…is off to a slow start. As of now (7:12 p.m. Sunday), I’ve completed exactly half of the word quota I need in order to make 50,000 words in 30 days.

I’m trying to write my novel the way they write soap operas: Start with a broad overview of the storyline, then elaborate that into a scene-by-scene breakdown, then fill in the actual dialogue and descriptions. I roughly have breakdowns for the first week’s worth of chapters, and am trudging through turning the second chapter into pristine prose.

If I’d been truly on the proverbial bean, I’d have had all the chapter breakdowns, and a couple thousand words o’ text, done by now. With luck and gumption, I may be able to catch up.

In addition to promising y’all a brand spankin’ new print MISC by the end o’ the year, I’ve also just signed up for National Novel Writing Month. That’s a North America-wide group of hundreds of humans who all vow to complete a first-draft novel (minimum 50,000 words) from Nov. 1 to Nov. 30. Why they had to pick one of the short months is beyond me; but at least they give you more time than the Vancouver-based three-day novel writers get.) I’ll post my progress regularly here, and perhaps even (I’m not guaranteeing anything) show some excerpts.

The tale I’m gonna weave is The Myrtle of Venus, an expansion of an unfinished screenplay project I attempted three or four years ago. It involves the destruction of artist-studio space, the tiresomeness of “edgy” corporate youth culture, the tech-industry bubble, Greek mythology, American history, social satire, hot sex, dorky old TV cartoons, and the world’s blandest woman. (The final version of it, as you might surmise, might be a lot longer than the draft I’m about to start writing.)

‘TWAS A GRAND NITE at the Crocodile on Thursday, when my ol’ pal and fellow scene-documentator Charles Peterson debuted his latest and ultimate book collection of rock n’ roll imagery, Touch Me I’m Sick.

It’s truly a splendid hardcover coffee-table tome, and a vast improvement over the editing and production job done on his now-out-of-print 1995 collection Screaming Life. You should all rush out and get a copy promptly, so you can drool and marvel at all the up-close moments of pure rockin’ Hi-NRG, in glorious monochrome.

The book release party was a spectacular gala, a flashy party, and a reunion of the pre-Nevermind Seattle music community (at least of those members of that community who are still alive but aren’t homebound with kids). Among them: Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt, who played DJ and spun some truly rare vinyl by Devo, Mudhoney, and others of the era.

Of course, yr. web editor couldn’t resist an opportunity to photograph the evening’s live bands, Girl Trouble (above) and the Briefs, in imitation of Peterson’s inimitable style.

TURNS OUT I MIGHT’VE been a trife optimistic about attendance figures at this year’s Northwest Bookfest. Unofficial reports have it at 9,000 over the two days, down at least half from last year’s event (when admission fees were only voluntary). There were also fewer exhibitors (the rare/antiquarian book people didn’t care for the old airplane hangar’s leak-prone roof).

Still, the event should be considered a success, given the dire fiscal straits the Bookfest organization’s gone through in the past two years or so.

Now, it’s time to start planning for Ought-Four. And this time the Bookfest gals-n’-guys really oughta start listening to the suggestions I’ve given just about every year:

Give it the ol’ razzle-dazzle. More authors, more games, more fun. Imagine the possibilities:

• Literary-character costume contests (kid and adult divisions).
• An adults-only corner where readers recite the “good parts” from favorite novels.
• A two-day, on-site novel writing contest.
• A literary-trivia-based treasure hunt across the Magnuson Park grounds.
• A local-celebrity poetry slam.

Why, the possibilities are endless…

ANOTHER OCTOBER, another Northwest Bookfest. (Or, as I like to call it, the World of Words Lit-O-Rama.)

With corporate donations drying up, organizers laid off most of their paid staff this year and enforced a cover price for the first time. But it seemed to go off more or less smoothly and with almost as many attendees to the ex-naval air station at Sand Point.

Of course, it helps if you have an extra added attraction to bring the punters in, such as a live pony…

…or a stuffed bird…

…or a guy in a lion suit acting toward the ladies like, well, like a predator.

It also helps if you’ve got many of the Northwest’s brightest literary lights. Sure Jonathan Raban, Sherman Alexie, and Fred Moody all had neato things to say, but the crowd gave the true superstar treatment to Book Lust author and “Librarian Action Figure” model Nancy Pearl. (Who deserves every bit of her adoration.)

The books, of course, are the real stars of Bookfest. There were thousands of ’em, from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.

And there were readers, too. Besides the big names mentioned above, print MISC contributors Stacey Levine and Matt Briggs appeared on a panel organized by Clear-Cut Press. (They’re separated here by Corrina Wyckoff.)

Bookfest has essentially replaced one role of Bumbershoot, the role of Seattle’s big start-of-bad-weather public fete. We gather together one more time to proclaim our readiness to shut ourselves in for the winter with printed entertainment for company.

And we get to feed the seagulls while we’re at it.

The NYU professor and longtime showbiz-basher passed away last Sunday, but (perhaps appropriately, given his contempt for all things media-esque) the papers didn’t mention it until Thursday.

The following is not intended as a “flame” message, but I always felt frustrated at Neil Postman’s writings. He said he wanted people to avoid deceptively simple ideas, but his books were full of those.

In the past, I’d publicly belittled Postman as a grumpy ol’ baby-boomer elistist of a character type I used to know in college, whose examples were always stringy-bearded, always disdainful of anything in culture or entertainment that didn’t remind them of The Late Sixties, and always contemptuous of anyone who dared commit the mortal sin of being younger than them.

This past February, some of you might recall, I was asked to join a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library entitled, “Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death?” (from the title of Postman’s best-known book). I found myself essentially arguing against the premise, vs. a stringy-bearded baby-boomer film critic who essentially argued that anyone whose lifestyle or demographics were different from his was automatically a dumb mainstream dupe.

I argued, and would still argue, that popular culture is not intrinsically evil (and neither are heterosexuality, meat, or non-co-op grocery stores). I would also argue that the world situation is not nearly as one-dimensionally simplistic as Postman claimed it to be (even while he denounced the masses’ excess simplicity). The books of his that I’d read were full of a priori arguments, gross overgeneralizations, ageisms, sexisms, and us-vs.-them dichotomies (although, like all my stringy-bearded professors, Postman often said “us” when he really meant to say “them”; when he wrote “we,” you could tell he meant “all those ignorami out there in dorky mainstream America who don’t know what we know and wouldn’t understand it if they heard it”).

Some of you reading this might imagine that I must be a right-winger who disliked Postman as a left-winger. NO, NO, NO. I believe Postman wasn’t too radical, he was too conservative. He was too comfortable in his hermetically-sealed ideology. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he never acknowledged that life, politics, et al. are complex, and that our schoolchildren need to learn to deal with these complexities; that there are more than two sides to most issues, and that there are a lot more than just two kinds of people in this country.

If I can now say something positive on Postman’s behalf, it’s that, at times, he did proclaim the need for critical thinking, even if he insufficiently practiced his own prescription.

…put online by the best US news source (Britain’s Guardian), tells distraught Americans: “Face it, you’ll never be rich.”

…and turn-O-the-last-century illustration (and you should all be such fans) oughta check out Coconino Classics, a bilingual French-English site chock full of tributes to (mostly American) early cartoonists and other drawing types. Your attention should be particularly drawn to the fascinatingly fractured animal drawings of T.S. Sullivant, including 20 of his illustrations for H.W. Phillips’s book Fables for the Times.

Oregon State U. prof Jon Lewis’s book Hollywood V. Hard Core, now out in paperback, claims the Hollywood studios aren’t and weren’t the free-speech crusaders they sometimes claimed to be. Lewis argues, according to the book’s back-cover blurb, that the studio-imposed ratings system and other industry manipulations served to crush the ’60s-’70s craze for sex films and art films, and thus “allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what movies got made and where they were shown.”

When the Independent Film Channel runs its salute next month to “renegade” type filmmakers of the ’70s, you can compare and contrast IFC’s take on the era with that of Lewis. IFC, I suspect, may describe ’70s cinema as a freewheeling revolutionary era, whose rule-breakin’ bad boys took over the biz and are still among today’s big movers-n’-shakers.

I’d give an interpretation closer to Lewis’s. That’s because I essentially came of age at the height of ’70s cinemania. My early college years (including one year at OSU) coincided with the likes of Cousin Cousine, Swept Away, The Story of O, All the President’s Men, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Dawn of the Dead, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Being There, Rock n’ Roll High School, Emmanuelle 2, and countless other classics that forever shaped my worldview.

But that was, to quote a film of the era, “before the dark time. Before the Empire.”

Lucas and Spielberg, those clever studio-system players who let themselves be marketed as mavericks, re-taught the studios how to make commercial formula movies. Before long, they and their imitators became the new kings of the jungle. Francis Coppola, Alan Rudolph, Richard Rush, Terrence Malick, and other medium-expanders were shunted to the sidelines of the biz.

The sorry results can be surveyed on any episode of Entertainment Tonight.

In related news, an alliance of Net-radio entrepreneurs is planning to sue the record industry, claiming the major labels have set royalty rates so high only big corporate stations can afford to legally exist….

…And Jeff Chester of TomPaine.com interprets Comcast’s lastest cable-contract wrangling in Calif. as a scheme to kill public access channels. I don’t think Chester’s allegation’s fully supported by the evidence he gives, but the situation’s still one to watch with concern.

…posted to this site in the past week, here’s some nice clean romance pulp-novel covers courtesy of the Private Screenings boutique in Fremont.

I JUST KNEW that decade-old “menswear for women” fad would finally get its logical counterpart.

…with some of “those” words from the comics.

This short item will start out as an observation and end with an appeal.

Within the past month, four or five different acquaintances have suggested I set this artsy photojournalism shtick aside and write the one type of book they’re certain will sell-sell-sell: A mystery novel.

I thanked each of these well-meaning friends and relatives, but gave each of them one reason (the same reason to each) why I’ve never wanted to write a mystery novel.

I hate mystery novels.

Specifically, I hate the central conceit behind the formula whodunit story–the wanton slaughter of human life treated as a quaint li’l intellectual puzzle, all clean and light and dispassionate.

I happen to believe violent crime, at its burning-cold heart, is the ultimate act of dehumanization. The killer, rapist, or mugger objectifies his/her victim as a mere thing in the way of the criminal’s goals?and objectifies himself/herself as a mere beast (no, as something less than a beast, as a mere machine cut off from the continuum of life).

And the writers (and readers) of formula whodunits, by this view, are, at least as a momentary expression of escapism, vicariously sharing in this soulless attitude.

The murder-victim character typically is both dehumanized by the killer and by the author, created to be nothing but a plot activator. The killer character typically is treated with slightly more empathy than the victim, but is still ultimately little more than an elusive safari prey, to be tracked down and bagged by the clever detective hero.

I know you’ll tell me there are mysteries out there that aren’t this inhumane in their depiction of inhumanity. But the whodunit authors who take homicide seriously (cf. Raymond Chandler) end up depicting acts and attitudes of sad, futile nihilism. Emotionally accurate, perhaps, but awfully grim-n’-depressin’.

Longtime readers of this site know I believe David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was, and is, my all-time fave TV drama and one of the most true-to-life portrayals of Northwest life ever filmed. Yes, it had a murder mystery as its central plotline. But part of what made me love it is that Lynch and Frost deliberately broke several of the rules of murder mysteries (thusly dooming the series to a short network run). The murder victims (at least most of them—we never really got to know the likes of Bernard Renault) were human beings with good and bad sides and personalities and everything, whose demises were treated with tragic weight. The killers, particularly the schizo Leland Palmer (a medium-time sleazeball even when in his “right” mind), were also humanized. They were still violent criminals, with or without the excuse of demonic possession, but they were also victims in their own way; victims of their own dark ambitions and vanities.

But Twin Peaks succeeded as a great story because it failed as a mystery-puzzle. If I were to attempt a story that could be commercially marketed as a “mystery,” it’d have to be one that had no successful homicides in it.

There are plenty of precedents for this type of bloodless investigation yarn (Nancy Drew, Cookie’s Fortune, various stories investigating such lesser crimes as jewel heists and art forgeries).

If any of you have any favorites in this area, or wish to tell me I’m totally wrong about the whole premise of this piece, lemme know.

…to the economic wreck.

You already read about the impending demise, sometime later this year or early next, of the historic and sumptuous Cloud Room in the quaint but affordable Camlin Hotel. It’s been one of Seattle’s oldest surviving piano bars, along with (but a lot more cozy n’ elegant than) the also-closing Sorry Charlie’s on lower Queen Anne.

Slightly less publicized is the folding of Orpheum Records on Broadway, one of the town’s finest indie-rock and techno CD stores. It was a great supporter of local bands for over a decade and a half, and hosted innumerable memorable in-store gigs by local and national faves.

The Capitol Hill Times recently ran a checklist-type piece about the comings and goings of the Hill’s CD stands. A partial list:

Coming: Sonic Boom, Wall of Sound (moved from Belltown), Music Werks, Down Low Music, Half Price Books and Music.

Going: Wherehouse Music, Fallout, Beats International, and now Orpheum.

Morphing: Cellophane Square into Everyday Music (the budget chain of Cellophane’s Portland-based parent company, Django).

Staying put: Fred Meyer Music Market.

MEANWHILE…: My former bosses at Fantagraphics Books have publicly pleaded for customers to buy more of its graphic albums and comics, to help the company survive the current econo-turmoil (which in this company’s case included the bankruptcy of a big wholesaler). Fantagraphics has gone thru plenty of ups n’ downs in its past 27 years, and I’m sure it will survive this setback as well. But it’s still a great opportunity for you to grab some of the best visual storytelling this and several other nations have ever produced.

…a little further on the addictive quest for what my previous post referred to as “abstract power,” the destructive madness that’s fueling our governmental elite during its current drive toward doom.

Some of you who lived through the Watergate era remember the “Blind Ambition,” as Nixon aide John Dean described the White House mindset of the time.

Look at the number of un-reconstructed Nixonians back in the White House now, imagine three decades’ worth of stewing grudges and revenge fantasies.

Next, consider the “Reality Distortion Field.”

That’s the late-’80s-coined phrase with which Apple Computer cofounder Steve Jobs was accused of being selectively unaware of business conditions that didn’t fit what he chose to believe. The lieutenants and yes-men who surrounded Jobs, according to this theory, held such personal loyalty to their boss that they came to share his delusions?and to feed them back to him, by giving him highly edited market data and highly weighted interpretations of that data.

Finally, we have the example of Big Bucks: The Press Your Luck Scandal.

This documentary, currently airing on the Game Show Network, tells the tragic life story of Michael Larson, an unemployed ice-cream truck driver from Ohio with three kids by three different mothers, a man obsessed with finding the perfect get-rich-quick scheme that would set him up for life. He spent his jobless days watching the four or five TV sets he’d stacked in his tiny apartment. He watched the now-classic Press Your Luck until he realized the show’s big game board wasn’t really random, that he could predict the order of its blinking lights and stop it on any prize square he wanted. He got to LA, somehow got through the contestant-casting process, and legally took the network for over $100,000. He then promptly lost it all between a shady real-estate deal and a burglary at his home (yes, he’d kept thousands in small bills lying around the apartment!).

Anyhoo, during the documentary a staff member on the old show recalls seeing a steely, emotionless stare in Larson’s eyes. The staffer says he saw the same look years later, when his teenage son started getting hooked on video games. It’s the “in the zone” stare one gets when one has become one with the game. Total zen-like concentration on making the right moves in the right sequence, and on the power-rush rewards for success. Total obliviousness to everything that is neither the screen nor the control console.

This country, my loyal readers, is being run by people who try to run government, and war, as one big video game. The chickenhawks don’t want to fight. They never wanted to fight. They just want to manipulate the joysticks of power by all means available, including by the means of making other people fight for them, whilst they remain in their posh office suites and luxurious homes bossing everybody around.

I could give a fourth metaphor here, but you already know about the hubris and comeuppance of those ol’ dot-com bosses.