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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hello you pretty people,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Love ‘n lovin,

Heather Rogers”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THANX AND A HAT TIP to the thirty-or-so-ish folk who attended our Myrtle of Venus book release party on Friday. Pictures from the event will be on this site soon.

Print copies of the novel can now be had at M Coy Books (Pine near Second) and Confounded Books (East Pine near Boren). They’ll be available later this week at Ola Wyola (First near Bell). The online ordering page should be up, in one form or another, by Wednesday.

The splendiforous release party for our novel The Myrtle of Venus occurs this very evening, 7-10 p.m., in the Rendezvous Jewel Box, 2320 2nd Ave. in Seattle. DJ Superjew will spin retro-lounge and Europop tuneage. Be there or be rhomboidal.

The fab release party for our novel The Myrtle of Venus occurs this Friday, April 2, 7-10 p.m., in the Rendezvous Jewel Box, 2320 2nd Ave. in Seattle. DJ Superjew will spin retro-lounge and Europop tuneage. Copies of the book WILL be available for purchase.

The following day, copies of the book will be available for purchase on this site and at a few select local retail outlets.

…comes from none other than Waterburglar John Dean himself, alleging that the current administration’s putting “a cancer on the Presidency.”

IT’S OFFICIAL: Titlewave Books has closed. The jam-packed li’l used book store on Lower Queen Anne, where I and many other writers gave readings, lasted 20 years. Since the average lifespan of such a business can be roughly figured in cat years, you can do the math for yourself and be even more impressed by Titlewave’s longevity.

(It can now be told that owner Nickie Jostol asked me to buy the place. I had to decline, but felt flattered that she would mistakenly think I had money.)

The store’s demise makes even more poignant the last thing read at the last live reading event there. Our ol’ pal Doug Nufer, who’d run the Titlewave reading series for the previous nine or so years, closed the last edition by reading a piece he’d created out of the final sentences of several dozen classic novels.

And I’m looking to talk to people who’ve worked in local television, here or elsewhere, for research purposes. Email me to set up the details.

IN CONTRAST to yesterday’s linked essay about the suckiness of corporate publishing, here’s a quick ode to self-publishing as the book industry’s savior.