Yep, once more the costumed and street-dressed throngs descended upon the Cinerama, engaged in a waiting and bonding ritual prior to the local premiere of a franchise fantasy sequel. This time, the film in question was the third-but-really-sixth Star Wars megamonster.

The low-budget, creaky-optical-effects charm of the original SW is, of course, long gone in this big digital-FX spectacle. The “New Hope” message of the first three films is also subsumed by the galactic-geopolitical epic plotline of the prequels.

I’ve previously written that the previous prequel, Attack of the Clones, was all about how a republic can devolve into an empire; it was an obvious parallel to the US political situation, even though Clones had been written before the 2000 election fraud and had been principally filmed before 9/11. Sith, some critics say, makes the analogy even more overt.

All that apparently didn’t matter (or, in SW geekspeak, “mattered not”) to the crowd that had gathered three-quarters around the block by 6 p.m. Wednesday, for the 12 a.m. Thursday premiere (and the 3:45 a.m. second show!). Some had camped out for days. (The self-proclaimed “Star Wars Guy,” who’d tried to camp out in front of the theater months before the premiere, had ran afoul of city authorities, and instead camped out in front of the IMAX theater at the Pacific Science Center.)

Anyhoo, the SW line was full of dudes, dudettes, and li’l tykes. All seemed boistrous and cheerful despite the miserable weather (torrential downpour, high winds, lightning). Some of them had brought card tables and card games. Some had portable DVD players spinning out the previous SW films. Some purchased light saber toys (with authentic SW sound effects) from roving vendors. Some teamed up to place Domino’s Pizza orders from cell phones, or to acquire snacks and beverages from Ralph’s deli-mart, kitty corner from the theater.

They were united in the spirit of fandom. They braved the elements, and the snickering local news media, to be part of something bigger than any mere movie. They were there to be among one another, to have fun, to dress up, to dare to look silly in public, to embrace their inner Jedi-osity.

That kind of spirit is potentially more powerful than any fictional “Force.” In a world gone all too serious, we need that spirit more than ever.

…but “If You’re Not Picky About Color” is now a trademark (see bottom of linked page). I suppose that would prevent the phrase from being stolen as the title of an interracial porno.

…can rap acts be when they’re selling product placements in their songs?

…and I haven’t posted a remembrance of that potenially silliest of all silly dot-com-era hustle concepts, MarchFirst.com.

It was a merger of two web-design and online-services companies, which themselves were the results of several prior mergers. It was named after the date in 2000 in which the merger documents were signed.

The combined company boasted more than 5,000 employees, doing many different things on behalf of other companies. But MarchFirst’s preeminent claim was that it would help corporate clients build their Internet presences from scratch. Just one call to the Chicago-based MarchFirst, and your firm would instantly turn from an old-economy dinosaur into a new-economy powerhouse, right up there with such rising behemoths as Pets.com and Flooz.com.

None of this, however, was mentioned in the company’s costly TV ads. Most infamously, it bought naming rights for NBA halftime shows on NBC. “Coming up next: MarchFirst At the Half! Presented by MarchFIrst, where it’s all about ‘The Importance of Being First,’ at www-dot-MarchFirst-dot-com!” The commercials that aired within these halftimes were sentimental things, with gauze-filtered cameras and soft-rock music, in which a syrupy narrator talked about such feats as the first manned space flight and the first four-minute mile, and then simply reiterated the “Importance of Being First” slogan. Nary a word was given to what the heck MarchFirst was or what the heck it did.

For a company whose principal premise was helping other companies market themselves, it sure did a lousy job of marketing itself.

Within 14 months of its formation, it declared bankruptcy. Now, the URL points only to a claims site for ex-employees who were bilked out of their health benefits.

THIS IS how it used to be, and how it still ought to be.

This is an outrage. An abomination. Something so totally beyond WRONG that the mind reels to find a similie. Worse than Led Zeppelin for Cadillac. Worse than Adam Ant on a Motown Records anniversary special. Worse than auditioning a new singer for INXS on a reality series. (Make up your own “worse than” here.)

…the stick-in-your-head ad jingle?

AS THE GANG at Anthropologie take down the Xmas window displays, we mark the end of a damn-depressin’ year, both here at MISC Towers and out in the world at large.

But there have been some not-altogether-unpleasant events during it, particularly this past week or so.

On Christmas Eve Eve, the Wall of Sound folk put up a holiday fete starring the improvised vocal stylings of Les Voix Vulgaires (from left, King Leah, Detonator Beth Lawrence, and Amy Denio).

Then this past Tuesday, K Records held an intimate li’l CD release party at the Green Room bar in the Showbox building. It promoted reissue compilations by two early-’80s local “art-damage” bands, the Beakers and the Blackouts.

Ex-Beaker (and fellow Stranger refugee) Jim Anderson is shown above, introducing longtime local musician/producer Steve Fisk, who performed for the packed room on a vintage ARP synthesizer. Also in attendance: Ex-Blackout Bill Rieflin and ex-Beaker Francesca Sundsten, who’ve been a lovey-dovey couple for perhaps more years than they care to remember.

I have more memories of the Blackouts than of the Beakers (I saw more of the formers’ gigs, including several at the Showbox). In Loser, I marked the birth date of the “Seattle scene” as the date, in 1976, of the premier gig by the Blackouts’ previous incarnation, the Telepaths. The Beakers, meanwhile, were among the earliest incarnations of the Olympia scene’s indie-ideology purity shtick.

In the blurry mists of hindsight, both bands now seem to belong outside of their time and place. The bands they borrowed from (Pere Ubu, Gang of Four, the Pop Group) didn’t become VH1 nostalgia faves. Their sounds remain as brittly dissonant, yet strongly compelling, as ever.

But some retail institutions did not survive the holiday season. One was the second incarnation of Video Vertigo, East Pike Street’s own friendly neighborhood horror-and-porn video store.

Another was the Sam Goody music store at Third and Pine. It’s been there, under one chain-name or another, since the late ’70s. The building owners now want to carve the space into several smaller retail spots, possibly including (you guessed it) a Starbucks.

…with the whole “advertising is evil” crowd.

Read all about the recently-settled trademark dispute between the Postal Service (the rock band) and the Postal Service (the mail-carrying organization).

…a quasi-abstruse model, complete with charts and graphs, for learning “how to deprogram yourself from the cult of consumption.”

…Sojourners, is running an ad in big papers with the headline “God is Not a Republican. Or a Democrat.”

…isn’t getting a lot of Presidential commercials anymore, here’s the Philly Daily News’s look at the latest deceptive, fear-mongering Bush ad.

…the pro-Kerry doc Going Upriver online in its entirety.

…who compared Subarus to punk rock: Portland ad agency Weiden & Kennedy’s admitted it staged a faux weblog, as part of a PR campaign for a new video game. What’s weirder, at least to those who don’t follow W&K’s shenanigans: It was a critical fake blog, supposedly written by a game tester who’d suffered from “blackouts and uncontrollable fits of violence” while test-driving the game.

Utne magazine (formerly Utne Reader) has put out its twentieth-anniversary issue. In keeping with its current perky eco-lifestyle format, its cover displays a CGI happy-face orb within the bold headline “GOOD INTENTIONS: They have more power than you think.”

Utne, you may recall, was originally intended as a Reader’s Digest-esque reprint mag for the so-called “alternative press.” In a season when most “alternative” pubs are screeching toward an election-time frenzy of anger, Utne tells us to not worry, be happy.

As I’ve been noticing, the Presidential campaign’s been all about projections of attitude. Bush has propagated the image of a hard-strutting office cowboy. Kerry wants to be seen as a shining beacon, guiding us out of the Bush-made mire. The anti-Bush-but-not-exactly-pro-Kerry left, which includes much of the “alternative press,” is big on the power of righteous rage.

But unlike The Nation, Harper’s, Mother Jones, The Progressive, The Village Voice, The Stranger, Z, CounterPunch, et al., Utne would like us to remain mellow about everything. In a four-article package, it tells us to embrace the power of coincidences, the flow of intention, westernized Buddhist chanting, and empathy with nature. These articles don’t mention politics, but they do claim our attitudes can influence the world around us (treating AIDS, relieving traffic jams, etc.).

The mag proposes to solve America’s political crisis a few pages later, in “Radical Middle to the Rescue.” Associate editor Leif Utne (whose dad Eric started the mag and whose mom Nina runs it now) believes we could all get along if we all just sat down and talked through our differences. He’s certain we’d all learn the value of a “pragmatic idealism,” of stepping “outside old ideological boxes to fight boldly for the common good.” If this sounds suspiciously like the near-right mumblings of the Democratic Leadership Council or The New Republic, that’s because it is, both in Mr. Utne’s intro and in the mini-profiles of some of his favorite neo-centrist operatives (why not bring back nuclear power?).

In between the positive-thinking stuff and the radical-middle stuff, there’s an excerpt from Jeremy Rifkin’s new book The European Dream. (The story’s cover blurb: “It’s About Belonging—Not Belongings.”)

Rifkin notes that many or most Euro countries now have stronger economies, better health care, better education, longer vacations, less violence, fewer teen pregnancies, and fewer prisons per capita than the US. At least in the Utne excerpt, Rifkin doesn’t credit these accomplishments to the legacy of paternalistic Euro-socialism, or to the US-led restructuring of the continent’s post-WWII socio-economic infrastructure.

Instead, he posits a “European Dream,” an ethos and set of ideals he finds different from the American dream of accumulation and disposal.

To Rifkin, Europe’s all about belonging to a culture, a subculture, an extended family, a tribe, and/or a peer group. America, he contrasts, is all about the rugged individual, building empires and conquering the land.

He sees the ideal European home as a happily raucous, funky little dwelling on an urban street or country village; the ideal American home as a single-family McMansion isolated on ten acres of exurbia.

Rifkin also notes that Americans still go to church a lot more than Euros. He seems to interpret this statistic as putting Americans in a backward zeitgeist of discipline and blind obedience, as differentiated from a Euro zeitgeist of enlightenment and empowerment.

This brings a contradiction to Rifkin’s primary thesis. Religion is, to use the rave-promoters’ use of the term, “tribal.” Agnosticism is individualistic. Religion, at its highest, seeks an identification with values other than those of mindlessly getting and junking stuff. Secular capitalism (or hypocritical faux-religious capitalism) has no problem with all that.

But people, and continents, are full of contradictions.

So are magazines.

Utne itself pays frequent lip service to promoting A Simpler Life, while more passionately promoting what might be called “eco-materialism.”

The anniversary issue’s got “special advertising sections.” One promotes assorted hemp products; the other exclusively plugs Organic Valley brand food products.

A small ad in the front of the issue promotes the Tweezerman® cuticle pusher with the headline “Choose to Make a Difference” and a Gandhi quotation: “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The ad doesn’t explain just how a fingernail tool, even one whose “ultra thin hand-buffed edges will not scratch nail,” will help bring Gandhi’s ideals into reality.

The issue’s other ads sell such psychographically-niched wares as Earth Friendly® dish soap, Pax World Mutual Funds (“funds even a redwood could love”), Stonyfield Farm yogurt, Maranatha peanut butter (“Newton obsessed over gravity, Einstein over matter. We chose nut butters”), Peace® Essential 10 cereal (“Do your bowl a world of good!”), and Liberator® angular pillows (“Bedroom Adventure Gear”).

The back-cover ad invites the reader to “Join the Dansko Revolution” for “Peace, Love and Happiness.” Assorted casual shoes are arranged in the shape of a peace sign, over a faint background image of trees. It reminded me almost exactly of the old 7-Up billboard with a pseudo flower-power design, as seen on the cover of Tom Frank’s book The Conquest of Cool. Frank explored how big advertisers quickly re-interpreted the anti-consumption aspects of hippie ideology into a pro-consumption message to a target market. Eco-materialism is a direct descendant of that concept.

But eco-materialism can also be something else.

Hippie-era philosopher Alan Watts once said something to the effect that America wasn’t really a materialistic nation. If we really worshipped personal possessions, he opined, we wouldn’t oversate ourselves on so many shoddily-made things, just to throw them out.

Perhaps, just perhaps, the kinds of sales pitches found in Utne presage a different relationship between people and their stuff. A relationship that promotes owning fewer things, but better-designed, better-made, and better-cared-for things. Something closer to Rifkin’s European ethos, giving greater respect toward the land, the city, the home, and the family heirlooms.

Or perhaps it’s just another tribal status symbol to buy your cuticle files from people who quote Gandhi.