MAKING THE SQUARE SQUARER: From approximately 1971 to 1991, the official live music genre of Seattle was white-boomer “blooze,” as played at Pioneer Square bars. The “blooze” bars of 1st Ave. S. play on today, virtually unchanged. Yet P-I writer Roberta Penn recently claimed Seattle didn’t have a blues club. She probably meant we lacked a club that treated blues as a serious art form, instead of formulaic macho “party” tuneage. It’s worth noting that the only national star to emerge from this scene, Robert Cray, split for Calif. as soon as he hit big (and bad-mouthed the Square bars promptly after he left).

Now, the forces of development want to rechristen the Square as luxury-condo territory. Some developers say they’d like to rid it of such elements as nightly noisemakers (even if they’re sport-utility-drivin’ caucasisn noisemakers). I wouldn’t personally miss the “blooze” bars (though there’s something quaint about standing outside the 1st & Yesler bus stop on a Sat. night, hearing three bands from three bars playing three cacophanous variations on the same theme). But I wouldn’t want the clubs to be forced out by demographic cleansing, especially since the area’s handful of prog-rock and electronic-dance clubs would likely get the boot at the same time, if not first.

PHASES OF THE MOON: With the warm weather’s come an odd masculine fashion statement: dorsal pseudo-cleavage. It involves wearing jeans with a belt, but hanked down to show the tall waistband of designer boxer shorts. I know it originally came from tuff-guy street wear, which in turn was based upon prison garb (oversize trousers with no belts allowed). But in this incarnation, it’s like a male version of that “sex-positive” women’s book Exhibitionism for the Shy. And in case you wondered why there weren’t “sex-positive” books for men?)…

VIAGRA-MANIA: After 10 to 20 years of the magazines and the TV talk shows defining sexual issues almost exclusively from a (demographically upscale) woman’s point of view, now Time and its ilk are scrambling to out-hype one another on the concept of masculine performance, as a problem now chemically solveable. It comes amid a new wave of skin-free men’s magazines like Maxim, trying to attract male readers without that pictorial element proven to attract men but to scare off advertisers. So instead, all the sex in these mags is verbal, not visual, and it’s often in the how-to format so familiar to women’s-mag followers.

Viagra-hoopla might also mean we’re finally over the late-’70s orthodox “feminism” in which the erection was depicted as the root of all evil. In the Viagra era, an erection is seen as something all men and 90 percent of women crave and wish would occur promptly, predictably, and on cue.

Then there’s a scary story in Business Week depicting that pillow-shaped erection pill as a harbinger of a new generation of prescription lifestyle drugs, for people who wouldn’t die without ’em but would just like to “feel better.” In 1990, when the Lifetime cable channel ran programs all Sunday “for physicians only” (complete with slick ads selling prescription drugs to doctors), there was a panel discussion show in which a doctor predicted everybody in America would be hooked on at least one prescription drug (including remedies for common conditions not at the time considered “problems”) by decade’s end. Looks like he might’ve been close to right.

Another question could be posed from the hype: Is the legal “feel-good” drug industry morally distinguishable from the illegal “feel-good” drug industry? In the past, I’ve dissed both those who seek all the answers to life thru pharmaceuticals and those who piously seek to punitively condemn such seekers. Both camps, I wrote, were on ego trips more potentially dangerous than any drug trip. But with ordinary citizens going more or less permanently on chemicals for little more or less than self-confidence, perhaps that dichotomy will transform into something different.