I’M STILL TRYING to sort out how I felt after the last First Thursday, almost two weeks ago.

It was a big week for breasts in the Seattle arts scene. Jem Studios’ “Blue Boobs” group installation, the Tule Gallery’s two 10-foot-tall hyperrealistic bust paintings, and the usual other figurative-art stuff.

I’d have enjoyed it all as I usually do, except it was the week after my mother’s partial mastectomy.

Just after I’d come to terms with near-addictive fascination, acknowledging that I had nothing to feel guilty about i/r/t my hormonically pre-programmed craving for the sight and touch of female skin, I learned my favorite female body parts had threatened to kill the first and still most beloved female in my life.

The “Blue Boobs” installation was beautiful, but the close-up breast images in monochrome-blue paintings and videos looked too creepily like, not X-rays, but like some weird other kind of medical photography.

And the breasts in the Tule pix are exactly the scale (and eye level) of a mom as seen from the POV of a nursing infant, though the women’s faces aren’t really “maternal” looking as much as pop-art sendups of ’60s-mod fashion art.

I do know a few things at this perspective. I’m not going to stop loving women’s physiques. If anything, I hope I’ll be even more appreciative of precious gifts life and beauty are.

Especially after the Friday night right after First Thursday, when I witnessed the finish of the annual Belltown bicycle race. As the winner sped across the finish line in the alley behind the Rendezvous, an apparently drunken man suddenly stepped out and slapped him. The racer fell to the ground; Medic One quickly responded to a cell-phoned 911 call but took almost 15 careful minutes to get the guy into the vehicle and away.

(Last word: He’s apparently going to be all right. As, for now, is my mom.)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.

TOMORROW: On a much lighter note, e-commerce is trying to get hip.

ELSEWHERE: The next step toward taming the arts: Quantifying them… A faux-Sassy webmag likes today’s incessant “positivity”… This is not, repeat, not, a real eBay auction; but this is…

IN LAST FRIDAY’S Misc. World Midsummer Reading List, I mentioned James H. Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel Home From Nowhere.

The two books claim to offer a thorough diagnosis of what’s wrong with the American suburban-sprawl nightmare and what might be done about it. Unfortunately, Kunstler himself sprawls all over the landscape of thought. He reveals himself as a self-described “angry old hippie” who doesn’t just have beefs against cookie-cutter subdivisions, soulless strip malls, and scenery-scarring freeways. He appears to hate the entire 20th century industrial society.

Kunstler rants and rants against mass-produced building materials, standardized home design, Craftsman-era magazines that published ready-to-build house blueprints, single-crop agriculture, etc. etc. etc.

And, of course, like all conformist nonconformists of the angry-old-hippie school, he reserves his deepest animosity for television, the angry-old-hippie’s all-purpose scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with everything.

I guess we should be grateful that Kunstler, unlike a certain other angry old hippie who hated industrial society, offers some positive solutions. Most of them come from the “New Urbanism” movement, a scattered bunch of architects, developers, planners and thinkers who wish to undo 55 years of North American civic planning.

For now, the New Urbanists’ schemes have led to a few planned communities, mostly in the Sunbelt. But if carried a little further, their schemes might eventually lead to “suburban renewal,” humanizing the existing sprawl (taking advantage of the possible depletion of oil reserves and the even more possible decline of existing malls and big-box chains as Net retailing gains more of a foothold).

Dig, if you will, the picture: Decaying old discount stores and supermarkets rebuilt as, or replaced by, public marketplaces and walkable meeting places. Hectares of surface parking lots replaced by curbside storefronts. Older and more decayed subdivisions refitted to be (or razed and done anew as) real neighborhoods with narrower streets, real sidewalks, smaller houses built closer together, and the population density that could make public transit more feasible.

One thing the New Urbanists sometimes don’t like to mention (though Kunstler does) is how today’s sprawlscape is the child, or at least the bastard grandchild, of yesterday’s humanitarian schemers, who thought they could destroy the twin scourges of urban chaos and rural poverty by imposing a rational, efficient, modern, convenient, and clean-looking built environment. Harvard Design Magazine writer Michael Benedik discusses this in a piece on “Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace”: “The condition of the modern world is due at least partially to what the ‘best’ and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe over the past fifty years.”

Kunstler insists government regulation will have to be part of the answer. But he also admits government regulation has been part of the problem. Streetcars were private enterprises that merely used city rights-of-way. Freeways were and are built and maintained by governments, via gas and vehicle taxes encouraged by “the highway lobby.” Subdivisions and strip malls are the product of building codes devised to allow almost no other types of residential construction.

The Libertarian Party might use these facts to claim developers not only could but certainly would build more imaginative, affordable, dense, and eco-friendly tracts if only freed from those pesky ol’ governments telling ’em what to do. I don’t completely buy that line of reasoning (the private sector’s done plenty-O-damage to the landscape over the decades, with and without gov’t encouragement), but it does have something going for it.

As the influx of cyber-wealth into Seattle has shown, people want to live in real cities and towns. It’s just that Sprawlsvilles are the only new residential areas being built.

But before we buy up the old beige-rambler houses and replace them with something with more “character,” let’s remember what the subdivisions have wrought, the human-scale lives lived in inhuman-scale surroundings. As a current photo exhibit in NYC shows, humans have and will continue to express their individuality amid even the least-likely settings.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be octagonal.

MONDAY: A think-tank boss wants us to stop worrying about overpopulation.

ELSEWHERE: “Want to know what to expect before you see a movie? Want to read a mockery of some movie you hated? Have a few minutes to kill?” Then see parody movie scripts at The Editing Room (“We Clean Up After Hollywood”). An example, opening up Eyes Wide Shut:

INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT

NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.”

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION

TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked.

HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked.

AUDIENCE: So did we.

TOM: Ha ha ha.

REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.

Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”

While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).

So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.

A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.

Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:

• “The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essense, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources….
• “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even…. If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either….
• “…By packaging Success with Virtue, we make of failure a moral defeat. And rather than risk such failure, the less daring now take it to be the part of wisdom to sit out in the booths and the bars. They do not wish to commit themselves, they are reluctant, in this sick air, to let themselves be engaged. Not realizing that the only true defeat is to be capable of playing a part in the world, and playing no part at all.
• “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.

Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.

So what to do?

Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”

That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?

Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.

More about that on Friday.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.

TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?

ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.

FOR THE THIRD YEAR, we’ve gathered a veritable barrage of quality tomeage for your edification and enjoyment at the beach, the airport, the RV waste-disposal station, or wherever else you might find yourself wanting or needing to kill some quality time, and assembled it as the Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.

(Some of these titles may be subjected to longer reviews in the coming weeks.)

• Oulipo Compendium, Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie, eds. Show yourself off as the most erudite person on the beach with this long, way-detailed account of experimental techniques in forming new structures for prose and poetry, by a mostly-French group of deep-thinkers, mathematicians, and game-theorists. If you like alternately-scaled music or

  intermediate-to-advanced word puzzles, you’ll like this.

• Great Plains, Ian Frazier. Histories, travelogues, and memoirs of one of America’s most fascinating, least documented places.
• The New Life, Orham Pamuk. A fascinating travelogue (mostly by bus) across modern-day Turkey, wrapped around a young man’s obsessive quest for his dream woman and for a mysterious Utopian land described in an old children’s adventure story.
• Truck Stop Rainbows, Iva Pekarkova. Social-realist novel of quiet desperation, set in Prague during the socialist regime’s dying years. Our young heroine takes clandestine photos of environmental catastrophes, in between sessions sleeping with truck drivers to buy a black-market wheelchair for a dying friend. A poignant, erotic, account of a not-long-ago social-engineering mistake.
• Within the Context of No Context, George W.S. Trow. Reprint of a years-old rant against the usual things a New Yorker essayist might be expected to rant against, particularly every intellectual-type’s favorite all-purpose bogeyman TV. As you may know, I’m just as skeptical of paeans to a supposed golden age of live before TV as I am of paeans to a supposed golden age of life before desegregation. I disagree with Trow’s videophobia as much as I disagree with the videophobia of Mark Crispin Miller or Jerry Mander; but at least Trow writes well and tries to support his statements instead of simply throwing out a bunch of a priori arguments like most TV-haters.
• In Short: A Collection of Brief Creative Nonfiction, Judith Kitchen and Mary Paumier Jones, eds. The back-cover blurb and the introduction claim “the Short” or “creative nonfiction” to be some whole new writing genre. It’s not, of course; newspaper columns, radio spot-commentaries, single-page magazine articles, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul inspirational books have been making (factual) long stories short for a long, long time. But the ones compiled in this volume are still damned cool. There’s also a sequel collection, In Brief, specializing in authors’ personal reminiscences; but I prefer this one, wherein the contributors observe the world beyond themselves.
• Why I Am Not A Christian, Bertrand Russell. A good sampling of the great freedom-thinker’s thinking. Only beef: The volume’s religion emphasis means it doesn’t include some of Russell’s best pieces, such as the account of his falling-out with D.H. Lawrence (whom, Russell claimed, saw women “only as something soft and fat to rest the hero when he returns from his labors”).
• Why We Buy, Paco Underhill. As if North Americans aren’t already being systemattically marketed to at darn near every opportunity, here comes a corporate consultant who (as part of a whole treatise on “branding” and retail/advertising psychology) thinks there are remaining spaces of human existence which haven’t, and ought to be, turned into spots for sales pitches. I could try to think up some really exaggerated example (product placements in operas; Pampers ads tacked onto delivery-room ceilings) going beyond Underhill’s own suggestions, but I’m afraid they’d come true.
• The Geography of Nowhere, James H. Kunstler. From 1993, an attempt “to consider in some detail why the automobile suburb is such a terrible pattern for human ecology,” resulting in “the loss of community.” Too bad its lessons (and those of its sequel, Home From Nowhere) hadn’t been widely learned a few years before. We might not be stuck with so much excess paved-over countryside turned into lookalike Sprawlsvilles–or with so many bored, affluent children of the Sprawlsvilles taking over the cities in upscaled “downtown revival” schemes, driving all the longtime residents out.
• Nonconformity, Nelson Algren. A posthumously-discovered long essay written in the ’50s by the Man With the Golden Arm novelist; subtitled “Writing On Writing” but really about the need for outspoken free-thinkers in an America subsumed by Cold War paranoia, McCarthyism, and the start of suburban numbness. “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are the most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

AND SOME OF YOUR SUGGESTIONS:

• Anne Silberman: “Don’t know if this book was mentioned last year or not: Last Days of Summer by Steve Kluger. I’ve passed this one along to so many friends I’ve lost track of it. It’s a small book, written in correspondence form. The story takes place in the early to mid 1940’s. A fatherless boy from Brooklyn starts writing fan letters to a big league baseball player. These two are real, salty characters who are cut from the same cloth. The baseball player becomes the boy’s surrogate dad. It’s all about baseball and being Jewish and Franklin D. Roosevelt. It is one of my favorites… and I hate baseball!”
• Bruce Long: “The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. Reflections on impermanence by a German on a walking tour of East Anglia, accompanied by the likes of Conrad and Borges.”
• Ed Harper: “I’d recommend anything by Carl Hiaasen for warm weather reading (I couldn’t imagine reading any of his stuff in the winter), but my favorites are Native Tongue and Tourist Season.”
• Nick Bauroth: “How about the Bible?”

MONDAY: I try to get a DSL line.

A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.

Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.

But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.

(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)

Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.

And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.

But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.

As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.

As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.

(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)

This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.

Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.

Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.

Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.

Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).

So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.

(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)

TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?

ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”

THE KINGDOME WAS TWO YEARS OLD, and had housed the Mariners for one season, when Esquire contributing editors Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin published a coffee-table picture book, High Tech: The Industrial Design and Source Book for the Home.

Here’s what an out-of-print-books site says about it:

“High-tech is a term being used in architectural circles to describe an increasing number of residences and public buildings with a nuts-and-bolts-exposed-pipes technological look or to describe residences made of prefabricated components more commonly used to build warehouses or factories. The authors have expanded this definition to include a parallel trend in interior design-the use of commonplace commercial and industrial equipment in the home.”

The Kingdome was a high-tech design of the old school (before the trends discussed in the book). That is, it took a purely utilitarian approach to its purpose of housing entertainment.

It was a perfect symbolization of the Seattle civic zeitgeist circa 1976-77. In a town just a few generations removed from the frontier, and just six years removed from the massive Boeing bust, it was a monument to frugality and efficiency. It lacked not only the creature comforts of modern stadia but the basic aesthetic principles of a facility whose tenants had to compete for the public’s discretionary leisure spending.

But it was an engineering marvel, despite having been built to less-than-precision by the low bidder. Boeing, and its engineering mentality, still ruled the Seattle spirit back then.

That spirit adored the miracle of the thin concrete roof, of the whole nine-acre interior room built for only some $50 million. It marveled that our then-fair city could finally become A Big League Town, simply by turning some old railroad yards (on filled-in tide flats) into a just-adequate-enough home for baseball, football, basketball (for a couple years), soccer, evangelists, monster trucks, RV shows, and gift expos.

But, as they say, that was then.

Today, the Seattle civic zeitgeist is much better symbolized in the new Mariner park, Safeco Field.

The old ballpark was done on the cheap. The new ballpark’s the most expensive ever built, at a cool half-billion.

The old ballpark was old high-tech: All business. The new ballpark is the new high-tech, as prophesied in Kron and Slesin’s old book: Industrial luxury.

From the faux-aged brick false front along the 1st Avenue South side to the green steel girders buttressing the mammoth sliding roof, it embodies the same design aesthetic as the Bemis Building a block to its west. That’s one of those old warehouses that’s been gussied up into costly condos, where the cyber-nouveau-riche put up their Chihuly glass bowls among exposed pipework and concrete structural columns and imagine they’re living in “artist housing.”

Safeco Field is a way-cushy entertainment palace that merely looks old-fashioned as a luxury-design choice, intended by the architects to reinforce that George Will baseball-as-Americana feeling while still lushly pampering its patrons and charging them accordingly.

While neither Bill Gates nor Paul Allen is directly involved in the team or its management, the team’s new home clearly reflects the city as the suburban-residing Gates and Allen have helped re-define it.

A city where industry, the making and moving of tangible objects, is treated as a nostalgic memory.

A city where everything and everyone is expected to serve The Upscale, to the point of tax-subsidized luxury suites (still not sold out) within a tax-subsidized luxury stadium.

A city with no more patience for such quaint notions as thrift or mere adequacy; where everything must be World Class (even if it sports a back-to-basics look to it).

ELSEWHERE: The L.A. Times reports a clever Russian company’s found the perfect brand name for its cut-price detergent: “Ordinary Detergent,” copping the name and box design seen in ubiquitous Russian ads for a Procter & Gamble product. I’m still waiting for the chance to start my own band, “Special Guest” (they’d never headline a gig, but would open for everybody).

TOMORROW: Re-examing the age-old question, Does Seattle Suck?

AS WE’VE MENTIONED, there’s a whole counter-revolution in male depictions going on these days. While indirectly due to a post-feminist generation of American college boys taught that their only proper gender-role was to wallow in universal guilt, its direct origin comes from Britain and a slew of “laddie” magazines, many of which have now established successful U.S. editions.

It’s spread to two cable shows, FX’s The X Show (a daily hour of Maxim-like lifestyle features on beer tasting, rowdy football-fan behavior, strip-club etiquette, et al.) and Comedy Central’s The Man Show (a weekly half-hour of Almost Live-like comedy spiels built around the same topics).

These shows and magazines don’t rebut the neo-sexist image of Man As Slime. They revel in it.

More reveling, albeit with more tragic consequences, gets portrayed in current novels (Richard Ford’s Women With Men) and movies (Neil LaBute’s In the Company of Men).

When Infinite Jest novelist David Foster Wallace started spewing forth stories into assorted magazines last year under the common title “Brief Interviews With Hideous Men,” I was prepared for more of the same. More male-as-intrinsically-evil-predator, female-as-innocent-prey-or-righteous-avenger.

Thankfully, Wallace is too smart for such one-dimensionalities.

The men who narrate their life stories to an unheard female interviewer, in segments scattered through Wallace’s new story collection of the same name, are less hideous than merely pathetic. The sins they either boast or whimper about consist of little more than wanting to have sex with women and achieving that goal via somewhat-obvious come-on routines. The men never stop to consider the extent to which their “conquests” might have seen through, and chosen to play along with, these stupid seduction tricks.

If anything, these elequent, rambling narratives show not how bad the men are but how deeply PC-self-consciousness has hurt women and men.

That Wallace’s low-level Lotharios can so readily proclaim and/or bemoan their own self-perceived hideousness, based on nothing more than fulfilling (or wishing to fulfill) their casual-sex desires, shows how ready the characters are to accept the new sexism’s double standard, that a man can only choose to be either male-but-not-human or human-but-not male.

Some of the collection’s other stories don’t quite carry the same emotional heft. “Octet” is little more than a longwinded postmodern writing exercise in the limitations of postmodern writing exercises. He does better with “Adult World” and “The Depressed Person,” in which two young women are psychologically trapped deep within the private hells of their own recursive thought patterns–until sudden, unexpected realizations let than have moments outside their own heads, brief moments that still show them ways out.

These heroines’ obsessive-compulsive thought patters are ideally mated to Wallace’s obsessive-compulsive prose style, which, as always, is the real star of the book. Alternately concise and expansive, it leads you in with acres of rambling asides and aburd levels of detail that appear more like rough-draft notes than exited text–then zings you with a morsel of verbal perfection.

SIDEBAR: One of the collection’s pieces is in the first issue of the new quarterly journal Tin House, which, like Starbucks’ in-store magazine Joe, is a would-be middlebrow litmag with Northwest money behind it (Portland, in this case) but N.Y.C.-based editors.

A dumb hype piece in the Village Voice raved on and on about how Tin House represented something all new and daring and cuttin’-edge. Don’t believe it. Aside from the Wallace piece and Richard McCann’s downbeat liver-transplant memoir, all of it’s competent and none of it’s really good. Would be avant-gardists love to quote something Picasso’s supposed to have said about the chief enemy of creativity being good taste. Tin House has good taste up to its armpits, and that’s about the worst insult I could give it right now.

TOMORROW: The Rainforest Cafe is the world’s easiest satirical target–EVER!

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed Is America Used Up?, a 1973 book about America’s infamous ’70s malaise, a book which recommended somehow finding our way back to the can-do spirit that the author claimed had made this country great.

Twenty-six years after that book came out, we all can think of some things Americans could do if they got back to some of that old industrial-expansionist-era vigor.

Here’s one task: Rebuilding urban, and especially the suburban, landscape. Make the burbs more like real towns, with more informal meeting-places and more strolling around and walking to work; instead of ever-huger houses in ever-sparser subdivisions connected by ever-wider roads for ever-bulkier assault vehicles.

It’s a big task, even bigger than building the suburbs in the first place. But fewer cars is a good first step. And if we can’t have fewer cars right away, let’s at least get smaller ones, like some of the way-cool minicars that sell so well in Europe, Asia, and Latin America.

The Mercedes-Swatch Smart Car (discussed on this site last year) is, alas, still not coming to North America anytime soon; and neither is Ford of Europe’s cute little “Ka” (described by one critic as “a concentrated espresso shot of carness”).

But Toyota’s got an electric “concept car” (i.e., just for show) called the ecom that it is trotting around, particularly in Calif. where more severe smog limits are pushing automakers to pursue such desperate measures. Damn, the thing’s cute! It goes 60 mph, with about a 60 mile range between recharges. The company bills it as just the thing for scooting around short-range areas (colleges, small towns, “planned communities,” office-industrial complexes).

I can imagine it as a lot more. I can imagine it as a way to help bring back “community,” by encouraging folks to live, work, shop, learn, and hang out in closer geographic quarters. This would help neighborhood businesses (as opposed to big-box chains), though it would also encourage Net-based home offices and Net shopping and home schooling.

(Other companies are proposing to deal with the pending Calif. smog limits via more conventional-looking vehicles, such as Honda’s Hybrid, which uses batteries to supplement a regular gasoline engine.)

(Speaking of America’s unmet needs, what do you think this country could, or ought to, do? State your case at our ever-belligerent Misc. Talk discussion boards. More on this topic a little later on.)

ELSEWHERE: KOMO claims it’s the first TV station in the world ot air all its daily newscasts in digital, hi-definition TV. But its engineering department confirms only the anchor-studio segments are HD. Those of you well-heeled “early adopters” out there with the way-costly HD-compatible sets can see Connie Thompson’s face exquisitely pixel-rendered, but the field coverage (you know, what you’re really talking about when you talk about “seeing the news”) is still shot on good old, ’80s-vintage, analog-tape Betacams. (KING has some HD field cameras in use, but it also still uses some traditional analog camcorders and then uses digital-processing tricks to enhance their images. NorthWest Cable News shoots and edits its field footage on digital, regular-definition tape.)

TOMORROW: Cool webzines that are not Salon or (thank heavens) Slate.

PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).

Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.

“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”

Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.

(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)

At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.

Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.

In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.

I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).

The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.

What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:

“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”

MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…

LAST THURSDAY, we briefly discussed whether the “swingers” (organized spouse-swapping) movement was a potential force for social liberation or merely just another middle- to upper-class recreational option.

Last Friday, we briefly discussed the new Austin Powers sequel, whose time-traveling plot’s mainly set in a retro-parody of the “Swinging London” era (albeit in 1969, close to that era’s real-life demise if not just after it), and which depicted the hero’s sexual hijinx as something more than mere casual “shagging” but as a necessary regular recharging of the life-force he needs in order to keep saving the world.

Today, we’ve got a link to a British social critic who claims the casual promiscuity of ’60s-style “swinging” and the organized, invite-only group sex of ’90s-style “swinging” are both less-than-optimal expressions of sexual nature.

Jennie Bristow, writing in the magazine LM (no, I don’t know what the letters stand for), takes a dim view of “playful” sexual expressions of all types, paying particular scorn at “queer culture” and at young heteros who wish to emulate it.

It’s not that Bristow doesn’t want folks to have fun. It’s just that she thinks fun-for-its-own-sake isn’t enough.

Bristow claims consumer culture’s emphasis on the orgasm as a personal experience (little different from a drug high or an athletic feat), combined with radical-feminists’ and corporate-conservatives’ moralistic phobias against coital intimacy, has left a new young generation in the U.K. and the U.S. obsessed with looking and feeling sexy but deathly afraid of anything approaching the deeper, interpersonal aspects of sexual interaction.

The result: College campuses full of sexually-suggestive imagery, attire, walks, and stances. Joy-of-masturbation books and seminars. A booming market in self-pleasuring toys. S/M iconography everywhere, from movies to comic books and video games. Hetero young adults pretending to be bi so they can appropriate the self-righteous hedonism of queer culture.

But also, increasingly draconian sexual-harrassment rules and regulations treating almost everything people do with one another (and especially what males do with females) as (1) really sexual and (2) potentially menacing.

“In public,” Bristow writes, “sex is more than acceptable; in private, between individuals, it is treated as suspect.”

She concludes, “Passion is what sexual codes of condust seek to regulate, and passion is what most of the fashionable forms of sex are safe from. In today’s antiseptic culture, where relationships are conducted at arm’s length and in the public eye, the closer you get to somebody the less you are encouraged to trust them, or commit yourself to them.”

That was certainly the credo of Austin Powers’ spoof source, James Bond, who in Ian Fleming’s original novels was depicted as an aloof aesthete who mated and killed with equal dispassionate skill.

It’s somewhat akin to the credo of the mate-swappers, who enjoy their extracurricular rites but are expected to emotionally bond with no one except the spouse they came in with.

It’s also, as we briefly noted previously, the credo of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which “everyone belongs to everyone else,” where promiscuity and virtual-reality porn are everyday institutions, but where deep one-on-one love is considered a threat to the social order.

I can sort-of partly agree with some of Bristow’s points. I believe public sexual-posturing, erotica, sex toys, and fetishes can be all well and good within their inherent limitations. And I support queer culture more than she does; but I’m more willing than her to know that gays and lesbians are indeed capable of deep relationships with all the associated turmoils and rewards. It’s the rewards part that “sexual liberation” advocates sometimes forget about. There ought to be an approach to sexuality that’s neither the Religious Right’s old-style repression, the Andrea Dworkin crowd’s new-style repression, and the lonely rugged-individualism promoted by the porn and dildo industries.

Sex ought to be about bringing people together, not keeping them apart.

Tomorrow: Some more thoughts on this.

I SAID LAST TIME THERE’D BE a new look for your favorite social-commentary site, and here ’tis. From now on, you’ll get a fresh Misc. World dose every darn weekday.

Usually, these mini-columns will contain only one item apiece, compared to the 13-year tradition (four years online) of a grab-baggy of three-dot juxtapositions. These daily installments will show up right here on the main miscmedia.com page, so you can start ruining your mind right away.

For those of you who can’t log on every day, you’ll still get to read a week’s worth (or more) thanks to the handy links right beneath each day’s installment.

These daily column-ettes will now incorporate the book, movie, and music reviews which for the past seven or eight months have had their separate section of the site, Clark’s Culture Corral. Recent review pieces will continue to be linked from the Culture Corral index page; and you’ll still be able to directly go from the reviews to get the works from Amazon.com.

And, in case you haven’t noticed, there’s a slight name change here. The site itself is now known as miscmedia.com; the site’s former name, Misc. World, is now the name of the online column (previously known just as Misc.) that’s the site’s main feature. The short name lives on in The Big Book of Misc.

SPEAKING OF WHICH: The Big Book is out. It’s beautiful, if I may modestly say so myself. Those of you who’ve pre-ordered your copies should have ’em now; if not, please email me.

Thanks to all of you who attended the pre-release party last Tuesday at the Ditto. Highlights from the annual party questionnaire tomorrow.