happy bite of seattle consumers

• Food vendors, start your engines. The City Council likes you.
• A Vancouver news site describes last month’s Canuck riot as a desperate attempt by the city’s young males to momentarily escape “a state that could be described as a deficit of the real, which is dangerous and unstable place, full of unfocused outrage and an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement that constantly simmers just below the surface.”
• As past allegations of phone tapping, computer hacking, and other dirty dealings resurface against Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. businesses (which still aren’t directly implicated in the current U.K. phone hacking scandal), Peter Cohan at Forbes suggests News Corp. shareholders would have themselves a much more robust business if it weren’t for Murdoch, his kinfolk, and their insistence upon continuing to run newspapers.
• One anti-tunnel measure stays on local ballots; a second gets kicked off by a judge.

In a lot of cases, it was “nice” middle class boys n’ girls powered by alcohol and an anything-goes attitude. In other breaking news, the earth is round.

Up in the land of real health care and real ketchup flavoured potato chips, a few hundred dudes n’ dudettes used the Canucks’ dramatic collapse in the hockey playoffs as an excuse to rip it up in the streets, looting stores and setting cop cars afire.

Initial reports state the fracas may have been larger and more intense than the similar riots following the Canucks’ 1994 playoff defeat, but was contained more quickly.

Of course, Seattle had its own street riot in the 1990s. But ours was about petty things like global politics and trade; nothing this important.

I watched the game, and a little of the postgame riot coverage, at Teddy’s Off Roosevelt, one of Seattle’s major Canuck fan gathering spots. The crowd was noticeably belligerent  during the first period. But as the Boston Bruins expanded their lead, the Canuck contingent became more steadily morose. Drunken despair is just as futile as violent frustration, but can leave fewer cleanup bills and insurance liabilities.

A new exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery (that won’t be put on tour) suggests that the European surrealist movement was primarily influenced by Northwest Coast indigenous art.

Just imagine the potential meaning: This place didn’t become “cultured” when big money collectors emerged in the region, buying art works made elsewhere. Great stuff has always been created here.

In political news so far outside “the Beltway” even Rachel Maddow isn’t talking about it yet, Canada might make a sharp left turn in next week’s parliamentary elections.

The New Democratic Party, longtime scourge of Canadian corporate cronies, says it’s got enough momentum to become the fulcrum of power in the next Government, potentially winning more seats than the currently ensconsed Conservatives.

We’ll know the results next Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning), a lot sooner than we’ll know, say, the results of the NHL playoffs’ second round.

• Curling really is the greatest game of all time.
• Apolo Anton Ohno is in line to replace the disgraced Tiger Woods as the champion all-around ad spokesman for everything. This does not, however, mean anyone will care about speed skating until the next Winter Games.
• I can see why the Intl. Olympic Committee chose to add more “x-treme-y” events and not to add women’s ski jumping. Why simply stick on an extension to a legacy Olympic sport when you can instead grow your young, hip, edgy, more marketable side?
• The whole thang’s already a fiscal disaster for the Vancouver and B.C. governments. But the province’s zeal in attracting the Games is understandable if you know how it works. Over recent decades, successive provincial leaders have staked their political careers on “megaprojects,” big govt.-subsidized development schemes that invariably funnel money from the taxpayers to politically-connected landowners and construction firms. The Olympics are simply the biggest, costliest megaproject of them all.
• NBC’s coverage sucks because the network’s stuck in a coverage model invented decades ago by ABC sports exec Roone Arledge. He operated from the premise that too few Americans intrinsically cared about these sports, so instead he’d put on a drama serial. Pretaped profile pieces turned these athletes into instant celebrities (even if, in real life, they were often bland workaholics). Armies of videotape editors would slice-n’-dice the competition footage into “shows,” carefully timed to draw and keep the biggest possible mass audience for the longest possible viewing time. But we’re not in the three-network era anymore. In the age of cable + Internet, audiences are fragmented into little pieces based on shared intense interest—such as those who are intensely interested in winter sports. The more you care about any of these events, the more you’re disgusted by what U.S. TV does to them.

Twenty-four years after Expo 86, Vancouver BC is getting ready for another “world class” mega-event. This time, as Sports Illustrated reports, many “people in Vancouver are dreading Games.”

For its first 50 or so pages of his novel Happinessâ„¢, Canadian satirist Will Ferguson provides a quaint send-up of office politics and the book industry (historically, literature’s second most boring subject, after writers themselves).

But the humor picks up once the main story gets underway. This is really a book about a book, the ultimate self-help book, a meandering 1,000-page series of life lessons entitled What I Learned on the Mountain and credited to a pseudonymous guru calling himself “Rajee Tupak Soiree.” Our hero, downtrodden book editor Edwin de Valu, gets the typewritten manuscript in the slush pile at the middling publisher where he gruelingly toils. After some initial misadventures, Edwin has the text published with no changes.

Without the blanding-out process of the industry’s professional prose-polishers, What I Learned on the Mountain gets unleashed full-strength upon an unsuspecting world. Within days (the book biz’s notoriously slow operational pace is highly compressed in Ferguson’s fictional world), it’s the #1 best seller of all time.

And it really works!

Soiree’s turgid prose turns out to have a hypnotic effect, subconsiously leading most of its readers into a new way of thinking. (Ferguson doesn’t attempt to show us how this works; he only directly quotes from What I Learned on the Mountain in very brief snippets.)

The result: Pretty much the end of civilization as we know it.

Millions of North Americans suddenly convert to inner peace and contentment. The alcohol, tobacco, drug, fashion, and baldness-remedy industries collapse. So does the book industry, except for spinoffs and ripoffs of What I Learned on the Mountain. Vast swaths of the U.S. work force just up and quit their posts to embark on vision quests or to join Tupak Soiree’s Colorado ashram/harem. This heaven, like David Byrne’s is a place where nothing ever happens.

Edwin de Valu sees everything he’d known (including his wife and his ex-lover) disappear around him, and feels responsible for it. This milquetoast salaryman reinvents himself as an action hero (or antihero), determined to strike his revenge on Tupak Soiree and all he represents. In the process, he learns the real lesson of life—it’s meant to be a struggle. Happiness, real happiness, is a journey, not a destination.

And (spoiler alert) Edwin also finds out that Tupak Soiree is a total fraud. What I Learned on the Mountain, the book that conquered humanity’s cynicism and greed, was a cynical attempt to make money.

I found Ferguson’s ending to be a real cop-out. I wanted to read about the ultimate battle for humanity’s soul, between evil-disguised-as-good (Tupak and his blissed-out hordes) and good-disguised-as-evil (the now angry, gun-toting Edwin).

That story remains to be written.

So does the heart of Ferguson’s conceit, a sufficiently-long example of Tupak’s seductive prose stylings.

But these failings may simply mean Ferguson’s conceptual reach exceeds his stylistic grasp.

In other words, he’s also still striving.

(Sidebar 1: The novel’s original Canadian title in 2001 was Generica, referring to the uniform state of bliss people adopt upon exposure to Tupak Soiree’s teachings.)

(Sidebar 2: Could there actually be a style of writing that, like monks’ chants or recent attempts in “binaural-beat” electronic music, rewire the human mind? The story possibilities, oh the story possibilities…)

(Sidebar 3: What would US/Canadian society really look like after a mass conversion away from anxiety/depression/addiction and toward inner peace? We’d still have to feed and shelter ourselves, and we’d still have tribal/social/political differences. More story possibilities…)

• The British Columbia pig farmer who’s been charged in Canada’s worst-ever serial killing case has been found guilty in six cases of slain Vancouver prostitutes. He still faces charges in some 20 other deaths.
• More folks are pondering whether logging and suburban sprawl played a part in letting last week’s floods get as bad as they got.
• FEMA’s coming to flood-ridden southwest Washington. Is this a good thing?
• In the yeah-duh dept., those 80-year-old ferry boats turn out to be in really bad shape.
• A Westport man who’d been cast as the killer in a local dinner-theater mystery play may have committed the real thing.

• Two suburban high school teachers took part in an antiwar protest. The administration wants to punish ’em. Students are rallying around ’em in support.
• It’s the first, probably exaggerated, snow scare of the season.
• How not to hide pot in your car: Package it as a Christmas present.
• The tragedy surrounding the failed UW-devised AIDS vaccine moves further from “noble failed experiment” toward “real scandal.” A UW researcher allegedly faked test data and altered lab images. (The researcher in question was conducting AIDS-related research not directly related to the vaccine trials.)
• Reverse-sprawl dept.: Ski maker K2’s moving its head offices from Vashon Island to south Seattle. The products will still all be made in China.
• The SeaTimes posits two Eastside transportation solutions: Add passenger rail, cancel plans to widen I-405.

No, the Canadian election results don’t mean North America’s bastion of sane politics has suddenly turned into a bunch of Bushbots. Thanks to their four-party system and the shift of a couple dozen House of Commons seats, a Liberal minority government has been replaced by a Conservative minority government. Incoming prime minister Stephen Harper may talk the same rural-oriented, top-down, lawn-and-order talk as the Bushies; but to pass any legislation he’ll have to work out vote-by-vote coalitions with the Liberals, the independence-minded Bloc Quebecois, and the progressive-left New Democrats.

The most famous brand in romance novels, “Harlequin Romance,” is apparently to be retired next year. The company’s still churnin’ out the paperbacks; but the firm’s specialty lines have taken the sales, and the shelf space, away from what had been its flagship series.

Masculine-oriented readers might scoff at ’em, but romances are the last commercially successful branch of old-fashioned pulp fiction. They’re “adventure” stories written to precise pubilsher-decreed formulae–just as the Hardy Boys, Sherlock Holmes, the Shadow, Tarzan, and Doc Savage had been.

Horror, sci-fi, mystery, and action novels are still being published in paperback, of course; but those industry segments are, for the most part, not as centrally editorially-controlled as they used to be (with some exceptions, such as Star Trek novels).

No, it’s the romances that are still this heavily pre-planned by the home office. Each “series” brand has its own characteristics–length, setting, characters, explicitness level (some of the racier romance lines are now the only sexual material allowed for sale at Wal-Mart).

This obsession with order and contrivance can be seen in some of the “chick lit” novels marketed to women who consider themselves too hip to read romances. “Chick lit” stories might not always have happy endings, but they seem to all have perky young heroines who all live in glamorous cities and all have glamorous AND high-paying careers, just like the heroines in certain romance series. (Trust me on this: In the real world, nobody who writes for an alternative weekly newspaper can afford Sarah Jessica Parker’s wardrobe.)

We’ll leave this item with a totally unrelated aphorism from the source of this news flash, “Superromance” novelist Susan Gable: “Beware of men with expensive, flashy cars and expensive, flashy teeth.”

…but there’s a list of Canada’s top 50 pop songs that includes nothing, absolutely nothing, by Nardwuar the Human Serviette!

The National Hockey League’s team owners have canceled the whole season, having failed to make the players’ association give in on salary caps and other issues. Puck-and-stick fans will now have to find new pursuits, such as knitting, drinking, and watching Degrassi High reruns.

Mike’s Hard Lemonade is moving its (small) head office to Seattle; specifically to Pioneer Square’s Washington Shoe Building, that onetime party central for the Seattle indie art world. The company’s Canadian-born founder-CEO (whose real first name, natch, is Anthony) will hire 30 people here to handle development and marketing for the Mike’s brands, which are manufactured and distributed by subcontractors.

Imagine the implications: Boeing, Muzak, and UPS may have moved their corporate HQs to other states, but by golly we can still become the capital of flavored clear-malt coolers!