THE NEXT FEW INSTALLMENTS of these virtual pages will discuss a topic seldom discussed here–my personal life. You are hereby warned.

I’M NOT SURE when I first became aware that I had misgivings with “America’s love affair with the automobile.” I only know it came at an early age.

I grew up in what at the time was the countryside of Snohomish County, over a mile away from even a convenience store, dependent upon grownups’ cars to even see a movie (the area had no transit system at the time, and the rudimentary one it later obtained has recently been decimated by the first of KV-Lie favorite Tim Eyman’s kill-transit initiatives).

I developed a lifelong disdain for the supposed paradise of the exurbs. I longed to live in a real neighborhood in a real town, even a small one. The countryside became something I wanted to escape from, not to. A sidewalk, a street grid, neighbors, stores that faced a street instead of a parking lot–these were my initial basic icons of a true civilized community (though I wasn’t educated enough yet to actually use such hi-falutin’ words as “community”).

In real farm territories, the automobile was a symbol of freedom and progress. From my vantage point in the far suburbs, it represented enforced isolation and loneliness.

I seemed at the time to have been the only kid anywhere who believed this. Eventually, I’d learn that many, many adults who’d come of age in the Blank and X generations felt the same. (Hence, the hyperinflated housing prices in “real” neighborhoods, and the economic rise of “restored” downtowns at the expense of malls and strip malls.)

But returning to the topic at hand, I finally escaped, eventually settling in Seattle. As a poor college student and an even poorer college graduate, I never got around to buying a car.

It meant that I was dependent on rides to and from places in the far suburbs (such as Boeing Surplus), and that certain other tasks have always been more problematic than they might otherwise have been (such as distributing magazines).

But it also meant that I could read while commuting to work, and that I never had to worry about the little things car owners seem to always worry about (gas prices, new tires, insurance, parking).

One Saturday earlier this month, I borrowed a friend’s late model station wagon. It was my first time behind the wheel in years. To my surprise, it was as easy as ever (even parallel parking). The leisurely, non-traffic-jam drive was even relaxing in a semi-hypnotic sort of way. I instantly understood the lure of the words “Road Trip,” beyond the urge to actually get anywhere.

I’m afraid to make it too big of a habit. I remember the cautionary words from Repo Man: “The more you drive, the less intelligent you become.” (And Repo Man came out before the invention of hate-talk radio!) I suspect the kind of attention safe driving requires might rewire the brain over time, discouraging a certain type of wandering thought process in which certain great and/or stupid ideas can develop.

And as for acquiring my own low-mileage Clarkmobile, that won’t happen just yet. I’ve other major expenses these days, as we’ll discuss tomorrow.

TOMORROW: Misadventures in the housing market.

ELSEWHERE:

• More collectors of unpopular popular culture: OOK (of particular interest: the essay “There’s No Such Thing As a Bad Movie”)….

THE NYC-BASED KOZMO.COM was in the news a couple weeks ago when its Seattle division started firing delivery people and other workers if they refused to submit to background checks. The balking employees called the checks an unfair inveasion of their privacy. Management of Kozmo (which delivers videos, CDs, bestselling books, and fast foods to most of Seattle, and is preparing to branch into costlier goods) says it’s a necessary security measure.

I say the company could have avoided the bad vibes and the bad press. Instead of sicking private eyes on lowly delivery dudes, it could instead have them submit the following Kozmo Quiz:

• Your deliveree is a physically attractive person of your favorite gender, who appears to be home alone. Which would you do?
  

  A. Deliver the ice cream and Three Tenors CD, then continue your route.

  B. Ask if the person will be free when you get off work.

  C. Invite yourself in to re-enact scenes from Last Tango In Paris.

  D. Remember the address for future stalking purposes.

• You note quite a number of condoms, Ricky Martin CDs, and show-tune videos being delivered to a prominent male politician whose public policies you despise. Which would you do?
  

  A. Ignore the information.

  B. Snicker about it quietly with trusted friends.

  C. Report it anonymously to The Stranger’s gossip page.

  D. Plan your blackmail demands.

• You’re delivering a CD by a teen-dream pop singer you loathe. The woman at the door tells you it’s a gift for her preteen daughter. Which would you do?
  

  A. Hand over the merchandise, no questions asked.

  B. Hand over the merchandise, but slip in a demo tape by your own (much more progressive) rock band.

  C. Lecture the mother about the dangers of subjecting an impressionable child to such mindless pap.

  D. Anonymously report the mother to Child Protective Services.

• They won’t let you off work long enough to grab a pair of Ozzfest tickets before they’re sold out. Which would you do?
  

  A. Forget about it and hope Ozzy will tour again next summer.

  B. Arrange to be “stuck in traffic” during the noon hour.

  C. Arrange for a “sudden family emergency” during the noon hour.

  D. Bribe the ticket clerk with all the frozen pizzas he can eat.

• An acquaintance offers to hire you to deliver pot to his friends, using your legitimate delivery job as a cover. Which would you do?
  

  A. Scold him about the dangers of drug use.

  B. Respectfully turn him down.

  C. Accept the offer.

  D. Accept the offer, and additionally offer to throw in a customer’s favorite munchies.

• You suspect a deliveree is making and selling illegal copies of the music and/or movies you deliver. Which would you do?
  

  A. Report your suspicions to the proper authorities.

  B. Keep your big trap shut.

  C. Ask for kickbacks in exchange for your silence.

  D. Offfer to slip them the new Matchbox 20 disc a week before the official release date.

• A driver cuts you off in traffic, giving you the finger as he passes you. The next day, you make a delivery and he answers the door. Which would you do?
  

  A. Let the anger pass, and continue your deliveries.

  B. Identify yourself to him and constructively suggest more courteous driving habits.

  C. Identify yourself to him and give him a piece of your mind.

  D. “Mistakenly” give him My Little Pony: The Movie instead of the Eyes Wide Shut tape he ordered.

• Your deliverees keep requesting movies the company doesn’t stock. Which would you do?
  

  A. Pass their request on to the management.

  B. Ignore them.

  C. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors.

  D. Tell them you can get a copy for them, in exchange for certain sexual favors, but then instead give them My Little Pony: The Movie.

• You’re delivering an “R” rated movie. A teenage male answers the door. No adults are apparently home. Which would you do?
  

  A. Respectfully decline to hand over the tape, unless someone with valid ID can sign for it.

  B. Vocally chew him out over his attempt to put one over on you.

  C. Slip him the tape, if he promises not to tell.

  D. Advise him how far he should fast-forward for the really hot scenes.

• You’re stopped for speeding on your motorcycle while making a delivery. Which would you do?
  

  A. Accept the ticket, and duly report the incident to your superiors.

  B. Accept the ticket, but don’t tell your superiors.

  C. Accept the ticket, but make up for the loss by reporting a couple of “stolen” videos.

  D. Tell the cop that the Internet has no use for government interference, just before you speed away.

Scoring:

Each “A” answer is worth four points.

Each “B” answer is worth three points.

Each “C” answer is worth two points.

Each “D” answer is worth one point.

Totals:

34-40: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so honest, you could be in the Secret Service, protecting the next President of the United States.

26-33: You’re honest enough to be trusted with Kozmo merchandise, yet dishonest enough to make good driving time delivering it.

18-25: You possess a valuable combination of superficial trustworthiness and deep-down duplicity. You shouldn’t be delivering goods on behalf of a dot-com. You should be running your own dot-com, collecting dough from day-trading speculators based on dubious business models.

10-17: What are you doing delivering frozen pizzas and rental copies of Next Friday? You’re so dishonest, you could be the next President of the United States.

TOMORROW: An odd night on the town.

ELSEWHERE:

• “As it’s generally used and encountered, video is either in ‘sell’ mode (snazziness and production values = you’re being sold) or ‘reality’ mode (no professionalism = truth)….”

AFTER THE LAST ISSUE of our MISCmedia print magazine discussed various variations on the theme of “Utopias,” it seemed only proper to follow with a “Dystopias” theme.

Only thing is, I couldn’t find folks who wanted to write about nightmare worlds–other than ones they’d personally lived through.

Perhaps I just didn’t ask the right people.

Perhaps all the dystopia fans were heartbroken when Y2K failed to instantly end Civilization As We Know It.

Perhaps economic times really are good enough (or enough people believe they’re good enough) that they couldn’t imagine things ever getting really scary.

Perhaps everybody’s just so taken in by the talk about global corporate power representing the “End of History” (i.e., the world’s final and permanent socioeconomic configuration) that even those who protest against it can’t imagine any other system (let alone any other dysfunctional system).

Indeed, the cheap and easy way to construct a fictional nightmare future has been to predict the future will be exactly like the present, only more so.

In the past three or four decades, there have been fictional evil futures constructed wholly around single dominant trends of all types: air pollution, oil shortages, overpopulation, fundamentalist religion, nuclear war, the dehumanizing effects associated with big old mainframe computers, radical feminists, radical anti-feminists, humorless liberals, repressive conservatives, Communists, Fascists, Thatcherists, and (just about every dystopian writer’s all-purpose bad guy, in either a lead or supporting role) television.

Just maybe, all these authors’ different wrongnesses add up to one big accuracy–that any future elaborated from a single aspect of the present would be a dystopia.

History seldom flows in a single, linear progression or regression. There are multiple, competing influences in the course of events everywhere. There are trends, backlashes, and backlashes to the backlashes. There are intercene fights, palace struggles, wars, and rumors of wars. There are serendipities, happy accidents, and unplanned disasters.

Life is oscillation and vibration. Death is stasis. A static culture, no matter what it was, would be a living death.

MONDAY: Would “open media” do for (or to) journalists what Napster might do for (or to) musicians?

IN OTHER NEWS: Shopping malls are losing sales fast. Some analysts say half the nation’s current suburban shopping centers may be gone within 10 years. How does a crafty mall operator survive? Make the place look more like a ‘real’ downtown!…

ELSEWHERE:

• Sage advice for the inexperienced lover: “Don’t take etiquette advice from porno films….”
• Are CNBC’s choice of stock-pickers and their recommendations “rigged against the retail investor?”…

THE AMERICAN DISTRIBUTOR of the Danish movie The Idiots demanded its frequent shots of male nudity be (crudely) censored, to insure an ‘R’ rating (and, therefore, the chance at mainstream theatrical bookings and big-newspaper advertising).

My first thought: What’s so horrible about a penis and a couple of testicles anyway? I think my own are just fine. I’ve been in locker rooms and at nude beaches, and my finely-attuned writerly senses were never offended by other men’s dangling participles.

As for female viewers, some sensitive ones might indeed feel confronted by the organs some women associate only with rape and violence, not with lovemaking. But such viewers, I believe, would be helped if they could see more male bodies in the nonthreatening environment of a cinema; they might learn to see them as symbols not of male power but of the ultimate male weakness.

(I’ve seen naked men running, in a nudist camp’s annual Bare Buns Fun Run, and it can be as silly and awkward a sight as one can imagine.)

In certain other jurisdictions of the civilized world (namely Britain and Japan), the formulaic, ritualized entertainment known as hardcore pornography does not legally exist, but less extreme sexual and/or anatomical exhibitions are freely and openly available (nudity in newspapers, cuss words in the comics, simulated film-sex on network TV).

In certain other jurisdictions (such as much of the European continent), this dichotomy is considered superfluous and just about anything goes.

Here, things are a little different.

The Motion Picture Association of America, the media conglomerates who control it, and the other media conglomerates who control major-newspaper advertising have conspired to keep anything more salacious than one Kate Winslet breast from being seen in anything that looks like a real movie theater (where IDs can be checked) and instead relegated to premium cable TV (where anyone living in a subscribing household can conceivably watch) or the adult-video market (where the use of sexuality to reveal characters or tell stories isn’t a high priority).

Anyhoo, I went to the U District and saw the censored version of The Idiots, with the quaint black censor bars around the male parts (and, in only one shot, around female parts).

The movie would’ve been a lot less disturbing if they’d shown the full nude scenes and cut out all the scenes with the cast wearing clothes.

Essentially, this is a story of six men and five women, all young adults of solid bourgeois upbringings, who crash in one of the men’s uncle’s second home and turn their lives into a performance-art project, by acting in a rude and obnoxious manner to anyone they meet. (I can see that sort of thing in the U District any day without spending $7.00 for the privilege, but that’s beside the point.)

Specifically, they do this by pretending to be from a group home for retarded adults. (You might expect me, as one with a retarded older brother, to be offended by this, and I was.)

Back at the house, the film’s characters continue the role-playing as a means of releasing their “inner Idiots.” They justify this with the age-old young-intellectual blather about overcoming everyday consciousness to become one with primal nature; but at least they don’t do this by pretending to be blacks or Indians.

In the last reel, we’re supposed to suddenly poignantly identify with the faux-Idiots, because at least three of them are revealed to have had real emotional problems, and to have been using the Idiot game as therapy. I didn’t buy it.

Nor did I buy the “purity” of the film’s Dogme 95 wobbly-cam technique, which (thanks to too many bad Amerindie fake-documentary films) already seems like just another gimmick.

Director Lars Von Trier has done far better stuff. Any regular filmgoer who tells you otherwise is a, well, you know.

TOMORROW: Flann O’Brien, my current Main Man.

ELSEWHERE:

• The most amazing feat of the year, thus far: Salon.com finally writes about a North American city other than San Francisco!…
• “Bill Gates suffers from a bad case of Acute Hubris Syndrome….”

WITH THE SEATTLE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL safely over for another year, it’s time for a gentle reminder to celluloid-hypnotized Seattleites about the significant differences between the real world and the world depicted in motion pictures:

In the real world:

• People who speak in other languages don’t have little lines of English-language print in front of them.
• Cops who “break all the rules” aren’t always heroes.
• Men have genitalia too.
• There are actually more older women than there are older men.
• Violent criminals aren’t all that hip or fashionable, and usually don’t utter very clever catch phrases.
• Most African-American men are neither athletes, musicians, nor criminal thugs.
• Most African-American women are not prostitutes.
• The populations of Los Angeles and other major U.S. cities include significant numbers of Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, overweight people, non-wealthy people, children, and brunettes.
• Seattle doesn’t look exactly like Vancouver.
• Objects in outer space don’t make sounds. Not even when they explode.
• Deaf, aged, or disease-ridden people are no more or less saintly than anybody else.
• Most North American adults work in jobs. Many of these jobs are rather unglamorous.
• Most sagas of racial struggle and injustice don’t centrally involve, and aren’t solved by, a noble white male hero.
• Gay men aren’t always cute and fabulous; lesbians aren’t always smugly self-righteous.
• More than half the Americans who were alive during the year 1968 were not, at the time, college students.
• People often talk to one another for longer than two minutes at a time.
• Private investigators handle many more divorces than homicides, and spend more time searching databases than firing guns or chasing cars.
• International espionage agents are often not particularly athletic.
• Women often don’t wake up in the morning already wearing make-up or with their hair perfectly styled.
• Sexual intercourse involves odd smells, silly noises (such as that of two tummies in friction), awkward pauses, imperfect bodies, and sticky messes. At least when it’s done right.
• Teenagers and young adults have additional drives and goals besides sex.
• Adulterous affairs don’t always lead to violent confrontations ending in one or more tragic deaths.
• Some people go to church. Some of these people are not necessarily moralistic stuck-ups. Some of them even have sex.
• Physically and mentally challenged people don’t exist merely for our amusement.
• More people lose at lotteries, slot machines, battle-of-the-bands competitions, etc. than win them.
• Pain hurts.

MONDAY: Mulling some possible changes to this site.

ELSEWHERE:

• A personal, opinionated, yet quasi-objective guide to modern beliefs and superstitions, The Skeptic’s Dictionary….
• Cuss like they used to cuss, with the Shakespearean Insult Generator (found by Applelinks)….

SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with that other monopolistic operation Paul Allen used to partly own.

IF I WERE A CONSPIRACY THEORIST, which I’m still not, I’d ponder the following scenario with a furrowed brow:

1. A company called TicketWeb proclaims itself to be a new, valiant challenger to the Ticketmaster monopoly.

2. It quickly snaps up contracts for alterna-rock and DJ venues and other places and bands whose “indie street cred” means they’ve been reluctant to join the Ticketmaster fold.

3. TicketWeb then promptly sells out to Ticketmaster, leaving the ticketing monopoly even further entrenched.

ELSEWHERE IN CONSOLIDATION-LAND, the Feds apparently believe the big media conglomerates still aren’t big enough. They want to let big broadcasting chains control even more TV/radio stations and networks. This latest proposed deregulation was entered into Congress on behalf of Viacom, which wants to buy CBS but keep the (practically worthless to any other potential buyer) UPN network.

MORE RAPSTERMANIA!: One of those media-consolidators, Seagram/Universal boss Edgar Bronfman, comes from a family that originally got rich smuggling booze across the Canada/U.S. border during the U.S. Prohibition era.

Now, he’s quoted as saying MP3 bootlegging represents such a major threat to the intellectual-property trust that he wants massive, Big Brother-esque legal maneuvers to stop it–even at the expense of online anonymity and privacy.

Meanwhile, the whole Net-based-home-taping controversy has caused Courtney Love to finally say some things I agree with, for once. She’s suing to get out of what she considers a crummy contract with one of Bronfman’s record labels. As such, Love (formerly one of the harshest critics of the Olympia-style anti-major-label ideology) has suddenly turned into an even harsher critic of major-label machinations and corruption:

“I’m leaving the major-label system. It’s … a really revolutionary time (for musicians), and I believe revolutions are a lot more fun than cash, which by the way we don’t have at major labels anyway. So we might as well get with it and get in the game.”

RE-TALES: Downtown Seattle’s Warner Bros. Studio Store has shuttered its doors. Apparently the location, across from the ex-Nordstrom in the middle of the Fifth-Pine-Pike block, isn’t the hi-traffic retail site big touristy chain stores like. (An omen for Urban Outfitters, now also in that stretch of the block?)

In more positive out-of-state retail-invasion news, you no longer have to go to Tacoma to buy your chains at a chain store. Seattle’s now got its own branch of Castle Superstores, “America’s Safer Sex Superstore.” It sells teddies, mild S/M gear, condoms, vibes, XXX videos, naughty party games, edible body paints, and related novelties. It’s in an accessible but low-foot-traffic location on Fairview Ave., right between the Seattle Times and Hooters.

TOMORROW: Some differences between the real world and the world of the movies.

ELSEWHERE:

• Documentarian Jeff Krulik has posted streaming versions of his movies online, from Heavy Metal Parking Lot to Ernest Borgnine on the Bus!…
• What will follow drive-thru espresso stands? (found by Fark)….
• The Zagat restraurant-guide series’s rejected reader comments (found by Bud)….

A REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

TO OUR READERS: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.

AS LONG AS the Feds have Microsoft square in their judicial gunsights, ready to cleave the software monopoly in two (pending the results of a few years in appellate courts), let’s add our own recommendations for the “remedy phase” of the case.

After all, we in the Seattle metro area have been affected by the machinations of our own native son Bill Gates, for good and/or for ill, just as the global business and computing scenes have been.

So herewith, a few modest proposals for how Gates and company (or companies) can partly atone for what they’ve done to our formerly quiet little region:

• A maximum wage for executives.
• A maximum work week for all other employees.
• An affordable-housing fund, to be supported by all MS or sons-of-MS profits above a preset point.
• A mass-transit fund, to be supported by a share of all proceeds from MS paid support calls.
• A program to give cell phones to street people, so they’ll look little different from everybody else talking aloud by themselves these days.
• Employee-retraining programs for all upper-echelon MS or sons-of-MS personnel. Subjects may include Beginning Humility, Intermediate Niceness, and Advanced Getting-A-Life.
• Charm-school lessons for all single male employees, to shape them into the sorts of guys women could stand being around even if the guys didn’t have money.
• A public-service advertising campaign, much like that of the tobacco industry, only propagating values for a post-MS Seattle:

  “Money. It’s not everything.”

  “Support the arts. Buy some local art today.”

  “Other people. Talk to one or more of them today.”

  “There’s not enough ‘country’ for everybody who wants to be the only person in it.”

  “Tech stocks: Tempting but dangerous.”

  “Is that fourth car really necessary?”

  “Get off the computer and talk to your wife. At least once a week.”

  “Sex is like tennis. It’s a lot more fun when you’re not playing alone.”

  “You’re not the center of the universe. Live with it.”

• A pledge to start making software that didn’t crash, freeze up computers, or allow pesky email viruses to spread, at least not as much.

  (Okay, this last demand is the one MS will never, ever agree to. But one can dream, can’t one?)

IN RELATED NEWS: The Canadians have already taken away Wash. state’s film industry. Now they want to take Microsoft. I’d say “Let ’em have it,” but that’d be cruel to our beloved neighbors-2-the-north.

TOMORROW: Did I really think white people wouldn’t take over hiphop?

ELSEWHERE:

• What Domino’s employees really think of their products (found by Boing Boing)….
• Do “Chicks Dig Unix”?…

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

TO OUR READERS #1: Due to problems uploading to our server, some of you may have missed Tuesday’s column. It’s linked here, and it has to do with Paul Allen’s architectural monumentalism. Read it, then come back to this page.

TO OUR READERS #2: Yr. ob’t corresp’d’t has been summoned to that great spectator sport known as jury duty. Daily site updates may or may not, therefore, be spotty over the next few days. Stay tuned for more.

I’M WRITING THIS a little over a week in advance, due to the potential circumstances listed above. As of this writing date, this year’s Seattle International Film Festival is four days old, and I haven’t been to it yet.

I have been out, mind you–hanging with chums, going to alt-country music shows and non-SIFF movies, seeing U District Street Fair bands risking short-circuits by playing their guitars and amps in the late-May rain.

Last year I went to nine SIFF films. Some years I’ve been to as many as 15; some none at all. I know, you all just assumed I had a full series pass every year, but no.

Mind you, I love foreign and/or true indie films. The best ones tell great stories with great characters, while de- and re-constructing the language of audio-visual communication (the language we’re all used to receiving, and an increasing number of us are learning to speak).

But I’ve never been an all-out SIFF “film orgy” obsessive.

But I still love to observe those who are. While the universe of film has utterly changed several times over the past quarter century, the hardcore SIFF fan base remains as it ever was (albeit slightly older in its average age).

The traditional SIFF target audience: professional, educated, practical, sensible, of middle-class origin but upper-middle-class present circumstances. Likes to see her/himself as an “arts” lover, but is simply less intrigued by live theater, dance, etc. than by film.

And it’s easy to understand why.

The highbrow performing arts are the sorts of stuff someone who didn’t come from an affluent or intellectual background would grow up familiar with, except thru sometimes dreary culture-in-the-schools programs.

But film’s different. It can be enjoyed as the more challenging, more socially acceptable version of “the movies”–something even the daughters and sons of G.I. Bill parents had grown up loving.

The two Canadians who started SIFF knew this was their target market. Over the years, they carefully nurtured this audience with an ever-larger melange of serious art-film, midnight-style fun film, bloated-budget Hollywood product, classic Hollywood oldies, other countries’ commercial-entertainment movies, films for women, films for gays, those emerging Miramax-formula “indie” U.S. films, and every year’s new B-movie trend (slackers, hip violence, AIDS musicals, etc.); all served up with healthy portions of hoopla and hype.

(Even the local TV newscasts, which abandoned arts coverage several years ago, still cover SIFF, at least when there’s a Hollywood celebrity visiting it.)

While filmmaking in Seattle has had its fits and starts, the curation and attendance of SIFF have done as much as any actual film to reveal the tastes and character of the pre-Microsoft Seattle. SIFF, like the city it grew up in, is (or was) often predictably bourgeois and monocultural, interested in other lands principally as sources of exotic Other-ness–but also sincerely receptive to new ideas and experiences (as long as they’re at least mildly entertaining and not too noisy), and proud to proclaim itself a crossroads of the world.

Other film festivals may have more celebs, more prestige, more deal-making action, or more industry clout. But SIFF’s got more total films, and in so many different flavors.

And it’s all because the “film orgy” hardcore audience likes it that way.

TOMORROW: Life dies again.

IN OTHER NEWS: For the first time, the Indy 500 had two women. They quickly crashed into one another. But before you go “so much for gender solidarity,” note that the crash was caused by a third driver.

ELSEWHERE:

• What Murphy’s Law really says–and even who Murphy was!…
• Rich white kids pretending to be mack daddies (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)….

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

SOME SHORT STUFF this Memorial day, starting with two words you should start remembering:

“Fette Mittlelschrift.”

You’ve probably never heard its name before, but you’ve seen it.

It’s the typeface that’s taking over the world.

(Some type suppliers call it “Meta,” but we’ll choose to call it by the more-fun name.)

Last year, it seemed every wannabe-hip graphic designer and design client (from rave flyers to MTV to Urban Outfitters) was agog over plain old Helvetica, the typeface they all saw as representing the sleek modernism people in the ’60s thought people in the ’00s would all be living in. (I, as a former late-’70s-early-’80s young adult, still identify Helvetica with bad early desktop publishing and Penthouse magazine.)

But now that nostalgia for formerly-predicted 21st centuries is a fairly done deal, this newer sleek-modern sans serif face is spreading everywhere.

Readers around here probably know Fette Mittelschrift as the typeface in The Bon Marche’s current ads. It’s immediately identifiable by its narrow letter shapes, its large “x” sizes, and the peculiar lower-right curve in its lower-case “L”s.

Once you recognize it, you’ll start spotting it everywhere–Harper’s Bazaar cover blurbs, assorted smaller lifestyle and fashion rags, on-screen graphics on The NBA On TNT and the Independent Film Channel, and ads and in-store signs for Bank of America, Canon, Merrill Lynch, Payless ShoeSource, Kmart, Oldsmobile, Subaru, American Express, HBO, Philip Morris (those pathetic “Working to Make A Difference” spots), and many, many others.

(Similar, but not precisely identical, typefaces are used by the new P-I TV listings and those annoying ABC “We Love TV” ads.)

But be careful–once you start realizing just how widespread Fette Mittelschrift is, you could end up seeing it everywhere; or even obsessively-compulsively repeating the name, a la Zippy the Pinhead. “Fette Mittelschrift, Fette Mittelschrift, Fette Mittelschrift.”

PHILM PHUN: Let’s attempt, for future readers, to explain some prospective future confusion.

The 2000 release American Psycho was, on at least one level, about beauty–a cold, antihuman, perfectionistic ideal of beauty.

The 1999 release American Beauty was about psychos–four adults and three teenagers, each a case study in a different type of psychological dysfunction (neurosis, paranoia, catatonia, voyeurism, transferred incest-compulsion, etc.).

Critics who called AB just another anti-suburban slam were wrong. It’s really a taut character study that could be set in any affluent North American setting. It’s just that the “wide open spaces” setting clashes perfectly with the characters’ internal confinement.

TOMORROW: The city Paul Allen’s building, in spite of us.

ELSEWHERE:

• Weblogs as the modern equivalent of old-time cabinets of wonders….
• Being an invisible woman means never worrying about your looks….

AN EARLY REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

TODAY’S MISCmedia is dedicated to actor-director Paul Bartel, whose Eating Raoul remains the most true-to-life cinematic portrayal of a baby-boomer generation grown hostile to the essential life-forces and obsessed with individual lifestyle “perfection.”

THANKS TO THE WEB, annoying marketing cliches and concepts can emerge, rise, and burn out at up to ten times their previous rate.

Today’s case in point: All those “My __” sites.

How it works:

(1) Take any portal site, news site, sports-stat site, MP3-download site, online-retail site, or burlap-sack-fetish site.

(2) Fix it up to add even a tiny bit of user customization. Maybe let a user pick the background colors, or set it up to show soybean-futures prices but not flaxseed-futures prices.

(3) Congratulations! No longer have you a mere “Notarysojac.com”. You can now proudly offer “My Notarysojac.com”!

Always ones to believe in taking dumb ideas and running them further into the ground, we hereby pre-announce plans to (one of these quarters, eventually, as soon as we finish reading CGI-BIN Scripting for Dummies) revamp this site so you can create “My MISCmedia.”

• Choose your satirical target. Don’t get riled up by today’s pre-chosen topic? Then pick another, from a handy list that might include:
  • Half-million-dollar condos that need structural repairs after just one winter.
  • Why Dallas doesn’t deserve to host championship ice hockey.
  • This weather we’re having lately.
  • Those Kids Today.
  • Talk show hosts who have their own magazines with themselves on the cover.
  • That “Whazzup?” beer commercial.
• Choose your sarcastic comments and adjectives. Instead of the same-old same-old, pepper up your reading with your selection of:
  • “What’s up with that?”
  • “Can you believe the nerve of these guys?”
  • “Doesn’t anybody remember how much this sucked the last time it was revived?”
  • “Just call me another old white guy who doesn’t get it.”
  • “The feel-good hit of the year.”
  • “Bravo! Encore! More, more, more! Don’t stop yet!”
• Choose your semi-obscure topical references. Compare your chosen topic to your chosen point of universal comparison:
  • The deciding Game Six of the 1979 NBA finals.
  • The lost original ending to The Magnificent Ambersons.
  • Police Academy III: Back In Training.
  • The life and works of Emily Dickinson.
  • The final episode of Roseanne.
  • Dryer lint.
• Choose your trite and predictable political line. For every phenomenon, there’s a quick-N-easy way to classify it into a prepackaged ideological schematic, such as:
  • “That’s so pretentiously anti-PC, it’s PC.”
  • “If we can implode the Kingdome, why can’t we stop this?”
  • “As a phenomenon, it makes less of a statement than it does a rhetorical question.”
  • “Another example of the dominant culture’s systematic peripheralization of The Other in the realm of signifying discourse.”
  • “In a planned economy we’d have just the same thing, only it would be to the proletariat’s benefit.”
  • “Mumia wouldn’t approve.”
• Choose your simple explanation. For every phenomenon, there’s a quck-N-easy way to classify it as part of an all-purpose universal enemy, such as:
  • The Patriarchy.
  • The IMF/World Bank.
  • Bill Gates.
  • The UN’s Black Helicopters.
  • People who eat meat and watch television.
  • The fashion industry.
• Choose your more perfect world, in which such aboninable phenomena would never occur:
  • The Late Sixties.
  • The pre-recorded-history worldwide matriarchy.
  • The True Socialism that’s never been practiced anywhere yet.
  • Regency England.
  • The good old days of the Depression.
  • The future Libertarian paradise, after governments have been dissolved and business runs everything.
• Choose your would-be snappy closer.
  • “Make it so.”
  • “If not here, where? If not now, when?”
  • “Whatsoever ye do, do so quickly.”
  • “I say it’s spinach.”
  • “Those who forget [insert today’s topic here] are doomed to repeat it.”
  • “Joe Bob says check it out.”

MONDAY:The next Great Anti-Microsoft Hope: Is it open-source software Or is it Napster? Neither?

ELSEWHERE:

• They’re ready to save post-cocktail culture from the crude, the rude, and the cell-phoned: They’re the Etiquette Grrls!…

PLENTY OF BAD MOVIES have come from good books.

And, occasionally, a good movie has come from a bad book.

Today’s case study: American Psycho.

Folks who’ve seen the movie but haven’t read the book have had a hard time believing the book was so dumb when the movie was so smart.

Where the movie was witty, bitingly satirical, and equipped with a standard story arc, the book was dull and repetitive, and didn’t end; it just stopped.

Where the movie depicted title character Patrick Bateman’s crimes obliquely, as possibly just his own fantasies, the book made them all too real and depicted them all too explicitly.

And where the movie has Bateman killing (or fantasizing about killing) anyone who even moderately annoys him, the book’s psycho principally kills beautiful women, principally as a power-fetish obsession.

Before the book came out, as some of you may remember, it was the topic of a boycott campaign by certain radical feminists who’d apparently neither (1) read it nor (2) heard that a novel’s chief character isn’t always a “hero.” The boycotters wanted folks to not only not buy Psycho but any other book from any publisher that dared put it out (except for books written by radical feminists).

When the book came out, the boycott campaign quietly faded. It was instantly clear to any reader that author Bret Easton Ellis (Glamorama, Less Than Zero) wanted to update the Jack the Ripper legend to 1980s Wall Street. He wanted to depict his modern-day setting as a parallel to pre-Victorian London, another place where decadent rich kids thought they had the unquestionable right to do anything they wanted, to anyone they wanted to do it to.

But Ellis’s thematic ambitions greatly dwarfed his literary abilities. The result was a borderline-unreadable mishmosh of heavy-handed moralizing, repeating the same plot sequence several times:

1. Bateman works at his bank job, making merger deals that make him rich while sending workers at the merged companies to unknown, and uncared-about, fates.

2. Bateman hangs out with his “friends;” chats about some of the fine brand-name consumer products he has or will soon get.

3. He meets someone, usually female, often someone he’s previously known (an ex or a recent date).

4. He gets her alone and emotionlessly, methodically butchers her.

Repeat step 1.

The movie’s director and co-screenwriter Mary Harron was told by her backers to cut way down on the book’s explicit violence, both to ensure an “R” rating and to make it more acceptable to female moviegoers. When she did that, she also restructured the story. She emphasized the dark humor and social commentary Ellis had tried and failed to achieve.

She’s made a movie nice upscale audiences can go see, then chat about later, comfortably imagining themselves to not be anything like the psycho Bateman and his shallow drinking buddies.

Meanwhile, the real-life Batemans on Wall Street and elsewhere continue to pull the strings of a consolidating economy, destroying thousands of livelihoods (though not directly destroying lives) and seldom giving it a second thought.

TOMORROW: Could Microsoft become a greater threat apart than together?

ELSEWHERE:

• Cooking with the indie-rock stars!…
• Another listing of wacky items sold on Ebay….

SOME SHORTS TODAY:

THE MAY ISSUE of the MISCmedia print magazine may be delayed a week or so, for reasons to be discussed later. (I’m feeling fine and everything; just job and personal complications have taken their time toll.)

THE FOLLOWING is the actual text of the story in the bottom-left corner of the Seattle Times front page on Sunday, 4/16, under the headline, “In Europe’s eyes, America becomes uglier and uglier”:

Newspaper

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch.

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification.

It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 2 inches of standard body copy. 2 inches.

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading. It should be replaced with the real story. You now have 1 inch of standard body copy. 1 inch.

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification.

It will be replaced with the story when it is ready.

You have 3 inches.

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with standard tracking, hyphenation and justification.

It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 4 inches of standard body copy. 4 inches.

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading.

With standard tracking, H & J.

It will be replaced with the story when it is ready. You have 5 inches of standard body copy. 5 inches.

This text is set in Century Old Style at 9.8 points with 10.6 points of leading with

PLEASE SEE Story slug on Xx

STACKED: More fascinating info keeps emerging about Rem Koolhaas, the “world class” (code word for out-of-state) architect picked to design the new main Seattle library. For one thing, he just got his profession’s top award. Even cooler, the Times reported he once wrote an unproduced screenplay for everybody’s favorite sexploitation filmmaker, Russ Meyer! (I don’t know if it had anything to do with the naked-in-the-library fantasies occasionally reported on with bemusement in the Abada Abada weblog.)

DID YOU FEEL TIRED last Friday? Everyone I met that day said so. At least those who had enough energy to get out of the house. I was in line at Tower Records at 4 p.m. and everybody was yawning.The bars I hopped among were nearly deserted later that evening; folks who should’ve been bouncing and dancing were shuffling and moping instead.Was it just the arrival of cool weather after a week of warm temps, or was it a post-full-moon energy drop, or unconscious Good Friday solemnity?

TOMORROW: Seattle as photo-copyright capital of the world.

ELSEWHERE:

• I can’t believe PolkaNet got undeservedly listed in the “Worst 15 Sites on the Web”….

CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.

But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.

And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.

We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.

We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.

There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.

Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).

It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.

Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.

As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.

When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.

They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.

Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.

TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.

ELSEWHERE:

• Implode Your Own Dome!
• The most current list of forbidden phrases for the year 2000 (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room)….

TODAY’S COLUMN IS DEDICATED to that timeless vaudeville comic of the Stiff Records era, Ian Dury.

WATCH THIS SPACE: No sooner had we printed the precarious status of the Frontier Room than rumors spread about potential changes at Belltown’s other remaining old-folks’ drinking house, the venerable Rendezvous.

For the sake of our out-of-town readers, some background: The area surrounding Second Ave. and Battery St. used to be Seattle’s “Film Row,” where the major studios had their regional distribution offices. The Rendezvous restaurant and lounge was built on this block in the ’30s by a company that built and furnished movie theaters. Its back room, a former private screening room where the movie distributors previewed their latest offerings to theater managers, was designed as a miniature version of the auditoria this company designed and supplied.

In recent decades, the Rendezvous has had two simultaneous main uses. The beautiful back room has been a reasonably-priced rental hall for Belltown’s young hipsters to hold birthday parties, film screenings, performance-art pieces, and music shows. (At least three music videos have been shot there.)

The crowded barroom, meanwhile, has proudly served strong cocktails and cans of Rainier beer to merchant seamen, fishing-boat shoreleavers, old-age pensioners, working-class widows, and young adult alkies-in-training. As building after building in Belltown has gotten torn down or upscaled, the Rendezvous is one of the neighborhood’s last remaining unpretentious dive bars.

But for how much longer?

Here’s all we’ve been able to confirm: The building’s been sold. The new landlors have evicted the apartments, band-rehearsal spaces, and bicycle shop, which had all been on month-to-month.

The Rendezvous itself, and the Sound Mail Services private-mailbox service next door, have long-term leases, which will apparently be adhered to for now.

But eventually, rumor-mongers claim, the new landlords would like to assume management of the restaurant-lounge and (yes, that dreaded word arises once more) “restore” it.

As one who’s held public events in the Rendezvous’s classy old meeting room, I’d loathe any changes that would make the pensioners and fishing-boat people less welcome there.

Maybe we could hold a benefit toward keeping the Rendezvous more or less as-is. I’m sure we could get Dodi, the local band named after the Rendezvous’s legendary veteran barmaid, to play at it.

TOMORROW: Boy, we’ve sure got some demographics.

ELSEWHERE:

• Another utterly-cute vehicle we’ll probably never see in the U.S., the Phoenix….
• Cheaper than car collecting, it’s road-map collecting (found by Larkfarm)….