WATCH THIS SPACE #1: A new independent movie house is tentatively set to open sometime next month, joining the Grand Illusion, the Admiral, and the part-time screening spaces around town. The 108-seat Casbah Cinema‘s downstairs in the Sailors’ Union building at 1st and Wall, next to the former Trade Winds/ My Suzie’s restaurant space. Owners Laura and Anton DeJong are self-described “big film fans” who’ve planned for years to set up their own “grand cinema on a small scale.” They promise “classic and foreign films, but nothing really obscure” on Thurs.-Sun. evenings, with early-week dates open for rental to independent screeners and community groups. The DeJongs are also opening a cafe in part of the space, but aren’t applying for a liquor license at this time–a shame, since some of the McMenamin brewpubs in Oregon have quaint little screening spaces attached to ’em.

WATCH THIS SPACE #2: A Barnes & Noble book superstore (or perhaps a B&N-owned B. Dalton regular-size chain bookstore) is rumored to be taking over the Fantasy Unlimited/ Deja Vu corner at 1st & Pike, previously considered for a new public library. Scouts for the chain are said to have been poring over Left Bank Books across the street in the Market, presumably to make sure the new B&N’s fully competitive in the fields of feminist-film-analysis zines and left-activist memoirs. B&N’s regional management claims no definitive plans to add a location downtown, or anywhere else in town, just yet. While anything’s possible, I’d bet against ’em taking that particular site. For one thing, it’s too small as is, and its adjacent buildings are controlled by too many different interests to make assembling an appropriate parcel easy.

STOPPING THE PRESSES: Aorta, the occasional local art tabloid, has published its fifth and last issue under its current all-visual-arts format. Publisher/editor Jim Demetre’s closing editorial gripes predictably about the vagaries of trying to mount a self-sufficient, unsubsidized journal promoting indie and fringe visual artists. But he also complains that “There are many issues which I am very interested in writng and reading about,” but “the local visual art scene… has rarely provided me, or my writers, with a relevant point of departure for discussing them.”

While thanking Demetre for going this far, and acknowledging he has every right to revamp his publicaiton into something he’s more willing to put time and toil into (he plans to resume later this year with a more generalist culture-crit rag), his statement says something about the state of contemporary-art criticism in America. In Aorta, its precursor Reflex, and some of the slick NYC art mags, critics haven’t seemed to want to write about art or artists as much as about the critics’ own philosophical/ political worldviews. Sometimes, articles and reviews in these would take no more than a sideways glance at the nominal art topic, before wandering around about the writer’s beliefs concernig The Dominant Culture and The Other; or about how prejudice is a major contemporary problem and it’s those people who aren’t like us who’re always committing it. We could still use a regional contemporary-art mag that’s really about contemporary art, but it’d take a whole rethinking of the critic’s role. Any takers?

STARTING THE PRESSES: Two Rocket veterans have pop-cult self-help books just out: Start Your Own Band by Marty Jourard and Start Your Own Zine by Veronika Kalmar. Both are packaged by one Jet Lambert (described on the back cover as “a muse to those bitten by the bug of entrepreneurism in the 1990s”) and distributed by Hyperion (the Disney book division that just paid an upteen-thousand-dollar advance for the yet-unwritten memoir of Seattle Schools boss John Stanford). Besides the juicy irony of learning about DIY culture-making from one of Earth’s hugest media giants, there’s something strange about instruction books for activities you’re not supposed to need instruction books for. Still, ex-Motels member Jourard does get some good basic topics covered (such as what chords are and why good used guitars can be better than bad new ones); while Kalmar’s book lightly touches on a lot of topics experienced zinesters (such as myself) already know plenty about.

YOUR HELP NEEDED: Can you think of any formerly-popular American musical genre which hasn’t been the subject of an attempted “hip” revival in recent years? If you know of one, please let me know at clark@speakeasy.org.