The Vogue – 1980s Seattle

The Belltown dance-club scene got kick-started in 1977 with the founding of a gay bar called Tugs Belltown at 2207 1st Avenue. It featured a big dance floor, lots of fresh punk and New Wave music, and the occasional live band. Down the street another gay venue, Johnny’s Handlebar, followed Tugs’ lead in 1979 when it reemerged as Wrex, a video dance club that spun alternative and punk records. In 1980 Wrex booked the first of what would be countless live bands — Delta 5, Joan Jett, X, Grace Jones, Hüsker Dü, and Romeo Void all played here. In 1982 Wrex was shuttered and The Vogue opened in its place. Many of the best local bands performed at The Vogue, including Mudhoney and Alice in Chains, and it was the venue for Nirvana’s first well-attended Seattle show, on April 24, 1988.

https://historylink.tours/stop/wrex-vogue/

Visible Targets at Wrex advertisement
Visible Targets at Wrex 1981

I have not been able to figure out what a “video dance club” is. There are a few clubs that have media systems nowadays – for example, Dante’s in Portland gets crowded and has a television system so you can see the band from different corners of the club. And then there’s The Voyeur in Olympia, which apparently makes videos (or at least potentially makes videos, or it did make videos) of any/every band that plays there. Not sure what happens to those videos, because I’ve never seen them appear anywhere online. Evergreen State College in general is media-oriented (as is Portland Community College) and this is a whole bag of worms – because I am by now basically certain that both of these colleges are links between the CIA and the larger entertainment industry, and to this end, a ton of funding is coming in to these places from various sources to literally do surveillance based sex trafficking and brutal mind control forced-cult activities like the ones that led me to file a Title IX complaint in 2017. A complaint that I believe was shut down by Seattle-linked financial sources.

But I digress.

I don’t know what a video dance club. The photo I have of Snow Bud playing at Vogue shows a television set behind them and – is it a screen? with a white pyramid shape above it.

Snow Bud at the Vogue

In Portland the Met (located where Dante’s is now) until 1982, and in Seattle the Wrex until 82 and then the Vogue all seem to have been gay clubs that also attracted the “new wave” or “new music” crowd. The characters from the Vogue who reappeared in Chris’ life in some way after he met me include Claudia Gherkin, the booking agent, and secondarily Dennis White who had been a bartender at both Wrex and Vogue. Chris mentioned to me that White used to tend bar dressed like a woman, whereas Claudia sometimes uses a male name (Claude), at least online.

The Vogue seems to have been an important stepping stone for the bands that would be signed to Sub Pop. Going from the premise that grunge was a manufactured phenomenon largely based on imitating and then burying Chris Newman, and the whole process set up years ahead, it’s worth asking why the name Vogue (or even the name Wrex) was chosen. Wrex has a number of connotations, but one of the things it is are call letters of a TV station in Illinois – WREX channel 13, established 1953 (which was also the year Chris was born). UHF frequencies are used in mind control and to cause cancer via piezo electrical biomedical implants.

I stared into a belly through the eyes of a beast
Made a toast to life and commence the feast
We chewed up mints and creams till our mouths were oozing full
Devoured mounds of meat, sucking marrow from the bone
Washed it down with wine, vintage 1953
Leaned back in our chairs, sucked our gums and picked our teeth

Mudhoney – Final Course 2013
John Sex at Vogue - Seattle Rocket cover
From NYC – John Sex at Vogue (get it?) – Seattle Rocket 1987

A reason why I wonder about the name Vogue is because it’s the name of a premier – maybe the premier – fashion magazine, and grunge was not just music, it became fashion as well. David Bowie, Fashion is a 1980 song that seems in some ways to link the concept of fashion with fascism (goon squad, robotic dancing, etc) and may be related. The “Derelict” fashion show section of the 2000 movie Zoolander is an obvious satire of the concept of grunge fashion. The movie also brings out references to mind control black sites (“You have been in a day spa for a week”) and Manchurian candidate style assassinations. Just because a movie is fiction doesn’t make all parts of it untrue. There was literally a grunge-era Seattle band called The Derelicts, and yes they played at the Vogue and seem to have been close to Mudhoney.

The obvious reference to Vogue Seattle, once you begin to understand what it was, is Madonna’s Vogue (1990) “strike a pose.” In that song she names off a list of classic Hollywood movie stars.

Bowie also lists stars in his 2013 song about entertainment industry linked surveillance The Stars Are Out Tonight (with various meanings for “star” as star-like drones are part of this surveillance and attack network).

One of the things I figured out in 2015 when I was experiencing so much sexual and other harassment at Portland Community College was that there are cameras in bathrooms and dressing rooms all over Portland, and I now know, in Seattle clubs as well. Also, there are hidden cameras broadcasting from doctors exam rooms. The main location of these video surveillance devices seems to be fire sprinklers, so obviously, fire departments are part of the cover up. Also, it’s against the law to cover up a fire sprinkler. All of this footage – photos or video – collected from this hidden camera system seems to be distributed or trafficked to wealthy people (including celebrities and all in that orbit) worldwide. My understanding is this global surveillance, trafficking, and attack system is run by the CIA and FBI.

There are a few reasons why I know for sure that this hidden camera network exists and is being used widely, and the main reason is because things were done deliberately over and over to let me know about it – either via covert communications with me in real time or by mirroring something back through media. For example, something was said or something that happened in a doctor’s exam room when it was just me and the doctor – shows up on a TV show or movie (or several TV shows and movies) or in music videos. Alternative, there have been a lot of real-time coded communications coming from outside the exam rooms, restrooms, and dressing rooms in the form of timed or responsive bumps and thumps on walls and ceilings. (I can still remember several specific examples.) This is why calling me delusional is such an important defense mechanism for those covering this up.

Visible Targets at the Wrex 1982