No matter what you think of big box retail chains, I always find it sad to see one go.

Especially when it’s in an industry for which I have particular fondness (and in which I’ve invested much of my life).

This is the case this week. Borders Books and Music, not too long ago one of the Big Two of bookselling, didn’t find a buyer and will probably shut down. Going out of business sales at the remaining 399 branches (down from 1,249 in 2003) may start Friday.

You can read exhaustive histories of the company elsewhere. If you do, you’ll learn how the Borders brothers of Ann Arbor, MI started a book superstore operation that was bought by Kmart, which merged it with the mall chains Waldenbooks and Brentano’s; then the whole “books group” was spun off into a separate company.

“My” Borders, the downtown Seattle location, opened circa 1994, during the Kmart ownership. At the time, it was considered a major vote of corporate confidence in a downtown that had lost the Frederick & Nelson department store  two years before.

It seemed a warm and friendly place despite its size. It had downtown’s best CD selection, including a healthy stock of local consignments. It had a children’s section that served as a play area for shoppers’ tots. It had in-store events nearly every weekend, ranging from readings to acoustic musical performances and chocolate tastings. Its charity gift wrap table helped many a bachelor such as myself every Christmas season.

But the local store, no matter how cool it was, could not escape the parent company’s troubles.

As local staff was cut back, the in-store events disappeared. The up-only escalator to the mezzanine level was removed. The music and DVD departments were severely shrunk. The various book genres were shuffled around, and a huge section of floor space was given over to long-shelf-life stationery items and even iPhone cases.

Now it will be a brief bargain store, then get gradually emptier, then go dark.

There will still be physical places to acquire physical books, including Barnes & Noble and Arundel Books downtown.

But what of the Borders downtown space?

It’s not like there are a lot of other big chain stores itching for a two story space like that. (Though if you’re listening, University Book Store? Powell’s? Even JC Penney?….)

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A secondary loser in the Borders shutdown: Starbucks. Its Seattle’s Best Coffee subsidiary had dwindled in the past few years, mostly to a string of coffee stands inside Borders stores. Will the rest of SBC’s stores survive this?

• Where the state fails, the city steps up, today’s edition: With no more govt.-sponsored tourism promotion in Washington, Seattle might tax hotels for its own tourist ads.
• Tuesday’s County Council hearing on the scheme to impose a car-tab surtax to save Metro Transit: Stuffed to overflowing with citizens, sparse on County Council members.
• You know that deal for Electronic Arts to buy Seattle’s PopCap Games, the deal PopCap management emphatically denied? It’s real, and it’s on.
• Rupert Murdoch will stop trying to buy all of the satellite TV company BSkyB after all.
• So far, the Murdoch newspaper scandals in Britain haven’t been directly tied to his U.S. properties. Well, here’s a fresh, all-American scandal for you: Murdoch’s Stateside businesses not only pay no income taxes, but clever exploitation of every tax dodge on the books has let Murdoch get $1 billion or more in tax refunds each of the past four years.
• Re/Search Books cofounder V. Vale, seeing his industry falter against the winds of tech-induced change, proclaims “If I were an alien from Outer Space wanting to ruin life on Planet Earth, I think I’d invent the Internet.”
• RIP Sherwood Schwartz, 94, the radio and TV comedy writer who became the creator-producer of Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch. Fun fact: Schwartz later admitted he’d named the S.S. Minnow after Newton Minow, the FCC commissioner who’d denounced most of primetime TV as “a vast wasteland.”
• Speaking of which, Joe Berkowitz has handy tips for those of us who refuse to live in televisual abstinence and who continually take gruff for it.
• While on the big screen, Carina Chocano sees all these “strong women” movie characters and hates ’em. She says they’re not identifiable as women, but just as a different set of stereotypes.
• New Lake City strip club owner: We’re really an “adult cabaret,” and a respectable business too.
• And there are many other stories out there, important stuff about the fate of humanity and all. But there’s only one topic on all online users’ minds this day. How dare Netflix raise its rates?

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

In case you haven’t noticed, there are some lovely cover-art images on this page’s lower left. They depict books, CDs, and DVDs with at least a vague connection to Seattle and proximity, all of which are for sale.

The selection changes at random every time you load or reload any page on this site. So if you don’t see something you like, you probably will the next time.

I just added more than 100 additional titles to the database, so there’s plenty of variety.

Of course, if you really want to help support these verbal endeavors, you should buy one of our own lovely MISCmedia products.

At least two more of those will be up for your perusal and purchase within the next few months. Stay tuned.

…and Sherman Alexie defends writers’ right to depict these hells, both realistically and metaphorically.

The Honeymooners writer and Get Smart! producer would be worth a long obit just for his TV and film work. But he also created the Mad Libs books, and cofounded Price/Stern/Sloan Publishing to put them out. The company became a huge supplier of point-of-sale minibooks.

You may now tell your own jokes about fill-in-the-blanks obituary articles.

A Forbes.com story about lawyer/author/TV pundit Lisa Bloom asks the musical question,

How did women go from caring about the Equal Pay Act and Title IX to celebu-tainment and Botox, and what can we do about it?

Whenever I read such all encompassing remarks about “women,” I always respond, at least to myself: WHICH women?

There have always been women who translated their personal concerns and needs into society-wide issues.

And there have always been women who consumed escapist entertainment.

And, yes, there have even been those who did both.

The film version of (part of) Atlas Shrugged has come to and mostly gone from America’s cinemas. (Around here, it’s still playing at one multiplex in Bellevue.)

All progressively-minded film critics and political pundits have used this apparently mediocre movie to make big snarky laffs at the expense of the story’s original author, the eminently and deservedly mockable Ayn Rand.

As is usually the case, Roger Ebert expressed this conventional wisdom better than anybody. (Though Paul Constant at the Stranger gave it a good try.)

So why am I writing about it this late in the game?

Because there’s something ironic, and not in a cute/funny way, about art-world people calling Rand and her followers arrogant elitists.

There’s an outfit in Italy called the Manifesto Project. It gathered short essays on graphic design and commercial art (in English) from 24 leading designers around the world.

One of these is by the eminent American magazine, book and poster designer Milton Glaser. During a passage about how “doubt is better than certainty,” Glaser starts discussing why so many designers can’t embrace either doubt or collaboration:

There is a significant sense of self–righteousness in both the art and design world. Perhaps it begins at school. Art school often begins with the Ayn Rand model of the single personality resisting the ideas of the surrounding culture. The theory of the avant garde is that as an individual you can transform the world, which is true up to a point. One of the signs of a damaged ego is absolute certainty.

Schools encourage the idea of not compromising and defending your work at all costs. Well, the issue at work is usually all about the nature of compromise. You just have to know what to compromise. Blind pursuit of your own ends which excludes the possibility that others may be right does not allow for the fact that in design we are always dealing with a triad—the client, the audience and you.

Ideally, making everyone win through acts of accommodation is desirable. But self–righteousness is often the enemy. Self–righteousness and narcissism generally come out of some sort of childhood trauma, which we do not have to go into. It is a consistently difficult thing in human affairs. Some years ago I read a most remarkable thing about love, that also applies to the nature of co–existing with others. It was a quotation from Iris Murdoch in her obituary. It read “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real.” Isn’t that fantastic! The best insight on the subject of love that one can imagine.

I’ve ranted umpteen times in the past about “alt” culture’s silly tendencies toward us-vs.-them nonsense. All the anti-“mainstream” pomposity. The brutal stereotypes against anyone who can be sufficiently categorized (suburbanites, sports fans, meat eaters).

The real purpose of art and culture isn’t to show off how awesome you are. It’s to communicate something to somebody else, to strengthen the bonds that tie all of this mongrel species together.

When we fail at this, are we no better than Atlas Shrugged’s cocktail-downin’ snobs (only with hipper clothes)?

“E-book Sales Explode in February.”

Dead-tree book sales? Ehhh….

Joanna White at (the formerly locally based) Slate.com sees Charlie Sheen’s public meltdown (which I still believe he’d at least partly contrived, as a stunt to get out of his TV contract) as a sign of hope.

White wishes “mean sitcoms” with their insult gags and mutual-deprecation-society casts would go away. She would like the probable end of Two and a Half Men to portend the whole sub-genre’s oblivion.

I’m not so sure it’ll happen.

There’s at least one cable half-channel (Adult Swim) whose “humor” is built entirely around inhumanity. Perhipheral characters suffer and die violent deaths, and the main characters shrug it off with a quickie one-liner.

And since even cheapo Flash-based animation has a long production lead time, even a sudden sea change in the public ethos won’t end those shows very soon. Though it could render them fatally unhip.

UPDATE #1: Matt Zoller Seitz at Salon.com suggests a reason for all the current TV series centered around the celebration of aggressive, obnoxious, middle-aged, alpha-male “heroes.” Seitz sez it’s because that’s the psychological profile of all the studio and network bosses in charge of greenlighting the shows, the guys to whom the shows’ creators and producers must suck up.

UPDATE #2: In Stephen Battaglio’s excellent biography David Susskind: A Televised Life, producer Leonard Stern (Susskind’s associate on Get Smart! and He & She, and coincidentally also the creator of the Mad Libs books) is quoted as saying pro-social comedy’s a lot harder to write than insult comedy:

A comedy based on love—and I really believe this one [He & She] was—is harder to sell and harder to sustain…. Why? I don’t know. But comedy writers generally can do deprecating humor much more readily and easily than they can humor that is loving and caring.

Current excuse for infrequent postings here: I’m on another book deadline, which means my computer time is going to real (albeit not immediately renumerative) work.

Once this is out of the way, I’ll again be out in the field seeking gainful employment. (Remember, I’m not looking for something to write about. I’m looking for someone to work for.)

And I’m so much more than a writer. I shoot and retouch digital photos. I design graphics and web pages. I enter data, process words, and do many of the tasks every office needs getting done.

Meanwhile, in the outside world in recent days:

• Mardi Gras came back to Pioneer Square, albeit in wimpy inside-the-bars-only form, on the same day as International Women’s Day. I see no conflict between the two traditions. That’s because to me, women aren’t just different from men. They’re different from other women. Some will want to be the next Miss Marple. Others will want to be the next Miss September. Some will want both. Some will want something completely else.
• Neo-vaudeville performer and promoter Hokum Jeebs was stabbed to death in an apparent botched burglary attempt at his West Seattle home. News coverage of the tragedy focused on two supposedly scandalous facts about this jovial, nostalgic local figure: he grew his own medical pot supply, and he had a thing for dangerous looking younger men. In my view, neither of these were all that scandalous. Though it’s a shame he apparently took the latter passion to the point of inviting his suspected killer into his life.
• Madison is revolting. The city where The Onion began (and from whence most of the original Stranger team hailed) became America’s biggest non-fake news story. It’s all because the right-wing politicians there had the guts to dare to be total suckups to billionaire campaign donors, and used deep dirty-tricks chicanery to try to force Wisconsin to become another Mississippi. This power grab shall not hold.
• Japan was attacked, not by a cute movie monster but by the earth itself. Many people deserve your thoughts today.

While I wasn’t looking, Amazon’s put its Kindle ebook machine in brick n’ mortar stores. Including Fred Meyer, whose own in-store book selection has seldom stretched beyond the mega-bestsellers and Harlequin romances.

Just before the end of the previous year, I wrote here that Seattle has become the home of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre.

Seattle had already been one of the two U.S. hubs of the video game industry, which had been America’s fastest growing media genre the previous decade.

This is a vital, though potentially only temporary, shift.

To explain it, let’s start by going back to the allegedly good old days of the U.S. lit biz.

Books were more of a cottage industry during the first half of the previous century. That’s because they were far less popular than they are now.

Yes, less popular.

The masses read slick magazines and pulp magazines (and, later on, mass market paperbacks). “Real” books, the hardcovers and the coffee table editions, were sold in boutiques or boutique-like settings within department stores, to a target audience of educated but careerless women. They were commissioned and curated by small offices of tweed-suited gentlemen in New York and Boston.

The smallness of the market ensured that the established publishers and distributors could maintain profitable market shares, so long as they kept issuing saleable works.

The few new authors who could break into the rarified world of “trade books” (usually from the fiction sections of the “better” magazines) knew they’d be promoted and nurtured by their publishers, as big fish in a very small pond.

This is the milieu that “people of the book” nostalgize about. I dunno ’bout you, but I’d have hated it. Too stifling, too restrictive, too frou-frou.

Then the industry got big.

The GI Bill fueled three decades of growth in college lit programs.

Trade paperbacks, and original (non-reprint) mass paperbacks, helped bring the book racket into supermarkets and discount stores.

Chains opened full-line bookstores in shopping malls, succeeded by bigger chains opening big-box bookstores in every town and suburb.

Global conglomerates bought, sold, and combined publishers, bringing in cadres of corporate bean-counters in the process.

Authors became in-demand guests on TV and radio talk shows; their facility with these appearances (or lack thereof) often greatly affected their career prospects. Even in

Then came Amazon.

Instead of the extremely inefficient bookstore world, whose crippling (for publishers) return policies became ever-more abused by ever-bigger big box chains, there was one massive retailer who bought to order, and who tracked every sale with a staggering array of useful statistics.

Within a decade (a mere trice in this traditionally snail-paced industry), Amazon became the big publishers’ best frenemy.

As the big chains had eased out many smaller booksellers, Amazon took market share from the chains. When the great recession struck all retail sectors, the book chains suffered more than most.

Then came Kindle.

After more than a decade of attempts, electronic books finally took off thanks to Amazon’s marketing clout.

With no physical product for publishers to have manufactured, Amazon has wound up with even more leverage in the delicate dance of supplier and seller.

Amazon doesn’t even have to sell all its own hardware, with Kindle-format ebooks playing on PCs, tablets, and smartphones as well as Amazon’s own branded devices.

I’m not the only observer to see Amazon having a clear upper hand in the industry, if not its fulcrum of clout.

It had subsumed some of the biggest media companies on earth (while imposing its will on more than a few smaller publishers along the way).

And now, Amazon’s put its valuable sales-metrics data on a handy online dashboard widget thang. It includes data about industry-wide sales of a publisher’s titles, not just those made through Amazon.

With this information at hand, and without the need to invest in print runs or suffer the bookstore chains’ consignment policies, the financial barrier to book publishing (on a serious commercial level) continues to plummet.

It’s easy to imagine more authors becoming self-publishers, hiring their own copy editors, publicists, etc. instead of working for corporate publishers who have those operations in-house. (Already, in the comics world, ebook sales favor indie titles more than comic-book-store sales do.)

Who needs a royalty-sucking edifice in Manhattan, when an author can deal with Amazon direct?

The Jet City, once thought of in lit circles as little more than a strong book buying market and a gateway to Montana, has become Book City U.S.A.

For now, at least.

Thing is, the brave new book world is a faster place. A much faster place.

Enter Google Ebooks.

And Google Ebooks’ strategic ties with local indie booksellers.

That’s something Amazon just isn’t set up to offer (though the fiscally troubled Barnes & Noble is)—a physical, real-world presence, with friendly neighborhood book-lovin’ experts guiding buyers’ individual reading pleasures.

Then there are the authors and publishers who claim not to need Amazon or Google. They just sell direct, from their own websites. These include the new OR Books and my own sometime ebook publisher Take Control Books.

It’s going to get messy and complicated. When and if the dust clears, I expect Amazon will remain a strong player in both “e” and non-“e” books.

But it won’t be the only one.

Seattleites, enjoy your collective symbolic stance as capital of the world of words while it lasts.

If you’re to believe political cartoonist and radical essayist Ted Rall, everything’s just going to keep getting worse, and the only answer is to actively speed up the process.

He’s got a book out, The Anti-American Manifesto.

In it, he claims that “it’s time for our revolution.”

He doesn’t mean a “creative revolution,” or a “revolution in business.”

And he sure doesn’t mean a “tea party revolution” that just reinforces the big-money powers’ grip on control.

Rall wants to see an actual uprising, that would lead to the actual overthrow of our country’s political/corporate system.

He acknowledges that such a revolt would be violent. Many innocent people would be hurt or killed; many types of infrastructure would be destroyed; and what would rise from those ashes could very well be a dictatorship and/or reign of terror.

Rall doesn’t seem to mind all of that.

He claims that even if we end up with a Robspierre or a Napoleon or even a Pol Pot, the long-term result would still be an eventual overall improvement for the continent’s, and the world’s, people.

I wouldn’t be quite so sure about that.

But at least Rall, unlike some I know who’ve bandied about the “R word,” realizes it would be a serious action with serious consequences.

Hey, would be would-be book banners: Go take a Soma pill and chill out.