I used to say that upscale, whitebread Seattle’s favorite “minority groups” were (1) upscale white women, (2) upscale white gays, and (3) dead black musicians.

When I said that, I’d forgotten about a fourth ethnic fave–the mythical Native American Symbol-Person.

Nearly every Seattle Caucasian loves this fantasy figure, in one pose or another.

Athletes and corporate-motivation fans love the Warrior.

Stoners and ex-stoners love the Wise Philosopher attuned with the Earth.

New Agers love the Healing Shaman.

Art collectors and interior decorators love the Anonymous Artisan. (I once met a young white sculptor who griped that no local tribe would let him buy his way into membership.)

All these groups tend to be somewhat less fond of actual, living, flesh-n’-blood indigenous men and women; particularly those who fail to live up to the symbols.

All this is a prelude to a plug for Native Seattle, a new UW Press book by UBC historian Coll Thrush.

Mary Ann Gwinn’s
Seattle Times review covers Thrush’s basic plot points well. To summarize: Amerindians weren’t just icons and muses. They were real people. And they still are. And they’ve remained a vital part of the city’s life, whether whitey’s aware of this or not.

Native Seattle is an important book, despite its shortcomings. Thrush has a stilting, academic writing style; he repeats the same arguments over and over. He admits to gaps in his research, particularly in finding actual living native folk willing to talk with him. And in the introduction, he audaciously compares his own “outsider” existence as a gay man with that of the First Peoples. (In real life, there’s no comparison. Trust me on this.)

In one sense, Thrush also stereotypes the local native people, as Tragic Colonial Victims whose story requires a Brave White Liberal to tell it.

But if Thrush fails to fully grasp the human side of his tale, the research-wonk side still fascinates.

He vividly depicts the seasonal camps and full-time settlements in and near the present-day city. He’s particularly fond of discussing the topography of these places, before Seattle’s great regrades, landfills, canals, and drainage projects changed it all.

And he rightfully notes that natives didn’t just “go away,” peacably or otherwise. They were integrated (sort of) into the urban economy from the start, as mill workers, cannery workers, sailors, cooks, maids, hookers/mistresses, etc.

Even as the reservation system developed, local Amerindians continued to live and work here, full-time or seasonally, through all of Seattle’s 156-year history.

They intermarried with whites and Filipinos. They came here from outlying tribal communities. They worked for Boeing, for construction companies, and for fishing fleets.

And they’re still some of us. Not ghosts, not apparitions, but actual humans, who live and die and think and feel and love and try to muddle through somehow.

(Priscilla Presley quoted in USA Today): “Elvis means something to people because he wasn’t a contrived person, he was organic and true to himself.”

Sorry, ex-mother-in-law of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. You’re mistaken.

As Brit musicologists Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their fascinating new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Elvis was as contrived as they come.

He carefully constructed a persona that was one part nice Mississippi mama’s boy, one part James Dean sneer, and one part R&B outlaw. And it worked. These seemingly incompatible traits melded together in the 1954-58 Elvis persona, creating a musical legend and a world icon.

The trick to the early Elvis wasn’t that he was “natural.” It was that he made his particular artificiality seem natural.

Presley’s later reinventions, as a goody-two-shoes matinee idol and as an overstated Vegas self-parody, were no more or less “real” than his first persona. And they were just as successful with audiences of the time–as they are to this day, in the form of impersonators and merch/DVD sales.

So, on the 30th-anniversary week of Presley’s passing, let’s remember the real “real” Elvis, the consummate entertainer who found a way to rock the world.

(Faking It, by the way, is a wonderful book. Its chief premise: Forget “authenticity” or “keepin’ it real.” All pop music is a contrivance, and that goes for country, folk, blues, punk, hiphop, and square dancing too. Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured image–but so was John Lee Hooker.)

Got another little essay in the Capitol Hill Times, this one about how and why apartment and condo residents could be more sociable.

Got the August Belltown Messenger out, with three long pieces by yrs. truly.

And I’ve turned in another photo-history book to Arcadia Publishing. Seattle’s Belltown will be out in November, tentatively, and it’ll be just as fabulous as Vanishing Seattle. More on this later.

These past two weeks I’ve been hard at work on the next photo-history book, Seattle’s Belltown. (If anyone has any images of the Trade Winds, the Belltown Cafe, the original Tugs, the Weathered Wall, or the original Vogue, contact me immediately!)

The vastly larger and more comprehensive second edition of my “e-book” Take Control of Digital TV is now available.

As some of you know, television as we know it ends in 2/09, when the analog broadcast transmitters shut down and everything goes digital. Before then, you’ve got a lot to learn about the new digital TV system and all the software and hardware that goes with it. I humbly believe my e’book’s the best way for you to get up to speed about HDTV, LCD, plasma, Blu-ray, HD-DVD, Apple TV, DVRs, and all the other myriad aspects of the new video universe. Get it now.

I’ll explain this further, in handy online-audio form, on the streaming Net-radio show Tech Night Owl this Thursday evening.

…the only prior time I’ve mentioned Paris Hilton. It was a brief aside, pondering whether Hilton would have grown up to be a classier person if Elizabeth Taylor had remained part of the family.

Now, it turns out, Hilton and I have read the same book! (Or at least we’ve both been seen in public with the same book.)

In a papparazi shot earlier this week, a pre-jail Hilton was photographed carrying (1) a Bible and (2) the self-help tome The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle.

Tolle, 59, was born in Germany under the name Ulrich Tolle, and now lives in Vancouver. He apparently changed his first name in honor of 13th-century German mystic Johannes “Meister” Echkhart.

Tolle has written four books and released dozens of audio books and lectures, all of which are narrated in a very calming, softly accented voice. He borrows ideas from a lot of Eastern and Western sources, but his central thesis is a simple one.

Many modern humans, Tolle asserts, are crippled by their own “mental noise,” or obsessive-compulsive thoughts. Regrets about the past, worries about the future, self-condemnations about one’s physical appearance or social status–they’re all symptoms of the mental noise. The noise, in turn, is tied into the “pain body,” a mental state in which all someone can feel is pain (physical, mental, emotional), and all someone wants to do is to spread that pain to others.

Tolle’s prescription: Become aware of the true self behind the false identity of your thinking mind. Become more acutely aware of your body and of the world surrounding you. Accept the present moment. Learn to live in the stillness. Develop an awareness that goes beyond the “egoic mind.”

Some of you are already scoffing that you never perceived Paris Hilton as much of a left-brain thinker.

But a mental-noise victim doesn’t have to be a tech nerd, a video-game geek, or even a language nut such as myself.

Let’s armchair-analyze our poor little rich girl here.

If she’s like some ultra-fashion-conscious women, she’d be prone to constant fretting about every minute aspect of the way she looks.

If she’s like some professional “celebrities,” she’d be constantly calculating how best to keep her name and image in the public eye, even if it’s in the form of a self-deprecating “dumb blonde” role on a staged reality show.

And if she’s like some Hollywood types, she’d search for an apparently simple short cut to spiritual growth, preferably one that didn’t expect her to renounce her material wealth.

But Tolle’s path isn’t as easy as he initially makes it out to be. It requires one to give up things more valuable to a celebrity than money. It requires one to give up one’s ego, one’s fully-constructed but false sense of self.

It’s giving up everything that makes someone a professional “celebrity.” And if Hilton’s ready to do that, more power to her.

…”reading is going to “go completely online.” I can imagine that fate for ephemeral and time-sensitive matter, for research and reference, and for community info sharing (aka “social networking”). But more artistic, entertainment-oriented, long-form, or “experience” reading (yeah, that includes porn) may always be more popular in nonvolatile formats that don’t require separate playback hardware, i.e. books.

…the Ides-O-March this year my thanking the P-I’s Bill Virgin for a really nice Vanishing Seattle book plug in his column today. Virgin’s topic: The past and future, if there is one, of that once ubiquitous institution, the gas station.

Today’s front page news is “Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades.”

This spells disaster for the grumpy-grownup set.

Ever since I was a teenager (the term “teen” having been temporarily out of style then), pompous adults have relished every chance to stereotype their youngers as a gaggle of illiterate nothings.

I like to imagine this was especially true in the ’80s, when haughty “’60s Generation” people were crowding the grumpy-grownup demographic, but no. This habit has been going on long since, and it was going on long before (cf. Steve Allen’s old snipes against that silly rock n’ roll music, or the scene at the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy where an aging George M. Cohan (James Cagney) cringes at some energetic teens singing “Jeepers Creepers”).

More recently, Seattle Weekly’s new management figured the way to capture a young-adult audience (which the paper’s previous managements had either ignored or overtly spurned) was to fire the news department, decimate serious political coverage, and add dumb imitation-Onion faked features.

But this time the grumps can’t get away with their putdowns, at least not without a bigger reality-distortion field.

We’re facing what, a couple years ago, I half-facetiously named the “Long Attention Span Generation.”

We’re talking about teens who spent their preteen years devouring Harry Potter novels, each one 150 pages longer than the one before. Teens who’ve fled the instant-gratification video arcades to immerse themselves in the nonlinear, massively-multiplayer worlds of The Sims and Second Life. Teens who actually understand vast technical parts of the computers, cell phones, and online networks they use.

So, yeah, long-form narrative is quite a familiar concept for ’em. So is the activity of reading itself. (The non-porn parts of the ol’ WWW are all about words; so is text messaging.)

What this might mean in the future: Yes, I can imagine whole chat rooms devoted to Proust and Pynchon. I can foresee neo-Shakespeare fashions in London’s boppingest nightclubs (complete with codpieces, of course).

But, sorry to say, I suspect there will always be stoner boys whose idea of great writing begins and ends with Hunter Thompson.

…on the station’s online program guide, but my lovely interview about the book Vanishing Seattle is supposed to be on sometime between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. on KUOW, 94.9 FM in Seattle and streaming on the Web.

I taped a lovely interview yesterday at KUOW, Seattle’s NPR affiliate. You’ll hear me plugging the book Vanishing Seattle when the interview airs, sometime next Thursday, 2/15. I’ll let you know the time when I know it.

AND NOW, THIS OTHER PROMOTIONAL ANNOUNCEMENT: My colleagues at Take Control Books are offering a limited-time offer on a bundle of five ebook guides to Mac software. You can learn how to get the most out of your Mac (and iPod to create, manipulate, and organize music, photos, and personal web pages. But hurry: this offer’s only good for a limited time.

…is launching an experiment to create the first “wiki” novel. Anyone can sign up to contribute to it. It will be online and open for contributions for six weeks. The resulting work may or may not be issued in print form.

I’m sure the final piece couldn’t be any more disjointed than the worst committee-written Hollywood movies.

…Here’s a ’40s-era abridged and illustrated version of Friedrich A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. The original book was an American “free market” economist’s thesis on how “centralized planning” would always lead to one or another flavor of fascism. Hayek (no relation to Salma) clearly intended an anti-liberal (specifically anti-New Deal), pro-libertarian statement. But, at least in this condensed version, it’s eerily prescient about modern pseudo-“conservative” ideology.

…Vanishing Seattle review out now, this one by Artdish.com’s Jim Demetre. Aw shucks, ya make me blush.

…the past two weeks, instead of writing here:

• Selling Vanishing Seattle books. (It’s only been out less than six weeks, and the third printing is already scheduled.)
• Working temp gigs. Most recently, I was at the Convention Center during the American Library Association’s huge confab. Sorry to report, I don’t have any dirt to report about raucous librarian nights on the town. I was mostly stuck at a desk, fielding questions from exhibiting companies about their “lead retrieval” machines. (They’re magnetic-stripe readers that collect demographic info about any convention attendee who stops by a company’s display booth.)This is one of those meta business-to-business-to-business enterprises that should have been rendered obsolete long ago. But then again, the whole convention biz is something online communication should have rendered obsolete by now. Yet it’s still more-or-less going strong, propping up all sorts of industries (display designers/builders, staging crews, airlines, hotels, restaurants, hookers, cab drivers, caterers, truckers, Pike Place fish throwers, the makers of promotional swag of all sorts (backpacks, brochures, candies, water bottles, pens, golf balls)), all so dispersed people with one professional or social link can all gather F2F (that’s “face to face” in geekspeak), be collectively bored by PowerPoint slide presentations, and dine on overpriced trout almondine.

  My next such gig’s at the Boat Show. It’ll be nine straight days of, well, I never know what.

• Neglecting work on my next book, a history of bodacious Belltown, and on another update to my ebook about digital TV.
• Planning a long-way-overdue reworking of this here blog site thang. I’m not yet ready to say much about it, only that it’ll be a group endeavor with several other bloggers and journalists, and just might be the Next Big (Online) Thing.
• Putting the February Belltown Messenger together. It’ll have the first of two consecutive installments about the new Olympic Sculpture Park. One reason why: The “park” part of the park, the landscaping and the plantings, still aren’t done yet, and even those flora aspects that have been installed will look nicer the closer we get toward spring.