…on her website (and soon to be book) Class Matters, that there are more “Others” in this nation besides just upscale women and upscale gays.

…upon our recent piece on Seattle writing, Ryan Boudinot has submitted “A Primer: How to Write a Great Northwest Novel.”

LAST FRIDAY, a “Broken Record” party occurred at the Crespinel gallery space in Belltown.

It was a promo event for our ol’ pal Peter Blecha’s new book Taboo Tunes: A History of Banned Bands and Censored Songs. The book’s a scholarly, yet gripping, saga relating many of the myriad ways people have tried to silence other people’s creative expressions over the years.

Strictly speaking, Blecha doesn’t write about the censoring of “music” per se. He writes about the censoring of music-related creations—lyrics, band names, album art, and dancing.

At the exhibit (still up for the next week), the words and images associated with music are carefully preserved and protected, in the form of framed album covers, sheet-music covers, and posters. It’s the music itself that gets trashed, in the form of irreplacable 78s smashed around the gallery floor.

I disapprove of this destruction. I say: Be kind to your old 78s. You might be one yourself one day.

Among those who had a “smashing” time: Guest DJs Mark Arm and Krist Novoselic (above), Squirrels fun-popster Rob Morgan, and jazzman Maurice.

As most of you know I was an afficianado of Seattle-based writing since before there was much of it.

So I must start this piece by saying it’s great to have a lot more of it around these days—enough for a full-length anthology book.

I should also mention that Reading Seattle: The City in Prose, like Fred Moody’s Seattle and the Demons of Ambition, refers kindly to my body of work, for which I’m grateful.

I just wish Reading Seattle‘s editors, Peter Donahue and John Trombold, had done a more intriguing curatorial job.

Donahue (author of the fine short-story collection The Cornelius Arms) and John Trombold (a sometime Seattle U. prof) compiled passages from 41 fiction and narrative-nonfiction books. You get plenty (though not all) of Seatown’s big verbiage names (Emmett Watson, Richard Hugo, Roger Sale, Tom Robbins, Rebecca Brown, Sherman Alexie, Murray Morgan, Mary McCarthy, Betty McDonald, Earl Emerson, David Guterson, J.A. Jance, Thom Jones, Matthew Stadler). You also get some up-n’-comers (Michael Byers, Charles D’Ambrosio, Natalia Rachel Singer) and some unjustly neglected past prose-pros (Archie Binns, Mary Brinker Post, Josephine Herbst).

The book’s arranged into three chapters by eras: “1930s-1980s,” “1980s-1990s,” “and 1990s-Early 2000s.” This demarcation refers to when the fiction or essay excerpts were written, not when they were set. The settings of the excerpts go back and forth in time quite a bit. The sequence of pieces within the chapters appears to be thematic; though it can be hard to tell what exactly is the theme-link from one piece to the next.

For a town that un-ironically prides itself on ironic humor, there’s almost nothing funny in Reading Seattle. The cumulative emotional effect of some of the excerpts is the same somber, solemn, hyper-reverent tone found in hackneyed nature poetry; only in prose and about a city.

The challenge in Northwest writing has always been to draw portraits instead of landscapes. To draw attention to the cast, not just to the sets. Many of the full-length works excerpted in Reading Seattle achieve that. It’s just that too many of the excerpts themselves don’t.

Too many of the excerpts read as if one was watching a compilation of film clips consisting only of shots of actors walking across landscapes and entering buildings. As soon as they start acting, the scene’s cut off.

Some examples of this: A slice of Lynda Barry’s Cruddy consisting only of the heroine’s stroll down the waterfront; a similar stroll through the I.D. from Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter; a sound bite from Jack Cady’s thriller Street pontificating on, well, streets.

Some exceptions to this pattern: Binns’ re-creation of what Chief Sealth’s famous speech might have really contained; a piece from John Okada’s No-No Boy about a Japanese American man’s less-than-welcome return home from the WWII internment; McDonald’s girlhood memory of her failure at door-to-door sales.

The book’s editors, and seven of its contributing authors, appeared in a panel discussion last week at Seattle U. The ninety-minute chat didn’t lead to any big statements. They mainly mentioned the usual stuff about Seattle having rain and clouds and hills and water and distinct neighborhoods and moderate/progressive politics and a sense of community, and about it not being New York.

Among the panel’s more interesting statements:

• Tim Egan’s claim that “there’s a noir-ish, dark quality to our writing.”
• Lydia Minatoya’s observation of Seattle as “a metaphor for America; the shining frontier, the big dreams, but also the denial of racism and the other unpleasant facts.”
• Our ol’ pal Jonathan Raban quipping that this is “both a hard community and a soft community,” and “still a town of immigrants and dreamers.”

Seattle writing, unlike Seattle tourist promotion, should feel no need to strive for the “unique.” This is a human settlement like any other, in which men and women, boys and girls, eat, sleep, work, love, play, fight, travel, talk, think, create, are born, die, and all the rest.

It’s HOW individuals, by themselves and in communities, do all these things that make for fascinating stories.

The Great Seattle Novel has yet to be written. (My own new novel sure ain’t it.) And the Great Seattle Literary Anthology has yet to be compiled.

But that’s just one more challenge for a young city built on challenges.

PHOTO PHRIDAY TODAY begins with some standard beautiful cityscapes.

I’ll miss University Used and Rare Books, closing after 40 years. It was your classic college-town used-book store, complete with tall shelves, cats, grizzled customers, and that amazing out-of-print cult classic you’d never seen before.

(via Arthur Marriott):

“Your mention on the ‘Misc’ page of Boeing and the 7E7 reminded me of two things that occurred to me when I read the piece about the first 7E7 order last week in the Times.The first was that there was a photograph of and quote from one Ellen Piasecki, who’s some sort of marketing VP at Boeing. I’ll bet there’s a whole story there.

Piasecki Aircraft was the original name of the East Coast company that eventually became the core of Boeing’s helicopter division. Their specialty was always big heavy-lift ‘copters with two main rotors instead of a ‘tail boom’–their Korean-War ‘flying banana’ was the precursor to the present-day Chinook. What would you bet that she was born into that family, with aviation in her blood, and that eventually led to what she’s doing now?

The other thing I perceived was more ominous. The rendering of the 7E7 in All Nippon Airways colors accompanying the article showed only one person in the cockpit.

Over the last several decades, we’ve seen the flight crew of large airliners reduced from three to two as the flight engineer was automated the way of the railroad fireman. The effect of this on safety has been open to question, as evidenced by reading John Nance’s first major book–when things break, it helps to have more brain power at work and more hands to manipulate whatever controls are still working.

However, economic forces and corporate and technological arrogance may be leading to the day when it’s assumed that the aircraft can flawlessly run itself, and having a token ‘attendant’ sitting up front will be a transition to putting hundreds of passengers in a pilotless aircraft. At that point, I don’t think I’ll be flying anymore.”

Sometimes, our present-day life in occupied America seems like a bad science fiction novel.

By “bad science fiction novel,” I don’t mean a brisk, high-energy pulp adventure story of 1950s vintage.

I mean a ponderous, relentlessly grim-n’-geeky, multi-volume saga of 1980s vintage.

You know, those thousand-page trilogies that tried to shoehorn in all possible fan-favorite elements in the same story—”hard” science, magic, sword and sorcery, palace infighting. monsters, and a sniggering teen-nerd sexuality; all delivered in an ultra-humorless tone, with extraneous sublots and sub-subplots dangling every which where, distracting readers away from the lack of a compelling main narrative.

Sci-fi trilogies of the pre-cyberpunk years often depict scary, foreboding worlds. Similarly, the geeks running today’s conservative establishment posit a vision of a scary, foreboding America, eternally besieged within an even scarier, more foreboding world.

Trilogies are full of near-incomprehensible jargon, catch words, acronyms, and bureaucratic geekspeak phrases that often conceal more than they reveal. So does today’s U.S. federal government, with its straight-faced doubletalk about “weapons of mass destruction related program activities” and such.

Trilogies depict freakishly misunderstood stereotypes of human behavior and interaction, and demand the reader accept them as just the way things are in this fictional universe, with no questioning allowed. So do the likes of Karl Rove, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage, et al., who, with their incessant screeching and posturing, insist that we can make the rest of the world adore us by shoving them around, that we can defend “freedom” by destroying it, and that anybody who disagrees with this is a terrorist.

Grim sci-fi, just as much as the less pretentious pulp sci-fi, wallows in physical impossibilities portrayed as hard science. Exploding spaceships might not make noises in trilogy novels (as they wouldn’t in real life); but the writers do play havoc with accepted real-life laws of mass, energy, and matter; often coming up with convoluted pseudo-explanatory excuses for doing so. Likewise, the right wing’s yarn-spinners insist to us, with no hint of irony permitted, that monopolies are good for competition, imperial invasions are good for democracy, pollution is good for the environment, conservative-only talk TV is “fair and balanced,” bigotry is Christlike, and the best way to persuade others toward your point of view is to insult and belittle them.

And most importantly, grim SF offers up a skewed definition of heroism and/or antiheroism. Grim-SF protagonists don’t have to be noble, inspiring, or all that heroic. They’re the good guys because the writers say they are; they can do evil things and it’s still OK. And in our century, we’ve got a ruthless gang of powermongers who regularly whore themselves out to big campaign contributors, who put the greed of the few ahead of the need of the many, who deliberately consign the domestic economy and the global environment to the figurative toilet, and who still, with total sincerity, believe themselves to be the noblest, most righteous figures on our planet.

Oh yeah—grim SF “trilogies” don’t always top out at three volumes. They can go on for seemingly ever, spreading their joyless aesthetic of bitter struggle, until people stop buying them.

Let’s hope people stop buying the fictions of our federal storytellers soon.

…why “Books Are the Hot Medium,” specifically referring to the current deluge of White House insider scandal tales.

One answer: With modern production technology, a hardcover tome can be rushed to the stores as quickly as a monthly magazine.

Another: Interviews with authors (and with govt. officials on the receiving end of authors’ accusations) can cheaply fill some of the unlimited time the cable news channels have to fill.

A third reason, which the NYT story doesn’t give: As we head into the dawn of a long-attention-span generation, books simply seem to be more worthy of one’s time. Classic “short-form” TV programming keeps losing viewers, while feature films on DVD have become the US consumer market’s most successful new product. Even video games have evolved from pinball-length short entertainments into 45-hour-long epics of level after level. When today’s children-not-left-behind graduate into adolescence and adulthood from years of relentless studying for standardized tests, a long, hefty read will seem even more like a natural way to relax at the end of the working day.

I’m not completely thrilled by all this. For nearly two decades, my local professional reputation has been that of a writer specializing in short, sharp shocks. With the ascencion of Jean Godden from the Seattle Times to the Seattle City Council, my li’l monthly half-page in the Belltown Messenger is the only three-dot column left in local print media.

So I’m moving into books. They’ve got higher profit margins and longer shelf lives than periodicals. (A fourth reason why books are “hot.”)

It’s a whole different type of work, requiring stronger legs and a sturdier torso. You can’t just stretch a short topic to feature length, no more than you can enlarge a spindly-legged spider to movie-monster size. But it’s where the flow is going, and all the self-help books say I gotta go with the darned flow.

I speak, of course, of the developer of California’s Madonna Inn, the fantastic and beloved pop-fantasy motel depicted in the film Aria and the Umberto Eco book Travels in Hyperreality.

Heather Rogers, who derives more enjoyment from drag shows than I do, contributes the following second installment of personal entertainment recommendations:

“Hello you pretty people,

Today’s Earth Day, so cut the whole “I’m so over the whole PC thing… I gave up recycling in ’94 along with my Birks” attitude. Today’s a great day to do something good. Like make a window box of flowers. Or get your soil tested for lead and arsenic and report the results to the city (it’ll help you with your lawsuit later on!). And you know what—you’re helping the environment RIGHT NOW—by reading fabulous online media (although I know a lot of you print out my column so you can read it in the bathtub while touching your “special place”. But I forgive you, you dirty doggies!)

Speaking of special places, you need to read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. It’s Hedwig chilled and served with a slice of baklava. It’s a fuller Bildungsroman. It’s fabulous. I know I mentioned it last time, but I don’t think enough of you are actually reading it yet. Plus if you want to be part of Nerd Out book club, you need to read it. Our next meeting is May 9 at 3 pm. There will be a special screening of Hedwig following the meeting, featuring erotic food. Email me for more details at slowdiva@yahoo.com.

Now, onwards to what the hell are you going to do this weekend:

Make time this weekend for the MC5 True Testimonial film at the Little Theatre. It’s playing April 23-29 (no show Mon.) at 608 19th Avenue East, $7. Dir: David C. Thomas. This will also go along great with Middlesex because it, too, will Detroit race riots in the late ‘60s, albeit from a very different perspective. Plus, a rare MC5 photo show following the film Dial 206- 675-2055 for more info.

Tonight: Rest up—you’ve got a busy weekend ahead of you.

FRIDAY NIGHT, the favorite choice is the BIG GAY DANCE NIGHT at Chop Suey. Or you could check out the Turn-Ons and Film School at the Croc. But I think we all need a little big gay dancing right now. (Oh, underagers—you could go see a cool band called Holy Ghost Revival at the Old Firehouse. But I’m mean and don’t like that venue, and I don’t go to the Eastside. Sorry! I’m a West End Girl now (see below for details).)

SATURDAY NIGHT, the music isn’t really making my slot go ca-ching, but I know what will… and you heard it hear first. Check out the window peep show at Salon Dewi, right by the Baltic Room. Travis the Waxing Diva will wax a girl’s private area (that is, PUSSY!) in public. Ooh, Naughty Naughty. Anyway, it starts at 10 pm and it’s free. Perfect—you have some din-dins over at Machiavelli, then watch some poor innocent girl (he always seems to talk some clueless little thing from the suburbs into this action—it reminds me of that sexy ravishing-of-the-innocent-girl scene in Interview with the Vampire. Yum.) have her icky old hair removed, exposing her oh-so-tender, flushed, peachy flesh… Then go to the Baltic Room after you’re all charged up and dance sweatily to house music with someone hot. OK!

Monday is actually the BIG NIGHT this weekend (or week, whatever). You have to choose between Kraftwerk at the Paramount and BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB and the Rapture at the Showbox. Whatcha gonna do now?  Huh?  (Tho’ I love BRMC and the Rapture, the correct choice is obviously KRAFTWERK. Duh. They’re playing only three American cities, I heard).

So, I’m moving to West Seattle this weekend, so I’m going to rely on my gentle (and rough) readers to give me the skinny, because though my ear will still be to the ground, the vibrations will have to travel farther to get to me. So, fork over your fab events and if it sounds cool, I’ll tell everyone.

You know what? I love you. I really, really do.”

Heather Rogers has offered to post a weekly entertainment guide on this site. Here’s a sample she whipped up. Lemme know if you find it useful, and if you’d like more of its type:

“To-Do: Kill Bill Vol. 2 + shards of melted glass

OK. I admit it. I copped out. There were so many amazing things going on the past couple weeks that I just decided against ALL of them and stayed in reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is wonderful, by the way. I hope you had fun doing your whatever it was you were doing. And happy birthday to NOLAN REYES (former promoter of Start! and good friend of mine)! That’s my one regret-not making it to Nolan’s b-day/welcome back from the Bay area deal last night. Sorry No-No-Nolan… school night.

Anyway, now I know you want to know what’s going on this weekend! So I’m gonna tell ya!

Well, tonight is a big night. There are a ton of fun things going on. But a can’t miss for me is Kill Bill Vol. 2. Kill Bill Vol. 1 was my absolute favorite by QT to date, so I’m thinking tonight will be super fun fun fun! I hope to go en masse with my crew, so if anyone’s planless, do give a ring-a-ding.

Continuing the theme of fab film, after Kill Bill Vol. 2, how about heading to the lovely Majestic Bay Theatres (2044 NW Market St in Ballard) at midnight to see a hilarious collection of shorts? I know you’ll want to see David Miller’s “Pickup,” which is a short adapted from his longer film “Shoot the Girl” (of which I’m a huge fan). It’s one of about 15 or so terrific pieces by respected and/or emerging and/or none-of-the-above artists. It’s $10 gen admission. For more info, check out http://www.artisttrust.org/events/Reel-movie-poster.gif. I’m such the early bird these days–hope I can stay up because I know it will be well worth it. Hey, SHORTS–much better than longs. If one should happen (which it won’t) to be boring, it’ll be over and on to the next thing in what, two minutes?

So, Saturday night, I’m going to the ‘secret’ U.S.E. house-party. (It’s like that stupid joke: how many Cha-Cha patrons does it take to screw in a light bulb? What, you don’t already know????) So, I’ve been instructed not to post the address all over hell ‘n halfa Georgia, but if you email a request to me, I’ll probably tell ya. Oh, and in case you wonder what U.S.E. is – wake up and go request United State of Electronica from KEXP or come to this party. They are literally the funnest band in Seattle to date.

Oh, and if that gets too crowded, Mama Casserole is spinning at Kicks! at the Twilight Exit. It’s free, 21+ and it’s always a good time, huh kids?

I’m sure there’s plenty of other things to do, but you’d have to be a goddamned moron not to want to do the aforementioned things. Because I’m pretty sure it’s all going to blow our minds to tiny little shards of melted glass before it’s all over.

Love ‘n lovin,

Heather Rogers”

OUR NOVEL The Myrtle of Venus is now available at Amazon.com. I earn more money if you buy it from my site, but you’re all still free, nay encouraged, to go to the Amazon page and contribute an unbiased rave review.

ALL LITERATE PEOPLE (hint, that includes you) need the site of Strange and Unusual Dictionaries.

I’ve avoided reviewing Fred Moody’s personal-essay book Seattle and the Demons of Ambition: A Love Story in the half-year it’s been out.

Perhaps I didn’t want to potentially hurt the feelings of Moody, a former acquaintance (and a fellow member, with me, of the dwindling breed of humans who still remember how to run a CompuGraphic phototypesetter).

Of course, Moody would cite that reluctance to criticize as part of the Old Seattle mindset, a zeitgeist marked by reflection, introversion, and near-fanatical politeness. To that, he contrasts a New Seattle, both dominated and demonized by rambunctious corporate go-getters out to unwittingly fulfill the city’s original name of “New York-Alki” (“…Pretty Soon”).

To his credit, Moody acknowledges the superficiality of this dichotomy. He also acknowledges his contradictory affections toward each side of this divided ideal. Too bad he doesn’t acknowledge some of the other holes in his narrative, and in the image he constructs of himself as your near-perfect Mr. Progressive Seattle.

Throughout the book, Moody tries to psychoanalyze his former home as if the city was one collective entity. He may have learned this limited perspective as an early staff writer at Seattle Weekly. He spends a lot of his book’s verbiage waxing about Weekly founder David Brewster, a benevolent dictator who’d imposed a singular ideological vision on what was, for a decade, the town’s only major “alternative” rag. Brewster’s vision of Seattle, to which Moody writes about eagerly agreeing, was of a town in which white, upscale, professional-caste baby boomers (such as Brewster and Moody) were the only people in sight, or at least the only people who mattered. Moody admits the paper’s myopia caused it to miss out on Seattle’s biggest arts story, the rise of the local rock scene—even though the Weekly and Sub Pop Records were housed in the same office building, and future Pearl Jam member Stone Gossard worked as a barista in the ground-floor cafe!

All these little prejudices were fundamental to the “Old Seattle” Moody nostalgizes about; or rather to the transitional Seattle of Moody’s local-journalism heyday, between the Boeing-dominated past and the Microsoft-dominated present. And squarely in that middle era, as big as the shoulder pads on an old Nordstrom office dress, lie the roots of the ambitious Seattle Moody rues.

Moody writes, with no little degree of self-congratulation, how he spotted the Microsoft phenom almost from the start, and got plenty of work from it for his typesetting enterprise in the pre-laser-printer years. Imagine, right there in Seattle’s prefab Eastside suburbs, an outfit not just surviving but getting rich and huge, all from this ephemeral “software” stuff, stuff made by writers, and employing writers to document it all! Ex-English majors were making enough money to buy houses, and even move to Bainbridge! How cool! So what if this home-computer technology would make phototypesetting obsolete; Moody would simply bounce back by writing a couple of books about the whole e-revolution.

But soon enough, it got out of hand. Dot-com hustlers raised millions in venture capital based on faulty or nonexistent premises, went bust, and left behind hordes of overmortgaged, overqualified ex-employees. The bad old days of the 1970 Boeing crash returned, only this time the food-bank lines were filled by NPR listeners and Weekly readers.

Moody sees the high-tech depression and the jobless recovery a well-deserved comeuppance for Seattle, a collective spanking for the city’s previous lusts for wealth and glory. He even sees the 1999 WTO riots (in which mostly out-of-town protesters ranted about out-of-town conventioneers) as a rebuke to Seattle’s will to “world class” status.

But that’s a silly overgeneralization, one of many in Moody’s book. He chides the city’s political/business nabobs for trying to artificially inflate their own importance, as he artificially inflates the importance of his statements about them.

He frequently admits, in a doth-protest-too-much type of confessing, how he, as a dutiful member of the Seattle establishment’s favorite constituency (upscale boomers), got caught up in the hype he was supposed to be covering. But even his mea culpa moments seem hyped-up, in that smug Big Chill-generation way.

I know Moody; I’ve read his prior books. I know he’s capable of better stuff than this.

Which is what I’d say to Seattle as well. The city doesn’t have to be World Class. But it can still be the best darned regional gathering place it can be.

And that’s not putting anybody down. That’s criticism meant to instruct, to improve. It’s something Moody, Seattle, and I need.

…is finally available for online purchase! Simply go to the bottom of this page, or go direct to our ordering page at kagi.com.

(If you should, perchance, have any difficulty following the instructions on the page, lemme know.)