Just saw the documentary Obscene, a profile of longtime Grove Press/Evergreen Review publisher Barney Rosset. Rosset specialized in hibrow and “daring” lit for the GI Bill generation of college kids and for their ’60s successors.

He also specialized in anti-censorship court battles. He successively succeeded in legalizing Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, Naked Lunch, and the film I Am Curious (Yellow).

Now in his 80s and still feisty, he’s full of colorful stories about his life and times.

But the most shocking image in the movie involves a right-wing smear campaign against Evergreen Review in 1972.

The magazine, in its last years, had become part lit journal and part “artistic” skin mag. One issue contained an essay by WA’s own Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. The appearance of Douglas’s words within the same staples as erotic art photos was enough to give then-House Minority Leader Gerald Ford an excuse to call for Douglas’s impeachment.

We see a press junket event with Ford and two other Repubs. Jerry holds up the magazine, lingering on each page of the nudes, demanding that we all be outraged.

Two years later, Ford would become the beneficiary of another impeachment drive, and would propagate the self-image of a conciliatory Mr. Nice who just wanted to bring everybody together.

It’s good to learn this other side of Ford, as just another right-wing sleazemonger.

I’ve known Thomas Frank’s work since his cultural-commentary zine The Baffler and his first book The Conquest of Cool. As the Clinton era and the tech bubble gave way to Bush’s Reign of Error, Frank’s focus morphed from “hip” youth-marketing shticks to the early-oughts’ financial speculation mania, to the deepest darkest heart of conservative malevolence. This is the setting of his latest treatise, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule.

Frank’s premise in a nutshell: Many of your worst conspiracy theories about the right-wing sleaze machine are true, and he’s got the voluminous research to prove it. Legislation is sold to lobbyists for big money at golf courses and expensive restaurants. This lobbying industry’s made DC’s Virginia suburbs one of America’s wealthiest enclaves.

Among the results: tax and regulatory breaks for the rich and connected, the outsourcing and even offshoring of many government functions, the hiring of well-connected incompetents at business-unfriendly agencies such as FEMA and the Department of Labor, official support for overseas sweatshops and oil drilling in national parks, the decimation of consumer protection and endangered species listings, etc. etc.

Frank particularly enjoys tracking all this through the career of uber-influence peddler Jack Abramoff, who seems to have been everywhere graft and sanctioned bullying have been within our time. Abramoff’s depicted as helping turn the College Republicans into a gaggle of liberal-bashing shock troops, as coordinating apartheid South Africa’s US PR drives, and of turning the post-1994 Republican Congress into a highly organized machine for legal and quasi-legal bribery.

Like Naomi Klein (whom Frank qoutes and name-drops at one point), Frank’s current work covers a few sectors of the VRWC (vast right wing conspiracy) in excruciating, mind-numbing detail, but is silent almost to the point of nihilism about what progressives might do to reverse these plutocratic trends.

This is particularly ironic considering one of Frank’s chief argument points, that Republican corruption and mismanagement increase public cynicism toward government—an opinion Republicans actively want to promote. (Frank calls this situation “Win-Win Corruption.”)

At the opening of the Obama era, this everything-sucks attitude on the part of the left has simply got to give way to more practical (and, yes, hopeful) strategems.

…today. Thanks to all of you kind readers who wrote in asking. I went to an MD today about this seasonal crud I’ve had for the past month. I came back with nothing but a flu-shotted arm. (The clinic techs know me well enough by now to give me the Bugs Bunny Band-Aids without asking.)

I’m only coughing occasionally now. At times circa Halloween, I was violently hacking to the point of momentary breathlessness.

Between that and my last, now-completed, temp gig, I’ve hardly touched my graphic novel script lately. I really need to get some more progress on it before I can announce it officially.

What I can announce are two new Vanishing Seattle products, just in time for your downscaled holiday giving plans.

First, may I suggest the Vanishing Seattle calendar? Thank you; I shall. It’s big, it’s bold, and it’s full of “future” dates and “past” pictures. Plan your ought-nine tomorrows while remembering the Jet City’s funky yesterdays.

Then, for the snail-mail correspondin’ holdouts among you, there’s also the Vanishing Seattle postcard set. You get fifteen (count ’em!) separate views of Seatown past, each on a separate cardboard rectangle and all handily combined within a carrying case of clear, rugged-yet-pliable plastic.

Both are now at finer book and gift shops and via the above online links. Why not get both today?

…this evening to the greatest American author of our generation, David Foster Wallace, who died by his own hand at 46.

He’ll be remembered most for Infinite Jest, his thousand-page epic novel of PoPoMo reconstructivism and recursive complexity, about (among many other things) drugs-as-entertainment and entertainment-as-drugs, set amid a near-future North America in perhaps-inexorable political and environmental decline.

But that was only the cap of a remarkable body of works, fiction and non-, whose common thread was the hyper-rigorous parsing of a scene or a topic down to the most minute detail, the most obscure angle; all treated with a dry humor AND sincere compassion.

Wallace was no hipper-than-thou alt-cult celeb. His stories and essays, even when about his personal experiences (including past struggles with drugs and alcohol), always dealt with more universal conditions.

This Metafilter thread is one way to learn more about this.

Perhaps his most direct worldview-statement is his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon University. Towards its end, he states:

The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.

A few of you might have noticed that the Obama campaign’s got a a really slick graphic-design department.

One of this design team’s major motifs is a solitary, serif capital “O.”

To many, that letter, presented in that context, is reminiscent of a magazine whose figurehead and co-owner is a big Obama supporter.

To others of us, it reminds of The Story of O, the classic novel and movie about bondage, discipline, submission, pain-as-pleasure, and the total surrender of one’s being to a figure of strong authority.

Damn, doesn’t that sound exactly like the ol’ Republican seduce-n’-swindle syndrome, from which Obama promises to deliver us.

Oh, and the time remaining until Election Day? Nine and a half weeks.

You may have heard of “Garfield Minus Garfield.”

That’s the Web site that takes Jim Davis’s iconic comic strip, removes the titular cat from all frames, and leaves behind “Jon Arbuckle… an isolated young everyman as he fights a losing battle against loneliness.”

Well, now there’s going to be an official Garfield Minus Garfield book. It’s authorized by Davis and published by Garfield‘s regular paperback licensee.

Utne Reader has discovered Seattle Sound’s item about an online sub-sub-genre of “slash fiction,” this version involving the likes of Kurt Cobain and Dave Grohl, among other bad-boy duos of rock.

“Slash” fiction, for the uninitiated, is a four-decades-old shtick in which mostly female writers imagine guy-pals of celebrity or fiction as if they were hot n’ heavy gay lovers. Most observers believe it started with Star Trek fan fiction.

I’d go back earlier, to the college English profs who’d give an easy A to any student essay that “proved” the major characters of any major literary work were really gay.

Cobain, as many of you know, sometimes claimed to be bi; though there’s no knowledge of his ever having had a homosexual experience. I used to figure he’d just said that because, in Aberdeen, to be a “fag” was the worst insult you could give a boy, while in Olympia and Seattle, upscale white gay men were the most respected “minority group” around.

Fiction based on real-life celebrity caricatures is also nothing new. The New Yorker did it in the 1930s. South Park has been doing it for a decade.

Anyhow, there are further slash frontiers out there than Seattle Sound or Utne have bothered to explore. They include “femslash,” women writing about female fictional icons as if they were really lesbians. It might have started with fan-written stories about Xena and Gabrielle. It’s spread to include other SF/fantasy shows with at least two female cast members, and from there to other fictional universes. The grossest/most intriguing, depending on your tastes, might be the stories imagining half-sisterly cravings between Erica Kane’s daughters.

One of Frank Zappa’s kids will edit Disney comics.

A kind reader recently gave me a 1927 hardcover book, Who’s Who in Washington State. (I’ll show a scan of the handsome cover as soon as Blogger lets me.)

It was published in Seattle by one Arthur H. Allen. His preface calls the book “the story of human activity, the successes and failures of forward-looking individuals who have not only conceived projects but have had the courage either to successfully carry them through, or to lay a ground work which resulted in final completion.”

He also promises, “An effort will be made in the next edition of Who’s Who in Washington State to list the names of more women.” As far as I’ve been able to tell, there wasn’t another edition, at least not by Allen; later books by the same name were apparently published in 1949 and 1963 by others.

The tome’s 240 pages are crammed with tiny-type, one-paragraph bios. Most of the subjects are businessmen and lawyers, with a few doctors, government officials, and educators added into the mix.

The Fisher family (then of Fisher Flouring Mills, now of KOMO and related properties) is handily represented. William Boeing, however, is listed alone, with no relatives. Such pioneer family names as Yesler, Boren, and Denny are missing altogether. So are druggist George Bartell, banker Joshua Green, and the shoe-selling Nordstroms (though the families behind Frederick & Nelson and The Bon Marche are duly included).

Those who are in the book, and whom I’d heard of, include real-estate titan Henry Broderick, longtime P-I sportswriter Royal Brougham, nursery owner Charles Malmo, UW prof Edmond Meany, naturalist/writer Floyd Schmoe (whom I’d met in his old age), lumbermen Charles Stimson and John Weyerhaeuser, Seattle Times publisher Clarence Blethen, PACCAR cofounder William Pigott, and seed packager Charles Lilly (his firm later became Lilly-Miller).

But it’s the names I’d never heard of that particularly fascinate me.

Names like Alice Rollit Cole (“teacher of expression and dramatic reader”), Walton Lindsay Fulp (“supt. Carnation Milk Products Co., Kent”), O.H. Woody (“Mgr. and publisher, the Okanogan Independent”), and Anna Elisibit Green Grant (“owner S.O.S. Placement Bureau”).

These are some of the people who helped made this state great. They, and a few million others even more obscure. It’s fun to open the book to any random name (say, “Fleming, Howard Glenn, v-p. Snoboy Fruit Distributors”), and make up an imagined full life story for the person, complete with parents, spouse(s), children, likes/dislikes, triumphs/frustrations, hopes/fears, and ultimate life’s regret, if any.

Saturday just happened to be the first warm day of the year; a perfect setting for the already much-documented Dalai Lama show in the pro football stadium, where he talked about compassion and coexistence for all people.

(No, I see absolutely no cynical irony in that. American football is a game of confrontation, but it’s also a game of cooperation.)

His message, and the other messages at the Seeds of Compassion confab, have been both simple and deep. I’ll probably have more to say about them later this week.

Later that evening, I found myself at the Georgetown Art Attack gallery crawl. Saw some lovely informal paintings at Georgetown Tile curated by my ol’ pal Anne Grgich; then caught some great buys at the Fantagraphics bookstore’s scratch-and-dent sale.

Sunday brought us the last day of the last bowling alley north of the Ship Canal, Ballard’s totally beloved Sunset Lanes.

It was also the day of what just might have been the last pro basketball game in Seattle. Maybe. If we don’t do something about it.

Even after a deliberately thrown season, the finale was sold out. Fans booed the home team’s owner Clay Bennett, and cheered the opposing team’s owner (Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, who opposes Bennett’s desired team move to Oklahoma City). You saw little to none of this on Fox Sports Net; under terms of its contract with the team, FSN’s announcers said almost nothing about Bennett’s threats or the real importance of Sunday’s game.

Also Sunday evening, and this takes the whole entry full circle, CNN held what it called a “Compassion Forum,” in which Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (appearing separately) discussed their religious and/or spiritual foundations. Of course, because they are rival applicants for a really big job, some pundits just had to compare and contrast who’s really the most faith-based.

…is peripherally involved in the latest fabricated memoir scandal.

That’s Marie Phillips, author of the novel Gods Behaving Badly, when she writes about wanting to be “a pop novelist”: “Maybe I can be like Ray Davies or Peter Blake. They’re no lesser because they aren’t Mozart or Michelangelo. They are doing something else.”

Jim Demetre has a response to Charles Mudede’s review of Seattle’s Belltown.

M. Coy Books is indeed shuttering, after 18 years on Pine Street. The last non-chain, general-topics bookstore in the downtown retail district has indeed lost its lease, and the two Michaels who run it have decided the business is too marginal to relocate. The Michaels have always supported my work, even when I was reduced to self-publishing.

THE VIRGINIA INN’S current incarnation closes Jan. 13. It will reopen in an expanded “double wide” format, including a full kitchen, in March.

AND CRANIUM, the local board-game enterprise that got big with a deal to sell games at Starbucks, is selling out to toy mega-monster Hasbro. The latter’s brands include Monopoly, Scrabble, Candy Land, and the locally-invented Magic: The Gathering.

…disappearing city-wise: Ballard’s Sunset Bowl, the last remaining bowling center north of the Ship Canal and one of Seattle’s last 24-hour eateries, has lost its real estate and is closing, probably by April.

And things aren’t looking that rosy for the lease of my fave new-book store, M Coy (the last non-chain general-book outlet in the downtown retail core). Details to follow.