LAST FRIDAY AND YESTERDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.

If I ever rewrite my old list of ways to voluntarily complicate your life, I’d have to put “move to a new home” right up at the list’s top, next to “start taking heroin.”

I’d previously mentioned that during my starving-student and starving-graduate days, I’d lived in approximately 20 locations over a course of 10 years, including one stretch of nine addresses from June 1981 thru July 1984. That constant hassle left me pretty much wary of the whole process.

So when I got into a Belltown apartment that was soon taken over by the semi-subsidized Housing Resource Group (which meant rent increases were far below the prevailing market trends), I sat and stayed for a comfy nine years.

But the time came at last to get the heck outta Belltown and into a home of my own. It could’ve gone far easier than it did.

First step: Getting two weeks ahead in the ol’ online column, knowing my life (including my Net access) would be screwy for at least that long.

Second step: Boxing up everything, and throwing away everything else. As a devoted collector of pop culture’s ephemera and detrius of all types, this posed severe questions of what was worth carting and what deserved trashing. (Eek! The Cat toys: Keep. Ken Griffey Jr. cereal boxes (empty, no collector resale value): Dump.)

Third step: Arranging the move of my mail, phone, electric account, cable, bank statements, and especially DSL service.

Fourth step: Getting new furnishings for the new space, instead of the hobble of donated and Dumpster-saved items that had furnished the old space. Because the new space had one large room (plus a separate kitchen and bathroom), I knew I’d want a separate bed space. To conserve square footage, I chose to get a loft bed.

Fifth step: Arranging with my brother the naturopath and a pal of his to rent a U-Haul van and get everything on it, then off of it, within a time frame amenable to both of them and also to the management of my new building. This became the first impossibility. The brother’s friend could only get out of work and to my old space after 6:30 p.m. The management at the new space had a policy forbidding move-ins from starting after 7 p.m.

The result: Two and a half hours of loading all my belongings (except the furniture-to-be-trashed) into the van, which would then be parked overnight at the brother’s place in Wallingford. I was left overnight at the old space with nothing but the clothes on my proverbial back, the contents of my trusty shoulder bag, the contents of my old refrigerator, and the to-be-trashed old furniture.

The brother tried to put a positive-yet-ironic spin by saying the night of stufflessness would be “an adventure. It’ll be like being homeless.”

Actually, it was a case of having two homes, and nothing in either of them.

TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.

IN OTHER NEWS: Burger King suddenly quit its promo campaign for the movie Chicken Run, in which viewers were encouraged to “save the chickens” by eating more beef. Replacing the ads: New spots, which look very hastily-prepared, selling chicken sandwiches.

ELSEWHERE:

• At last, a Netzine asking the vital question, “Which is your favorite: New Coke or Crystal Pepsi?”…/UL>
  

I’VE BEEN THINKING OF MOVING to another building.

In the great tradition of “We’d Rather Sell It Than Move It” sales promotions, I’ve been auctioning pieces of my book collection on eBay. (Please go ahead and click here to look at what I’ve got up there today; I promise I’ll still be here when you get back.)

I’ve been augmenting the sale items I’ve already got wtith a few titles I’ve picked up at second-hand outlets, for whch I can find avid collector-buyers.

One of these was The Girls from Esquire.

That was a 1952 hardcover collection (which I’ve already sold; sorry) of stories, essays, and cartoons about and/or by women, originally published in “The Magazine For Men” during its 1933-52 original heyday.

(For the uninitiated, the first version of Esquire, created by legendary editor Arnold Gingrich (no relation to Newt), was far different from the sad little mag it is today. It was a lush, oversize compendium of top-drawer fiction, quasi-naughty humor, “good girl art” cartoons, pinup paintings, fashion, and other material for the sophisticated Urbane Gentleman, or rather for the man who fantasized about being an Urbane Gentleman.)

The main attractions of The Girls from Esquire for modern-day collectors are (1) the cartoons and (2) the big-name authors. The authors include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nathaniel Benchley, Ilka Chase, John Dos Passos, John Steinbeck, Brendan Gill, Langston Hughes, Budd Schulberg, and James Jones. The cartoons, by such unjustly-forgotten greats as Abner Dean and Gardner Rea, mostly depict gorgeous, splendidly-dressed fantasy women who are totally adorable even when doing less-than-proper things (kept mistresses, husband-killers, etc.)

The fiction pieces are great. So are the profiles of four of the period’s great women (Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein, Dorothy Parker, and Ingrid Bergman).

But what makes this book truly a relic of an earlier age are the seven essays (four by female writers) complaining about those uppity U.S. females who insist upon careers in the work-world and upon dominating marriages and families at home.

Piece after piece rants on and on about how American had lost their femininity, their sense of purpose, their joy, their fashion sense, their homemaking skills, and their “knowledge of woman’s rightul place”–especially as compared to the WWII war brides from Britain and the European continent, who (the various authors claim) were more attractive to men and more satisfied with their own lives because they still knew how to be soft, beautiful, quiet, modest, and deferential to men.

A half-century (and umpteen new paradigms for American womanhood) later, similar arguments are still being made by hate-radio hosts and by mail-order-bride websites. Books like The Rules and A Return to Modesty and What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us propose to bring back “old fashioned” feminine values and principles.

And Esquire is in a circultion and ad-sales rut; threatened by the British-led spate of “bloke” magazines celebrating the end of the Urbane Gentleman and the rise of the Guy. Freed from the sole-family-provider role and from the associated need to appear mature and stable, the new Guy (at least in these magazines’ fantasies) can remain an overgrown boy, possibly for life. He can drink and cavort and drive fast and sleep around and perform any other number of less-than-responsible behaviors, leaving the women to run more and more of the household and the world.

Any return to old-fashioned womanhood would require a return to old-fashioned manhood. By that I don’t mean the drunken rapist boor of radical-feminist villain imagery, but the suited-and-tied, emotionally repressed breadwinner who used to read Esquire in order to fantasize about being an Urbane Gentleman, going to Broadway shows with the wife and to hotel afternoons with the mistress.

Despite the recent cocktail and swing revivals, I don’t think many men really want that era back.

TOMORROW: Memories of the Bicentennial summer in Philadelphia.

ELSEWHERE:

• Learn to cut down on excess verbiage with the 1928 text “How to Write Telegrams Properly” (found by Memepool)….

I’VE BEEN SPENDING as much time as I can down in Seattle’s great old Duwamish industrial district; partly because it might not last much longer.

Oh, the land (recovered tide flats of the Duwamish River) and the streets will be there for years to come.

But the businesses there now, and the “family wage” jobs they provide, are endangered.

Last month, the Seattle City Council approved a master development plan for the industrial district (called by some real estate developers “SoDo,” as in “South of the Kingdome,” even though there’s no longer a “Do” for anything to be “So” of).

The scheme allows developers, aching to build as many square feet of dot-com office space as they possibly can, to take over the northern part of the area, almost south to the former Sears warehouse now mainly occupied by Starbucks’ HQ offices. A little further south, the Seattle School District is going ahead with plans to turn part of a former Post Office facility into administrative offices.

These encroachments can be interpreted as a Phase One. Once all those blocks have been cleared of warehouses, steel fabricators, garment shops, etc. and planted with office, retail, and restaurant uses, the developers are sure to come back and ask for more; to the eventual gentrification of everything down to Boeing Field (which itself is facing a gentrification issue, as small “general aviation” companies are starting to lose hangar space in favor of hi-tech moguls’ private planes.)

Seattle’s civic establishment hadn’t really cared about the industrial district for years. The last time they tried to master-plan the place was in the early ’90s, when they envisioned a (thankfully scrapped) scheme to evict dozens of smaller businesses, assemble the real estate into larger parcels, and dole out those lots to big corporations.

Even then, the idea wasn’t to save working-class jobs but to make deals with the big boys. The local powers-that-be have long been uncomfortable with Seattle as an industrial city. (They even prefer to think of Boeing as a high-tech engineering firm, not as a manufacturer.)

Their official vision for Seattle has always been that of a financial, administrative, and transportation hub for the region. Seattle would be the island of “progressive” (i.e., WASP and clean-cut, cultured and polite) civilization amid the wilderness. The unsightly business of actually making tangible, physical items (not to mention the Joe Six-Packs employed making them) was to be left to the likes of Renton, Tacoma, and Everett.

So it’s a natural that sweatshop-clothing companies like Generra and Unionbay developed here (and spiritually influenced their Oregon neighbor Nike); and that Bill Gates and co. would have devised a scheme to control the personal-computer industry without making any hardware more elaborate than a replacement PC mouse.

The rest of the country caught onto this anti-industrial aesthetic too; back in the mid-’90s “downsizing” fad and before. (A character in an ’80s Doonesbury cartoon proclaimed, “America doesn’t have to make anything–except SUCCESS!”)

So I encourage all our local-area readers to visit the industrial district while the rust, the rail lines, the diners, and the semi rigs are still there.

Many of the buildings themselves (at least those considered salvageable) will likely stay. Lotsa folks love “industrial design;” even gentrifiers who have no use for industry itself.

After all, there’s nothing that says “hip” to a high-tech office like the post-industrial fantasy, the “art loft look.”

It’s just so nostalgic, so “real.”

TOMORROW: Whatever happened to dystopias?

ELSEWHERE:

• What every North American boy really wants in a website: movie files full of car, plane, and balloon crashes….
• This week’s cliche-to-be-banned: iEverything (found by MacSurfer’s Headline News)….

HARPER’S MAGAZINE still doesn’t have a full-content website, so I’ll have to tell you about its May issue, which has several items relating to topics we’ve been discussing here.

First up: The main article, “Notes From Underground: Among the Radicals of the Pacific Northwest,” in which writer David Samuels hangs out with some of those Dreaded Eugene Anarchists.

He essentially depicts them as well-meaning children of suburban affluence who’ve sadly but understandably gotten sidetracked from the complexities of the world, instead preferring oversimplified ideologies that allow them to imagine themselves as Totally Good and the culture of their upper- and upper-middle-class parents as Totally Evil (almost completely ignoring all other cultural and subcultural differentiations in late-modern society).

Anarchism, as Samuels interprets its young adherents, isn’t an ideology about empowering The People but an excuse for these girls and boys to imagine themselves as the world’s rightful would-be dictators, philosopher-kings who’d decide what’s best for the world on the basis of what feeds their own self-righteousness.

(Samuels’s depictions may have helped inspire P-I cartoonist David Horsey to recently depict young radicals as snot-faced idiots irresponsibly meddling in issues that should be left to the Real Experts.)

Samuels’s anarchist portrayals contrast with the memoir of oldtime radical Emma Goldman, excerpted elsewhere in the same issue. While Samuels essentially depicts anarchism as just another flavor of elitism, Goldman insists it’s a means toward the abolition of all elites. As an opponent of all centralized states, Goldman wound up seeing capitalism, socialism, and fascism as more or less equally repressive. She undoubtedly would have felt the same about philosopher-king fantasies.

Elsewhere in the issue are pieces that tellingly indict aspects of the current-day elitist regime, the rule of corporate power and money:

• Nick Bromell’s “Show Them the Money,” a satire purporting to be a fundraising letter from a respect-for-the-rich lobby, includes a number of scary stats about the increasing concentration of wealth in the U.S. and the relative silencing of any public debate about it.
• Mark Weisbrot’s essay “Globalism for Dummies” provides a succint summary of just why the Global Business power-grab isn’t the greatest thing for working folk, the environment, or democracy.
• And Ellen Ullman’s “The Museum of Me” bitterly yet cleverly chastizes selfish cyber-Libertarians for turning their backs on cities, interpersonal relationships, civil society, and anything else that gets in the way of the New Elite making even more money.

A reader who gets through the whole May Harper’s can easily conclude that Samuels’s Eugene anarchists, even if they’re really like his negative characterizations, might be more emotionally than rationally driven (like those now-fetishized ’60s radicals), still have a point. There’s got to be some way for society to seriously consider other priorities than just helping the rich get richer.

TOMORROW: Safeco Field, where the best seats are the worst.

ELSEWHERE:

• Another site recalling the humble, sacrificed sporting house, MyKingdome.com….

TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to the master of visual macabre humor, Edward Gorey.

LIKE SO MANY 18-YEAR-OLDS, USA Today (founded in the summer of ’82) has suddenly decided it didn’t want to look like a bratty kid anymore.

So it’s thrown out its old typographical wardrobe (backward baseball caps, team-logo shirts and all), got itself a page-size haircut, and is proudly showing off its “mature” look all over town.

The official excuse: Most of the newspaper industry’s moving to a standardized, narrow page size, so national advertisers can place the same ad designs in papers across the country without pesky reformatting.

USA Today, which uses 33 printing plants that belong to local dailies across the country (unlike the Wall St. Journal, which fully controls its own manufacturing network), had to go along with the scheme.

The paper’s original design, built on seven narrow columns, wouldn’t work at the even narrower new width. So the paper had to design a six-column format, and decided to use that as an excuse to modernize the whole look.

The practical result (and, if you’ll forgive me, a metaphor-switch): A paper that had always looked like a mall-store floor display (bright lights; loud, “busy” signage; lots of merchandise departments; small and shallow selections in each such department) now looks like a mall store that’s been “tastefully” redone to look more upscale.

Appropriately enough, the first week of the new look included a long feature about the Adbusters Quarterly folks in Vancouver, who preach that there ought to be more to life than just the selling, buying, and using of consumer goods.

That’s a slightly less hypocritical version of the “voluntary simplicity” movement, which in turn is being thoroughly exploited by some new mall-store outfits as an excuse to sell more consumer goods.

Like a retailer that figures to get higher sales with a clean, uncluttered, “lack of pretense” pretense, the new USA Today packages its wares in a “modern, elegant,” pseudo-Euro look.

But, like a redesigned and Martha Stewart-ized Kmart store, it’s still the same bazaar of Chee-tos and sweat pants.

And, like a kid trying to look old enough to score beer, its still-youthful enthusiasm and silliness still show through.

Which is just the way I like it.

At least in newspapers.

At least in that newspaper.

TOMORROW: Why Republicans really like baseball.

IN OTHER NEWS: What’ll happen to those IPO-obsessed dot-com slaves now?

ELSEWHERE:

• Learning about life and the Bible, the I Love Lucy way….

THERE’VE BEEN SOME RECENT CHANGES to the Seattle newspaper scene.

But, so far, they’ve one longtime tradition still standing.

The P-I still buries, back in the classifieds, a handful of comic strips that don’t garner enough popularity (according to its market research) to get into the main comics pages, but still attract just enough readers (or enough support from the paper’s sister company, King Features Syndicate) to avoid getting dropped altogether.

Among these is the strip King Features originally marketed as “the conservative Doonesbury,” Bruce Tinsley’s Mallard Fillmore.

The strip’s premise, all its 14 or so years, is utterly simple. Mallard Fillmore is a cynical talking duck in an otherwise all-human world, a la Marvel’s onetime Howard the Duck. Mallard’s also an embittered right-wing newspaperman in Washington, D.C. Every day, he spurts a two-line rant against whatever Those Liberals are doing these days.

That’s it.

During the Depression era, when FDR liberalism held the sway of popular opinion, several conservative-written comic strips (Little Orphan Annie, Li’l Abner) managed to achieve mass appeal while upholding traditional values–including the values of solid storytelling, fine draftsmanship, and portrayals of supportive personal relationships.

Mallard Fillmore has none of these.

There are no storylines and no character development. Mallard has no apparent family or personal life. There are a handful of semi-regular supporting characters (including a roly-poly little boy named Rush!), but they do nothing but provide set-up lines for Mallard’s pithy remarks. (Bill Clinton appears in the strip more often than any of these.)

Despite the lack of any narrative element, the strip still imbues its title character with a personality. And it’s perhaps the most unattractive personality of any daily-comics protagonist ever.

Mallard is depicted as an embittered loner, whose whole self-image revolves around defending and supporting people richer and more powerful than himself; as if to define himself as rightfully belonging with the rich and powerful. His politics, as a long-term reading of the strip will reveal, have almost nothing to do with any system of philosophy but with what some liberals call “identity politics.” (More about that on Friday.)

But despite his personal identification with the political causes of America’s power elite, he can’t stop seeing himself as a disempowered victim of Those Bad Old P.C. Liberals.

Pecadillos and hypocrisies among Democratic politicians are skewered regularly in the duck’s mini-rants. The same misdeeds, when performed by Republican politicians, are never mentioned. (The strip spent weeks bashing the “sensitivity training” sessions ordered to baseball pitcher John Rocker, while never discussing the racist interview remarks that got Rocker into trouble.)

If Mallard (or Tinsley) ever get disappointed by any of their conservative heroes, they never mention it. Indeed, the strip almost never advocates any conservative stances. It merely complains about liberal stances.

If Mallard didn’t get much more prominent placement in certain conservative-advocacy papers such as the New York Post, a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not) might almost imagine the strip as a cunning liberal’s project to depict conservatives as pathetic grumblers, ultimately ignored by the power structure they aggressively endorse and left lonely by their partisan separatism, unloved and unlovable.

Mallard Fillmore is still the worst strip in the papers. But as a (possibly inadvertant) PoMo deconstruction of both modern-day newspaper strips and pseudo-populist conservative politics, it continually fascinates.

TOMORROW: Where America no longer shops.

ELSEWHERE:

• Why male computer-gamers take female roles online (found by Fark)….
• A fond look at the landmarks of Minneapolis Past and Present, including the Mary Tyler Moore Show office tower and the Purple Rain nightclub…./UL>
  

FIRST OF ALL, a huge thanks to all who attended the group lit-fest I participated in last Sunday at Titlewave Books.

Whenever I do something like that, I pass out little questionnaires to the audience. Here are some of the responses to this most recent survey:

Favorite food/drink:

• Coca-Cola
• Dick’s chocolate milkshake
• China pavilion noodles
• Pizza
• Pasta
• Tacos
• Pop-Tarts
• Beer (3 votes)
• Wine
• Steak
• Cherries and cherry juice
• Mashed potatos at Jitterbug’s

Favorite historical era:

• 3000 B.C.
• Ancient Greece
• Early Roman empire
• Edo Japan
• 1850s
• 1880-1900
• 1920s
• 1950s
• 1960s
• Present-day
• “The next 20 years”

Favorite website:

• Soon.com
• Traderonline.com
• eBay
• Shortbuzz.com
• Suck.com

Favorite Pokemon character:

• Pikachu (3 votes)
• Dactril

Favorite word:

• “Goloudrina”
• “Wasibi”
• “Weird”
• “Ersatz”
• “Zap”
• “What?”
• “Awry”
• “Snacky cakes”
• “Fuck”
• “Aggressor”
• “Coochie”

What this decade should be called:

• “Of the absurd”
• “A waste”
• “Spiritless”
• “Hype”
• “Age of Porn”
• “Decoid”
• “The Ohs”
• “2-ot”
• “Double O”
• “Beat me now with a post”
• “Over”

My biggest (non-money) wish for the year:

• “Whip WTO off the map”
• “No Starbucks in Georgetown”
• “Stop rampant development”
• “To see Jimi cloned”
• “A dog”
• “To surf (try to at least)”
• “Finish a novel”
• “To leave”
• “A child”
• “The letter ‘L'”

I think the Experience Music Project building looks like:

• “An elephant fetus”
• “A great and colorful addition”
• “A pink marshmallow”
• “Shit”
• “A big pile of putrid, smelly shit”
• “The inner ear”
• “A ductile moment resisting frame”
• “The Blob with color”
• “The old building on Roy and Queen Anne Ave.”
• “Gaudy without a clue”
• “The next big demolition site”
• “My colon”

Favorite local band/musician:

• Sleater-Kinney
• Henry Cooper
• Vexed
• Modest Mouse
• Nightcaps
• Combo Craig
• Black Cat Orchestra
• Pat Suzuki
• Monty Banks
• Melvins
• TAD
• Artis the Spoonman
• The Drews

The Seattle music scene’s biggest legacy/lesson?:

• “It’s a Mafia gig”
• “1. Kurt Cobain. 2. Courtney Love”
• “Stay away from ‘hot’ shots”
• “Heroin is cool”
• “Don’t quit heroin and pick it up again”
• “Don’t take heroin while driving”
• “Eviction of the Colourbox club/condos rule”
• “Ripping down all the beautiful buildings”
• “Grunge, how quickly you can be forgotten”
• “Nothing is what it seems”
• “I moved here to be in a band”

How I’d preserve artist and low-income housing:

• “Freezing rents”
• “Prayer”
• “Call Paul Allen”
• “Apply to Microsoft for a ‘fund'”
• “Get them all jobs at Microsoft”
• “A smear campaign against tourism”
• “Kill the rich Californian real estate tycoons”
• “Put a kibbosh on developers”
• “My people”

What This Town Needs (other than construction projects):

• “More poetry readings”
• “More trees; less condos”
• “Giant green houses with rare flowers, etc.”
• “Less millionaires or wannabe millionaires”
• “No-yup zones”
• “More strip bars”
• “All-ages clubs for the kiddies” (2 votes)
• “Neighborhood produce stores”
• “A counter culture”
• “A recession”

MULTIPLE CHOICE PORTION

What should be done with Schell:

• Hold a recall election (3 votes)
• Let him finish out his term (6)
• I don’t care; I get a better deal at Arco anyway (4)

What should be done with Microsoft:

• Split it up (3)
• Leave it be (6)
• Let “me” run it (5)

What should be done with Ken Griffey Jr.:

• Trade him (7)
• Keep him (4)
• Sell him the team (3)

What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:

• Arts coverage (12)
• Cartoons (11)
• Public forums (6)
• Fiction (6)
• Photography (4)
• Classified ads (5)
• Sports (3)
• Recipes (3)
• Porn (6)
• Travelogues (4)
• Quizzes (4)
• Puzzles (5)
• Fashion (3)
• Politics (5)
• Fun with words (5)
• Investment advice by naked men (5)

I’d pay for MISCmedia magazine:

• If I had to (7)
• If it were bigger and/or had color (1)
• If I got a free CD with it (1)
• Only if you paid me (1)

What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:

• Chat rooms (2)
• Streaming audio files (3)
• Online games (1)
• Surveys (4)
• Cool Web links (7)
• More chocolatey goodness (6)

TOMORROW: Confessions of a Microsoft refugee.

ELSEWHERE:

• As a former teenager in Corvallis, home of Oregon State University, I can attest that this Vonnegut excerpt always makes the girls in that particular town giggle in an endearingly faux-nervous manner….
• What do the French know about hip hop, anyway?…
• Why some songs just won’t leave your head alone….

IN A RETAIL RECORD STORE (I’m going to try to avoid the term “brick and mortar,” which should’ve been on Matt Groening’s “Forbidden Words” list for this year), space limitations necessitate what you’ll get to choose from.

It’s usually some mix of what the store operators believe will sell (whatever’s getting the hype or buzz in its respective genre this month; what’s sold well in the recent past) and what they want you to buy (personal favorites; stuff they’ve got too much of this week; stuff they get extra profit margins from).

But on the Web, as you know, the “stock in trade” is limited only by what the operators can special-order from their wholesale suppliers. Web-based music stores can therefore sell any darn thing they want to, to just about anyone who’s got the credit rating.

Web music “malls,” which rent or give away server space to any artist with wares to offer, do away with even minimal “quality control.”

I’ve previously said this is an overall good thing. If properly nourished, this could be a vital part of the demolition of the big-media cartel (or at least a strong challenge to it) and the triumph of what Patti Smith once called “The Age Where Everybody Creates.”

But I also appreciate the great difficulty a band has in getting any attention from the users of an MP3 free-for-all site, where thousands of other bands (many of them quite similar to your own) vie for the same attention, and where free streaming-audio files don’t necessarily spur users to buy whole CDs of a band’s stuff.

Nevertheless, there is some cool/odd/cute stuff on these sites. From time to time, MISCmedia will attempt to find you a few of them. Such as the following (in no particular order):

• DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY BAND, “I Saw Mama Kissing Santa (So Did Dad).” From the album “Dysfunctional Family Christmas,” a nice unpretentious piece of country-farce; just slightly more cynical than Homer & Jethro.
• DREBIN , “Anniversary.” Thoughtful, tasteful co-ed twee-pop from Belfast.
• SOME OF THE QUIET, “Basicia.” Ambient seems an easy genre to pull off, until you try to develop a simple melody line without over-embellishing it. These guys succeed.
• CHAMPION BIRD WATCHERS, “Callisto.” Christian emocore meets cello-and-flute-augmented prog rock. It works, particularly if you’ve taken certain non-church-approved substances.
• ALICE THE GOON, “Clowns Die Every Day.” Mid-’70s-era Zappa meets Stan Ridgeway and has a threesome with post-postpunk nihlism; a marriage made in an alternate-universe Heaven.
• WOMEN OF SODOM, “Jews and Arabs Become Friends.” There are many techno belly-dancing tunes out there; but this is one you might actually imagine dancing to.
• AGENT FELIX, “90210.” “Why don’t they cancel/That stupid show?” Fun pop-punk without a cause; or at least with a relatively unambitious cause.
• PLAVU, “Seventeen.” Girlie-pop with a mind-bending slide-guitar undercurrent. Deelish.
• STAR GHOST DOG, “Downer.” The band’s web-page description says it all: “Blondie meets the Pixies and moves into a crappy apartment.” They really should try to think up a better name, though.
• ACTION FIGURES, “Lauraville.” Sharp power-pop hooks, smooth harmonies, smart youth-angst, and Twin Peaks references. Everything I like in one package.

TOMORROW: New media buys old media, or is it the other way around?

ELSEWHERE:

• I agree with this guy: Microsoft’s web-content efforts have sucked. I disagree with his reasoning why: that people outside NY/Calif. can’t possibly do content right….
• Revealed: The causal connection between action heroes and inactive fans (found by A Boy and His Basement)….

I’M PRETTY SURE you’re all damn sick-N-tired of the millennial hype by now.

So we’ll take a few days off from the whole new-era talk, and instead talk about an era that’s ending today.

When other boys in the mid-’60s were into the likes of Spider-Man, I was collecting Peanuts books.

The Fawcett Crest volumes, to be precise–mass-market paperbacks that arranged four-panel daily strips into full-page layouts, often with additional, anonymous artwork that usually ruined the deceptive simplicity of Charles Schulz’s designs. (Yes, I could realize that as a kid.)

My family didn’t subscribe to a paper that carried the daily strip; so the books, which showed up in supermarket newsracks a year or two after the strips’ original newspaper publication, provided my only access to them.

Eventually, I tracked down the better Peanuts books–the Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston trade paperbacks that stacked two strips per page in proper sequence.

When the papers announced “the first in a series of animated adaptations” of the strip, I was elated. You can imagine my disappointment when I found out the “series” wasn’t going to be a weekly visit with the gang but just occasional specials. The week after A Charlie Brown Christmas first aired in all its depressing glory, I glommed up to the black-and-white Magnavox only to find a regular episode of that mediocre sitcom The Munsters.

A very Charlie Brown-y moment.

Like a lot of smart, unathletic, unpopular boys throughout North America, I identified a lot with Charlie Brown.

He was no dumbed down kid-lit tyke like the Family Circus brood, nor an artificially cheery “lovable loser” like Ziggy or The Born Loser. He was a realistic kid with realistic kid frustrations. He lived in a cookie-cutter suburb like the one growing around our house.

He was lousy at sports, at making friends, at one-upsmanship games–at everything except verbally articulating his troubles; a skill that often just led him into deeper troubles, thanks to “friend” Lucy’s “Psychiatric Help” booth.

His only true friend was a dog whose hyperactive playfulness settled into an elaborate fantasy existence, part of which Charlie Brown was once invited into (the sequence in which Snoopy’s tiny dog house was revealed (verbally but not visually) to be a Doctor Who-like dimensional portal into a vast, art-filled mansion).

Such occasional flights of fancy (a boy known only as “5;” Pig-Pen’s magical ability to become instantly unclean) somehow only enhanced the “realism” of the Peanuts universe.

The strips were often funny and more often poignant, and always maintained sympathy with the characters. They taught an infinite number of lessons in comic pacing, dialogue, and the construction of complex narratives within the discipline of daily four-panel installments.

Bill Melendez’s TV specials and movies (all scripted by Schulz) expanded the visual scope of the strip’s universe without breaking its fundamental laws (except for a few of the later shows, which showed adult human characters on-screen). Vince Gauraldi’s jazz-piano music was gorgeously understated. The casting of real child actors to voice the characters’ elaborate dialogue further cemented Schulz’s central tenet that children really do think and talk this intelligently.

But the tight perfection of Schulz’s draftsmanship (at its peak from about 1965 to 1985) was one aspect of the strip that Melendez’s animators never quite mastered. This was a clue that the strip, unlike most strips from before the days of Calvin and Hobbes and Bloom County, would not continue without Schulz.

In 1987, Schulz suddenly abandoned the format of four identically-sized panels per strip. Peanuts went to three taller panels most days; except on days when Schulz chose to divide his space differently. At the time, I wrote that, while it brought a new energy to the strip, it ruined one of its main unspoken themes. The rigid repetition of the same number of frames, all the same size, perfectly matched the ultimately hellish concept of these characters forced to repeat the same life mistakes, to remain the same presexual age for eternity.

Now, they finally get to leave their newsprint prison. Not to enter adult freedoms, but merely to disappear.

AARRGH!

IN OTHER NEWS: Thousands took my heed (or, more likely, got the idea on their own) and gathered all around the closed-off Seattle Center to enjoy a healthy, terrorist-free New Year’s despite mayor Paul Schell’s best efforts to ban them. Schell himself showed up to be interviewed on KOMO, and was very properly met outside the TV station by safe-and-sane jeers and catcalls. Good job, citizens. Next step: A recall election that would be a referendum on the city’s now more official than ever damn-the-non-upscale attitude.

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: The one company you’d expect to have changed its name by this week still hasn’t, at least as of Sunday night.

TOMORROW: A portent of the digi-future most culture mavens don’t want to talk about–the potential obsolescence of culture mavens.

ELSEWHERE:

• Did the “Joe Cool” storyline mark the inevitable decline of Peanuts?
• Business always tries to make things easier for consumers–even protesting….
• A UK soft-erotica site has its own novel “Quick, the Boss Is Coming” diversion page….
• Alas, this site is fictional. I was so hoping to get some “Christ Sicle Flavoured Ice Treats” (found by Memepool)….

AS WE LEFT OFF YESTERDAY, I’d finally gotten around to reading Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s (1850-96) 1888 utopian tract.

In it, a “refined” young man of 1880s Boston awakens from a 113-year trance to find himself in the all-enlightened, worry-free Year 2000. The doctor who’d revived him (and the doc’s comely daughter) then spend the rest of the book telling him how wonderful everything has become.

The chief feature of Bellamy’s future is a singular, government-run “Industrial Army” that owns all the means of production and distribution, employs every male and childless female citizen from the age of 21 until mandatory retirement at 45, and pays everybody the same wage (less-desirable jobs offer shorter hours or other non-monetary perks).

Some other aspects of Bellamy’s ideal state:

• Our species is still referred to as “Man,” and its chief players as “Men.” The big future benefits for women: One-stop shopping (in government-run warehouse-order stores); government-run restaurants called “public kitchens” (eliminating the need to cook); and housework-reducing technology.
• Racism apparently doesn’t exist, but the narrator apparently meets no nonwhite people in his future journeys and doesn’t seem to think that’s worth noting.
• The other big-industrial nations have adopted the same economic-governmental system; and “an international council regulates the mutual intercourse and commerce of the members of the union, and their joint policy toward the more backward races, which are gradually being educated up to civilized institutions.”
• Instead of cash, everybody carries a punch card (called by the then-novel name of a “credit card”), nontransferrable.
• Music is fed into every room of the home via telephone wires from central studios, where live musicians play edifying classical selections 24 hours a day.
• Consumer goods are distributed by hyper-efficient pneumatic tubes, which connect all the buildings in the major cities (and, the doctor promises to the narrator, will soon be built out to farm communities).
• Efficient calculating and industrial forecasting are a vital functions of the Industrial Army, but no computational devices are mentioned.
• With no poverty or homelessness, there’s almost no crime. The apparently only major taboo is “laziness” (refusal to perform one’s assigned job). Those convicted of this are detained and fed bread and water until they repent.
• Despite total government control of the means-O-production, ideas and arts are not censored. Rather, visual-art projects are voted by citizens (in what sounds alarmingly like today’s “public art” bureaucracy). Book and periodical publishers must raise their own startup costs (the closest thing to “capitalism” permitted in the system), ensuring artistic freedom while discouraging “mere scribblers.”
• And most importantly, just like in most utopias, Bellamy’s “Age of Concert” doesn’t just demand personal uniformity, it claims that’d be the inevitable result of everybody getting together and figuring out that a hyper-rational, planned-economy society’s the only way to go.

One person’s utopia, someone I can’t remember once wrote, is another person’s reign of terror. You don’t have to be a Red-baiter to see elements of other folks’ dystopian nightmares within Bellamy’s utopian dreams.

Soviet-style communism used some of the same ideals spouted by Bellamy to justify its police-state brutalities. But the “human face” experiment of post-WWII Euro-socialism had its own problems–uncompetitive enterprises, bureaucratic sloth & corruption, massive worker dissatisfaction.

Of course, neither of those systems went as far as Bellamy would’ve liked. They still had rich-poor gaps and ruling classes. But that’s reality for you.

TOMORROW: Back to the (more likely) future.

ELSEWHERE:

• A round, yellow icon celebrates 20 years of conspicuous consumption; but this story (found by MacSurfer’s Headline News) doesn’t mention the secret behind Pac-Man’s status as the first video game many women liked to play. As punk-rock cartoonist John Holmstrom once noted, “Some women couldn’t identify with games about shooting and other obvious male metaphors. But Pac-Man engulfs its opponents–the female sexual function….”/UL>