We haven’t given “Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light” as much snark as some online sites have. So you might not expect we’d note that his painting factory and gallery franchisor has filed for bankruptcy.

The story isn’t simply that Kinkade’s assembly-line “art” isn’t as popular as it used to be. There’s also a lawsuit filed by two disgruntled ex-franchisees. They claim, according to the here-linked WSJ article, that Kinkade had “used his Christian faith to fraudulently persuade them to open one of the artist’s ‘signature’ galleries,” leaving them stuck with unsaleable merchandise.

When I recently listed some things that may want to change their names for the sake of changing their initials, I forgot all about the BP. department at Nordstrom (formerly The Brass Plum).

My ol’ acquaintance Thomas Frank sees pundit/politician reaction to the BP disaster and proclaims that, with a few notable exceptions, “We are all liberals for the duration.”

Some folks don’t just want to fine, or to boycott, British Petroleum in response to the big, still-spewing gusher a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico.

They want the US government to take over the whole company, or at least its US-based assets. They’ve stated a petition drive at SeizeBP.org.

This is actually the company’s origin story.

In the “gathering storm” era just before WWI, Winston Churchill was running the Royal Navy. He didn’t trust Britain’s fuel supplies to the pro-German management at Shell. He lobbied the British Government to take over the Burmah Oil Co., which ran oilfields in what’s now Iran.

BP thrived when Britain came to control much of the post-WWI Mideast, including a new British colony called Iraq.

In the 1950s, when a nationalist regime in Iran seized BP’s assets there, the company allegedly became a big sponsor of the CIA-engineered coup that brought back the Shah.

Margaret Thatcher sold off the Crown’s holdings in the company, but not before it developed the North Sea oil biz and bought a big piece of the Alaska oil biz.

Now, the “Seize BP” promoters would like the US Government to take it over, at least in this country. It’s almost certainly not going to happen. (The centrist Democrats would rather criticize the oil industry than be responsible for running it.)

But if it did happen, the new entity could revive a dormant, BP-owned brand—”American Oil.”

(ADDENDUM, 6/2/10: For everyone who came to this post from a link on a libertarian or anti-regulation site, please also read the post immediately below. BP’s past sins occurred while under UK government control, but its current sins are pure private enterprise.)

I recently posted a link to marketing guru Garland Pollard’s list of  “brands to bring back.”

Now, the local angle on missing brands.

Pollard’s blog has praised Seattle’s Major League Soccer franchise for wisely keeping the beloved Sounders name.

He’s scolded the retailer formerly known as Federated Department Stores for trashing its beloved regional store names, including The Bon Marche. He’s suggested bringing those back at least in some capacity.

And when the Post-Intelligencer folded as a print daily, Pollard suggested things Hearst bigwigs could do to keep the P-I brand active, beyond a mere Web presence, such as a weekly print paper or magazine. I think that’s still a good idea.

I, of course, have my own faves I’d like brought back:

• If it can ever be determined who (if anyone) owns the trademark rights to Frederick & Nelson, I’d love to see a new store with that storied name. It needn’t be a full line department store. It could just be a quality family clothing store plus a cosmetics counter and a tea room.
• The Rainier and Olympia beer brands currently live in vestigial form, owned by the Pabst marketing company and made by Miller in LA. It’s time they were brought home, perhaps contract-brewed by one or more local microbrewers.
• With Sound Northwest merged out of existence, the region could use a print music mag again. Why not resurrect The Rocket? I can just see gleefully overdesigned cover portraits of today’s Seattle “beard bands.”
• Someone, somewhere, has the bulk of the exhibits from the Jones Fantastic Museum, the beloved carny attraction that used to reside in what’s now the Seattle Center House.
• Heck, for that matter let’s find a place somewhere in town to put up a new Fun Forest. I suggest the former Frederick Cadillac/Teatro ZinZanni block in Belltown, where two humungous condo towers were supposed to rise up before the housing market fell down.
• Speaking of Belltown, this town still needs a restaurant/lounge as fun, as welcoming, and as classlessly classy as the Dog House.
• Compared to most of these fantasized revivals, there’s actually some practical hope for a new Sonics franchise. The money and the management are in place. I’m certain a re-enlarged arena can be conceived with a minimal govt. investment. This leaves only two obstacles—David Stern and the current team owners at whose bidding he serves.

Corporate consultant Garland Pollard, at his Brandland USA blog, put out a list three years ago of “100 Brands To Bring Back.”

It has many fondly remembered names you might expect on such a list—Oldsmobile, Plymouth, Marshall Field’s (Pollard also wants the other Macyfied regional retailers brought back), Woolworth, Pan Am, Mutual Radio, GTE.

It’s also got at least a couple of clunkers. It’s way too early to get nostalgic over MCI, and I suspect few people would ever place trust in the Enron name again.

On more recent blog entries, Pollard has added his condolences toward Postum, Pontiac, and Continental Airlines, and expresses his fears toward the future of the Mars-acquired Life Savers.

As part of a federal plea bargain with associates of strip-club vet Frank Colacurcio Sr., his Talents West company and its three remaining clubs (Rick’s in Lake City, Honey’s Everett, and Foxy’s Tacoma) have closed.

The Everett building will be razed. The other two, plus the previously-closed Sugar’s in Shoreline, become U.S. Government property, to be auctioned off.

Think of this as another opportunity. Let’s get ’em reopened under new management, bringing more class to the shows and more respect toward the performers.

At a site called Newspaper Death Watch, one Paul Gillin looks at a New England woman named Bobbie Carlton. who organizes marketing seminars for small businesses. Gillin finds in Carlton’s work one answer to the dilemma of “how to save local newspapers.”

Gillin surmises that, historically, local papers were local merchants’ de facto advertising and publicity advisers. Therefore, local papers could formalize and expand these relationships, turning themselves into full-range media advisors. For an appropriate fee, they’d help merchants build and maintain Web sites, engage in online social networking, send targeted email notices, and otherwise get their businesses out into their communities.

This idea could help the companies that put out local papers. But would it do anything to support newsrooms?

Sonicsgate, the locally made documentary about the theft of Seattle’s oldest pro sports legacy and the locals who aided and abetted it, can now be viewed online in its entirety. And here’s (most of) ESPN’s Outside the Lines episode about the sad saga, which does a decent job of summarizing the main tragic plotlines.

For all the press and acclaim and high-profile-osity accorded over the decades to the Lusty Lady, the operation was simply a slightly-cleaned-up rendition of a live peep show, a type of sex business devised at Manhattan’s 42nd Street fleshpots of the ’70s.

Considering how much the porn and stripper industries have changed since then, what’s amazing isn’t that the Lusty’s closing in June, but that it’s lasted this long.

In an age when high school kids freely disseminate nude cell phone pictures of themselves and “amateur adult couple” images flow bountifully on Tumblr blogs, the mere sight of nude women across a glass curtain has lost its novelty.

The full story of the place, when it’s written, will be a story of a changing city and a great job of branding. Its roots are in the Amusement Center, a pinball-and-bowling arcade on the ground floor of the Showbox ballroom, first opened circa 1938. By the 1970s the coin-op arcade had gone, replaced by a new business under the same sign and name with coin-op stag film booths.

In 1981 it was revamped again, as a nominal nonprofit calling itself The Venusian Church and Temple of Aphrodite. It still had a few movie booths, but its main attractions were two live coin-op shows. One had nude couples making out (but never coiting) on stage. The other had naked lady dancers, performing continuously in staggered shifts all day and night. (I had a summer crush that year on one of those first live dancers.)

The Venusian Church concept generated its share of civic controversy at the time, but it faded as a commercial premise. When the peep dance operation moved across and down First Avenue in the mid-’80s (to the former Seven Seas Tavern building), it only kept the “Amusement Center” name. That was soon changed to “the Lusty Lady,” a name the owners were already using for a branch operation in San Francisco.

Along with the new name and location came a highly promoted new image. While the “Venusian Church” brand had sought to confront moralists, the “Lusty Lady” brand was meant to fit right in with the new Seattle’s upscale NPR-ish affectations. It advertised itself as the respectable sex business. It boasted of how its workers were well treated in clean surroundings by kind mother-hen managers. (Contrary to common belief at the time, it wasn’t all-female owned.)

Its main promotional vehicle, of course, has been its marquee sign with its cute dirty-joke slogans lit up in huge type. Roger Forbes’ old XXX movie houses downtown in the ’70s and ’80s had had all-text signage; but the Lusty’s ever-changing punnery was itself an entertainment, all good clean dirty fun.

Business at the Lusty peaked in the late 1990s. It owned its building, so it got a big cash infusion by selling the “air rights” above the space to the Four Seasons Hotel’s developers. But the overall economy, and the peep concept’s own fall from favor, meant its end was nigh.

What now? I’d obviously like to keep the sign up (and continually refitted with new risque verbiage). Behind it, I’d like to see an adult cabaret, with tables and chairs and coffee and snacks and burlesque-inspired strip acts. (And while we’re at it, let’s amend the WA liquor laws, so this new establishment could serve up both cocktails and no-touch nudity.)

All fans of kitsch architecture, great dive bars, giant teapots, and Tacoma—Unite! Save the Java Jive alive!

• There’s another real supermarket in greater downtown!
• It’s got quite decent, everyday low prices on the staples and the perishables. (As long as you’re willing to do without a really broad selection or the high-end artisanal varieties.)
• But on packaged, canned, bottled, and frozen stuff, it really shines. That’s because the franchise chain (130 stores in six states) specializes in buying manufacturers’ surpluses, closeouts, and overstocks. This means the concept can’t spread too big. (As you may have read elsewhere, the U.S. food industry operates at sometimes brutal efficiencies. There’s only so much “remarketable” product for the likes of Grocery Outlet to pick up.)
• But on what Grocery Outlet does obtain, retail prices can be half of what regular stores charge, or even less.
• And what stuff it is! It’s an ever-changing array of the familiar and the exotic. Store brands from stores that don’t exist in this region. (Acme! Jewel! Stop n’ Shop!) Boxes of Cap’n Crunch boldly labeled USA PRODUCT FOR EXPORT ONLY. (Nice to know there’s still some goods we can sell overseas.) Items that never gained great distribution here, such as Vienetta (a “frozen dairy dessert cake”).

Some industry insiders, including the NBC execs who want to be taken over by Comcast, claim old fashioned antenna TV just can’t compete against cable’s superior business model. Now, Max Fisher claims “cable TV is doomed.”

Our pals at Seattle PostGlobe, one of the nonprofit online ventures started by Post-Intelligencer vets, have their own view of the still gaping hole left in this city by the print P-I’s demise.

Today, or yesterday, or the day before (however you wish to count it) is the one-year anniversary of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s disappearance from area newsstands and vending boxes and doorsteps. The final edition was edited on 3/16/09 and distributed on 3/17/09.

That made 3/18/09 the first day since the print P-I stopped. That’s why tonight, 3/18/10, is the one-year anniversary of seattlepi.com as a stand-alone Web site. The site’s “producers” (they were careful to avoid Newspaper Guild-recognized job titles) are holding what they bill as an evening of celebration at the Crocodile.

It’ll still seem like a wake to me.

PI.com officials say the site now gets as many “hits” and readers as it did when it had a newspaper feeding it content. They’ve scraped and scrambled to get to that level, using every trick in the old Hearst playbook–canned gossip items, comics, cute animal pictures, fashion pictures, basically all the soft sides of Wm. Randolph Hearst Sr.’s old circulation-building formula. (The hard side of that formula, the scandals and exposés, would require more person-hours of research than the site’s minimal staff can muster.)

Most days, there’s at least one significant local news story on the site. Its sports commentary and tech-biz coverage have steadily improved. Local entertainment coverage disappeared from the site altogether when it went web-only; now at least there’s some.

The site’s design is still too cluttered, but it’s better than it was.

But it’s not the depth-and-breadth news source that the print P-I had been at its best, and that today’s Seattle Times sometimes tries, but usually fails, to be.

To become that, PI.com would need to bulk up from its current 20-person core staff to at least double that.

Even if online advertising rebounds from the current all-around business slump, it’s unlikely to generate enough revenue to support that. (PI.com, from all accounts, is inching toward profitability as is.)

It’ll need some other, or additional, revenue model.  (An iPad paper? A print weekly?)

Until then, or until some other new venture or set of ventures shows up, Seattle’s information landscape will still have a P-I sized hole needing to be filled.