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.

“A smart heroin addict is still a heroin addict.”

A Facebook correspondent said that to me, after I rebutted his anti-television screed.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I’m writing to confess something.

Yes, I am an addict.

Specifically, I am addicted to what members of certain online message boards call “stim.”

That’s short for “stimuli.”

In my case, for a broad array of mental/emotional stimuli.

Among many other things, I am addicted to:

• The beat and the chords and the melody of a great pop song.
• The urgency of news headlines, as delivered in any medium.
• The telegraph-inspired urgency of old network radio “news on the hour” themes.
• The scrolling headlines and stock tickers on cable news channels.
• The wild juxtapositions of time/space/narrative in an old newspaper.
• The similar juxtapositions in a well-curated blog.
• The sound of a phonograph needle hitting the scratchy outer groove of a vinyl record.
• The frenetic beauty of a Merrie Melodies cartoon.
• The typography and design of old magazines and newspapers.
• The look and build of an old building, even one that was considered ordinary in its time.
• The all-out attempts at persuasion seen in old advertisements, pamphlets, political badges, and printed pop ephemera of all types.
• The glow of a neon sign; the stasis of its daylight background base.
• The noise, beats, sights, and smells of many industrial processes (including those that were sampled in the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack).
• The poignancy of urban decay, of streets and structures whose once-noble aspirations have faded with time.
• The “instant insight” of a well turned phrase.
• The “gotcha” moment of a particularly awful pun.
• The sight of a female figure, revealed in artistic, alluring, and/or fun ways.
• All of the sounds, touches, tastes, and scents associated with heterosexual pleasure.
• A sugar rush.
• A caffeine rush.
• The sated feeling after a big meal.
• The exotic thrill of a foreign film, particularly a foreign mass-entertainment film. The song-and-dance spectacles of Bollywood, in which generalized sensuality triumphs over sexual prudery. The audacious blare of an Italian “giallo” soundtrack. The milieu of early British Hitchcock films, just foreign enough to unsettle.

Strangely enough, several genres and industries designed wholly around “stim” don’t particularly enthrall me. Casino gambling; modern video games; big budget special effects movies—I just don’t respond to ’em.

It’s a few days late, but CBS.com has finally posted the Letterman segment with author Bill McKibben. (Fast forward to the last 10 minutes of the video.)

Since I am probably the only McKibben reader who continues to own and use a TV set, I got to see this segment on its original air date. He forcefully argues that not only do we have to act to save the planet, but that we can.

It’s been a couple of months since I read it, but I continue to be impressed or haunted (I’m not sure) by Seattle author David Sheilds’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

Parts of it are like an essay anthology, even if they were written expressly to be in the book. I’m particularly thinking of the part where he tells other authors what their books are really about.

Other parts fit more closely into the “manifesto” concept.

And it’s all written in a short and breezy fashion, like Marshall McLuhan’s better known works.

Now if you know my work here, you know I believe there’s absolutely nothing inferior about aphoristic writing, despite four or more decades’ worth of hi-brow ranting against it. Long, cumbersome prose is not inherently insightful. Short, pithy, precision writing is not necessarily dumbed down writing.

In this case, Shields has thoroughly whittled and sanded down his arguments to a fine point.

His main premise: North American white suburban life has become so plasticized, so sanitized, that humans have developed an insatiable craving for “reality.” Even if it’s virtual reality, or faked reality, or fictional narratives disguised as reality.

Hence, we get “reality” TV series. We get the protagonists of these series treated as “celebrities,” splashed over the covers of gossip magazines.

We get first-person novels falsely and deliberately promoted as the real-life memoirs of young drug addicts and street orphans.

We get radio and cable “news” pundits who don’t relay information so much as they spin narratives, creating overarching explanations of how the world works—even if, in some cases, they fudge the facts or just plain lie to make their worldviews fit together.

We get fantasy entertainments (movies, video games) executed in highly hyper-realistic fashions, complete with ultra-detailed 3D computer graphics.

So far, Shields’ argument makes perfect sense.

Now for the “yeah, but” part:

In the past two or three years, most non-billionaire Americans and Canadians have been forced to face a lot of reality; a lot of unpleasant reality at that. Some of us have had all too much reality.

“Reality” entertainment can be seen as just another style of escapism. An escapism that promises total immersion. An escapism that promises, however falsely, to offer an alternate reality, one that’s more dramatic or more comprehensible than the audience’s “real” reality could ever be.

This doesn’t mean Shields’ main premise is wrong.

Millions of people could, indeed, be desperate for more “real” lives.

But they won’t find it in the highly edited and curated “reality” entertainments.

They’ll only get a scratch that makes the itch worse.

I’ve been one poor correspondent, again.

But I had a reason.

I was busy finishing my next book, Walking Seattle.

As of this morning, it’s off to the publisher.

(The last thing I did for it was to snap a pic of the restored Hat n’ Boots in Georgetown.)

I promise to be more present at this site in upcoming days.

(I know, I’ve made such promises before. This time I mean it for sure.)

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Thoughts on recent performance events, big and small, on the Hill:

•

1) The Capitol Hill Block Party.

From all accounts it was a smashing success. Some 10,000 people attended each of the event’s three days. Except for one no-show due to illness, all the big advertised bands satisfied their respective throngs. Seattle finally has a second summer attraction with top big-name musical acts. (I personally don’t consider an outdoor ampitheater in the middle of eastern Washington to be “in Seattle.”)

But as the Block Party becomes a bigger, bolder, louder venture, it can’t help but lose some of its early funky charm, and a piece of its original raison d’etre.

Once a festival starts to seriously woo major-label acts, it has to start charging real money at the gates. It’s not just to pay the bands’ management, but also for the security, the sound system, the fences around the beer gardens, and assorted other ratcheted-up expenses.

That, by necessity, makes the whole thing a more exclusive, less inclusive endeavor.

The street fair booths that used to be free get put behind the admission gates. The merchants, political causes, and community groups operating these booths only end up reaching those who both can and want to pay $23 and up to get in.

I’m not suggesting the Block Party shut down or scale back to its earlier, small-time self.

I’m suggesting an additional event, perhaps on another summer weekend. It would be what the Block Party used to be—free to all, but intended for the people of the Hill. An all-encompassing, cross-cultural celebration of the neighborhood’s many different “tribes” and subcultures. An event starring not just rock and pop and hiphop, but a full range of performance types. An event all about cross-pollenization, exchanges of influence, and cultural learning.

It wouldn’t be a “Block Party Lite,” but something else, something wonderful in its own way.

•

2) Naked Girls Reading: “How To” Night.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about a strip club in Los Angeles called “Crazy Girls.” I told him I would rather pay to see sane girls.

Now I have. And it’s beautiful.

“Naked Girls Reading” is a franchise operation, originally based in Chicago. But it’s a perfect concept for Seattle. It’s tastefully “naughty” but not in any way salacious. It’s not too heavy. It’s entertaining. It’s edifying. It could even be billed as providing “empowerment” to its cast.

The four readers last Sunday night, plus the dressed female MC (costumed as a naughty librarian), all came from the neo-burlesque subculture. But this concept is nearly the exact opposite of striptease dancing. There’s no stripping, no teasing, and no dancing. The readers enter from behind a stage curtain, already clad in just shoes and the occasional scarf. They sit at a couch. They take turns reading aloud. When each reader has performed three brief selections, the evening is done.

Each performance has a theme. Last Sunday, it was “How To.” The readers mostly chose types of texts that are seldom if ever read aloud in public. Given Seattle’s techie reputation, it’s only appropriate that we rechristen instructional text as an art form.

Selections ranged from explosive-making (from the ’70s cult classic The Anarchist Cookbook), to plate joining in woodwork, to home-brewing kombucha tea, to deboning a chicken (from The Joy of Cooking), to the famous Tom Robbins essay “How to Make Love Stay.” The women performed these selections with great humor, great voices, and great sitting posture.

Despite what you may hear from the Chicken Littles of the book and periodical industries, The Word isn’t going away any time soon, any more than The Body. Both obsessions retain their eternal power to attract, no matter what.

“Naked Girls Reading” performances are held the first Sunday of each month in the Odd Fellows Building, 10th and East Pine. Details and ticket info are at nakedgirlsreading.com/seattle. The promoters also promise a “Naked Boys Reading” evening at a yet-unset date. (The participles won’t be all that’s dangling.)