…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.

If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.

As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.

One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.

I’ve been recruited into speaking this Thursday at the Tacoma Public Library’s main branch (1102 Tacoma Avenue South; 7 pm).

They’re running one of those “everybody in town reads the same book” promos, based this time on Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The panel I’ll be at will discuss Bradbury’s premise of a future dystopia where audiovisual media are drugs and books are outlawed.

This nightmare image has been very popular among highbrow technophobes, particuarly by Neil Postman. In his 1986 book Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman essentially argued that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of TV-addicted idiots; that new info technologies were always inherently reactionary and anti-thought; and that The Word was good for you and The Image was bad for you.

I’ve written about Postman in the past: I disagreed with his premises then and still do.

The Simpsons and The Sopranos are, I argue, more intelligent than the books of Danielle Steel and John Grisham. Secondary and tertiary cable channels provide more highbrow arts and culture than PBS ever did. The Internet has helped to democratize the written word (and helped get the current peace movement jump-started).

And kids’ attention spans seem to be getting longer these days. I’ve written before how every Harry Potter book is at least 100 pages longer than the previous one; and about those PC adventure games where you have to methodically explore and experiment for weeks or months before discovering the solution.

Postman, and most of his leftist pop-culture-haters, apparently believe there had been a pre-TV golden age when everybody was a Serious Reader, every newspaper was a junior New York Times, and every magazine was a junior Atlantic Monthly.

Not so. Escapism has always been with us. We are a species that craves stories, pleasure, beauty, and diversion. Bradbury himself is an entertainer. (In the early ’50s he sold stories to EC Comics, whose Tales from the Crypt and other titles were denounced in the U.S. Congress as corrupters of innocent youth.)

And no, The Word isn’t in decline. We’re more dependent upon words than ever. Rather than dying, the book biz seems to be weathering the current fiscal storm better than the TV networks, and a lot better than the movie theater chains and the cable TV operators.

And those words aren’t always progressive or enlightening. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the anti-Jewish hoax that’s become recently popular among Islamic fundamentalists, is a book. The Bell Curve, a pile of pseudo-scientific gibberish intended as an excuse for anti-black racism, is a book.

Entertainment can give a context for ideas and propose a way of seeing the world. Few people knew this more fully than Francois Truffaut, who directed the movie version of Fahrenheit 451. Truffaut was a lifelong student and admirer of great films. He wrote elequently about how the perfect scene, or even the perfect single image, could immediately express whole ranges of thoughts and feelings.

The question should really be what contexts and worldviews emanate from the entertainments we’re being given. That’s what I hope to ask in Tacoma this Thursday. Hope you can attend.

The normally at-least-semi-lucid New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff has gone mildly insane in his most recent essay.

He took the firing of an editor at a big NYC book company, something that happens darn near every month at one of those places, and whipped up a big concoction of a piece claiming the whole book biz is an old-media dinosaur stuck in a permanent death spiral.

This is the sort of fluff I’ve been hearing for eight years from the Wired dorks (hey, just ’cause their own book division went sternum-up…) and for over twenty years from the disgruntled-hippie-curmudgeon set. But from where I sit, books (as a fiscal if not a creative endeavor) are about as strong as any media endeavor during our current Great Depression Lite.

When the Kmart Corp. began its current tailspin, what was the first asset it sold, the one most certain to fetch a premium price? The Borders bookstores. That tactic’s what the financially sicker-than-sick AOL Time Warner is doing now. The AOL Internet racket wound’t fetch ’em the price of a measly banner ad; but the conglomerate’s book units (including Little, Brown and Time-Life Books) would, so they’re what AOLTW’s putting up for sale.

The ol’ dead-tree-lit biz has certain advantages in the current marketplace. Unlike websites, it puts out a tangible physical product (that can even be resold on the used market). Unlike periodicals, its products have relatively indefinite shelf lives. Unlike periodicals or broadcasters, books aren’t dependent upon slump-prone ad sales. Books can be “affordable luxuries,” little treats you can give yourself or loved ones.

Wolff claims there’s no need to romanticize The Book anymore, because it’s become just another lowest-common-denominator, dumbed-down product. But then he claims nobody’s buying books (or at least caring about them) except a little Northeastern elite (that happens to coincide with his own readership). There wouldn’t be mass-market books if mass markets weren’t buying them.

There are a few problems besetting the book biz these days, above the general economic malaise. Wolff’s just mistaken about what they are.

First, book publishing can’t be run on a healthy, long-term basis on the kind of profit margins demanded by media conglomerates obsessed with The Almighty Stock Price. Thus, even the making and selling of highly commercial titles is best handled by independent firms. (Thus, the spinoff of AOLTW’s book arm might be better for both the seller and the sold.)

Second, there’s the little matter known as Serious Literature. Like “independent” film and “alternative” music, it’s a niche genre that appeals to customers who think they’re hipper and smarter than any dumb ol’ corporation. (Whether the customers really are all that hip or intelligent doesn’t really matter.) They’re a piece of the business even more apt to be better serviced by the non-conglomerates.

Wolff sneeringly dismisses serious-lit lovers as passé crackpots, out of tune with the 21st century. Actually these are the gals n’ guys who, when they’re doing their jobs right (as writers, editors, sellers, and readers), unearth and reveal the truths about our age.

It’s the media hype speed-freaks like Wolff who, from this corner, seem more like relics of a discredited time.

IT’S BEEN OVER A WEEK since our last post to this site. (Sorry.) Things that have gone on during that time:

• The Chubby & Tubby hardware-variety stores were put up for sale, and simultaneously began a liquidation sale. Wanna help me buy and preserve ’em?
• The Sonics continued to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in game after game.
• A&E reran its Cleavage documentary, an excuse to show seconds-long clips displaying 50 years’ worth of minimal attire. In true American-repressed fashion, the show censored all nipple and see-thru shots—except during icky surgery scenes.
• The two-years-in-the-making eighth issue of the literary tabloid Klang came out, with a long story by yr. obd’t web-editor about the Alasdair Gray novel Poor Things.
• I’ve continued to work tirelessly on assembling the next print MISC, which should wow and wonder you any week now.
• I viewed Scarecrow Video’s copy of the unjustly obscure Mexican film Sexo por Compasion (Compassionate Sex) Made in 1999 by director Laura Mana, it deftly applies the neopagan “sacred prostitute” legend and sets it in a lethargic little Catholic town.Our heroine Dolores (Lisabeth Margoni) is a plump, middle-aged barmaid who’s so conscientiously pious, her husband splits town rather than face her “excess of goodness.” This only prompts her to redouble her efforts at do-gooder-hood, until she overhears a male barfly complaining about his own straying wife. She offers her sympathy in the best way she can imagine. While there’s no on-screen sex in the film, we’re told the man learns from Dolores that a little sin isn’t so bad; and that he also learns how to satisfy his own wife.

  With the speed of small-town gossip, the town’s men all line up for Dolores (who’s renamed herself Lolita!). She soothes and consoles all (middle-aged virgins, widowers, the lonely, the misunderstood). She asks nothing in return but donations for the church building fund.

  Director Mana switches from b/w to color. The men are now energetic and serene. Their wives don’t like that they’ve been barred from Lolita’s bar, but adore their hubbies’ new sexual knowledge and doting tenderness.

  Everybody’s happy and well-adjusted—except the now underworked hookers from the next town and the priest who goes mad when he learns the source of the parish’s new riches. But Lolita gets their heads set straight soon enough.

  Even Lolita’s returning hubby eventually learns to stop condemning her love-sharing ways, after the town wives draft him into giving them some compassionate sex. The film ends with the happy announcement that Lolita’s going to have “our child,” the “our” referring to the whole town.

  That’s all cozy and uplifting. It’s also neatly confined somewhere in the outer provinces of Latino “magical realism.” Could anything like its premise work out in real life, in jaded urban civilization? I’ve no answers. Even the authors of New Age essays about the “sacred prostitute” archtype seldom come out and advocate reviving the practice. (They mostly ask female readers to take the legend as a lesson for individual self-esteem.)

  I do know the film’s penultimate plot twist is comparable to my own mini-essay in this space a month or so back calling for a men’s antiwar movement, which I only half-facetiously christened “Peepees for Peace.” It would refute “alternative” culture’s frequent denunciations of masculinity, instead proclaiming a positive role for yang passion in the building of a better world.

  None of the “sacred prostitute” books I’ve seen mention men providing sexual/spiritual enlightenment to women—only women healing men and women healing themselves.

  What if there were more women like this film’s Lolita—and more men like her husband at the film’s end, healing the planet one clitoris at a time?

SOMEBODY AT SLATE thinks Harry Potter’s just another lazy rich kid.

…Dead Souls, the protagonist tours the feudal countryside, buying the title deeds to big landowners’ dead serfs, so he could amass enough “property” to force his way into the privileged classes.

Now, instead of buying dead people, the relentless arm of Marketing wants to sell things to them. P-I columnist Joel Connelly has written about the commercial junk mail that still comes addressed to his recently-deceased ladylove. That piece generated many responses from bereaved citizens with similar tackiness to report. In the story linked here, these include an old UW Daily colleague of mine, Joel VanEtta, who lost a brother but can’t convince mailing-list compilers of this.

…or as I call it, “The World-O-Words LiteRama,” set up shop last weekend at one of Sand Point’s ex-naval air hangars (not, as I’d previously said here, the same hangar used for the Friends of the Library book sales).

News accounts said attendance was back up from last year’s event at the bland-modern Stadium Exhibition Center, and quoted several attendees as preferring the “funky old” atmosphere of the huge drafty structure originally built to house symbols of military power. Some of these quoted attendees said Bookfest belongs somewhere other than a standard sales-show hall, since books, after all, weren’t just another business.

Books, of course, have been treated for some time as just another business, by the intellectual-property oligopolists who run that business. And also by ambitious entrepreneurs selling specific info to niche markets; such as Heather & Co., the publisher of Eat Without Fear: Help for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.

The relative remoteness of the Sand Point site, which doesn’t have direct bus service from downtown Seattle, did as much as the building’s “funkiness” to help the event’s goers believe themselves to be so darned special in that PBS-precious middlebrow way. Even the weather played its part, providing perfect tweed-sweater temperatures and waterfront grayout sightlines.

Book-biz realities, as I’ve monotonously said every year around Bookfest time, are a little different. There’s no separate subculture of book readers, just as there’s no separate subculture of CD listeners. There are now as many mega bookstores in Seattle as there are mega record stores.

There are subcultures (or niches) within the larger book biz. “Serious” literature is but one of those niches. What I like about Bookfest is the way it crowds so many of these niches into one room–the cookbook people, the travelogue people, the coffee-table-book people, the children’s-chapter-book people, the antiquarian-book people, the nature-poetry people, the self-help people, the mystery people, the sci-fi people, and at least some aspects of the serious-lit people.

(Still underrepresented at Bookfest: Comics, zines, romances, erotica, translated lit, and PoMo/experimental lit.)

And oh yeah–there’s another, locally quite popular, genre of “writing,” the tattoo. This new U-District parlor’s awning sign could easily represent not only what customers oughta seek in a tattoo parlor, but what some government/business leaders leaders seek for our local civic society.

The Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle canceled a fundraising appearance by Leonard Nimoy, after federation bigwigs discovered the retired actor and cult legend had just created a book of photos combining nekkid ladies with Jewish religious iconography. (The two great tastes that taste great together!) Instead, Nimoy will appear at a local Jewish congregation the next day, Oct. 24. Of course, this won’t be the first time he’s gone against Federation directives. (I know, I had to say it…)

THEY WERE THIN, they were (relatively) inexpensively produced, and they still look hotter than most fancy-schmancy coffee-table tomes. They’re Russian avant-garde books from 1910 to 1934, and the MoMA guys in NYC have a site about ’em.

David Halberstam’s 1972 book The Best and the Brightest

vividly describes the steps by which the Kennedy-Johnson administration, chock full of Ivy League thinkers and respected analysts, stumbled into the morass that was the Vietnam war. Among the most important factors in the stumble, according to Halmerstam, were the limited perspectives these operatives chose to view. They decided early on that theirs was a winnable war to defend a stable, pro-democracy ally; they chose to ignore any analyis or research that differed from the scenario. (I’m naturally vastly oversimplifying Halmerstam here; read the book itself for the whole sad story.)

The same thing’s happening now. Only the people doing it know they’re doing it. Our current battle-criers decided long ago they wanted to conquer and colonize Iraq. (An Australian newspaper story claims they’d started plans for an Iraq war even before Bush’s inaguration.)

We’ve got a whole Executive Branch establishment that, for all intents and purposes, proudly only listens to Rush Limbaugh, only watches the Fox News Channel, and only reads The Weekly Standard and books from ideological publishers like Regnery. This establishment does have staff people who scan CNN and the NY Times, but just to learn what its “Others” are saying in order to craft virulent rebuttals.

This establishment loves to scoff at liberals’ “political correctness,” but is fetishistically devoted to ideological conformity within its own ranks. It believes it’s always right, not because it’s smart but because it’s pure.

Actually, “pure” isn’t the right word, because it implies a sense of moralistic self-denial. These guys (and a few gals) want everybody else to do all the sacrificing; while they grow ever wealthier and more powerful.

We started with a book reference; we’ll move now to a film reference.

There’s a film, based on a stage play, set in an era in which a ruling class lived as libertine wastrels and the masses were subjected to strict authoritarianism.

An era enmeshed with domestic turmoil and colonial wars. An era of fierce political name-calling and backbiting. An era in which defenders of the corrupt social order will do anything to maintain their privileged status, despite the hindrance of an unelected ruler who often talks nonsense and behaves absentmindedly.

In short, an era with resemblances to our own.

Yes, we’re all currently suffering from, and for, the madness of King George.

…was celebrated all over town on Sunday. Hundreds of bibliophiles prepared for the long indoor season ahead at the semiannual Friends of the Seattle Public Library book sale, held at a former Sand Point naval-air hangar. (This is also where Northwest Bookfest is moving next month.)

Nearby in Magnuson Park’s no-leash beach, local dog owners gave their pets one last vigorous round of wet exercise.

Also nearby, Magnuson’s public-art collection of military submarine diving-plane tails, arranged to resemble orca fins, might just help one remember the sacrifices incurred in past wars, and thus help one resolve to try to prevent future carnages.

But let’s return, for now, to celebrating the equinox. A fairly large crowd gathered at Gas Works Park to do so, under the auspices of Seattle Peace Concerts. Hundreds paid varying degrees of attention to an all-day lineup of “blooze” music (you know, that music that’s sorta like blues, only all-white and all-aggressive).

Hundreds of others sipped, chatted, and danced at the second Fremont Oktoberfest. Some of my favorite current local acts (Peter Parker, the Beehives) performed, along with an all-polka afternoon slate.

But serious autumnal responsibilities waited just outside the beer garden, with a street-poster reminder of the monumental tasks ahead of us.

(Thanx and a hat tip to loyal reader Stephen Cook for research help on this piece.)

In a recent New York magazine, its tech-media beat writer Michael Wolff has proposed one possible post-MP3 future: A music business that’s more like the book business.

Wolff’s premise: Manufactured teen-pop acts are rapidly reaching their inevitable sell-by date. Commercial radio is becoming ever more corporate and ever more unlistenable. The Internet, MP3 trading, and home CD-R burning are furthering the indie-rock agenda of shunning rock-star decadence and championing a more direct rapport between artists and audiences.

Therefore, a record industry built around trying to make every release go multiplatinum is doomed. Also doomed is the whole industry infrastructure of waste and hype (“independent” promoters, payola, limos, drugs, hookers, mansions, plastic surgeons, promotional junkets for journalists, etc. etc.)

Instead, recordings will have to be sold more like books are. While there will still be some bestsellers, for the most part artists will carefully construct works that a few people will really love. Street-savvy marketers will promote these works to an infinite array of tiny niche markets.

If Wolff’s prediction comes true, we just might also expect a few other changes in the way music is made and sold, such as the following:

• Groupies will start dressing more like undergrad teaching assistants.
• Following the hardcover-paperback timeline, artists will release the deluxe box set first, then the single disc in the plastic jewel box.
• Instead of Jaegermeister and Chee-Tos, chianti and brie.
• Instead of moshpits, discussion circles.
• Volvos replace limos.
• The new “Oprah’s Record Club” turns listeners onto the tastefully dramatic, housewife-friendly tuneage of tomorrow’s Sarah McLachlans and Natalie Merchants.
• MTV’s schedule includes the highly-edited “reality” adventures of everybody’s favorite wacky celebrity family on The Updikes.

I was going to ponder if ecru sweaters and tweed jackets would become the new rocker uniform, but then I remembered Belle and Sebastian.

…this story, a mega-bank and a mega-bookstore chain are (separately) working to stick it against small book publishers.

First came the highly unofficial Star Wars Un-Premiere Party, Thursday at the Rendezvous (which is still open despite a little kitchen fire last Tuesday, thank you). Singer Cheryl Serio was the most elegant hostess, accompanied by our ol’ friends DJ Superjew and DJ EZ-Action.

Among the audiovisual attractions displayed on the video projector: Mark Hamill’s appearance on The Muppet Show (above), the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (a truly bizarre spectacle indeed), and something billed as a Turkish language version of the original film but was really a whole different movie (a hilarious sword-and-scandal adventure) that happened to incorporate SW spaceship shots, with the SW producers’ apparent authorization.

ON SATURDAY, the 22nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens blowup was celebrated by Cheryl Diane (above) and three other singer-songwriter acts in Diane’s fourth annual Eruptive Revival cabaret. As you may recall, last year’s edition was cut short by that nasty fire at the Speakeasy Cafe (still a charred-out ruin today). No such mishaps marred this year’s show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar, thankfully.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, the University District Street Fair was underway again, as tired and worn-out as I’ve always remembered it being. The products displayed at the “crafts” booths were barely distinguishable from those displayed in the smarmiest tourist “fine art” stores of LaConner. The food concessions were no different from the elephant ears and kettle korn sold summer-long from Puyallup to Ellensburg. The assorted musical acts tried to grab passersby’s attention, but (at least the acts I saw) failed to overcome the cloudy-afternoon ennui in full smothering force.

And, of course, the booths only temporarily hid the dozen or more empty storefronts along the half-mile strip known to all as The Ave. The city thinks it knows just what to do about the retail ennui–a construction project. To the City of Seattle bureaucracy, every problem is solvable by a construction project.

But it’s hard to imagine anyone other than a bureaucrat imagining that wider sidewalks and prettier street lights will draw non-student shoppers back from the malls; not while the daily papers continue to smear The Ave as A Problem Place with Those Problem People.

And as long as there’s no money to do the right things for the throwaway teens (often banished by middle-class parents over not fitting a proper upstanding image) but plenty of money to do things against them (police harassment schemes that only make things worse), this situation won’t change.

ON A HAPPIER NOTE, Sunday evening brought two of my all-time fave cartoonists, ex-local Charles Burns and still-local Jim Woodring, to a singing session at Confounded Books/Hypno Video.

You’ve gotta check out Woodring’s newest, Trosper. Painted in bright pastel colors you can eat with a spoon, and printed just like an old Little Golden Book, it’s a wordless, utterly engrossing little tale of a cute little elephant who just wants to have fun, in a world seemingly bent on frustrating him. It even comes with a CD by one of our fave neo-improv artistes, the incomprable Bill Frisell.

NICHOLAS MURRAY WRITES: “Nineteen Eighty-Four has never really arrived, but Brave New World is around us everywhere.”

JUST A WEEK AGO, I was cautiously optimistic but still slightly worried about the 2002 Mariners, who at the time were only 4-3. Since then, they’ve only won nine straight road games against division opponents. Oh, me of little faith…

THE SPRING PRINT MISC has now been distributed to almost all the local dropoff spots. If you still have trouble getting one, consider subscribing.