Some people are apparently irate about a Pioneer Square restaurant offering something called “Naked Sushi,” an evening in which little sushi tidbits are served from the Saran-wrapped torso of a reposing woman (wearing just enough, besides the Saran, to appease the Liquor Board).

This is essentially a commercialization of an old Yoko Ono performance-art piece; or, if you will, a fusion-cuisine adaptation of an old entertainment shtick done in Hellfire Club-era London drinking parlors (as fantasized about in Geoff Nicholson’s novel The Food Chain.)

It’s not a statement of hatred against women or against sushi. If the restaurant in question presents it in the proper way, it could be a statement of sensuality, of adoration, and of honor for the circle of life.

Or, if the restaurant in quesiton presents it in the improper way, it could just be a silly little lark.

…the place to be for ambitious young techno-careerists, “a striving class of young Americans for whom race, ethnicity and geographic origin tend to be less meaningful than professional achievement, business connections and income.” In other words, don’t expect parking in Belltown on a Saturday night to get any easier any time soon.

…starts pondering whether TV viewership’s in a death spiral, at least among the young-adult-male demographic all the advertisters want, you’ve gotta wonder if it just might be true. On the other hand, the ABCNews.com article herein linked reads like one of those overblown instant-trend stories seen all over the newspaper living sections, stories that often prove not to be as universally prophetic as they say they are.

Yet the question may still be begged: Is network TV, as we know it, a lumbering dinosaur of a business? Sometimes, such as when Fear Factor or Joe Millionaire is on, it sure seems that way. Other times, such as when King of the Hill or Letterman is on, it still seems like it’s got some of its old industrial-age oomph left in it. Then there are times, such as when a soon-to-be-forgotten rote show like I’m With Her is on, when it seems too far gone to even worry about, like a cool old-time restaurant you never go to anymore but you’d greatly mourn if it went under.

TURNS OUT I MIGHT’VE been a trife optimistic about attendance figures at this year’s Northwest Bookfest. Unofficial reports have it at 9,000 over the two days, down at least half from last year’s event (when admission fees were only voluntary). There were also fewer exhibitors (the rare/antiquarian book people didn’t care for the old airplane hangar’s leak-prone roof).

Still, the event should be considered a success, given the dire fiscal straits the Bookfest organization’s gone through in the past two years or so.

Now, it’s time to start planning for Ought-Four. And this time the Bookfest gals-n’-guys really oughta start listening to the suggestions I’ve given just about every year:

Give it the ol’ razzle-dazzle. More authors, more games, more fun. Imagine the possibilities:

• Literary-character costume contests (kid and adult divisions).
• An adults-only corner where readers recite the “good parts” from favorite novels.
• A two-day, on-site novel writing contest.
• A literary-trivia-based treasure hunt across the Magnuson Park grounds.
• A local-celebrity poetry slam.

Why, the possibilities are endless…

ANOTHER OCTOBER, another Northwest Bookfest. (Or, as I like to call it, the World of Words Lit-O-Rama.)

With corporate donations drying up, organizers laid off most of their paid staff this year and enforced a cover price for the first time. But it seemed to go off more or less smoothly and with almost as many attendees to the ex-naval air station at Sand Point.

Of course, it helps if you have an extra added attraction to bring the punters in, such as a live pony…

…or a stuffed bird…

…or a guy in a lion suit acting toward the ladies like, well, like a predator.

It also helps if you’ve got many of the Northwest’s brightest literary lights. Sure Jonathan Raban, Sherman Alexie, and Fred Moody all had neato things to say, but the crowd gave the true superstar treatment to Book Lust author and “Librarian Action Figure” model Nancy Pearl. (Who deserves every bit of her adoration.)

The books, of course, are the real stars of Bookfest. There were thousands of ’em, from the sublime to the ridiculous and back again.

And there were readers, too. Besides the big names mentioned above, print MISC contributors Stacey Levine and Matt Briggs appeared on a panel organized by Clear-Cut Press. (They’re separated here by Corrina Wyckoff.)

Bookfest has essentially replaced one role of Bumbershoot, the role of Seattle’s big start-of-bad-weather public fete. We gather together one more time to proclaim our readiness to shut ourselves in for the winter with printed entertainment for company.

And we get to feed the seagulls while we’re at it.

BILL MAXWELL ASKS, is the “Ghettopoly” board game really worse than gangsta rap? (He doesn’t mention that both products are sold to predominantly white suburban customers.)

SHERI GRANER RAY claims in her new tech-insider-market book,
Gender Inclusive Game Design, that females “currently make up over 52% of Internet users and 70% of casual online gamers.”

In a related anecdote, a certain female Internet user of my acquaintance claims she’s got a fullproof Spam-mail response: “I just write them back and tell them if they want to sell me something to create a longer penis, they should send me a penis first. I never get another email from them again.”

A Seattle Times oped piece making nasty swipes at corporate welfare overkill.

POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST JOHN LEVESQUE points out the central irony of the P-I‘s strategy in trying to preserve the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times: “The paper that wants to put the Post-Intelligencer out of business is responsible for selling ads in the Post-Intelligencer.“

To restate the obvious: This marriage cannot be saved.

Last month, the P-I won the first round of courtroom battles over keeping the JOA. The Times wants to kill the agreement and, at the same time, the P-I. The P-I claims it can’t survive without the JOA, in which its printing, sales, delivery, and PR functions (everything except the paper’s editorial content) is contracted to the Times. Given the lousy job the Times has done (deliberately or otherwise) at maintaining the P-I‘s ad volume and subscriber base, I’d say the P-I can’t survive with the JOA.

Seattle still needs two dailies. It needs two separate dailies.

The best-case scenario for settling this flap would be a compromise court settlement, in which the P-I gets its own sales force again, while the Times still prints and delivers both papers until new arrangements are made (such as the Times selling its job-printing subsidiary in Tukwila, Rotary Offset Press, to the P-I). But don’t expect such a rational move from a Times management out for blood.

Underlying the whole dispute, but not overtly mentioned by either party to it: The fact that the traditional big American daily paper is an industrial-age anachronism. As I mentioned around the time the Seattle dailies went on strike three years ago, I believe there is a way for newspapers to become more competitive, with one another and with other info/advertising media–if they became leaner and more specialized, and established a more direct rapport with their readership (without necessarily turning to Fox-esque sleaze).

If the P-I does succumb to the current courtroom wars, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a great opportunity to create a new kind of newspaper for a new media age. Nothing like this has been tried in the U.S. since USA Today was first formulated 20 years ago.

Wanna help create it? Lemme know.

APPLE COMPUTER’S second company-owned store in the region opened last weekend in Seattle’s rapidly upscaling University Village shopping center.

As was the case with Apple’s Bellevue Square opening earlier this year, a line snaked out over the mall grounds on opening night. By the time the first customers were let in at six, guys (and it was almost all guys) at the end of the line would have more than an hour’s wait.

The new Apple Store, built from scratch on the onetime site of an A&P supermarket (remember those, anyone?), is much bigger than the Bellevue store, which had to be squeezed into an ex-Hallmark shop site. Thus, it more fully expresses the company’s aim of providing a real-world equivalent to the Mac OS’s clean, uncluttered, dignified aesthetic of cyberspace.

Live entertainment was provided on Friday by a subset of the UW Marching Band (above), and on Saturday with a 15-minute free set by Euro power-poppers the Raveonettes (below).

(Incidentally, the Apple Store’s free Wi-Fi signal reaches next door to the Ram sports bar, but just barely.)

Meanwhile, other businesses in the neighborhood have gotten into the cyber-craze, as seen in this exploitation of an already-tired Internet catch phrase.

I could add that I walked from the Village uphill to the University District late Saturday night, past the Greek Row where rowdy frat boys rioted after midnight. I left before that happened, but could sense a tension in the air, an angry and ornery sound of “fun” emanating from many of the fraternities and rental houses on the first Saturday night of the school year.

GET READY FOR the mother of all gender-bias lawsuits. Tens of thousands of potential class-action defendants at 3,500 job sites, litigation that could drag on as long as 13 years, and one creepy happy-face logo.

…MEANWHILE, the US rich-poor gap is at its highest since ’29.

When drug companies figured out how to market it as one.

…old-time department stores, even whilst some of them are still with us. (He seems to particularly miss the stores’ old mission as definers of a downtown-centric social culture.)

…there’s not much on Google about wannabe Kalakala buyer Charles Medlin. The one thing I did find was a three-year-old article in which he tried to buy Motorola’s failed satellite-communications venture. But all his correspondence and transactions were routed through a mailbox store near his home, since he had neither a separate office address nor his own fax number.

…independent artists hawked their wares in Occidental Mall on First Thursday. And once again, the bigshot corporate gallery owners made bluster in the daily papers about wanting the non-represented riffraff out of Pioneer Square for good. One gallery boss was quoted smearing the indies’ works as mere “flea market trinkets” that don’t deserve to exist in the same neighborhood with, say, expensive glass bowls. Thus, defenders of the li’l guyz sported T-shirts scoffing at the scoffers.

FUN WITH ELECTRICITY: When first we heard of the Calif. megastore chain Fry’s Electronics coming to Renton, we scoffed. We’d heard so many times of Northern Calif. institutions whose reputations turned out to have been due to little more than being from Northern Calif., that hubris-capital of North America.

But Fry’s turns out to be worth the hype, I must say.

It’s not just another Circuit City/Best Buy clone grown to Goliath size. It’s been designed from step one as Techno-Geek Heaven. Acres of hardware, software, parts and pieces (yep, even that Torx-6 screwdriver I’ve been looking for). Prices aren’t all that great, except for a few loss leader specials. It’s the selection that makes it different, that and the whole vastness of the joint, and the staff that speaks Geekspeak like natives.

While it’s not in an established strip-mall zone, it’s easy to get to by public transport because it’s reasonably close to the main Boeing Renton bus stop. (Not that Fry’s is all that keen on non-drivers shopping there; its delivery fees are tremendous, and staffers write down the serial numbers of anything customers bring in in backpacks that’s even close to merchandise Fry’s sells.)

Between Boeing and the also-nearby Kenworth truck plant, it’s right in the heart of our industrial heritage. But the fourth big institution in the neighborhood, the giant Cirque du Soleil tent complex, heralds a postmodern, postindustrial, upscaled culture built from the forms of populist working-class entertainments of olden days.

Fry’s is intended for “knowledge workers,” for engineers and designers and coders, not for assembly-line grunts. You can find U.S.-built products in the store, but they’re more readily found in cheaper categories (DVD discs) than in expensive ones (DVD players). No, Fry’s is a store for an America that, to quote an old Doonesbury line, “doesn’t have to make anything anymore—except SUCCESS.”