HOLLYWOOD’S WRITERS AND ACTORS might go on strike next summer. The big studios are rushing even more mediocre big-budget movies into production now, in case the strike creates what Entertainment Weekly calls “A Year Without Movies.”

I can hardly wait.

Imagine if the strike drags on, into the summer and fall of the year the cinema once predicted would be a space-age wonderworld.

As the supply of would-be blockbusters dwindles, the multiplexes will try to keep their seats filled by bringing back past favorites. The Pacific Place 11 could turn into an impromptu classic-film festival.

In between the oldies (or at least the more popular films from the mid-to-late ’90s (yes, expect Titanic and The Phantom Menace to be dragged out again and again)), the studios will release everything they’ve got lying around. Time Warner will raid its HBO and TNT subsidiaries, shunting made-for-cable movies into theatrical duty. Direct-to-video horror snores, shoot-’em-ups, and “erotic thrillers” will get an unexpected day or two on big screens.

One screen at a time, indies will infiltrate the (already fiscally beleagured) multiplexes.

Audiences will get the chance to get bored to tears by countless low-budget films made by perky white boys about the struggles faced by perky white boys trying to make low-budget films.

Young couples will make out freely, undisturbed by the laughless genre-film parodies unspooling before them.

And maybe, just maybe, some worthy films will get shown in places besides the U Districts and Capitol Hills of North America. Audiences everywhere could discover movies that really move, with real stories and characters. Maybe even a few films from other countries.

If that happens, watch out. The studios and their media-conglomerate owners will fight back. The studio-controlled TV gossip shows will refuse to cover these pipsqueak upstart films. Instead, they’ll trot out as many “real” movie stars as are willing to appear, pleading for an end to the strike so “real” movies can again be made. As more and more viewers discover they prefer movies with actors instead of stars, more stars will join the public pleading, even breaking ranks with their own union if necessary.

By the time the actors, the writers, and the studios finally get their collective acts together and get back to work, whole swaths of the moviegoing public might have decided they no longer need nor care for the return of Hollywood product.

I know, I know. It’s the kind of happy ending that only happens in the movies.

TOMORROW: Whither CNN?

IN OTHER NEWS: Aside from the fates of the now ex-employees, reading about dead dot-coms is so much fun. Why, I wonder?

ELSEWHERE:

• It’s America’s first “museum of women’s history.” It’s in Dallas. You gotta problem with that?…

LAST FRIDAY AND ALL THIS WEEK, I’ve been reminiscing about Seattle during the fall of 1975.

I’d arrived in town in September of that year after a childhood spent in Olympia and Marysville, WA and Corvallis, OR. I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life, except cease living with my parents and stay the heck out of the military.

Within two days I’d found what would now be called a “mother-in-law” apartment in Wallingford (in a home run by a devout Catholic couple with a Mary shrine in the front yard; within a year, they got a brand-new Betamax VCR equipped with “Swedish Erotica” tapes.) Days later, I got a graveyard-shift job at the U District Herfy’s (a once locally-prominent burger chain; that particular branch is now a Burger King).

I hadn’t many career expectations at the time. Writing was something I seemed to be good at, but I also could see myself in acting, local TV, music, retail, graphic design, even bike-messengering (which I wound up doing for a while).

Some of my initial memories:

• Metro Transit. I’d grown up with school buses, but hadn’t lived in a jurisdiction with municipal bus service. How convenient! You just stand in one spot for as long as half an hour and you’ll get anywhere you want to go (except some really obscure places or places out in the ‘burbs).

• My first neighborhood. I’d known Wallingford only as a hillside by the freeway. I soon discovered a perfect little neighborhood with an independent supermarket (the Fabulous Food Giant), two indie drug stores, an indie hardware store (Tweedy & Popp, still there), an art-house movie theater, the original Dick’s Drive-In, and block after block of handsome old bungalows. At the time, it was still a working-stiffs’ area. Before long, it would be taken over by professors and lawyers; by now even they can’t afford it.
• Pioneer Square. Corny as it now seems, I remember eating a cinnamon roll on a late-summer afternoon outside the old Grand Central Bakery on Occidental Park and thinking this was the perfect time and place to be at.
• Daytime TV. Game shows and entertainment-talk shows I knew; but this new night job left me sedate enough at midmorning to finally begin to appreciate the slow-grinding emotionality of the soaps.
• Late-night TV. Johnny Carson had been around almost as long as the Space Needle. I’d seen his show very rarely as a teen. Now I got to see it any night I wasn’t working. Either I’d just gotten old enough to realize he wasn’t that tremendously funny, or his move from NY to LA had killed his creative spark. Today, I’m more apt to believe the latter.

  That fall, a weekly Carson rerun would be replaced by a new show, initially titled NBC’s Saturday Night. The contrast only made Carson’s shtick seem even dumber (but in an endearing sorta way).

• The movies. Marysville’s only theater at the time was a drive-in (which for a while showed “hard R” films in full view from I-5). Corvallis had a few indoor cinemas, showing mostly mainstream Hollywood product. But in Seattle I got to see the whole cinematic gamut; especially with that newly-minted Seattle International Film Festival, and with Randy Finley’s almost-as-new chain of art houses (the first of which is now the Grand Illusion).
• Hippies and ex-hippies. Until I started meeting a number of them in person, I had no idea how docile and mumbly-voiced they could be, or how much of a superior species they thought they were, just because they’d been to a couple of protest marches five years before.

  (My teenage encounters with the fundamentalist-Christian universe had already taught me to beware those who claimed they were the only ones going to Heaven on the basis of picayune doctrinal trivia.)

• Minorities. I’d known native Americans and a few Asian Americans, but African Americans were a new in-person experience. They mostly turned out to be almost nothing like the media images of them at the time, even the “positive” media images.
• Chronic depression. Despite having lived a squeaky-clean life to that point, I was still barely awake toward the 4 a.m. end of my work shifts at the burger joint, and was fired quite promptly. To be cast out from supposedly one of the world’s easiest jobs sent me into what I now realize was a blue funk of prescribable-for proportions.

All in all, it was a time of diminished expectations, of a big city that still, mistakenly, thought it was a helpless little cowtown.

Despite everything that’s happenned for the better around here since then, and there’s been a lot, I miss something of that funky humility.

MONDAY: Back to the future with the simplest, stupidest business motivation book ever written.

ELSEWHERE:

• Dennis Miller’s Monday Night Football jokes and references explained for you in microscopic detail! (found by Dandot)….
• “How to Win an Argument with a Vegetarian”

THE MAJOR-PARTY APOLOGISTS, especially the Democrats, are pleading with voters not to jump on any Nader bandwagon. They’re insisting there really is a difference between Gore and Bush, enough of a difference that you’ve gotta choose only one of those two–lest the nation be stuck with the other of those two.

Yet the Gore supporters’ claims of difference (which seem to involve such secondary issues as how quickly Social Security funds can be fed into the control of Wall Street speculators) continue to be contradicted by the increasingly-apparent similarities.

Both love “free” trade and the rule of global financiers. Both want to turn up the federal $ spigot to big weapons contractors. Both would keep up the dumb ol’ “war on drugs,” and pay as little lip service as possible to campaign-finance reform. Both claim today’s is the best of all possible economic worlds; even though real-world wage and earning-power equations get decreasingly rosy the further you stray from the top-20 income percentile.

And both camps have said, or at least implied, that Something Must Be Done against all the sexy, threatening, violent, or just plain icky material out there in our pop-culture landscape these days.

They’re not saying it loudly or direclty enough to threaten the media conglomerates the candidates depend upon for hype pieces (er, “news coverage”) and, in the case of Gore, for big campaign bucks.

But they are saying it. Particularly Al Gore’s pal, and Tipper Gore’s sometime aide in crusades against musical free speech, Veep candidate Joe Lieberman.

The Lieb’s basic stump speech invokes two main themes:

• His personal devotion to Orthodox Judaism, expressed in terms Old Testament-knowledgable Christians can identify with; and
• his stoic disgust at That Filth Out There invading our movie/TV screens, our computer monitors, our CD shelves, and our magazine racks.

Lieberman and Gore have avoided, as far as I can tell, bashing NEA-supported art shows or college English classes. The Bush campaign, eager to put the GOP’s legacy of past priggishness behind it, has also been relatively muted in this regard–thus far. But the prigs still have a degree of power in the GOP trenches, and I predict it won’t be long before Bush starts trying to appeal to them.

So should we worry about these comparatively mild, but bipartisan, rants?

Yes.

If these rants become enforced public policy in the next administration, you probably won’t see direct government attempts to fully ban anything (except strip clubs).

You’re more likely to see, both within the next administration and from private groups operating under the next administration’s endorsement, targeted actions against specific “offensive” entertainments:

• Public outcries against raunchy songs (which, if past outcries are any prediction, will come mostly against black artists and/or indie labels);
• Calls for more restrictive and more consistent movie ratings;
• Further restrictions against indie and foreign films that attempt to get released uncut or unrated;
• Mandatory “V-chips,” “family hour” restrictions, and pressures on advertisers against raunchy TV shows (especially raunchy TV shows airing on channels not owned by Viacom, Time Warner, or Rupert Murdoch); and
• Mandatory (or at least really heavily encouraged) Internet “content rating systems,” censorware filters on all school and library computers, and other measures to make sure you’re unable to read nothing online that has as much sex and violence as, say, the Old Testament.
• Zoning and other pressures against outlets offering XXX videos (which, coincidentally, entirely involves video stores other than Blockbuster) and parental-warning-stickered CDs (i.e., stores smaller than Wal-Mart).

As usual, you needn’t fret for the big campaign-contributing media giants that have made zillions on raunch in commercial entertainment.

As we’ve seen with the conglomerates’ Napster-bashing, freedom and open expression aren’t among their highest priorities.

And as we’ve seen with the Napster phenom, such attempts to prop up the plutocracy of Big Media these days end up getting ever more desperate and blatant. They might not succeed in the long run, but can do a lot of damage in the attempt.

TOMORROW: Further adventures with the Razor scooter.

IN OTHER NEWS: Some 200 gay activists and supporters massed on Capitol Hill this past Saturday evening and Sunday morning, to counter-demonstrate against a series of antigay “rallies” by seven (count ’em!) supporters of a virulently bigoted Kansas preacher. Except at the end of the Saturday protests (when one counter-protester tried to approach one of the bigots, only to get shoved onto a car hood by the cops who were keeping the two camps apart), I’ve never seen so many loud and colorfully-dressed people get so worked up about a handful of inauspicious whitebreads since the last Presidential nominating conventions.

ELSEWHERE:

• Today’s most vigilant defenders of artistic freedom and crusaders against censorship–TV wrestling fans!…
• From would-be Net censors to Presidential candidates, the New Sanctimony isn’t just a threat from the rabid Right anymore….

YESTERDAY, we mentioned in passing the Seattle Mariners’ new “classic” baseball stadium.

The movie-theater biz is also trying to get neoclassical.

OK, they’re not going back to single-screen palaces of architectural wonder. (And they’re sure not going back to old-fashioned ticket or concession prices.)

But the big chains are trying to make moviegoing an entertaining experience again.

After decades of building big, bland, boxy multiplexes, they’re now putting up much fancier joints. The new multiplexes still have umpteen screens serviced by a central projection room; they still play the same dorky big-studio formula movies.

But they’ve got plushier seats, fancier carpets and lighting, and prettier lobbies and signage. They’ve got hi-tech projection and sound systems. They’ve got doublewall construction between auditoria, so you’re less likely to hear the movie next door.

Some of them even have curtains concealing the screen between shows (amazing what they’ll think up!).

But the new movie boxes are costly things to build and run, especially with the high rents in some of the “restored” big-city downtowns where many of the biggest and fanciest megaplexes are going up. And the chains aren’t closing their older multiboxes at the same rate they’re opening new ones. (For one thing, chains are building these partly to encroach on other chains’ established territories. For another, they’re often stuck in long-term leases, especially at malls.)

So even with movie attendance holding steady, and even with the high ticket prices and the high concession prices and the on-screen ads and the hawking of CDs and posters in the lobbies, the big cinemonster chains are in trouble. Three have already filed for bankruptcy protection; two others may do so this week. The biggest current circuit, Loews Cineplex (formed by the merger of several already-big chains), is being propped up by steadily cash infusions from Sony (which hasn’t been making big profits in its movie-production arm either). But even that isn’t keeping the chain afloat.

As one to always see an opportunity where others only see trouble (and vice versa), I can foresee many uses for the movie boxes that might become immediately abandoned if these bankruptcy moves go through. When Cineplex Odeon (now merged into Loews Cineplex) shut down its Newmark fiveplex, a local nonprofit theater briefly used one of its rooms before the whole space was redone for offices. We can do that again, all over North America.

Let’s turn some of these umpteenplexes into multidisciplinary fringe-arts centers. I can see it now:

• Performance art in Auditorium 1.
• Experimental opera in Auditorium 2.
• Conceptual sculpture shows in Auditorium 3.
• Dance rehearsals in Auditorium 4.
• Painting studios in Auditorium 5.
• Panel discussions on the role of the humanities in the 21st century in Auditorium 6.
• Avant-improv guitar circles in Auditorium 7.
• Neo-neo-neo-punk bands in Auditorium 8.
• Artist-made tchotchkes and gift items sold in the concession area.
• And in the lobby, all these tribes mixing and matching and coming up with new ideas and junk.

Not only would such a scheme provide valuable, centrally-located space for these sometimes neglected resources in the heart of their respective cities and/or suburbs, they’d provide a modicum of historic preservation to these buildings.

This way, kids in the 2030s will be able to see the places in which films like Rambo III were meant to be seen. It may help them understand why such films got made.

MONDAY: Both major Presidential candidates (heart) censorship.

ELSEWHERE:

• Three decades later, it’s probably a good thing the Boeing SST never got built….

IT’S QUITE EASY to bash the Bumbershoot arts festival these days.

There’s the admission ($16 per person per day, if you don’t get advance tix, which are only available at Starbucks, that nonsupporter of alternative voices).

There’s all the corporate logos and sponsorships (radio stations “presenting” musical artists they’ll never play on the air in a million years; the auditoria labeled in all official and unofficial schedules with company names they never hold the other 51.5 weeks a year; and everywhere dot-coms, dot-coms, dot-coms).

There’s the big lines at the food booths where you get to pay $4-$7 for hastily mass-prepared fast food entrees.

There’s the annual whining by the promoters that even with all this revenue, the thing still barely breaks even, because of all the money they spend for big-name stars to attract mass audiences and all the logistics needed to handle these same mass audiences.

There’s those mass audiences themselves (who’s more troublesome: the fundamentalist Christians or the fundamentalist vegans?) and the complications they create (the lines, the difficulty in getting between venues on the Seattle Center grounds, the lines, the lack of seats or sitting room, the lines).

There’s the annoying rules (I missed all but the last 15 minutes of Big Star’s gig because I couldn’t bring my Razor scooter into KeyArena and had noplace to put it).

Then there’s the whole underlying implicit demand that You Better Start Having Fun NOW, Mister.

But there’s still a lot to like about the festival, Seattle’s annual big unofficial-end-of-summer party.

Principally: It’s a big Vegas-style lunch buffet of art. Those high admission prices give you all the culture you can eat. You can sample some “controversial” nude paintings, a slam poet or two, a couple of comedians, some of that electronic DJ music the kids are into these days, an ethnic folk ensemble or two, an hour of short art-films, and (particularly prevalent this year) late-’80s and early-’90s rock singers rechristened in “unplugged” form.

(Indeed, this year’s lineup included a whole lot of acts aimed squarely at aging college-radio listeners such as myself–the aforementioned Big Star, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Ben Harper, Pete Krebs, the Posies, Quasi, Kristen Hirsch, etc. etc.

For its first two decades, Bumbershoot was programmed clearly for relics from the ’60s. Now, despite promoters’ claims to be after a youth market, it’s programmed clearly for relics from the ’80s and ’90s. Mind you, I’m not personally complaining about this at all. I like all these above-listed acts quite a bit.)

Some genres don’t work in the buffet-table concept. Classical music’s pretty much been written out of the festival in recent years; as have feature-length films, full-length plays, ballet, cabaret acts, and panel discussions. Performance art, modern dance, literary readings, and avant-improv music are still around, but in reduced quantities as organizers try to stuff as many crowd-pleasers onto the bill as they can afford.

Other genres have been shied away from, especially in the festival’s past, for skewing too young or too nonwhite. (I’m currently at home listening to the streaming webcast of DJ Donald Glaude mixing it up on the festival’s closing night; not many years ago, Bumbershoot would never have booked an African-American male whose act wasn’t aimed at making Big Chill Caucasians feel good about themselves.)

But all in all, the concept works. It’s a great big populist spectacle, a four-day long Ed Sullivan Show, a vaudeville spread out over 74 acres.

There are, of course, things I’d do with it. I’d try to figure a way to charge less money, even if that means booking fewer touring musical stars. I’d try to figure a re-entrance for classical, and bring back the “Wild Stage” program of the more offbeat performance stuff.

But, largely, Bumbershoot has turned 30 by actually gaining vitality, getting younger.

(Or maybe it’s really been 30 all along; changing fashions to keep up with its intended age like Betty and Veronica.)

(P.S.: The Bumbershoot organizers booked Never Mind Nirvana novelist Mark Lindquist at the same time and 500 feet away from the rock band whose singer’s real-life legal troubles are believed to have been roman a clef-ed for Lindquist’s story. But an attendee at the festival insisted to me that, despite what I’d written about the novel, Lindquist insisted he’d thought up his plot over a year before the real-life legal case, which occurred while he was trying to sell his manuscript to a publisher.)

TOMORROW: Riding the Mariners’ playoff roller coaster.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could Gore-Lieberman be more liberal than Clinton-Gore?…
• If it’s not a major (i.e., corporate) newspaper, you won’t find it at Starbucks….

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the re-emergence of interest in early-’80s skate punks.

But that’s just part of a growing ’80s nostalgia fetishism.

Just about every place you look, the music, the clothes, the video games, and even the polarized politics of what some of us used to call “Reagan’s AmeriKKKa” are back.

With one difference.

A good number of us who were around the first time HATED the ’80s.

We couldn’t wait to get beyond all the doo-doo that was going down then, which we’re still not fully beyond.

Herewith, an itemized explanation of how ’80s nostalgia differs from the real time:

• Music (hardcore): They were often louts and crusters who trashed clubs and rental halls (making promotion of any indie-rock shows nearly impossible), fought one another, and/or debilitated themselves with drugs and booze. Now, those who lived through hardcore punk and survived it all will wistfully look back on it as a magic time, an Age of Miracles now passed away from the earth. They’re getting worse at it than hippies.
• Music (power pop and noise pop): Movies like The Wedding Singer and radio formats like KNDD’s “Resurrection Jukebox” imagine the whole country was joyfully bopping to the Jam and the Psychedelic Furs.

  Actually, at least around here, this stuff was almost totally blacked out from local radio and clubs. There were seldom more than two tiny bars where you could hear anything more innovative than white blues bands.

  This gave its fans a sense of shared martyrdom, then a sense of community, then a sense of DIY movement-building which got a little sidetracked during those 1992 gold-rush days (when everybody in town felt they had to insist loudly that they were Not Grunge Dammit.)

• Music (hiphop): OK, one aspect of the decade to be wistful about. The hiphop Real Thing, back when it championed black intelligence instead of white stupidity.
• Video Games: Another now-lost art form. In the days of Pac-Man and Crazy Climber, gaming was about pace and play-quality and fun; not hyper-realistic, first-person-viewpoint slaughtering.
• Comics: The opening of specialty comics stores, and the nonreturnable distribution system supplying them, spawned a lot of second-string superhero crap, naked babes in outer space, and Ninja Turtle knockoffs.

  But there was also a blossoming of innovative, artistic, and really weird stuff: Love and Rockets, Eightball, Tales of the Beanworld, Dirty Plotte, RAW, etc. etc. etc.

• Movies: The promising ’70s art-film boom crashed to a thud with the arrival of that “rugged individualist” icon of global mass merchandising, the Action Hero. But the likes of Remo Williams were just the tip of the agent-driven, formulaic iceberg, which culminated years later with a real (computer generated) iceberg.

  Still, there were some true classics, and several more entries that weren’t really all that great but struck a chord with audiences who still recall them as coming-O-age keystones.

• TV: The first break in the three-networks oligopoly, and the slow dawning of the twelve-cable-channel-owners oligopoly.

  Some of those early cable shows were real hoots of blooper-filled, low-budget cheese (Loves Me Loves Me Not, A New Day In Eden, New Wave Theater, Financial News Network). Few predicted these hokey attempts would ever pose a real threat to the status quo of Blossom and Knots Landing.

  (In the crevices and interstices of all this, meanwhile, came such deservedly-remembered novelties as Max Headroom, The New Twilight Zone, Remote Control,The Tracey Ullman Show, and David Letterman’s wild, pre-celeb-fawning era.)

TOMORROW: The last of this for now.

ELSEWHERE:

• Was socialism doomed in the U.S. from the start? Are “new community” concepts today doomed for the same reasons?…
• One site that redefines the term “woody”….

NOW LET US PRAISE the greatest Northwest pop-cult book ever written (other than Loser, of course.)

I speak of Wet and Wired: A Pop Culture Encyclopedia of the Pacific Northwest, by Randy Hodgins and Steve McLellan.

The two Olympians have previously written a history of Seattle-set movies, published a short-lived print and web zine called True Northwest, and produced a comedy radio show. This modestly-produced, large-size trade paperback is their masterwork.

Its 226 pages cover over 500 of the most famous and/or influential people, places, and things in the Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver metro areas (plus a few side trips to Tacoma and Spokane). Mixing and matching the region’s three big cities means even the best expert about any one town won’t already know everything in the book (though I, natch, was familiar with at least most of the topics).

In short, easily digestible tidbits of prose (curiously laid out at odd angles), you get–

• Artistic and literary figures (Lynda Barry, Jacob Lawrence, cartoonist John Callahan, essayist Stewart Holbrook, whodunit-ist J.A. Jance).
• Business and political leaders (the Nordstroms, software moguls, progressive populists, big-business Democrats, Wobblies, and John (Reds) Reed).
• Food and drink favorites (Rainier and Oly beers, the Galloping and Frugal Gourmets, Dick’s Drive-Ins, Fisher Scones).
• Media (J.P. Patches, Wunda Wunda, some of the CBC’s blandest Vancouver-based dramas, The X-Files, Northern Exposure, Keith Jackson, Ahmad Rashad).
• Music (The old Seattle jazz underground, the Wailers/Sonics garage bands, and a certain latter-day music explosion or three).
• Attractions, Places, and Events (the 24-Hour Church of Elvis, the Java Jive, the Kalakala, Ivan the gorilla, Ramtha).
• Sports and Recreation (all the big pro and college teams, a few long-gone outfits like our North American Soccer League teams, legendary (Rosalynn Sumners) and infamous (Tonya Harding) stars).

…and lots, lots more.

The book’s only sins, aside from a handful of misspelled names, are those of omission:

• You get Nordstrom and the late Frederick & Nelson, but not the Bon Marche.
• You get Ivar’s and Brown & Haley (“Makes ‘Em Daily”), but not the great roadside attraction that was Tiny’s Fruit Stand in Cashmere, WA.
• You get Vancouver music greats DOA and 54-40, but not Skinny Puppy or even k.d. lang. (Its Seattle music listings are equally uncomprehensive, but there are other places you can go to read about that.)
• Portland comic-book publisher Dark Horse gets a listing, but Seattle’s Fantagraphics Books (and the locally-based portion of its stable of artists) isn’t.

But these are relatively minor quibbles that can (and, I hope, will) be rectified in a second edition. What Wet and Wired does have is well-written, accurate (as far as I’m able to tell), and a great mosaic of glimpes into our rather peculiar section of the planet.

TOMORROW: Cirque du Soleil pitches its tent in Renton’s Lazy B country.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Tacoma News Tribune, 8/21): “Giant Salmon a Scary Prospect.” I can see the horror movie ad campaigns now….

IN OTHER NEWS: Sometimes justice does occur!

ELSEWHERE:

• Can the nearly all-female-written-and-edited, yet still feminist-vilified, romance novel industry return to its formerly winning ways?…
• Analyzing the great comic-book implosion (found by Arts Journal)….

LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.

In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.

Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:

• Ending capital punishment is a noble cause that seldom has a convenient poster-boy.

  But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)

• Human bodies, and the care and feeding of same, are among the most researched, most documented topics of study in our species’s short history. The result of this work ought to be an appreciation of the body’s many intricate systems and their multilayered interactions.

  Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).

• Why kids behave the way they do is another topic with assorted major and minor causes all interfacing in myriad ways.

  But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)

• The Puget Sound area’s transportation problems are elaborate, and compounded by ever-further sprawl and the lack of a comprehensive public-transit system.

  Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.

  (Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)

• And if anything’s elaborate, it’s the ways women and men relate to one another. It’s a topic whose assorted permutations have kept many a playwright, novelist, songwriter, and therapist fed and housed over the past few centuries.

  But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.

The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.

That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.

• Many of the most popular all-time Boho-bookstore faves are guys (and a few gals) who marketed themselves, or allowed themselves to be marketed, as brand-name celebrities, whose most popular works were essentially commercials for their public images (A. Ginsberg, H. S. Thompson, A. Nin).
• In the Way-New Left, some of the causes and sub-causes that attract the most zine ink and volunteer support are those with really simplified storylines, slogans, and actions. (Hemp si! McDonald’s no!)
• I won’t even start in on the too-simple ideas that have ebbed and flowed in popularity among college professors and administrators in the past half-century. Many, many conservative authors (themselves mostly victims of their own too-simple ideologies) have raked in big bucks snorting in print and on the lecture circuit against Those Silly Liberals.

Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.

Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

LI>It’s Super Strawberry!…
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THE RISE OF “BLOKE” MAGAZINES, and of TV shows and commercials based on the same worldview, has, as I’ve previously written here, has propagated a new male archetype.

Call it the Proud Creep.

This character type is just as stupid, boorish, and woman-hating as the villain stereotypes in ’70s-’80s feminist tracts, but proclaims these to be somehow positive qualities.

In many ways, it reminds me of the “He-Man Woman-Hater’s Club” schtick in the old Our Gang movie shorts. It’s certainly just as juvenile.

I hereby propose a different archetype of hetero masculinity. One that is neither the Creep of certain sexist-female stereotypes, the Proud Creep of the bloke magazines, or the self-punishing Guilt Tripper of “sensitive new age guy” images.

It’s a man who doesn’t have to be sexist in either direction. A man who knows yang’s just as valuable as yin.

Herewith, some tenets of our proposed He-Man Woman-Lover’s Club:

• We love women. We just don’t hate men, and we don’t hate being men.
• We fully admit our inability to fully understand women’s thoughts and feelings. We accept their frequent ability to outsmart, outplay, outwork, and outlive us.
• While many of us may never be a woman’s sole source of economic support, the women we love still have needs we can and should help fulfill. These include, but are not limited to, intimacy, friendship, sexual fulfillment, moral/spiritual support, the care and educating of children, career advice, and/or home repairs.
• While acknowledging women’s needs, we also respectfully assert our own needs. Every individual on Earth, including us, is incomplete without one or more loved ones of various capacities. Even many gay men acknowledge the need for the feminine in their lives, by adopting drag or feminized roles.

  As hetero men, we fully admit we need women in our lives. We need women’s beauty, touch, wisdom, style, zeal, perserverence, leadership, and, yes, the occasional constructive nag.

• We enjoy the sight of women’s physiques, in all their infinite variety. This does NOT mean that we hate women but that we love them. It also does NOT mean that we don’t love women’s non-anatomical assets and strengths.
• Some of us have been customers of what has been collectively called “the sex industry” (strip clubs, pornography, prostitution, dominatrices, etc. etc.). We respect and honor the fine women who work in it. We want them to keep more of the money for which they work, instead of giving it up to managers and middlemen. We want them to be able to work and live without threats to their safety or fear of unjust laws.

  (In a more ideal world, some of the socially-prominent present and former customers of the sex industry would out themselves and publicly proclaim support for sex-workers’ rights. More on that later, maybe.)

• We’ve no need for that outmoded madonna/whore dichotomy. Most “good girls,” including almost all our mothers, have or once had active sex lives of various sorts. And so-called “bad girls” are really praiseworthy treasures, freely sharing of their precious gifts.
• We’ve also no need for the more recent, but equally outmoded, male asshole/wimp dichotomy. A man, and male energy, can indeed be active forces for good in this world.
• When we work with or for women in employment, we don’t expect them to think or react just as us–or as each other. If they don’t like to hear dirty jokes, we don’t offer them. If they can tell dirtier jokes than we can think up, we let them.
• When we see a beautiful woman provocatively dressed in public, we neither scowl in mock consternation, nor steal a guilty and guilt-inducing glance, nor stare discomfortingly. We make eye contact and give a friendly, smiling gesture of approval, admiration, and thanks.
• While we crave and enjoy plenty of mutually-beneficial sex, we respectfully (if sometimes sighingly) acknowledge there are many, many women who will never care for sex with us–nuns, lesbians, co-workers, faithful wives, and women whose personal taste in men calls for looks or mannerisms other than our own.

I do not personally claim to have fully become this kind of man. But it is an ideal to which I, and I hope many others, will strive.

It’s hard to find contemporary role models for this type of man in the modern pop-culture universe, aside from certain soap-opera hunks or the heroes of the “urban love story” novels written by black men for black women. If you can think of any, please submit them to our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.

MONDAY: My sordid past with John Carlson.

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