Thanks to the 50-plus people who partied with me last Friday as I became 50-plus. (No, I don’t have any pix. I’m not that self-centered.)

I don’t think of myself as an oldster. Some generous people have said I don’t look like one, either. Except for a strange craving for afternoon naps I started having last year, I still see myself as the frustrated ex-college student trying to get his life started already. (I was going to write that I still feel like a 25-year-old, but that didn’t mean I was going to get one.)

It turns out there’s one celebrity born on my day in my year: Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. He even made a circuitous reference to his birthday in the strip published that day.

Other folks sharing the great six/eight include Frank Lloyd Wright, Jerry Stiller, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Kanye West, Nancy Sinatra, Sonia Braga (herself still fabulous), Griffin Dunne, Supreme Court Justice Byron White, Joan Rivers, Mariner Kenji Johjima, Picket Fences costar Kathy Baker, James Darren, Bernie Casey, Colin Baker, DNA researcher Francis Crick, and some obscure Brit named Tim Berners-Lee who thought up something called the World Wide Web.

(Alas, I also share my special day with My Lai killer William Calley and Satan-spawner Barbara Bush.)

A birthday, especially one that’s a nice round number, traditionally represents a good time to look back at things.

I remember a few things about my early years–watching that primitive, five-channel television (one of my lifelong loves); teaching myself to read newspapers at around age three-and-a-half (another of my lifelong loves); getting bullied by the older kids; leaving the bucolic outskirts of Olympia (long before That College was ever built) for the comparatively sterile foothills east of Marysville (long before its casino- and sprawl-driven boom); being bored to tears by school and household chores; repeatedly discovering that a jock town held no particular fondness for smart but un-athletic boys; finding little to no interest in most bad-boy style recreations (drinking, smoking, drugging, cussing, driving, fighting); feeling imprisoned out in the (then) countryside; wishing as hell that I was among real streets and sidewalks; sitting and squirming in the back seat of a ’57 Chevy station wagon (we eventually became a “Ford family”); finding and losing religion; seeing my first live rock concert (a promo gig at the opening of a new housing development with The New Yorkers, later known as the Hudson Brothers); and discovering sex at the exact same time that the mass media did (hence failing to learn the valuable lesson that my culture had been lying to me all this time).

And I remember the day we all went to the Seattle World’s Fair. I basked in a real city experience. I stared in awe at the attractions. I calculated I’d be in my forties when all these wonderful techno-utopian predictions would come to pass. (I don’t miss not having a flying car; but the peace, prosperity, and progress they promised would still be nice.)

I might have more on this later, but I don’t guarantee it.

…in the once-hoppin’ town of Kansas City, our favorite TV critic Aaron Barnhart thinks Wired magazine’s “TV of Tomorrow” issue doesn’t go far enough. Barnhart foresees a TV that’s not just from NY/LA/SF anymore: “…It’s not a stretch to imagine high-quality drama and comedy shows someday originating from St. Paul or Cleveland or Dallas or … or … Kansas City.”

…insists on “The Optimism of Uncertainty:” “To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.”

…dammit, so I still want to see in real life some of the proposals depicted at Transportation Futuristics. Yes, that includes the Monorail.

…how TV news will survive in a postmodern world; implying that American journalism as we know it has been embedded in an old-style “modern” zeitgeist.

DARN IT, it’s a half decade into the twenty-first century and I still don’t have my Futuro house yet.

…via an MIT online journal, offers a list of “Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die.” I agree with almost everything on his list.

• Nuclear weapons; land mines: Only a GOP-machine politico could like those.
• Coal mines; internal combustion engines: Powerful and nostalgic, but wasteful as all heck and often fatal to their operators.
• Cosmetic implants: Usually dorky-looking.
• Lie detectors: Overrated and way fallible.
• Prisons (not really a “technology” but a social institution): A costly waste of human energy, particularly in the war-on-some-drugs US.
• Manned spaceflight: Now Sterling gets into potentially pissin’ offi some of his own sci-fi fandom. But is there really anything those dozen dead shuttle crewpeople did that a radio-controlled robotic space explorer can’t do?
• DVDs: The miracle movie medium doesn’t impress Sterling one whit. He hates their frailty and their copy-protection schemes. He seems to prefer unprotected digital downloads, but fails to answer how downloaders will conveniently store their acquired data. I happen to feel the discs are still way useful, if that dumb CSS and Macrovision can be gotten rid of.
• Incandescent light bulbs: As long as fluorescents are as irritating as they are, the warmth of the classic Edison bulb will, I say in opposition to Sterling, remain most welcome.

…offering an exhibition of old sci-fi magazine illos, entitled The Future We Were Promised. The most telling thing about it’s the fact that the museum proudly announces its location as being in “the historic Old City District.”

A future without the major record labels!

…or what would at least make for interesting new stories:

• Boeing fires Phil Condit; cuts costs by closing the fancy new Chicago HQ, establishing a less top-heavy corporate structure, and installing a smaller main office back in Seattle.
• The new Seattle Seahawks football stadium is named after the largest consistently-profitable company still based here. At Costco Park, all soft drinks come only in 24-packs.
• Two National Hockey League teams in U.S. small markets go broke. One moves to Winnipeg, the other to the Tacoma Dome.
• Baseball commissioner Bud Selig gets “contracted.”
• New York Mayor Bloomberg is forced to resign amid worldwide public outcry over his plan to tear down Yankee Stadium.
• Inventor Dean Kamen shows off a working, affordable, two-seater solar car. Every Republican state governor in America vows to never allow the thing on the streets.
• The major record labels lobby for emergency “survival” legislation allowing them to retroactively cancel all artist royalties whilst setting up government subsidies for executives’ mansions and cocaine budgets.
• Clever rust-belt entrepreneurs form a joint company to buy up underused and/or abandoned factories and mills. Their clothes, shoes, DVD players, garden tools, and other products all carry the same patriotic-themed brand name (perhaps “AmeriMade”). Their ads’ message: If you’re not willing to pay more for an AmeriMade product, you’re a bin Laden sympathizer.
• Democrats retake the U.S. House of Representatives, despite endless rants emanating from Limbaugh, Fox News Channel, the Wall St. Journal, The McLaughlin Group, etc. that anyone who doesn’t vote a straight Republican ticket is a bin Laden sympathizer. The new Congressional leadership begins to openly ask whether permitting further broadcast-media consolidations would be unwise.
• The New Republic runs a lead editorial admitting it is no longer a “liberal” magazine, and hasn’t been since 1983.
• Amazon.com becomes “profitable” by spinning off all its slower-selling product lines (hardware, appliances, sporting goods, etc.) to co-branded joint ventures with traditional retailers. The hardware operation, f’rinstance, becomes “Jack’sHometownHardwareAndBaitShop.com, Powered by Amazon.”
• Osama bin Laden is found in November on a remote island just like a soap-opera villain, having had plastic surgery to look like a whole other person.
• A cheap, simple-to-manufacture AIDS treatment drug is announced. Unfortunately for Muslim African leaders, it turns out to be made from reprocessed pork semen.
• High definition (or at least medium-high definition) TVs finally become popular, chiefly for viewing DVDs.
• Politicians in slumping tourist states propose Nevada-style regulated brothels, sparking a rift between the corporate and moralistic branches of U.S. conservatism.
• Gangsta rap completes its disappearance from the music scene when its last major audience (white mall kids) collectively decides it would rather pretend to be Mexican.
• An NFL head coach admits reports that he’s gay.
• Somebody figures out how to turn a profit from a “content-based” website. But the formula’s still too labor-intensive, and the potential return too low, to interest any but the smallest mom-and-pop sites.
• A major retail chain is reorganized as a co-op of local store operators.

BARRING ANY UNFORESEEN year-2001 computer bugs, this will be the first MISCmedia entry for the year of “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”

So what might you, my loyal (in your own fashion) readers, expect here over the coming months?

• Some more fiction experiments like the one serialized last week.
• Even more fun at MISCmedia Radio, our 24/7 streaming Net-music service. Perhaps even a second channel, devoted to the eclectic and exotic from all over.
• Attempts to play around with the online column’s currently standardized format (a single topic a day, running about the same length). Maybe I’ll return to my former threat to turn the daily site into something closer to a “weblog” or something close to the multi-topic format of the old Stranger column.
• Pieces of the new MISCmedia book (a photo-essay look at the city I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel with) as they emerge.
• Either more or fewer attempts to turn a financial profit from the site. It’s pretty clear the site’s current business model (or poor excuse for one) isn’t gonna work; but no new schemes (which might involve ads, subscriptions, special merchandise offers, etc.) have gelled in my viscous head.

  Many folk these days are claiming pure “content” websites, as business propositions, are molding corpses from 1998. I believe, now that the stupid money has largely abandoned the field, we can all get back to the work of figuring out just what might work in this crazy, still-new medium. Remember that broadcast radio was around almost a decade before the first national commercial networks started; and TV’s developers spent the whole of the 1940s working out the medium’s operational shticks.

• Possible new directions for the MISCmedia print mag. Scrapping the free distribution has put the print mag more or less in the black, but without real growth opportunities as it’s currently constructed.

  To make it more than a “personal zine,” albeit a professionally written and designed one, will require a move up to a thicker, slicker, and possibly more infrequent format. Perhaps something along the lines of the great old humor magazines (Punch, the original New Yorker); though for that I’d need some outside investment and a lot more content contributors.

• More of that “fun” factor, so easy to spot yet so elusive to define. Looking back at the past year’s entries, I see too many that, in retrospect, feel as if they were filler items, laboriously ground out to fit a self-imposed quota of work. There’ll be far less of that this year, I promise.
• More stuff by other people, adding the ever-valuable variety of points-O-view. Send your stuff in today. (Yes, we’re still picky and won’t run everything.)
• More chocolatey goodness.

TOMORROW: Two books, two different “radical” interpretations of the WTO protests.

ELSEWHERE:

• “Gore cared more about chads than about blacks….”
• That unsung savior of western civilization, beer! (found by Fark)….

THE TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 15th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical MISCmedia In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions.

As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of the Year of HAL 9000; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger forever, I’ve got some dot-com stocks to sell you.

(P.S.: Most every damned item on this list has a handy weblink. Spend the weekend clicking and having fun.)

NO COLUMN MONDAY, BUT ON TUESDAY: What you might see on this site in the year of Also Sprach Zarathustra.

ELSEWHERE:

• “If the music industry had its way, there’d be no such thing as a cassette player….”

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?”…

FIRST, THANKS TO ALL who attended our quaint little MISCmedia@1 party last Thursday night at the Ditto Tavern (yet another nice little place threatened with demolition).

YESTERDAY, we discussed the nostalgia-for-six-months-ago WTO protest art show at the Center on Contemporary Art. We compared it with the Woodstock-nostalgia photo show at the Behnam Studio Gallery, which reiterated the Time-Life Music party line remembering “The Sixties” mainly for the rise of corporate-rock gods and the wild-oat sowing of white college kids.

It’s too darned easy to imagine WTO protestors slowly succumbing to the same seductive lure of selective memory.

Imagine, sometime in November 2029, a 30th-anniversary gathering of former (and a few still) anarchists and anti-corporatists.

It might be held to mark the grand opening of a retro-’90s theme restaurant–complete with slacker-dude and goth-gal character waiters, a cute nose-ringed plush doll mascot, and authentic period dishes (fish tacos, pho soup, Mountain Dew) reformulated for contemporary family tastes.

Some of the newly middle-aged attendees at the gathering will grumble at the re-creation scenes of the protests being enacted as full-color holograms; Hi-8 video was, and will always be, good enough for them.

Folks who’ve become attorneys, politicians, advertising executives, and dimensional-transport engineers will reminisce about the good old days when sex still seemed dangerous (and hence exciting), when you had to get your hair dyed instead of simply taking a pill to change its color.

The old-timers will moan about Those Kids Today who mindlessly frolic in next-to-nothing and who casually sleep around with their genetically disease-resistant bodies.

In contrast, the old-timers will assure one another that Their Generation was the last apex of human society, as proven in that big, fun, life-changing spectacular that was the WTO protests.

They’ll remember everything about what they wore, how the tear gas smelled, the friends they met, and the music they played.

They’ll be a little foggier about just what it was they were protesting against.

Such a sorry scenario might be inevitable, but then again it might not be. It depends on the extent to which the loose post-WTO coalition keeps working on the real and important issues behind the protests.

TOMORROW: What our readers like to read.

ELSEWHERE:

• To us old-timers, “I Spy” signifies neither a DJ club nor a kids’ game, but a TV adventure show in which local kid Robert Culp was star-billed ahead of Bill Cosby….

OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.

WITH Y2KOOKINESS long past by now, we might be able to resume talking about “The Future” without sounding too much like hype-followers.

We might even get to resume talking about ideal futures, a.k.a. Utopias.

Utopias may never exist here in the realm of the real (indeed, the name literally means “Nowhere”). But they express the kind of society certain people want to create. Thus, they can hold bold and sometimes dangerous dreams–especially if those dreams involve the destruction or subjugation of everyone outside the dreamer’s own group.

Last month’s Atlantic Monthly carried a roundup of “five and a half” currently popular Utopian dreams:

• The Free-Market Utopia (essentially a purer version of the financier-ruled world we have now, as fantasized by Cyber-Libertarians and the WTO);
• The Best-and-Brightest Utopia (the academic left’s and the think-tank right’s dreams of a Dictatorship of the Intelligentsia);
• The Religious Utopia (Democratic Party fundraising letters’ nightmare scenario of Pat Robertson as czar);
• The Green Utopia (the bucolic, post-industrial future dreamed by hippie communes, Eugene anarchists, the Unabomber, and Pol Pot);
• The Technological Utopia (the old Mondo 2000 dream of sex robots, or conversely the AOL/Time Warner dream of an entire planet downloading the same encrypted Madonna video); and
• The Civilized Egalitarian Capitalist Utopia (the “and a half” scenario, being the author’s own hope for a just-slightly-less capitalistic world than we’ve got, based on his belief in civil society, representative government, private charity, and progressive taxation).

One could go on and on into ever more bifurcated Utopian fantasies; many of which would be someone else’s Reign of Terror.

There’s the one where all males would be held in bondage (if allowed to live at all). There’s the one where all meat eating would be unlawful. There’s the one where the total ideological rule of midtown Manhattan and southern California would be replaced by the total ideological rule of downtown Manhattan and northern California. There’s the one where the poor would be sent off to boot camps, to learn to become good submissive house boys. There’s the one where all drinkers would get stoned and all stoners would get shot.

What all these have in common is the dream of engendering a simpler, more predictable world by developing (by force if need be) a simpler, more predictable human race. None of these dream futures seems to have a place for anybody like me who believes society’s too simple and predictable already.

Corporate-libertarian writer Virginia Postrel sees a common flaw in both Utopian and anti-Utopian future-fantasies: “A uniform society, a flattened, unnuanced world designed by a few smart men.” She seems to find that a heresy against her own belief in capitalist hero figures continually emerging to seize the day.

I’d go even further, diversity-wise, than Postrel. My kind of Utopia’s one where entreprenurial crusaders wouldn’t get to run everything, because commerce wouldn’t be considered the totality or even the centrality of all human endeavor.

More about that some other time.

TOMORROW: The problems with proclaiming real-life Utopias.

ELSEWHERE:

• From the great local political zine Eat the State!, some strategies for keeping the anti-WTO coalition more or less intact….
• “Green Eggs and Hamlet….”
• Are club DJs and orchestra conductors merely overhyped middlemen? (found by Arts and Letters Daily)….