…“sick foods,” but I make up for it with well drinks.

Heather Rogers, who derives more enjoyment from drag shows than I do, contributes the following second installment of personal entertainment recommendations:

“Hello you pretty people,

Today’s Earth Day, so cut the whole “I’m so over the whole PC thing… I gave up recycling in ’94 along with my Birks” attitude. Today’s a great day to do something good. Like make a window box of flowers. Or get your soil tested for lead and arsenic and report the results to the city (it’ll help you with your lawsuit later on!). And you know what—you’re helping the environment RIGHT NOW—by reading fabulous online media (although I know a lot of you print out my column so you can read it in the bathtub while touching your “special place”. But I forgive you, you dirty doggies!)

Speaking of special places, you need to read Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. It’s Hedwig chilled and served with a slice of baklava. It’s a fuller Bildungsroman. It’s fabulous. I know I mentioned it last time, but I don’t think enough of you are actually reading it yet. Plus if you want to be part of Nerd Out book club, you need to read it. Our next meeting is May 9 at 3 pm. There will be a special screening of Hedwig following the meeting, featuring erotic food. Email me for more details at slowdiva@yahoo.com.

Now, onwards to what the hell are you going to do this weekend:

Make time this weekend for the MC5 True Testimonial film at the Little Theatre. It’s playing April 23-29 (no show Mon.) at 608 19th Avenue East, $7. Dir: David C. Thomas. This will also go along great with Middlesex because it, too, will Detroit race riots in the late ‘60s, albeit from a very different perspective. Plus, a rare MC5 photo show following the film Dial 206- 675-2055 for more info.

Tonight: Rest up—you’ve got a busy weekend ahead of you.

FRIDAY NIGHT, the favorite choice is the BIG GAY DANCE NIGHT at Chop Suey. Or you could check out the Turn-Ons and Film School at the Croc. But I think we all need a little big gay dancing right now. (Oh, underagers—you could go see a cool band called Holy Ghost Revival at the Old Firehouse. But I’m mean and don’t like that venue, and I don’t go to the Eastside. Sorry! I’m a West End Girl now (see below for details).)

SATURDAY NIGHT, the music isn’t really making my slot go ca-ching, but I know what will… and you heard it hear first. Check out the window peep show at Salon Dewi, right by the Baltic Room. Travis the Waxing Diva will wax a girl’s private area (that is, PUSSY!) in public. Ooh, Naughty Naughty. Anyway, it starts at 10 pm and it’s free. Perfect—you have some din-dins over at Machiavelli, then watch some poor innocent girl (he always seems to talk some clueless little thing from the suburbs into this action—it reminds me of that sexy ravishing-of-the-innocent-girl scene in Interview with the Vampire. Yum.) have her icky old hair removed, exposing her oh-so-tender, flushed, peachy flesh… Then go to the Baltic Room after you’re all charged up and dance sweatily to house music with someone hot. OK!

Monday is actually the BIG NIGHT this weekend (or week, whatever). You have to choose between Kraftwerk at the Paramount and BLACK REBEL MOTORCYCLE CLUB and the Rapture at the Showbox. Whatcha gonna do now?  Huh?  (Tho’ I love BRMC and the Rapture, the correct choice is obviously KRAFTWERK. Duh. They’re playing only three American cities, I heard).

So, I’m moving to West Seattle this weekend, so I’m going to rely on my gentle (and rough) readers to give me the skinny, because though my ear will still be to the ground, the vibrations will have to travel farther to get to me. So, fork over your fab events and if it sounds cool, I’ll tell everyone.

You know what? I love you. I really, really do.”

…is no longer live.

…are just too important to ignore. One of these is the 50th birthday of Tater Tots! Since Ore-Ida’s now owned by Heinz, the little golden-brown cylinders of goodness oughta be served up at every Kerry campaign dinner.

…and mom-n’-pop operators take over, they’re “Not Fooling Anybody.”

…to the hard-working food technologists, never slacking in their efforts to formulate snack products that (1) don’t have the nasty stuff that makes snack foods so wonderful, and (2) don’t taste like cardboard.

I AGREE COMPLETELY with Mark Rahner: The biggest threat from the mad-cow scare is having to face the smug crowing of fundamentalist vegans. Four close acquaintances have either emailed me vegan sermons or personally taken me to “raw food” restaurants for ice-cold carrot-and-eggplant soup. They remain close acquaintances, but they haven’t converted me.

Yes, the meat-processing industry’s rife with corruption and shoddy “efficiency” practices. But I’m not going to protest sweatshop clothing factories by walking around naked; at least not when it’s twenty degrees outside.

MORE THAN A HUNDRED grocery, drug, and hardware store staples of the near and far past can be seen again at The American Package Museum.

(via Anne Silberman):

“I usually agree with your take on sex and frivolity and the joys of loving our bodies and those of others.  However, I feel I must take issue with your stance on the Naked Sushi trend.  I wasn’t offended until I read the story at the Seattle Times and saw the photo.Perhaps it was because the model’s face wasn’t included in the shot but I couldn’t help but see the dehumanizing quality of using a living, breathing female as a serving platter!  I was horribly offended and even more so when I read that this is a trend that started in Japan and has moved to the US, first in Los Angeles and now in Seattle!  Where will it stop?  This is not celebratory of life at all.  It is exploitative. Perhaps if others find it offensive, the sushi bar will lose customers and the practice will stop. In a paternalistic, capitalistic society, that is the best we can hope for.

Otherwise, still love Miscmedia.

Anne”

Some people are apparently irate about a Pioneer Square restaurant offering something called “Naked Sushi,” an evening in which little sushi tidbits are served from the Saran-wrapped torso of a reposing woman (wearing just enough, besides the Saran, to appease the Liquor Board).

This is essentially a commercialization of an old Yoko Ono performance-art piece; or, if you will, a fusion-cuisine adaptation of an old entertainment shtick done in Hellfire Club-era London drinking parlors (as fantasized about in Geoff Nicholson’s novel The Food Chain.)

It’s not a statement of hatred against women or against sushi. If the restaurant in question presents it in the proper way, it could be a statement of sensuality, of adoration, and of honor for the circle of life.

Or, if the restaurant in quesiton presents it in the improper way, it could just be a silly little lark.

THE PNW isn’t just the most unemployed part of the nation, it’s now also the hungriest.

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, you’ll all be treated to the sights of the most recent Western Washington Fair (aka “The Puyallup”)

In its 102nd year (not counting the WWII years when its site was used as a Japanese-American internment camp), the fair was its ever-lovin’ boot-stompin’ best, an entertainment and people-watchin’ spectacle at least equal to anything staged at Seattle Center.

(I suspect it’d even be a superior fun-time to that certain tres-overhyped googah in the desert Southwest if said googah didn’t have any nekkid people.)

My date for the afternoon was a devout vegan who, for some reason, didn’t know beforehand that the cows on display at the fair were likely to become next month’s filet mignon–until she ran into a Beef Marketing Board counter in the beef-cattle barn, offering free samples from some of the same breeds lolling about in the stalls.

On a more immediately practical level, my companion found nothing that met her strict dietary standards at the fair’s dozens of fast-food stands (all non-chain; many run by third-generation families that have become cozy insiders with fair management). If just a few of these ol’ standbys were asked to give up some of their multiple stands around the fairgrounds, other folk could join ’em with a wider variety of meal/snack offerings.

One could easily imagine an allegedly “healthy” food concessionaire who could hype their wares as part of the fair’s original mission of promoting agriculture in Washington. They could promote their entrees, salads, desserts, energy drinks, etc. as products from higher-profit-margin crops that could fiscally save some family farms.

Why heck, such a food stand could even cross-promote its wheatgrass shakes and veggie platters with the guys who hawk blenders and choppers in the Modern Living barns.

AS PROMISED, here are the last of my Bumbershoot Ought-Three pix, at the big R.E.M./Wilco gig in High School Memorial Stadium. (No, the stadium’s not named in honor of dead high schools, even though Seattle’s got two or three of those.)

This year’s stadium “stage sponsor” was Comcast, the local-monopoly cable company (formerly AT&T, formerly TCI, formerly Group W, formerly TelePrompTer). Several of these successive companies have had logos that matched their business models.

TCI, you might recall, had a symbol of a sun (or satellite) beaming a signal to the Earth, exemplifying the old-media premise of everybody getting their entertainment/news/culture from one central source.

AT&T’s ringed circle visualized the company’s post-Bell System dream of wiring the world, back in the days before wireless-mania.

And Comcast has a stylized version of the circle-C copyright symbol, that icon of reverence to an increasingly concentrated (and increasingly vilified) intellectual-property industry.

The two acts on stage Monday night bridged one or two generation gaps, and cut across subcultural niche-appeal.

Wilco’s act, if described literally, would read like the description of an early-’70s “country rock” band. Wilco’s not like that. It’s simply a great, intelligent, inventive pop and rock group, which doesn’t “cross over” between categories so much as it defies easy categorization. (No wonder their record label dropped them just as they made their best record to date, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, as depicted in the documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.)

Little new seems to be sayable about the livin’ legends of R.E.M., except that (1) they’re more or less a Seattle band these days, and (2) they still make beautiful-sad-upbeat-energetic-soft-hard-fast-slow-memorable music, even in the promlematic environment of a stadium show.

…of our local heritage disappears: Vitamilk Dairy is shutting its Green Lake plant after more than 60 years as the region’s biggest indie milk distributor. Its production fell in half since 1997, due to consolidation in the supermarket biz.

I’ll always remember the Vitamilk truck that showed up two mornings a week at the ol’ childhood home, with the quaintly obsolete milk-bottle logo and the script-lettered slogan “Quality Always.” To the end, Vitamilk was a savvy marketer that knew what Washingtonians wanted; jumping on the latter-day bandwagon to promise only “free farmed” moo juice.

AS YOU CAN SEE ABOVE, yr. dangerously underemployed web editor bit the proverbial bullet of credit card debt and attained a replacement digicam.

The particular scene is the King County Regional Justice Center in the much-maligned suburban community of Kent, right in between the vestigial old small town and the strip-mall and office-park barrenscape. This big, magnificent 1997 building is NOT a grandiose waste-O-taxpayer-$$, in my opine. In places such as Kent where private-sector architecture’s particularly brutal & grim, we need governments to show what the built environment can be like when it’s made with care for the people who have to move through it.

Today, I was one who had to move through it. Called for jury duty, I spent a long under-caffinated morning being herded from room to room, listening to judges’ lectures and watching an instructional video on the juror’s responsibilities narrated by the late Raymond Burr (who probably did more to popularize misunderstandings about the trial process than anybody in U.S. history). At the end of all this, a state attorney kicked me out of the trial being empaneled that day. I get to go back Tuesday and make myself available for other trials.

Following that misadventure, I finally got to dine at an indie BBQ joint I’ve long heard about and even written about, the legendary Cave Man Kitchens. It’s one of those “you need no teeth to eat our beef” places. The meat is smoked and melt-in-your-mouth; the sauce is sweet and tomato-ey. Good eatin’. (Though I prefer the Pecos Pit on First Avenue South.)