So the onetime discount king, descended from the old S.S. Kresge dime-store chain, is now on the veritable fiscal ropes. Its market position has been crowded on one side by Target’s pseudo-hip image and by Wal-Mart’s special status as the only chain retailer in many small towns. Now, it’s the biggest retail company to ever file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. (The previous champ was Federated Department Stores, parent company of the Bon Marche (which finally has a web site!).)

Like many post-boomers, I grew up with the bizarrely soothing pastel blue-and-pink color schemes of the chain’s massive stores (particularly at the lunch counters). These days, like a lotta folk, I don’t get in there much–essentially because there are three Fred Meyer stores between me and the nearest Kmart (on 130th and Aurora, in a building inherited from the short-lived California chain White Front). And when I do get there, much of the merchandise, particularly the clothing and shoes, still looks like shoddy knockoffs ready to fray apart within a week.

Chain management insists it’s got a plan to save the big K. But in case it doesn’t work, or in case it sheds some locations during the restructuring, let’s think about recycling the real estate.

Many Kmart locations, such as the one in West Seattle’s lost valley of Delridge, are standalone sites, sufficiently far away from other big-box stores and strip malls as to be less than ideal trafficwise. A smart and progressive developer (perhaps a nonprofit) could buy up such a site should it become available and re-lease part of the front parking moat for small-retail development. Then, one could put the Kmart building itself, along with the rest of the lot, to new mixed uses.

An old Wired article once suggested something like this. It posited a community of artists taking over one of those 80,000-square-foot structures for production and living spaces, creating something like a permanent indoor Burning Man-esque community. That’s one potential reuse, but not the only one.

Local electronics manufacturer John Fluke turned an abandoned Everett discount store into a factory (too bad he didn’t call it Ye Olde Mall).

The B&I Shopping Center in Tacoma (known mainly as the former home of Ivan the Gorilla) was originally a discount hypermart whose second-generation owners decided would be more profitable not as one big store but as a bazaar with sections rented out to indie entrepreneurs.

The buildings’ simple structures, which necessitate interior supporting posts every 20 linear feet, make them hard to reconfigure for big-open-space uses (arena football, roller skating, etc.). But they could still be used for certain other non-selling purposes. They could become innovative affordable-housing solutions–the vastness of the space could be easily broken up with skylights and open-air courtyards; since the roofs are held up by all those steel posts, pieces of said roofs could relatively-easily be knocked out). Tthey could also be divvied up into alternative work spaces, not just for artists but also for sweat-equity entrepreneurs creating their own lines of clothes, cookies, snowboards, and such.

And, almost needless to say, they’d be awesome party/dance/concert spaces (even with those view-blocking posts).

Meanwhile, the company that wanted to be the retail goliath of the Internet, our own Amazon, announced an honest-to-goodness net operating profit for the first time ever this past quarter (not merely the not-counting-assorted-expenses “pro forma” profit management had promised). This doesn’t mean the firm’s out of the proverbial woods, and it certainly doesn’t mean its investors will see a proper return anytime soon. But it does mean the basic idea of e-tail can indeed work, sorta, with the right products and the right focus. (I still say Amazon would’ve been in the black sooner, and wouldn’t have had to lay off so many Seattle workers, if it had stuck closer to its books-music-video core and hadn’t thrown millions into ventures to sell pet food, video rentals, and power tools.)

According to one commentator, we all are.

…on the web before (aguably, the whole civilian Internet has been one big wacky and dubious “investment opportunity”). But this just might be the prize of the bunch. Someone’s trying to line up investors to start a chain of hetero anonymous-sex clubs. You’d be steered into a totally-darkened bedroom and be met by an opposite-gender patron you’d never met before and might never meet again. Left unanswered by the entrepreneur-wannabe: If this is a non-prostitution enterprise (i.e., one in which everyone pays at least something to participate), how is it going to attract paying female patrons? (Found by Memepool.)

POLL REVEALS Microsoft employees love Microsoft software!

A future without the major record labels!

RUPERT MURDOCH’S PUBLISHING HOUSE tried to get Michael Moore not to say bad things about George W. Bush in his new book. The question is therefore begged: What was Michael Moore doing at Rupert Murdoch’s publishing house in the first place?

OUR OL’ PAL Kathleen Wilson has written the greatest single piece of writing the Stranger’s ever published.

What was the real story behind the infamous company that helped buy the 2000 Presidential election, engineered the 2001 Calif. electricity crisis, and then went spectacularly kablooey? According to Fortune, it was a “new economy” company in an “old economy” industry. In other words, it behaved just like a dot-com, all bombastic and arrogant and obsessed with the stock price and executive perks (not necessarily in that order); devoutly disinterested in stable financials, accurate accounting, or other squaresville relics.

THIS ARTICLE claims to have the sad but not unexpected truth about the psychic hotlines shilled by the mysterious TV ads of Miss Cleo. It doesn’t mention that several acquaintances of mine claim to have known Youree Harris (Cleo’s apparent real name) as an itinerant budding actress who spent a couple years in Seattle learning her schtick.

THE NEW YEAR opened with almost exactly the same Space Needle fireworks routine (seen here from halfway up Queen Anne Hill) that began the last year.

It’s as good a time as any for a year-in-review. In 2001, this region faced:

• A spectacularly horrific mass-murder-suicide attack back East, leading to the U.S.-led overthrow of a particularly odious Third World dictatorship.
• A massive economic slump.
• Skyrocketing electricity prices.
• The loss of Boeing’s HQ, thanks to a CEO who thought he could re-image the company to stock buyers as a financial-services company that also happened to make stuff.
• A daily-newspaper strike that ended with few employee gains.
• A Mardi Gras riot, followed hours later by a massive yet fatality-free earthquake.
• The closure of the OK Hotel (to the earthquake), Tower Books, Pistil Books, the Frontier Room, the Speakeasy Cafe (to a spectacular fire), the Rendezvous Bar/Jewel Box Theater, the Ditto Tavern, the Korean-owned gangsta rap T-shirt store at 3rd and Pine, the Washington Film and Video Office, assorted dot-coms (including HomeGrocer, Kozmo, MyLackey, and MediaPassage), and a couple of upscale mags intended toward the dot-com crowd.
• The deaths of journalist-historian extraordinaire Emmett Watson and Two Bells Tavern owner Patricia Ryan.
• Tenth-anniversary-of-Nirvana hype in the national media.

On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:

• The Mariners had a once-in-a-lifetime regular season. (We’ll forget about the AL Championship Series.)
• The UW football team won the 2000-2001 Rose Bowl (we’ll forget about the 2001-2002 Holiday Bowl).
• Evictions and demolitions of funky old buildings slowed down, thanks to a collapsed market for shoddy-yet-costly condos.
• Our own delicious print MISC mag blossomed into an even tastier broadsheet with nearly two dozen contributing writers and artists (thanks, cats and chicks!).

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

FROM SRI LANKA (“a world where suicide bombings are so routine they don’t make a ripple in the international news”), ten lessons in how not to fight terrorism.

THE GOOD NEWS OF THE DAY: The corporate record labels are reeling in major losses, due mainly to the collapse of their longstanding business plans (the incessant hyping of a few bland superstars).

DESPITE THE TALIBAN’S FALL, there are still places on Earth where the simple enjoyment of pop music and nightlife is met with stern rebuke.

THOMAS FRIEDMAN, the NY Times’s second-most-anointed right-winger, facetiously proposes an all-nude airline, “Naked Air,” as a potential security solution.

If Friedman had been more of a journalist and less of a think-tank ideologue, he might have remembered that during the ’70s first wave of skyjackings, the unjustly forgotten humor columnist Arthur Hoppe wrote a much more entertaining piece based on the same premise. Hoppe proposed a Jaybird Airlines, in which not only would all passengers board the plane naked as a jaybird, but the male passengers would be assigned comely Seatmates to “entertain” them whilst in-flight. (Female passengers, in Hoppe’s piece, were expected to merely sit back and listen to the stewardesses (dressed in designer shoes and smartly-fashioned hats) explain the procedures for the unlikely event of a water landing.) The piece ends, of course, with a passenger attempting to take control of the plane–to prevent it from landing.

…Santa Fe Natural, makers of that “natural” cigarette whose addicts often mistakenly believe to be (1) made by Native Americans and (2) “good for you” just ’cause it doesn’t have additives. (News flash: Tobacco alone is lethal enough.) Maybe the brand will lose some of its unwarranted hipster mystique, now that it’s just another part of an oldline mass-murdering cig empire.

AGAIN THIS YEAR, those fun-lovers at the Seattle Cacophany Society came out in force for “Santarchy” (aka “The Night of 100 Santas”), a Friday-night Belltown pub crawl.

The premise is extremely simple. Several dozen Santas (plus some elves, clowns, reindeer, and the occasional Mary and Joseph) walk from bar to bar, brightening the evening by their raucous presence.

They ask some random bargoers whether they’ve been naughty or nice. Those who say “naughty” get a small candy cane. Those who say “nice” are given a gentle lashing and a scolding “Wrong answer.”

Despite the costume-party parody aspect of the event, it’s one of the purest Christmas Spirit spreaders I know of. No sales, no soliciting, no pressure, no be-happy-or-else intimidation. Just good old kitschy joy.

(The Cacophonics do other stuff year-round, and can be reached at this link.)

Meanwhile, the most appropriate holiday greeting this year could well be the simple message at Ross Dress for Less: “Hope.” (It’s just too bad the sign’s tree-ornament caricature looks too much like a lit cherry bomb.)

You’d expect the company he left behind, which loves nothing more than to stage all-star tributes to itself, would make a big deal about the old guy’s 100th.

We could go on about the ironies of a guy whose name became synonymous with fetishistically squeaky-clean entertainment, who worked and smoked himself to death at age 65. (And no, he’s not frozen somewhere.) But there are more interesting things to ponder about his contributions to world pop-cult, for good and/or ill.

The first thing to remember is Mr. Disney began his career in Kansas City. Anyone who saw last year’s PBS Jazz series knows KC in the ’20s was a rollicking center of official corruption, wide-open nightlife, and the closest thing to race-mixing you’d get in the pre-WWII upper midwest. Disney’s early studio films (many of whose artists came to LA with him) clearly reflect the brash jazz-age aesthetic of old KC.

But his studio style changed, and for specific reasons. His first niche was in animated short subjects, a “block-booked” aspect of the movie biz that offered a steady income (as long as you didn’t spend more than you expected to make) but little or no chance at the big money available on the feature side. To become anything more than a big fish in a tiny pond, Disney embarked on a multi-year strategy.

First, he made sure (after losing the rights to his silent-era star Oswald the Rabbit) that his company would wholly own everything it produced, no matter who financed or distributed it. At first, that allowed him to produce his shorts at a deficit and make the profits from the character merchandising, . Later, that led to today’s Disney company being one of the most aggressive promoters of copyright expansions.

As Disney strove to have the slickest, biggest-budgeted films in the cartoon field, his artists had to phase out the charmingly aggressive behavior and barnyard humor of his earlier shorts. Mickey Mouse was given eyeballs with pupils and ears that had sides and backs. Multi-page memos circulated among the staff, detailing how the studio’s star characters would move and react in different story situations. The studio also made one-shot cartoons without recurring characters but with increasingly elaborate production values.

The latter films were warm-ups for Disney’s big move into animated features, his ticket into Hollywood’s big leagues. Whole books have been written about where and how the Disney features departed from the original stories, toning down the healthy horror aspects of fairy tales in favor of an ultimately scarier “wholesomeness.” That helped make the films marketable around the world forever. Their specific unreality made them placeless and timeless. (The studio’s WWII-themed shorts were pulled from release, even in historical-context presentations, years ago.) And every feature introduced a new cast of merchandisable characters to be endlessly cycled through toys, T-shirts, record albums, lunchboxes, comic books, etc. etc. From the financial backwaters of the cartoon-shorts market, Disney had forged one of entertainment’s greatest profit machines.

But Disney was a lot more than just an aggressive marketer. He put cash, passion, and careful planning into every aspect of his spreading empire. His theme parks (and his unbuilt, original EPCOT model community) were total-immersion experiences, clearly showing the hand of someone used to devising 90-minute movies one frame at a time. He remained a tinkerer, a basement inventor with a whole lab of “Imagineers” to perfect his concepts.

The movie side of the Disney empire has had its ups and downs since Walt’s demise. Currently, its in-house animated features have been overshadowed in commercial and critical acceptance by the computer-drawn films supplied to it by Pixar. While Walt did more for the craft of drawn animation than anybody, he undoubtedly would’ve loved the possibilities of digital characters walking through hyper-realistic, pseudo 3-D spaces. He was a computer geek who lived before computers as we know them existed; so he had to channel his obsessively-detailed mind into other disciplines.

Indeed, perhaps nobody in the entertainment industry was as simultaneously adept at the creative, mechanical, and business sides of his trade. I can think of only one such multi-skilled exec in any industry today.

But somehow, I doubt there will be coffee-table books 60 years from now capitalizing on the public’s continued fascination with MS Windows 3.0.

(This article’s permanent link.)

“Fight the terrorists by giving my corporation money.”

WALLACE SHAWN imagines a session with a “Foreign Policy Therapist.”