youth and amateur soccer fields throughout the county, but have the stadium in town. It could even replaceHigh School Memorial Stadium (now a shoddy reminder of public-school budget cuts), either at its current site or at the ex-bus barn across the street. If we could get private money to put up a cool neo-classical soccer stadium, then rent it out during high-school football season at a fee no higher than the school district’s cost to maintain and upgrade Memorial Stadium (the WWII memorial parts can be moved or rebuilt), we’d have a clear winner–no penalty kicks required.
FOURTH & LONG: The Seahawks’ attendance woes coincide with the slow decline of the NFL. American football was “The College Game” for the first half of the century. The pro game was a novelty sport, far less popular than baseball, before TV showed how to market it. The networks and NFL Films took what was structurally a game of coaching, of the execution and interruption of pre-planned plays, and turned it into a spectacle of heroes and villains, of noble warriors and ignoble bullies.
But now, the league’s owners have come to believe themselves to be the invicible warriors lionized by NFL Films. Despite sagging attendance and TV ratings here and in other areas, the owners are playing stadium blackmail with cities on such a scale that I’d need to use a Telestrator on a map of North America to explain it. They’re going all-out for subsidized luxury-box arenas now, because they’ve seen the Telestrating on the wall. With the long-term decline of network TV, so will go the first real made-for-TV sport. Why watch a bunch of guys whose faces you can’t see knocking each other down when there’s women’s college basketball on Prime Sports?
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Jelly is a slick 16-page brochure containing record reviews of “Mostly All-American Blues Funk Jazz Country Soul Rock n’ Roll.” Get past the lame rock-bashing essay on the cover and you’ll find some quite tasty reviews inside, covering everything from Sam Cooke and Charles Mingus to ambient-dub and “Medieval Swedish blues,” whatever that is. The back page features Elvis’s allegedly favorite peanut butter and bacon sandwich recipe. ($1 from P.O. Box 24924, Seattle 98124-0924, or online.)
(More plugs of the shameless variety: I’ve got two (count ‘em!) speaking-signing events this week for my book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story; Friday at Pistil Books (1013 E. Pike, and Saturday at the Elliott Bay Book Co., 1st Ave. S. and S. Main St. Both are free and start at 7:30 p.m. Be there or be L7.)
All Hail the Tube of Gloom: Toyland Roundup Essay for the Stranger, 11/23/95
Again this year, I’ve canvassed over 30 stores (all within the Seattle city limits) to find the most fantastically cool new toys of the season. With no powerhouse licensed-property product expected this year (the Power Rangers fad peaked early), retailers hope customers will explore a wider range of gift ideas. But that’s what I’ve been advising you for years.
My biggest disappointment was not finding I Love It/I Hate It, a board game being promoted by Daryl Hannah. You’re supposed to guess whether your opponent really loves or hates the thing they’re talking about. I’d be great at it, since people already think I really love things I really hate, no matter how hard I tell them I really hate them.
Inga Muscio’s already told you about one of 1995’s greatest, Sky Dancer ($8.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Basically, it’s a flying plastic helicopter in the form of a beautiful ballerina with gossamer wings on her arms. It’s graceful, it’s serene, and it flies like a dream.
Somewhat less sublime is the Monique Hair Styling Set ($2.99, Pike Place Oriental Food Market). Inside a blister-pak with the quaintest mod lettering is perhaps the closest thing yet to a punk rock fashion doll. It’s a pouty, thin-waisted girl in black tights with assorted-color wigs–orange, black, silver, and pink.
If you must send out-of-town relatives something that says “Seattle” on it, the Oriental Food Market (across Pike Place from that fish stand the tourists love) also has Filipino-made Seattle Slugs ($2.50). They’re sorta like Slinky Dogs only made of folded-paper bodies and wooden heads. Or you can send Seattle’s Strongest Coffee ($11.99, Pike Place Magic Shop), a new label on your basic battery-powered vibrating can novelty.
Archie McPhee’s houses wondrous fun stuff year-round. Among its current goodies is the Tube of Gloom ($1.50), a duck-call-like device inside a grey plastic cylinder. Turn the tube upside down or move it back and forth, and it makes a variety of sobbing, weeping, laughing, psychedelic, and orgasmic sounds.
More aural fun can be had with the Echo Mike ($2.99, Bon Marché), a plastic acoustic echo chamber shaped like a microphone. Talk or sing into it and you make a natural echo while you’re pretending to make an electronically-synthesized echo.
The Bon’s ToyTropolis department’s also got a complete line of Playmobil people (figures $2.99-$4.99, play sets $5.99-$89.99), so you can make your own wood-people tableaux just like on the first Sunny Day Real Estate album.
But ToyTropolis lacks one of the hot toy lines, like the Nickelodeon/ Mattel plastic goops. Fortunately you need go no further than the Broadway Fred Meyer to find Floam, Smud, and the new food-scented versions of Gak ($3.99 each). You’ll have to go to the Greenwood or Lake City Fred Meyer, or to FAO Schwarz, to get the newest Nicksubstance, Zog Logs construction sets ($12.99-$19.99). They use a soft yet sturdy item that looks like candy-colored insulation foam to make nearly any 2- or 3-D artwork you can imagine. Expect hip gallery artists to start making Zog Logs installation pieces by this time next year.
Ex-Catholics and devout agnostics will love the parody prayer candles by local outfit Three Tacky Texans ($10.50, FireWorks at Westlake Center). The entertainingly drawn styles include Prayerful Protection from Alien Abduction, Our Lady of Artistic Inspiration, and Protection from Bad Hairdressers.
Last year’s mad-scientist simulator, the Dr. Dreadful Food Lab, is joined this year by the Juice Lab, Drink Lab, Living Lab, Brain Juice Lab and Squeem Lab ($7.99-$19.99, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). Each makes a different kind of oozing, glowing food product. If you’re giving one, include at least two refill kits ($3.99-$5.99) so your recipient will still have something to do on Dec. 26.
Not all toys are just fun. Some are also useful. The Sputty Ball ($5, FAO Schwarz) is so firm yet moldable, computer users can keep one by their keyboards to help prevent repetitive-stress injuries.
The slogan on the blister-pak says it all: “From the Prehistoric Past, Time Warped Into Our Cosmic Future, Come Insecto-Bots” (the Dollar Store, you-know-what-price). Simultaneously the cutest and most menacing-looking of the transforming-robot figures, they come colorful in Bee, Woolbear, Beetle, Mantis, Mosquito, and Butterfly models.
If David Byrne ever has kids, I’m sure they’ll get the whole Barbie Dolls of the World Collection ($19.99 each, Fred Meyer and elsewhere). As the catalog sez, “Redheaded Irish Barbie wears a vivid green dress. Dutch Barbie looks as if she just stepped out of a tulip garden. Kenyan Barbie wears an authentic African costume.” But no matter what their hair and skin color, they’re all taken from the same mold. It’s a small world (beat) after all.
There’s nothing particularly novel about the kids’ trivia board game Brain Quest ($16.99, PayLess) except for the slogan on the box, proclaiming the unfashionable-in-some-circles notion that “It’s OK To Be Smart!”
There are plenty of DIY drinking games involving various TV shows, but here’s a commercial product to enhance your viewing–the Channel Surfing Game ($15.99, Kmart). Players pick a card and switch channels trying to find something on TV that matches the card’s instructions (”Something Hot,” a car, somebody eating) before a timer runs out. No TV is needed to play The Talk Show Game ($29.95, The Game Place in the U District), in which players play talk-show hosts and guests and opposing players must guess what the “guests” will say next.
But we mustn’t leave out a suggestion for the hard-to-buy-for in your family, the young cynic of a niece who can’t wait ’til she can replace her rub-on tattoos with real ones. What can you get her that her parents won’t confiscate? In separate boxes, send her aSecret Wish Horse ($19.99, Bon Marché and elsewhere) and a Superman action figure ($9.50, Zanadu Comics). She’ll have untold hours of sick, sick fun in the privacy of her room.
At Misc. we know some things are just too creepy to turn away from. That was the case when some folks working late in a CapHill building looked ou the window and saw a film crew re-creating the Mia Zapata abduction for Unsolved Mysteries. Under banks of lights, an actress in vaguely punkish clothes kept getting into a passing car, take after gruesome take.
JUNK FOOD OF THE WEEK: Can’t get it here, but Semtex is the hottest new soda pop in Prague. It’s named after one of the old Czechoslovakia’s most notorious exports–a plastic explosive popular with various terror and organized-crime outfits the world over. An NY Times story sez the chemical factory that made the now-banned explosive is suing. The soda people say they adopted the name ’cause it inspires “a feeling of activity and motion.” That’s probably the same reasoning behind Royal Crown Cola’s new fake Mountain Dew, Kick (”Warning: Contains stuff you don’t even want to know about!”).
BRETHREN AND CISTERN: For unknown reasons, the wife of sometime Stranger writer Bryan Clark was put on the mailing list for Your Church magazine (”Helping You with the Business of Ministry”). It’s a Protestant Sharper Image Catalog, by the publishers ofChristianity Today but with no theological content. Just blurbs and ads for nifty products: Office-cubicle walls “repurposed” to house Sunday School groups, vinyl siding, fiberglass baptism pools, choir robes, bulk quantities of communion wafers, candle holders, electronic organs (”the way Sunday should sound”), clear plastic pulpits (”where no visual barriers exist between you and your congregation”), new and used pews, shatterproof fake stained glass windows, kitchen supplies (”Equipping the Saints in a practical way”), computer software to keep track of membership and fundraising, even entire prefab church building sections. Coolest of all are the electronic music boxes, “digital carillons” (by a company called Quasimodo Bells) and “digital hymnals” (”Instantly plays thousands of hymns, choruses, praise music, children’s songs, wedding music, and gospel favorites”). Our lesson: Even the heirs of Calvinist austerity can’t help but be eternally fascinated by that most basic of human desires, the Quest for Cool Stuff.
`R’ GANG: Entertainment Weekly’s piece on the recent box-office failure of several “sex” movies only pointed out how unsexy those anti-erotic, un-thrilling “erotic thrillers” and equally grim exercises like Showgirls really were. Don’t worry: Sex still sells, these movies just weren’t selling it. They were trying to sell fear and/or hatred of sex; but hundreds of direct-to-video Basic Instinct ripoffs wore out the concept.
TELE-KINETICS: When the new-age talk show The Other Side was suddenly, quietly canceled last month, NBC was left with only three hours of daytime programming. Ratings for the show, which took an almost-rational look at “psychic phenomena, ESP, ghosts, alternative healing, and more,” were never great. Replacing original host Dr. Will Miller (the preacher/ psychologist/ comedian from old Nick at Nite promos) with a perky Entertainment Tonight droid only made things worse. You can make your own joke here about the show’s fans still being able to contact it psychically. Speaking of daytime TV personalities…
THE NEVERENDING STORY: I’ve avoided O.J. Simpson in this column, but now note that the recently retired daytime personality’s looking to start a new life in the face of ostracism by former L.A. acquaintances and hangouts. The Philadelphia Weekly reports his representatives are looking into potential homes for him in Philly’s ritzy Main Line suburbs. Imagine–the figure who nearly put the soaps out of business, moving to the real-life Pine Valley.
LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Perv, a new local monthly gay paper, is a lot like what the Misc. newsletter would have become if I’d kept it going. It’s one big sheet of paper in Stranger’s old paper size but sideways, crammed with gossip, jokes and comix. Of course, I’ve never written about the gay-male bar scene and Perv writes about little else. Still, you don’t have to be gay yourself to realize the way-serious Seattle Gay News can’t be the only possible gay viewpoint in town. And I do like Perv’s comment on how “if every fashion show in town is fetish, then fetish isn’t much of an alternative anymore, is it?”
I’m Pseudo-Black and I’m Proud: Kwanzaa for White B-Boyz Original online essay, 11/20/95
This goes out to the phat n’ phunky white kids, hangin’ at the malls in their butt-cleavage threads and chuggin’ from 40-ouncers.
You might not know it, but you’re part of an American tradition of caucasian hip-wannabes remaking last year’s Black cultural stances into this year’s lifestyle uniforms.
Thing is, once whites start copying a black style, blacks do something else. When hippies took over electric blues, blacks went to soul. When soul became the property of Brit teen idols, rap emerged. Now that you’re the main gangsta market, Af-Am kids are listening to prosocial R&B harmonizers, as part of the Black Pride thang.
Another part of Black Pride is Kwanzaa. That’s a non-religious holiday created in 1966 by Black Studies prof Dr. Maulana Karenga. The name means “the first fruits of the harvest” in Swahili.
Here’s the short version of how it works: Each day from Dec. 26 to Jan. 1, Kwanzaa celebrants hold a simple home ceremony at a table decorated with straw, fruit, ears of corn, a communal cup, and seven candles. They light one candle and speak about one of the holiday’s seven principles: Umoja (unity), Kujichagulia (self-determination), Ujima (collective work and responsibility), Ujama(cooperative economics), Nia (purpose), Kuumba (creativity), and Imani (faith).
That’s a long ways from the glorified lowlife white kids love about gangsta music. But to be an ahead-of-the-curve hipster is to fake today’s blackness, not yesterday’s white fake blackness. Otherwise you’ll look as dorky as Dan Aykroyd’s Elwood Blues bit looks today.
So put down that malt liquor (you probably don’t like the stuff really). Get one of Karenga’s books, like Kwanzaa: Origin, Concepts, Practice. He writes for descendents of the African Diaspora, but a lot of his message has universal meaning, including the part about how “History is Knowledge, Identity and Power.” Kwanzaa yenu iwe na heri (Happy Kwanzaa).
All Hail the Stomach Steinway: Squeeze Please Record review by Clark Humphrey for The Stranger, 11/15/95
The three-CD set Planet Squeezebox (Ellipses Arts) is perhaps the perfect use of the CD box-set format. It offers a wealth of musical education, to the point that it’s a must for the collections of every school and public library. Its 51 tracks by 51 acts in 40 genres provide listening experiences ranging from exuberant participatory folk celebrations to world-weary melancholy to mind-altering alternate melodics. For an instrument of so many variations (including the concertina, bandoneon, and organetto) used in so many places in so many ways, it’s surprising to read in the box set’s exquisite 56-page booklet that the beloved “Stomach Steinway” dates only back to 1829 (less than 50 years before the first phonograph). From Austria it quickly spread throughout Europe, and from there to Europe’s colonies and ex-colonies in Africa, the Americas, and scattered parts of Asia. Twice as loud as any previous Euro folk instrument, it was also capable of playing melody, harmony and rhythm at once. By the 1850s its various forms were mainstays of folk and dance music worldwide, taking the place of everything from bagpipes to violins in dozens of new and pre-existing genres. Wallingford-based Petosa Music still makes some of the best-loved accordions anywhere; over-30 locals remember the sqeezebox stylings of kids’ TV personality Stan Boreson (while ’90s hipsters know Accordion Joe’s performances on The Spud Goodman Show).
Planet Squeezebox offers great examples of much of what you might expect it to offer: Polkas, tangos, Irish jigs, American jazz and blues standards, zydeco, Jewish klezmer wedding music, sambas, assorted Lat-Am dance musics. You might not expect what else you’ll get: French musettes, Egyptian belly-dancing accompaniment, Quebecois barn-dance balladeering, Italian tarantella, achingly poignant modern-classical compositions, even a Debussy prelude. It’s unfortunately diluted, by the kind of conservatively-curated and blandly-mixed mellow tedium that still gives the U.S. world-music industry a bad name. That’s particularly the case on disc 3, in which the set’s curators go to Africa equipped with your basic Paul Simon notions of nice unchallenging world-beat tuneage. But hey, that’s what programmable CD players are made for.
But at a time when the “Unplugged” fad and the various successors to ’70s “women’s music” have revived the association of acoustic music with singer-songwriter solemnity, it’s important to have the best parts of a set like this reminding us how this family of instruments has long been a force for honest artistic expression, celebration, and working-class togetherness. Those “punk polka” spoofs in the ’80s by Weird Al Yancovic and others weren’t too off the mark; the squeezebox really is the original hi-NRG DIY music machine.
