DAVID KOENIG WONDERS whether we’re seeing the slow demise of traditional Disney animation.

…was in the local region today, in a trip exquisitely planned to ensure he would see and hear from the only people he gives a damn about, zillionaires and corporate poobahs.

That didn’t stop a few hundred or so regular folks from using the occasion as an excuse to gather at Victor Steinbrueck Park, for a pleasant summer Friday afternoon of speechifyin’, T-shirt-wearin’, placcard-holdin’, and down-home togetherness.

The assorted young adults, union vets, senior citizens, Democratic Party operatives, and Greens in attendance were united by a shared idea:

That we don’t have to be paralyzed into passivity by what computer writer Dave Winer once acronymed as “FUD” (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

That people-power indeed can take back our nation from the junta.

That we can create an America that actually cares about her people and her land.

Meanwhile, life and art go on.

…about a recent piece of cutesy-poo “news” coverage:

Sent in response to the showing of part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s ad as a candidate for Governor on the KING news broadcast on August 19, 2003.Dear KING5,

Thanks for putting part of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s political commercial on (for free!) during your ‘news’ program last night. I’m sure that he appreciated the free plug, and it’s good to know that Arnold is the only one running, and, even though he’s not running for any office in Washington state, that this is a hip and trendy news story, and that we should all be paying attention. I’m also hoping that you will be airing the commercials, in whole or in part, from each and every one of the other 134 people running for Governor of California. I’d hate to think that just because Arnold is the press-appointed front runner that you wouldn’t be spending equal time on the other candidates.

I recognize that there is a certain amount of tabloid fodder necessary to entertain a significant portion of your audience, and that a famous actor running for office almost fits the bill. I only lament that the local news programs would pay so much attention to tabloid political movements in other states, while ignoring (or at least under-reporting) political developments in the state from which they broadcast.

I know that Arnold will pull in the viewers and hold them at least until the commercial runs, and that that’s your plan. But how about equal time for people actually running for Governor of this state? Or the problems that actually affect people that can receive your broadcast? I can think of a dozen stories of a political nature that are ever so much more important that who’s running for which office in some other state. And when you spend your precious air time resources on just one of the candidates, you implicitly declare him the winner, or at least the only candidate worth paying attention to. Arnold has already got what appears to be enough name recognition to win the race. He doesn’t need your help.

The press, and by extension television, even the tabloid type of television that you put on last night, has tremendous power to shape and define political races simply by focusing the attention on a particular candidate. The 24 hour news cycle demands that any contest for any office be reduced to a horse race where there must be a winner and a loser. ‘Reporters’ follow candidates around looking for ‘gotcha’ moments where a slip of the tongue can be turned into headline fodder in short order. Lazy shortcuts reduce people to clichés, painting a portrait of Al Gore, say, as a wooden policy wonk, or George Bush as a capable and decisive businessman. These portraits get reproduced in the echo chamber, reinforcing themselves until they begin to sound like truth. And we all know that truth is much harder to distribute in sound bytes between commercials, and that many viewers will change the channel if you try to engage them about something important.

I’ll continue to watch the three networks for my local news fix. I’m not even disappointed that you (in this case) have been caught in lowest common denominator ‘journalism.’ But I for one am capable of seeing commercials during the newscast for what they are, and I don’t have to be pleased about it.

Rich Webb

Oregon State U. prof Jon Lewis’s book Hollywood V. Hard Core, now out in paperback, claims the Hollywood studios aren’t and weren’t the free-speech crusaders they sometimes claimed to be. Lewis argues, according to the book’s back-cover blurb, that the studio-imposed ratings system and other industry manipulations served to crush the ’60s-’70s craze for sex films and art films, and thus “allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what movies got made and where they were shown.”

When the Independent Film Channel runs its salute next month to “renegade” type filmmakers of the ’70s, you can compare and contrast IFC’s take on the era with that of Lewis. IFC, I suspect, may describe ’70s cinema as a freewheeling revolutionary era, whose rule-breakin’ bad boys took over the biz and are still among today’s big movers-n’-shakers.

I’d give an interpretation closer to Lewis’s. That’s because I essentially came of age at the height of ’70s cinemania. My early college years (including one year at OSU) coincided with the likes of Cousin Cousine, Swept Away, The Story of O, All the President’s Men, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Dawn of the Dead, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Being There, Rock n’ Roll High School, Emmanuelle 2, and countless other classics that forever shaped my worldview.

But that was, to quote a film of the era, “before the dark time. Before the Empire.”

Lucas and Spielberg, those clever studio-system players who let themselves be marketed as mavericks, re-taught the studios how to make commercial formula movies. Before long, they and their imitators became the new kings of the jungle. Francis Coppola, Alan Rudolph, Richard Rush, Terrence Malick, and other medium-expanders were shunted to the sidelines of the biz.

The sorry results can be surveyed on any episode of Entertainment Tonight.

In related news, an alliance of Net-radio entrepreneurs is planning to sue the record industry, claiming the major labels have set royalty rates so high only big corporate stations can afford to legally exist….

…And Jeff Chester of TomPaine.com interprets Comcast’s lastest cable-contract wrangling in Calif. as a scheme to kill public access channels. I don’t think Chester’s allegation’s fully supported by the evidence he gives, but the situation’s still one to watch with concern.

IF YOU SAW the movie Ghost World, you’ll remember a shot of the astoundingly racist logo for an old restaurant, the Coon Chicken Inn. A few of you might not know that was a real chain, which until the ’50s had a large outlet on Lake City Way, just beyond the old Seattle city limits–and just a half mile north of the offices of Fantagraphics Books, which published the original Ghost World comic. (Ying’s Drive-In now stands on the ex-Coon Chicken site.)

What’s more bizarre than the old Coon Chicken logo is the fact that modern-day folks are making counterfeit logo souvenirs!

The Amtrak Cascades to Porltand left Friday morning at a challengingly-early 7:30 a.m. My traveling companion and I had been up two hours prior, so some napping was done by each of us on the soothing, scenic 3.5-hour ride.

I can’t think of many reasons to go enter the Beaver State through any means other than the train. Instead of strip malls and off ramps, you get to see farmlands, forests, Puget Sound, the Tacoma Narrows (above), the Columbia River, the giant egg statue at the town of Winlock, WA, and much more; and all the while you get to eat, drink, read, work, and/or watch an in-train movie. (The one this time was A Guy Thing, another of those horridly average sitcom movies set in Seattle but filmed in Vancouver.)

The economy in ol’ Rip City is as bad as it is here, or worse, and has been bad longer than it’s been bad here. The papers are full of dire warnings about yet another state government cutbacks. There’s an initiative campaign to raise a local income tax (on top of the state income tax) to keep the public schools open.

Yet some big-thinking local folks are trying to attract baseball’s athletically competitive but fiscally hapless Montreal Expos to Portland, a venture which would bring in tourist bucks but would probably require a publicly-subsidized stadium. I myself would love a National League team in the Northwest, if only as an excuse to go south more often.

We’ve previosly mentioned how most of Portland’s compact downtown has been preserved in its seedy yet funky glory. The new depression has kept rents low for the vintage stores, indie book and music shops, coffeehouses, and brewpubs.

And between the two MAX light-rail routes and a shorter downtown loop train, you won’t miss not having brought a car.

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

ALAS, our official Best Show On TV, CBC’s Zed, shuts down for the season Tuesday night (11:25 pm) after only 110 weeknight editions. (Still more than Carson showed up for in his last full year.) Starting Wednesday, its time slot will be occupied by hockey payoffs. Now we must wait until fall (or until any yet-unannounced summer reruns) for our fix of weird short films, avant-arts documentary segments, ambient-trance music, and ever-so-elegant host Sharon Lewis (if you’re reading this, Ms. Lewis, please consider becoming my green-card bride so I can live in a sane country).

Or you can go to Zed‘s giant website, where hundreds of films and musical performances from the show are archived. One of my personal favorites on the site is Violet, a complex, existential, and vigorous nine-minute dance short performed by the stunningly accomplished (and elegantly nude) Vancouver dancer Ziyian Kwan. Unfortunately, the site only has an info page (not the film itself) for Babyfilm, a darkly hilarious fake educational film encouraging new parents to become totally paranoid about anything that could possibly be unsafe for the baby. Neither would likely ever appear on PBS, let alone in a high-profile time slot.

…has done it again, by making and then not releasing a pro-peace music video in such a way that it would gain even more exposure. Too bad she still can’t act.

THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it’s currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.

The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store’s founder George Latsois. (He’d died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)

Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He’d started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he’d consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.

He built it from there according to that mid-’90s local business mantra, “Get Big Fast.” It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local ’90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store’s operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got ’em!).

Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city’s intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that’s become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate

Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don’t have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we’d rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.

Compare Raban’s depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle’s (fill-in-the-blank) isn’t an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.

I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don’t settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don’t have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.

FRANK RICH isn’t the first one to notice how the Chicago movie reflects today’s cynical media manipulations. But I haven’t yet read of anybody who’s noticed the political relevance that almost redeems Star Wars II: Attack of the Clones. A republic slowly devolves into an empire while fighting both large-scale battles and sneak terror attacks–and while its supposed leaders are actually conspiring with the attackers, to generate an atmosphere of instability and to promote the “emergency” suspension of democracy. Lucasfilm is now filming the next sequel, in which (as we all already know) the forces of empire win and the defenders of freedom scatter into far-flung exiles. Let’s hope we can improvise a happier ending to our real-life clone wars.

…at the (beautiful) main Tacoma Public Library was a smash. Some 60 Citizens of Destiny listened to me, KIRO-AM’s Dave Ross, and two Tacoma News Tribune writers debate whether or not we’re all amusing ourselves into oblivion. I, as I told you here I would, said we’re not.

If anything, I said, the current would-be social controllers aren’t trying to get us to ignore serious issues by force-feeding us light entertainment. They’re trying to get us obsessed with certain serious issues at a non-rational level of fear and obedience.

As I’d expected, there were several cranky old hippies who pined for the pre-TV golden age they were absolutely convinced had existed just before they were born, and who didn’t believe me when I told them the old newsreels had war theme songs long before CNN. I also tried to reassure some of the library loyalists in the crowd that books weren’t going away anytime soon (even if library budgets are currently big on DVDs and, in Seattle’s case, on building projects rather than on book buying); whether the stuff inside tomorrow’s books will be worth reading is a different question.

One woman in the audience noted that Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (the topic of an everybody-in-town-reads-one-book promotion to which this panel was a tie-in event) ended with a scene of people reciting from their favorite banned books, which they’d cared to memorize. In a variation on the old “desert island disc” question, she asked the panel what books we’d prefer to memorize. I mumbled something about The Gambler and Fanny Hill, saying they represented skills and pursuits that some people in a post-apocalyptic situation might not consider vital to survival but I would. I’m sure tomorrow I’ll think of a few tomes far more appropriate to the hypothetical situation. If you’ve any desert-island books, feel free to email the titles and reasons why you’d choose them.

Last weekend, the newspaper pundits were full of ponderings concerning the state of “independent” film, following the end of the past Sundance Festival in Utah.

Reality check time.

Sundance, now either part- or majority-owned by Viacom, is not really about independent filmmaking and hasn’t been since at least 1997. At best, one can say it’s about “art house” film marketing, the sort of thing at which Roger Corman, Sam Goldwyn Jr., and their cronies used to excel. At worst, it’s just another excuse for celebrity gossip bullshit and studio dealmaking corruption—precisely what truly independent film is a rebellion against.

K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson has defined an independent record label as a record label that’s neither owned, financed, nor distributed by one of the five majors. A similarly simple demarcation could be made for independent movies, except for the huge gray area between a film’s production and its distribution.

The days of such indie-film companies as Goldwyn, Cinecom, Cannon, DeLaurentiis, Hemdale, and Atlantic Releasing have gone the way of RKO and Monogram. Nowadays, only three truly independent theatrical distributors in North America are big enough for Variety to notice—IFC Films (owned by big cable-TV-system operator Cablevision), Lions Gate, and Alliance Atlantis. All the bigger “indie” distributors are merely niche-market (and non-union) subsidiaries of the intellectual-property conglomerates: Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, Miramax (Disney), New Line (AOL Time Warner), and Focus Features (Vivendi Universal).

These niche divisions don’t sit around buying up movies completed by rugged individualist filmmakers (despite the Sundance Festival’s mythology). More and more, they’re financing, packaging, and asserting total creative control over the products they release. (Miramax bankrolled the last Broadway revival of the musical Chicago to spur interest in its now-current film version.) They package mid-budget films as career-enhancing vehicles for stars under contract to the parent company. They crank out movies in fad genres for as long as the fads last (Pulp Fiction-esque hip violence, black-middle-class relationship comedies).

Some of the films but out by the big studios’ farm-team units are at least sort-of cool.

But they’re not independent films.

So what exactly is an independent film?

Here are a few guidelines:

• If it was made in Britain in the past ten years and doesn’t have James Bond in it, it’s probably independent.
• If it was filmed in Canada and actually set in Canada, it’s probably independent.
• If Tom Hanks was involved in any aspect of its production, it’s absolutely, positively not independent.
• If no cast or crew members have ever been on Jay Leno, it stands a good chance of being independent.
• If it stars a current or past boyfriend of Jennifer Lopez, it’s probably not independent (if it was made after or shortly before said Lopez hookup).
• If it’s all about the wacky travails besetting an independent filmmaker, it’s almost certainly an independent film (albeit a trite one).
• If it was directed by a woman who isn’t also an actress, it’s likely to be independent.
• If it was directed by an African American whose surname is neither Lee nor Wayans, it’s almost assuredly independent.
• If it’s about racial struggles but doesn’t have a noble white hero, it’s apt to be independent.
• If it includes a female character who both takes her clothes off and has actual speaking lines, it’s more likely these days to be independent.
• If it includes a male character who takes his clothes off (without being hidden by a dresser drawer or a potted plant), it’s undoubtedly independent.

Amid the ongoing ickiness of war and rumors of war, Shuttle Explosion II came along to remind us that American techno-might does not equal invincibility; that Americans can needlessly die horrific deaths at the hands of their own government’s wrong decisions (such as NASA’s chronic corner-cutting), with no overseas enemies involved.

If the deaths of these six Americans (one of whom was born in India) and one Israeli have any meaning at all, it will be to help dissuade a few more citizens from blind faith in their government and its promises.

WHILE MUCH OF THE NATION was being reminded about the frailty of technology, I spent the weekend (when I wasn’t moving the print MISC into stores) being reminded about the eternal strength of the plain ol’ human body, at the Seattle Erotic Arts Festival at Town Hall (a former Christian Science church). There’ve been countless erotic-art group exhibitions in town before, but never this big or this well-publicized.

The Friday-night opening and auction left over 150 people lined up outside waiting for the chance to enter the filled-to-capacity auditorium. Once inside, many patrons removed jackets to reveal the requested “provocative” attire. (Signs were posted at all doors leading to other parts of the building, announcing “CLOTHING REQUIRED Beyond This Point.”)

There were guys in leather chaps or Utilikilts or puffy pirate shirts. There were ladies in thong bikinis with body paint, or thongs and burlesque pasties beneath see-thru dresses, or vinyl hot pants and ’70s-esque knit halter tops. There were lots of corsets and other cleavage enhancers. The wearers of these costumes (some of whom were older and/or wider than the standard “model material”) all glowed with the pride of being admired, being desired.

There was a glorious vibe in the air of joyous celebration, of taking a vacation from winter blahs and sharing a form of instant intimacy with several hundred other adults. Unlike much of the “sex industry” (porn, strip clubs, advice manuals, etc.), there was no mercenary hard-sell attitude; not among the viewers and exhibitors and not even in most of the art.

There were 80 or so artworks on auction night, and over 200 artworks in the subsequent weekend exhibit. (About half the auction pieces were also on display the following two days.)

The artworks themselves encompassed most of the popular visual-art media. There were photos, paintings, drawings, cartoons, sculptures, and collages, in all sizes and shapes.

The subject matter of the works hewed close to a rather narrow variety of scenes, rather than the full possibilities of erotic expression.

There were many solo “figure studies” of women and men of assorted adult ages, nude or in fetish garb.

There were many bondage scenes, of a woman or man either tied up alone or being disciplined by an always-female dominant.

There were scenes of kissing and/or groping among lesbian, gay-male, and even a few hetero couples.

There were two or three scenes of fellatio, but none of cunnilingus.

There were no scenes of what used to be called “the sex act,” hetero intercourse. (One of the event’s organizers told me no such scenes were submitted.) The only penetrative sex shown was in a large painting of a gay orgy. (Once again, I thought, the Seattle art world’s reverse double standards were more open to gay-male sexuality than to straight-male sexuality.)

My first thought about the prevelance bondage art: “It’s just so 1998.” Some of the S/M scenes depicted the attitude of aggressive egomania that helped make the dot-com era so annoying. Others seemed intended to be “shock art,” as if we were still living in an era before there were adult novelty stores in half the nation’s strip malls.

But others recognized a more playful spirit to role-playing. Although the exhibition’s contributing artists come from all over North America, I pondered whether I was seeing the birth of a particularly Nor’Western flavor of erotica, and what that could be.

I decided it would be an erotica based on playfulness, closeness, and comfort. Instead of the “are we being transgressive yet?” bombast found in much NY/Calif. “alternative” sex art, or the artsy pretensions found in much Euro sex art, NW sex art would acknowledge that people have been having sex since before we were born, and having all assorted types of sex to boot. Het, lesbian, gay, bi, transgender, pain/pleasure, monogamous, nonmonogamous, multi-partner, solo, etc. etc.—none of it’s outré, all of it’s fun for those who’re into it. It’s all about connecting with other bodies and souls, keeping warm and passionate during the dreary winter days, being creative and positive, gentle and brash.

Sidebar: Before the exhibition, I’d seen the video Sex Across America #8: Seattle. It’s part of a series in which some hard-porn performers and their camera crew travel to different cities. This one featured hotel-room sex scenes taped in the (unnamed but obvious) Seattle Sheraton, Edgewater, and Inn at the Market, plus a billiards bar I’m sure I’ve been to under other circumstances; as well as clothed tourist scenes at the Space Needle, the Pike Place Market, and around Fourth and Pike.

While merely location-shot here by LA porn-biz people, the sex is a lot closer to personalized lovemaking than to most of the emotionless hot-action usually found in LA corporate porn. Especially in the final scene, with a real-life local couple (who’d previously appeared in an “amateur” sex video for the same director). Prior to showing off their well-practiced lovin’ technique, the couple’s female half is interviewed by the director: “So I hear the women in Seattle are really horny,” he says. The woman smiles back, “Yes! It’s all the moisture.” It’s a cute, charming prelude to some cute, charming nooky.

So there can indeed be a Northwestern eroticism. Another, more vital question: Can eroticism save the world, as has been pondered on this site and elsewhere?

The answer, like so much involving sex, is complicated.

The wide-open decadence of Berlin and Paris in the ’30s didn’t prevent the Nazis. Indeed, these scenes were among the Nazis’ first targets.

The ’60s hedonism didn’t do much to stop the Vietnam war or prevent the rise of Nixon’s gang.

The ’70s cult of individual pleasure merely foreshadowed the upscale “lifestyle” fetish of more recent times.

But a strong, supportive gay community, built largely around sexual enjoyment (and around demanding the right to it) is the dominant reason new AIDS infections have been stemmed in urban North America.

And today’s most pressing social problems all have sensually-based potential solutions.

Both fundamentalist Islam and fundamentalist Christianity seek to repress sex, as part of authoritarian ideologies encouraging obedience and disconnectedness.

Today’s war fever is profoundly anti-sexual, promoting cold ruthless ambition at the expense of almost everything to do with freedom or compassion.

Our contracting economy keeps most of us shackled and frustrated, while rewarding a tiny elite of whip-lashing doms.

The suburban landscape is a wasteland of beauty-deprived arterial roads and subdivisions keeping people apart and isolated.

Sex and erotica, by themselves, won’t solve any of these. A consumerist, self-centered definition of sex could even help these problems get worse.

But it’d sure help if more people used sensuality as a way to become more aware of the world around them, and if more people used sexual intimacy and to learn how to empathically bond with people, to help bring back a sense of community.

And, of course, sex is always a good way to advertise a progressive movement. Spread the joy, share the (consensual) love, propose a world of more satisfying possibilities, and have tons-O-fun doing it.

Come out of the shadows and into the warm pink light.

(SURE NUFF, the print MISC is delayed still, this time not of our making. Some outlets should get it by Friday.)

Regular readers of this space know we love bullet lists, outlines, and the other trappings of precision humor. Some persons, however, still apparently believe “real writing” hasta be obtuse & obfuscatin’. Even daily-paper writers, who must state their premises clearly, occasionally fall under this delusion.

That’s the best reasoning I could figure for a recent Chicago Tribune gripe-piece ragging about PowerPoint presentations. Writer Julia Keller claims they’re ruining the art of argumentative discussion, by turning every topic into a rigid sequence of oversimplified “talking points” and preventing impromptu exchanges among speakers and audiences.

In real life, those sins are only committed when the presenters are either:

• unsure of themselves in public,
• unsure of themselves with a particular audience (say, bosses or customers), or
• intellectually lazy.

The article includes several facetious examples of famous speeches reduced to easily-digestible PowerPoint lists. (Here’s another, visualized in presentation-slide format.) Go ahead and have a quick laugh, but then take another look. These gag translations actually reveal the soundness of the original authors’ arguments and the clarity of their thinking. Far from destroying the magic of the original speeches, these latter-day outlines could be useful tools for teaching modern-day folks how to think, write, and speak with similar clarity.

Keller also seems to claim outline-based presentations are incapable of expressing complex ideas. Bunk. Any good Hegelian knows any expressive or instructive statement flows from a sequence of hypotheses, antitheses, and syntheses. Details follow from sound structures, as much as any soundly-constructed building starts with a solid foundation and a sturdy frame.

Here’s a particularly beautifully written example: A 1930 manual published by RCA, intended to teach movie-theater projectionists how to properly exhibit those newfangled talking pictures.

The 211-page document travels a vast path from the laboratory basics of sound and electricity, to the procedures of operating the crude ealry theater sound equipment, to advanced lessons in maintenance and troubleshooting. But it remains thoroughly readable and comprehensible, because its clear copywriting arises from a clear structure. All “technical writing” worthy of the name exhibits these traits—and so do the most effective philosophical, argumentative, persuasive, and political writings.

When properly used, tools such as PowerPoint can help an author or presenter create clear structures. Some of the people these tools are helping are people who weren’t previously familiar with these principles, or with the general basics of writing and public speaking. PowerPoint is helping these rank amateurs become at least semi-adept amateurs. Some of their resulting works will feature less-than-Shakespearean elequence. But they can, with a modicum of creative discipline, effectively say what the speaker-presenter wants to say.

So don’t be another tech-bashing fogey, like so many culture-critics and newspaper essayists unfortunately are. If you don’t need software assistance to help organize your thoughts, you don’t have to knock those who do.

Besides, the PC-based “slide” lecture is another great addition to our collection of late-20th-early-21st-century literary forms. (Some others: FAQ lists, video-game hint sheets, e-mail investment scam solicitations, filmmaking storyboards, self-help quizzes, affirmation tapes, and shopping-channel spiels.) All of these vocabularies and more are just waiting for some clever writers to relaunch as more or less serious storytelling techniques.