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.