IT’S BEEN OVER A WEEK since our last post to this site. (Sorry.) Things that have gone on during that time:

• The Chubby & Tubby hardware-variety stores were put up for sale, and simultaneously began a liquidation sale. Wanna help me buy and preserve ’em?
• The Sonics continued to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, in game after game.
• A&E reran its Cleavage documentary, an excuse to show seconds-long clips displaying 50 years’ worth of minimal attire. In true American-repressed fashion, the show censored all nipple and see-thru shots—except during icky surgery scenes.
• The two-years-in-the-making eighth issue of the literary tabloid Klang came out, with a long story by yr. obd’t web-editor about the Alasdair Gray novel Poor Things.
• I’ve continued to work tirelessly on assembling the next print MISC, which should wow and wonder you any week now.
• I viewed Scarecrow Video’s copy of the unjustly obscure Mexican film Sexo por Compasion (Compassionate Sex) Made in 1999 by director Laura Mana, it deftly applies the neopagan “sacred prostitute” legend and sets it in a lethargic little Catholic town.Our heroine Dolores (Lisabeth Margoni) is a plump, middle-aged barmaid who’s so conscientiously pious, her husband splits town rather than face her “excess of goodness.” This only prompts her to redouble her efforts at do-gooder-hood, until she overhears a male barfly complaining about his own straying wife. She offers her sympathy in the best way she can imagine. While there’s no on-screen sex in the film, we’re told the man learns from Dolores that a little sin isn’t so bad; and that he also learns how to satisfy his own wife.

  With the speed of small-town gossip, the town’s men all line up for Dolores (who’s renamed herself Lolita!). She soothes and consoles all (middle-aged virgins, widowers, the lonely, the misunderstood). She asks nothing in return but donations for the church building fund.

  Director Mana switches from b/w to color. The men are now energetic and serene. Their wives don’t like that they’ve been barred from Lolita’s bar, but adore their hubbies’ new sexual knowledge and doting tenderness.

  Everybody’s happy and well-adjusted—except the now underworked hookers from the next town and the priest who goes mad when he learns the source of the parish’s new riches. But Lolita gets their heads set straight soon enough.

  Even Lolita’s returning hubby eventually learns to stop condemning her love-sharing ways, after the town wives draft him into giving them some compassionate sex. The film ends with the happy announcement that Lolita’s going to have “our child,” the “our” referring to the whole town.

  That’s all cozy and uplifting. It’s also neatly confined somewhere in the outer provinces of Latino “magical realism.” Could anything like its premise work out in real life, in jaded urban civilization? I’ve no answers. Even the authors of New Age essays about the “sacred prostitute” archtype seldom come out and advocate reviving the practice. (They mostly ask female readers to take the legend as a lesson for individual self-esteem.)

  I do know the film’s penultimate plot twist is comparable to my own mini-essay in this space a month or so back calling for a men’s antiwar movement, which I only half-facetiously christened “Peepees for Peace.” It would refute “alternative” culture’s frequent denunciations of masculinity, instead proclaiming a positive role for yang passion in the building of a better world.

  None of the “sacred prostitute” books I’ve seen mention men providing sexual/spiritual enlightenment to women—only women healing men and women healing themselves.

  What if there were more women like this film’s Lolita—and more men like her husband at the film’s end, healing the planet one clitoris at a time?

IT SHOULDN’T come as a surprise that Amazon.com’s getting into online clothing sales. The surprise is that mainstream media outlets have characterized clothes as a difficult item to sell online.

Apparel has been sold in mail-order catalogs for over 120 years. Anything that can easily be sold in a mail-order catalog can also be sold in an on-screen catalog at least as easily, and probaly more easily. Size and color variations, and fabric close-ups, can be viewed as instantly as the speed of a user’s modem allows. Images of garments and accessories can be combined, like digital paper-doll ensembles, to ensure the right total look. Custom sizes can easily be calculated for the perfect fit.

The only real barrier to online clothing sales thus far has been the perception of Internet users as all males (more specifically as slovenly, fashion-challenged males). Now, the Net’s far wider appeal has been proven in demographic surveys. The online realm’s gotten its walls repainted and its lawn mowed; it’s officially a lady-friendly place now.

And since females traditionally control more than their share of consumer-spending decisions, that means the bigtime may have finally come for those e-tail entrants, such as Amazon, that have managed to stick it out thus far.

HERE’S A TOPIC I’d been intending to write about but someone else already got to—online discussion boards for escorts and their clients. I might still write about the topic sometime, because it’s so darned fascinating and the story hereby linked doesn’t come close to including all its most intriguing aspects.

IN THE LAST PRINT MISC, I ran an only-slightly-satirical piece about corporate CEOs as today’s objects of cult worship. It turns out a Harvard prof agrees with me.

…continues abroad.

Last year, we praised Britain’s ITV network for its heritage of decentralized and impermanent authority. Historically, ITV was “owned” by a regulatory commission, which licensed local network-affiliate stations for multi-year contracts that weren’t always renewed. The local stations produced the shows and sold the ads, under the regulator’s heavy guidelines. The bigger-market stations (including the two that split the London franchise by days of the week) had more opportunities to put shows into the network schedule. But no one company controlled the network or its schedule.

The result was a diffuse system with different “voices” and different ideas on what would make a good and/or popular show. It brought forth countless small-screen classics; including Coronation Street, The Avengers, Ready Steady Go!, The Saint, Thunderbirds, The Prisoner, The Muppet Show, This Is Tom Jones, Upstairs Downstairs, Benny Hill, Danger Mouse, Brideshead Revisited, Inspector Morse, and the original versions of Three’s Company and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.

That all began to change in the Thatcher years. The 11 ITV stations in England and Wales got bought up by two companies. Now those two are merging, forming a behemoth that will control half the UK’s TV ad revenues–at least until “synergy”-obsessed mismanagement drives more viewers to other broadcast, cable, and satellite outlets.

By the way, if you click on the above link and you live in the US or Canada, you’re commiting some kind of intellectual-property crime. To which I naturally say go for it. (Another item about the story is at this link.)

When the Wonderbra was first brought to market, many commentators wagged about when a male equivalent would emerge. Now it has, under the aegis of Britain’s biggest middlebrow clothing-store chain.

LOTSA PEOPLE have schemed for years about how to revive America’s decaying downtowns. But what do you do with a dead mall?

ANOTHER UNEXPECTED SOURCE is now speaking out against record-industry greed.

…has some mostly-lucid ideas in a hereby-linked essay in the Guardian newspaper on why and how American pro-corporate ideology is spent, and is the chief reason for our current economic mess and biz-ethics scandals.

The guy’s wrong, however, when he puts the blame for this ideology on some particularly southern-U.S. legacy:

“The states of the Confederacy remain the heartland of the distinct brand of American conservatism that combines Christian, market and America-first fundamentalism to a unique degree, reinforced in the South by a legacy of barely submerged racism.”

In real life, some of our worst white racists have historically been in Northeastern cities and Midwestern small towns. The old northern oil and rail barons of a century ago successfully bought and sold politicians as routinely as financiers do today. And “America First” was historically a slogan that kept us out of WWI’s first four years, and was principally championed by the midwestern agitator W.J. Bryant and the Californian mining heir W.R. Hearst.

Yes, there’s a certain flavor to the type of conservative bombast that eminates from the likes of Texas and Florida. But equally rancid flavors of greed and arrogance can be found all over this vast land mass. Our own Nor’Western corporatethink cuisine is a deceptively mild stew, which hides its base of biz-as-usual crony favoritism under thick yet bland sauces of bureaucratic “process” and rigged “citizen input.”

So on this day when you’re going to hear umpteen gazillion mushy tributes to how wonderful we are, try to remember the nation is built on a fundamental contradiction between the concepts of individual freedom and capitalist licentiousness. The corporate libertarians, who openly invoke the former to excuse the latter, only make the contradiction more visible by pretending it doesn’t exist.

THE SUMMER PRINT MISC is officially late (I’d wanted it out today), but it is coming.

As part of it, I’m writing an exhortive little essay entitled “No, Seattle Doesn’t Suck.”

For it, I’d like your participation. Tell me what you like about Seattle. (Only things that are actually in Seattle! Out-of-town scenery doesn’t count!)

Send it in to our handy email box, preferably before the end of the month. Thanx in advance.

THE NY TIMES quotes an Italian business analyst on the Enron-Arthur Andersen-WorldCom mess: “What is lacking in the U.S. is a culture of shame. No C.E.O. in the U.S. is considered a thief if he does something wrong. It is a kind of moral cancer.”

WHAT ADAM SMITH REALLY WROTE, as opposed to what the pro-corporate “libertarians” claim he wrote.

THE FREMONT SOLSTICE PARADE is tons-O-fun; equally zany (although only slightly more dressed) is the Coney Island Mermaid Parade.

…aren’t the only people who want to put a muzzle on what you can say or do online. Now some aspiring political operatives in the state that gave us our duly-appointed President are putting out the big guns against a website that apparently offered lots of consumer-information posts about escort services and links to the services’ own sites. (The site itself is now down.)

…yet another blow, effectively killing off another great music sharing portal, Audiogalaxy.com. It was the best of its type, until the next one comes along. Which it will, despite the the forces of control.

IN SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NEWS, it’s increasingly apparent Arthur Andersen & Co. will pay the ultimate price for its past funny-money chicanery, and will essentially cease to exist except as a lawsuit-settlement entity. It’s time other companies faced similar disillusionments (not mere breakups). Clear Channel Communications is first on my list, followed by the major record labels. I’m sure you could think of others. Any suggestions?

…effectively killing off another great music sharing portal, Audiogalaxy.com. It was the best of its type, until the next one comes along. Which it will, despite the the forces of control.

As part of the increasing, much-vilified Kroger-ization of QFC, the formerly Washington-owned supermarket circuit has replaced is store-brand milk label with the “Carnation” logo. The Cincinnati “Distributed By” address on the label gives this away as being a case of the Cin-city-based Kroger having licensed the name from the eco-elite’s favorite love-to-hate company, Nestle, which umpteen years back acquired the formerly Washington-owned original Carnation Co., which had its local fresh-milk plant in a building east of the University Village mall, a building now housing a branch of, you guessed it, a certain supermarket chain. (Confused? Good.)

In a recent New York magazine, its tech-media beat writer Michael Wolff has proposed one possible post-MP3 future: A music business that’s more like the book business.

Wolff’s premise: Manufactured teen-pop acts are rapidly reaching their inevitable sell-by date. Commercial radio is becoming ever more corporate and ever more unlistenable. The Internet, MP3 trading, and home CD-R burning are furthering the indie-rock agenda of shunning rock-star decadence and championing a more direct rapport between artists and audiences.

Therefore, a record industry built around trying to make every release go multiplatinum is doomed. Also doomed is the whole industry infrastructure of waste and hype (“independent” promoters, payola, limos, drugs, hookers, mansions, plastic surgeons, promotional junkets for journalists, etc. etc.)

Instead, recordings will have to be sold more like books are. While there will still be some bestsellers, for the most part artists will carefully construct works that a few people will really love. Street-savvy marketers will promote these works to an infinite array of tiny niche markets.

If Wolff’s prediction comes true, we just might also expect a few other changes in the way music is made and sold, such as the following:

• Groupies will start dressing more like undergrad teaching assistants.
• Following the hardcover-paperback timeline, artists will release the deluxe box set first, then the single disc in the plastic jewel box.
• Instead of Jaegermeister and Chee-Tos, chianti and brie.
• Instead of moshpits, discussion circles.
• Volvos replace limos.
• The new “Oprah’s Record Club” turns listeners onto the tastefully dramatic, housewife-friendly tuneage of tomorrow’s Sarah McLachlans and Natalie Merchants.
• MTV’s schedule includes the highly-edited “reality” adventures of everybody’s favorite wacky celebrity family on The Updikes.

I was going to ponder if ecru sweaters and tweed jackets would become the new rocker uniform, but then I remembered Belle and Sebastian.