YESTERDAY, we discussed a would-be commercial “alternative” magazine that wasn’t quite fiscally making it, and how it would probably have to find a business plan that didn’t require big corporate advertisers.

There’s a class of what might be called “ground level” zines (slicker than underground fanzines but rougher than corporate mags) that basically run on the business plan of expecting to lose money, and coming out as often as, or as long as, their publishers can subsidize them.

One of the more durable of these was Ben Is Dead. In tiny type on cheap newsprint, it relished in adoration or at least obsession with many of the relics of late-modern life–Sassy, Beverly Hills 90210, childhood memories, Marvel Comics, underwear, etc. etc.

But after some 30 issues in 11 years, publisher Darby Romeo has finally quit. Like the makers of Factsheet Five, Fizz, and several other ground-levels that have gone away in recent years, she’s decided to move on in her life.

A piece at Feed claims the end of Ben Is Dead forebodes the end of the whole Zine Revolution, an explosion of self-expressions that got underway in the early ’80s with cheap photocopying and desktop publishing.

Nowadays, the Feed essay notes, it’s easier (and just as materially unrewarding) to put up a personal website.

From my own 5.5-year experience in newsletter self-publishing, I could certainly see how the excitement of accumulating piles of print can begin to wear off. But I also see personal publishing as, well, a personal endeavor, one it’s perfectly OK to leave when you want to do something else.

Ben Is Dead is not a “failure” for not being continued, and Romeo’s certainly not “giving up.”

A personal zine is also a product of its times. Back in the ’80s and early ’90s, the rough-hewn look of many ground-level zines was an appropriate visualization of a DIY aesthetic opposed to old bureaucratic communications media. But in today’s go-go-go-getter cyber-economy, everybody’s supposed to be a young entrepreneur, and homemade-looking media can sometimes be perceived as simply the work of young entrepreneurs who aren’t doing it right.

I’ve seen newer ground-level zines, such as ROCKRGRL, Bust, and The Imp, which put their messages into more elaborate, more “professional” looking (but still un-corporate) designs. Will these go on to enjoy long lives? Maybe, or maybe their makers will move on to still-newer concepts.

Zines are no more dead than print media in general.

And, no, print media in general isn’t dead either.

IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle’s news media finally found something more important than Ken Griffey Jr. leaving town–specifically, a chance to spend seven hours of commercial-free live TV ruthlessly exploiting a minor tragedy; complete with lingering helicopter shots of police dogs wandering around clueless and scentless.

IN STILL OTHER NEWS: Who had the first commercial on South Park’s virulent anti-Pokemon episode? That’s right–Magic: The Gathering, from the now-Hasbro-owned outfit that also makes the Pokemon card game.

TOMORROW: Ron Harris’s journey from phony workout videos to phony human-egg auctions.

ELSEWHERE:

• I like Jack Kerouac’s writing. I don’t like most other people’s writings about Jack Kerouac. Except for this piece….
• Saul Bellow on writing’s non-obsolescence…
• How to offend people in 47 different languages (found by Memepool)…./UL>
  

WHAT THE WORLD thought seven years ago to be “The Seattle Scene Look” was really just a thrown-together assortment of anti-fashions, usually obtained at thrift stores. Its aesthetic of comfort and unprettiness was the direct opposite of the “designer grunge” look the world would later blame Seattle for, even though it really came entirely from New York (and which pretty much killed off the Generra/Unionbay “sportswear look,” which actually did come from Seattle).

Back during the previous decade and the start of this one, the lowly thrift store was considered the absolute coolest shopping site by the punk elites, as well as by many other smart young adults.

A whole subculture formed around the ideas of outfitting one’s life for very little money, of surrounding oneself with beautiful goods tossed out by our planned-obsolescence society, and of collecting and preserving assorted cultural detrius (which could be good or hideous, timeless or incredibly passe, just as long as it wasn’t bland or dull).

And, as with any young-adult subcultural activity, it had its own zine–Thrift Score, edited in Pittsburgh by “Al Hoff, Girl Reporter.”

It’s been almost a year since Hoff issued TS #13. While both the print zine and the TS website promise new issues eventually, the bulk of issue #13 was devoted to a thorough dissection about “The State of the Thrift Union.”

It ain’t a pretty picture (not even a paint-by-numbers one on velvet).

Among the reasons Hoff cites for the thrifting lifestyle’s decline and fall:

• Stores going upscale. Yes, even the supposed last stands of affordability have succumbed to the retail industry’s obsession with servicing only affluent customers. Stores have been moved out of inner cities and into accessible-only-by-car suburban sites, complete with all the standard mall-type amenities (even cappucino cafes, natch). They’re setting up collectibles boutiques, charging “price guide” prices for everything from lunch boxes to Atari cartridges, and marking up the prices of even stuff only an in-it-for-the-love thrifter would even want. And some are even running their own collectible-oriented websites.
• Collector-speculation mania. From old Levi’s being shipped to Japan, to Beanie Babies (and even Happy Meal toys!) children will never be allowed to play with (‘cuz that’d make it no longer “mint”), greedy and ambitious would-be zillionaires are plunking down big bucks to grab up anything anybody says will become saleable to some other fool for even more money.
• Net-auction madness. Before Ebay, did anyone think day-trading in Yogi Bear memorabilia could become a potential full-time, work-at-home business?
• The death of the thrift-store stigma. The NY Times lately reported on the launch of a new magazine about thrifting–not by or for anybody like Hoff or her readers, but for wild-oat-sowing trust fund babies. Its launch party was a swellegant-people-only affair at one of Manhattan’s poshest discos.

Hoff’s call to action in that issue was largely a boycott cry: “Don’t buy stuff at inflated prices. If it sits unsold, a thrift may re-evaluate its price.”

Since then, Hoff has largely moved on to other freelance topics, such as NASCAR auto racing.

She now says concerning her thoughts about thrifting back in TS #13, “I reckon, most of that still holds true. if anything, it’s more so. I’ve sort of given up thinking about the topic. I mean, it’ll just drive me mad, and I promised everybody I’d look on the bright side.”

TOMORROW: Words about pictures.

ELSEWHERE:

• At a Gallery of Thrift Store Art, you can always find something to take attention away from your thrift-store couch….
• …while this other “Thrift Store Art” site “allow[s] the paintings to speak for themselves….”
• For those who’re finally sick-&-tired of collectible mania, Road Kill Beanies!

IT’S A LABOR DAY MISC. WORLD, perhaps the only online column that has never been to Burning Man.

JAY JACOBS STORES, R.I.P.: Another locally-owned chain succumbs to the global giants. Or is it rather the case of a mall-based specialty chain succumbing to the big-box superstores? You decide.

AT WIT’S START: Last Friday, I discussed Francine Prose’s rant in Harper’s about PC but poorly-written stories force-fed to kids in high-school English classes.

I suggested an alternative: A sequence of courses in which the teens would be introduced to Great Kickass Writing.

My own introduction to G.K.W. came some time after college. I’d come to believe there were two main kinds of fiction: the popular stuff (which, considering how well it sold, had to have some solid construction and fun elements, right?) and the highbrow stuff (like the turgid prose I’d been forced to read as a student).

I thought I’d try to cleanse my mind from the boring highbrow stuff and learn to read bestsellers.

Only, to my surprise, the bestsellers I picked up were even worse-written than my old English Lit required texts had been.

Ponderous science-fiction trilogies in which the future was always exactly like the present only more so. Sluggish fantasy epics about how, five thousand years after the Earth was nuked, a race of wizards emerged. Fictional Presidential widows marrying fictional Greek shipping tycoons. Whodunits in which the most grisly wastes of human lives were treated as mere premises for clue-solvin.’

Then a kind person introduced me to Flann O’Brien.

Real wit! Real pacing! Funny characters! Clever yet poignant stories!

My life was forever changed.

No longer would I settle for unadventurous “adventure” stories, flaccid “horror,” or clueless “mysteries.” Nope, I would insist, and still insist, on Great Kickass Writing.

Herewith, a few links to Great Kickass Writing on the Web:

• “I meet men who deliberately inject themselves with HIV-infected blood so that they will henceforth be attractive to Byronic women who think that fatal illness will make them interesting…”
• A long, long treatise about why web writing ought to be short and punchy.
• Here, meanwhile, are examples of the value of brevity…
• A lesson in e-commerce buzzwording…
• “Thats bull, I’ve said ‘I love you’ to a girl and meant it, and I would never use her for sex.”
• “One time I found a whole system of corridors I’d

  never seen before but I couldn’t check them out because I’d been away from my desk too long.”

• “Futons your girlfriend will hate.”
• “Leave my website ALONE! I can’t take this ANY MORE!”
• “The water from the hose tasted like spiky minerals and it iced Alma’s gums straightaway.”
• A site that proves even cliches can be kickass writing.
• “Softly, he runs his finger up and down my spine. ‘Women all look the same in the dark.'”
• “It’s the smell of new upholstery and car mats that gets us, and how a drink holder slides out smoothly from its tiny compartment. We like figuring out what size cups the holder can hold, and what kind of adjustments you can make to the driver’s seat.”
• “Nicole has a wonderful ambiance, and I mean that in the vaguest possible way.”

TOMORROW: As 1/1/00 approaches, Y2K survivalists become less communalist and more capitalist.

ELSEWHERE: A Disney subsidiary offered free home pages; this was one result…

TODAY’S MISC. WORLD is dedicated to artist Paul Horiuchi, whose World’s Fair mural still provides an elegant backdrop to every Pain in the Grass concert every summer.

AS PART OF A FREELANCE GIG I conducted with Everything Holidays, I’ve been looking in on what might be the top costumes this upcoming Halloween.

(I know, some of you around here in the PacNW don’t want to hear about mid-Autumn during this Coldest Summer of Our Lifetimes. But some of the site’s Eastern Seaboard readers might enjoy a beat-the-heat fantasy.)

Anyhoo, here’s some of what I told that commercial Website might be in style this 10/31, plus some additional thoughts:

• The Phantom Menace. The movie was planned from the start as a vehicle for scads of merchandise, and officially-licensed character costumes will certainly be among them. The only question: Whether very many fans will go as Jar Jar Binks, the movie’s controversial comic-relief character.
• Pokemon. The video game and TV cartoon with the dozens of different superpowered animal characters is a natural, for kids and adults alike. Partygoers could be any of the popular Pokemon critters: the cute Pikachu, the sad Psyduck, the sassy Squirtle, the bratty Meowth. If a group is dressing up together, some could be Pokemon creatures while others could portray the show’s human heroes (Ash, Misty, and Brock) or villains (Jessie and James).
• Pro wrestling. Cable TV’s year-round costume parties are a natural for Halloween. Adults without the requisite muscle mass could wear foam-rubber fake chests and arms to complete the look.
• South Park.The bratty-mouthed boys and their deranged fellow townspeople could be almost as popular this year as last.
• The Blair Witch Project.

  The year’s biggest horror movie has no “costume” characters, but that won’t stop partygoers from appearing as the doomed student filmmakers, carrying camcorders while running around acting terrified.

• The Y2K Bug. Any good insect costume will do, parcularly if the “bug” is accompanied by a bearded Nostradamus, a street-corner preacher predicting the end of the world, camoflage-clad survivalists, or a computer nerd with a giant flyswatter.
• The Iron Giant. More popular among young-adult sci-fi fans than among the Disney family audience, this movie’s alien-robot title character will be a great homemade-costuming project.
• Powerpuff Girls.The Cartoon Network’s trio of cute superheroines just might become this Halloween’s answer to Xena.
• Teen pop singers. N’Sync and 98 Degrees don’t have the trademark-costume sense of the Spice Girls, but matching black suits and some coordinated choreography could do the trick (or treat) for teams of boys.
• iMac and iBook. The first home computers in years to have “personalities,” they could be impersonated via homemade papier-mache heads. Alternately, two people could go to a party as a Mac and a Windows computer engaged in a mock rivalry.
• Other possible hits this year: Minime and Fat Bastard from the Austin Powers sequel; Clinton with a cigar; George W. Bush with a bong; Jerry Springer and cat-fighting guests; the U.S. women’s soccer team (particularly the sports-bra-baring member); the Dilbert gang; the ghetto family from The PJ’s, rap music’s Insane Clown Posse; disco-dancers; Drew Carey and his sitcom nemesis Mimi.
• In the sick-joke category: JFK Jr. (with aviator’s goggles and a broken-off airplane steering wheel); trenchcoat teens.
• What You Won’t See Much Of: There are few things sadder than a Halloween costume fad that never took off. In 1998, costume stores were dumping Power Ranger outfits at below cost. This year, expect Inspector Gadget outfits to meet a similar fate.

TOMORROW: We play with our food again.

ELSEWHERE: A healty antidote to the Nordstrom Way… Just when I was wondering when the feminization of the professional ranks would result in a further eroticization of men, here comes the latest look for dudes with “cool ankles”…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, I wrote something for Seattle magazine, expanding on themes I’ve been exploring here about the new face of “hipness” around town.

For the sake of our out-of-town readers and others who missed the mag, here’s the uncut version of that piece (the mag didn’t cut much):

There’s a new definition of hipness emerging in Seattle, and it’s a lot more than just “Not Grunge.”

It’s a repudiation of the whole bohemian notion of an “alternative” to “mainstream society.”

The new hipness doesn’t oppose society; it wants to lead it. It doesn’t repudiate material wealth; it wants to use it more stylishly. It’s about dressing up, seeing and being seen, and making the scene.

For a long time, to be a hipster in Seattle all you had to do was proclaim your antipathy to squareness.

And that meant almost everything approved by our civic powers-that-be.

Squareness ruled Seattle, absorbing all anti-status-quo movements.

In the ’50s, regional Teamsters boss Dave Beck turned a once-militant labor movement into a force for conservatism.

In the ’70s, many local hippies aged into either docile Deadheads or domesticated professionals.

In the ’80s, Starbucks made the coffeehouse, that beat-era symbol of artful rebellion, safe for strip malls.

In the early ’90s, college station KCMU moved away from raw noise bands, toward more retro-country and ethnic acoustic music.

For every incarnation of squareness, an incarnation of hipness emerged in response.

Ultimately, that led to the anti-fashion look and gritty sound of the “grunge” scene, so loud and aggressive it could supposedly never be tamed by the squares.

The new hipness denounces that dichotomy of having fun vs. having funds.

It says you can enjoy a creative, active life without taking a vow of poverty; that you can earn a good income without becoming a dull homebody.

It’s fueled by waves of cyber-wealth, bringing in people with youth and money, and by real-estate inflation, scatterring many old-style bohemians out of town or into non-artistic careers.

A locus of the new hipness is ARO.Space, the one-year-old dance club at 10th and East Pike. The building used to house Moe’s Mo’Rockin’ Cafe, the old hipness’s most lavish (yet still funky-chic) rock club. It’s now a sleek palace of pastel colors and recessed lights, where DJs mix the latest subgenres of electronic dance music for gay and mixed audiences. The design’s fancy yet understated and reassuring, a spot for beautiful people to show off their good taste.

Under Seattle’s old hipness, gay bars were obscure, underground-cachet places (some didn’t even have exterior signage).

Under the new hipness, they’re the high-profile trendsetter spots, where straight people try to look good enough and dance well enough to fit in.

The ARO.Space formula’s worked so well that two similar clubs have opened within walking distance, Spintron and the new Vogue.

The old Vogue space in Belltown (previously a new-wave bar called WREX) was an old-hip institution done up in basic black, where two generations of rock and dance-music fans co-mingled (and where Nirvana played its first Seattle gig). The new Vogue’s a little less funky, a lot more chic, and all-DJ.

[Update: Since this was written, the new Vogue added Tuesday live gigs, a former tradition at the old Vogue.]

The owners of ARO.Space just opened the Ace Hotel in the Belltown building where the Seattle Peniel Mission and Operation Nightwatch used to be. Its stark, Japanese-inspired look of small rooms with hospital-white walls and futon-level beds got it written up in hot design magazines.

The magazines’ writers were aghast that something in Seattle was so understated, so clean, so (you guessed it) not-grunge. They apparently forgot what ARO.Space’s name implies–we make passenger planes here, so a few people here would know how to make small spaces slick-looking yet efficient.

Downstairs from the Ace is the new Cyclops restaurant. The old Cyclops (demolished in 1997) was a hip icon, serving tasty food at affordable prices to aspiring artists and musicians. The new Cyclops’s decor bears some resemblance to its homier prior self, but it’s a fancier place, serving fancier dishes at fancier prices to folks who loved the old Cyclops but can afford nicer fare now.

Establishments that served the old hipsters had to keep prices down, because their customers didn’t have much money and didn’t ever expect to. Even after “grunge” bands got big, many hipsters continued to believe nothing you ever did here mattered; lasting change or influence was impossible in squaresville Seattle; the most you could do was form a community of fellow outcasts.

The new hipness, despite its occasional lapses into shallow hedonism, at least thinks certain achievements are possible. It says high-energy music and contemporary art and design play big roles in vital urban life.

But will the new hipsters’ achievements prove worthwhile in the long run? That’s a topic for another time.

IF YOU MISSED last week’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. this Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Bring people with you.

TOMORROW: The latest in fun inventions and designs.

ELSEWHERE: Somebody else who thinks irony is dead, and who dares to say it without “air quotes”… A next-big-thing story about Internet radio notes that traditional AM/FM listening “among those 25 and under has plummeted 10 percent in the last six years…”

BEFORE WE BEGIN TODAY, a gracious thanx to all who came to my big event last night at the downtown Seattle Borders Books. Another such event’s coming next Thursday (see below). And, again, apologies to those who couldn’t access this site earlier this morning. (I’ve been assured, again, that it won’t happen again.) But for now…

I CLOSED LAST NIGHT’S SHOW with some aphorisms and words-O-wisdom. Here are some more. (Some of these I’ve used before, on the site or in other scattered writings.)

• The baby boomer bragged about how, when he was younger, he marched and protested to try and save the world. The world listened to the boasts and replied, “That’s all nice, but what have you done for me lately?”
• If we printed fewer poems about trees, we’d have more trees.
• A Libertarian is a Republican who smokes pot.
• I watch TV, I eat meat, I shop at regular grocery stores. I demand the right to not be a hippie. (And that doesn’t mean I’m a Republican.)
• If God didn’t want men to watch TV, He wouldn’t have shaped the corners of the screen like a woman’s shoulders.
• Women aren’t just equal to men; men are equal to women too.
• Women and men are just about equally ignorant of one another; but the men are a little more likely to admit it.
• Everybody’s ignorant about something.
• Just about everybody’s beautiful when naked. It’s just that some bodies are better made for wearing clothes than others. But our great-grandchildren will have see-thru, microchip-controlled force fields to keep the air around their bodies warm and dry, so they won’t need to bother with this dilemma.
• People have been having sex since before you were born.
• Everybody loves black music as long as it’s at least 20 years old and performed by white people.
• For 23 years, the picture-postcard view of downtown Seattle from Alki Beach has been of a bookshelf of office towers, bookended by the Space Needle and the Kingdome (both of which were reproduced as Jim Beam bottles you could theoretically use for real bookends). When the Dome goes, that nearly-symmetrical image will go too. Safeco Field just doesn’t make a good bookend.
• The Mariners keep winning at home! Are they feeding Safeco Field food to the opposing teams or what?
• We can’t afford all the money that’s moving here.
• Science uses big words for the sake of precision. Pseudoscience uses big words for the sake of intimidation. Social science uses big words for the sake of obfuscation.
• If you can’t stand the heat, move to Anchorage.

IF YOU MISSED last night’s wonderful live reading/event, there’s another promo for The Big Book of MISC. next Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there. Aloha.

MONDAY: How can one be “hip” when there are fewer and fewer “squares” to rebel against?

ELSEWHERE: Some of the top cliches in bad erotic writing: “Everyone has a perfect body you could break a brick on…” “All women in a position of authority have secret desires to be submissive…” “Any woman described as having a scientific occupation will invariably be occupied with making her breasts larger…” “No jealousy…”

I’M STILL TRYING to sort out how I felt after the last First Thursday, almost two weeks ago.

It was a big week for breasts in the Seattle arts scene. Jem Studios’ “Blue Boobs” group installation, the Tule Gallery’s two 10-foot-tall hyperrealistic bust paintings, and the usual other figurative-art stuff.

I’d have enjoyed it all as I usually do, except it was the week after my mother’s partial mastectomy.

Just after I’d come to terms with near-addictive fascination, acknowledging that I had nothing to feel guilty about i/r/t my hormonically pre-programmed craving for the sight and touch of female skin, I learned my favorite female body parts had threatened to kill the first and still most beloved female in my life.

The “Blue Boobs” installation was beautiful, but the close-up breast images in monochrome-blue paintings and videos looked too creepily like, not X-rays, but like some weird other kind of medical photography.

And the breasts in the Tule pix are exactly the scale (and eye level) of a mom as seen from the POV of a nursing infant, though the women’s faces aren’t really “maternal” looking as much as pop-art sendups of ’60s-mod fashion art.

I do know a few things at this perspective. I’m not going to stop loving women’s physiques. If anything, I hope I’ll be even more appreciative of precious gifts life and beauty are.

Especially after the Friday night right after First Thursday, when I witnessed the finish of the annual Belltown bicycle race. As the winner sped across the finish line in the alley behind the Rendezvous, an apparently drunken man suddenly stepped out and slapped him. The racer fell to the ground; Medic One quickly responded to a cell-phoned 911 call but took almost 15 careful minutes to get the guy into the vehicle and away.

(Last word: He’s apparently going to be all right. As, for now, is my mom.)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. If you can’t make it then or want a double dose, there’s another one the following Thursday, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be a parallellogram.

TOMORROW: On a much lighter note, e-commerce is trying to get hip.

ELSEWHERE: The next step toward taming the arts: Quantifying them… A faux-Sassy webmag likes today’s incessant “positivity”… This is not, repeat, not, a real eBay auction; but this is…

ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.

Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.

Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.

Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.

“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”

Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.

Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.

If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!

To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.

Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).

But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.

If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.

I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.

TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.

FOR A RELATIVELY-SHORT but seemingly-endless time, the innocent citizenry of a once-remote place were under seige.

A would-be dictator, operating under the barest semblance of lip-service to democracy, fought with every means available to impose his personally-defined concept of civil order upon the populace. In motion after motion, he declared one specific segment of the population to be the only true and deserving citizens, and classified all the others to second-class status, to be harassed and “persuaded” to get out.

But then, a glimmer of hope appeared. The long-trod-upon people began to cautiously rejoice.

Mark Sidran’s reign might finally be ending.

Yeah, so this joke-comparison between overseas horrors and the machinations of Seattle’s city attorney are grossly distasteful.

But that’s the best way to describe what happened last Tuesday.

Here’s what happened. Essentially, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a state law dating back to the post-Prohibition years, directing the Washington State Liquor Control Board to regulate “Added Activities” such as live entertainment at bars and nightclubs, was unconstitutional.

So now, the Liquor Board and local governments can’t tell bars what entertainments they can or can’t offer their customers.

Immediately, it means no more telling bars to stop playing music that might attract black people.

Sidran, who can’t stand the existence within the city limits of anybody who’s not an upscale, lily-white, professional-caste baby boomer such as himself, won’t get to use “Added Activities” to shut down black clubs or “persuade” them to move to white-oriented fare.

This also means no more liquor-board crackdowns on nudie art-pix at the Virginia Inn, no more worries about bad-word censorship at comedy clubs (as if anybody still goes to those places), and maybe, just maybe, looser dress codes at fetish nights and leather bars.

It doesn’t mean bars can start regular stripper formats, however; that’s still covered under those increasingly-draconian “adult entertainment” laws in Seattle and other localities. See the current issue of the journal Gauntlet for many tales of anti-strip-joint crackdowns across the country.

What will happen next? The Liquor Board apparently isn’t interested in promoting new legislation to replace the overturned “Added Activities” rules.

Sidran’s own, even-more-draconian “Added Activities” proposal (which, in its current draft, had depended upon regulatory precedents in the now-overturned state law) will probably die in the Seattle City Council; though he might still try other means to enforce Mandatory Mellowness via stricter noise and public-nuisance ordinances.

So the Sidran menace ain’t really over yet. But, between the end of “Added Activities” and a council increasingly fed up with his continuing attempts to be a de facto municipal head of state, he might find himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to work for the city rather than trying to run it.

The city attorney’s job is an elected position. Nobody ran against Sidran last time. Let’s get someone to run against him next year. Someone who’ll be a good government lawyer, and not some strong-arm enforcer of “civil society.”

TOMORROW: If we can’t have fewer cars, let’s at least have more smaller ones.