…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.

…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.