…the SeaTimes for finding Sunday feature space for a topic so seldom discussed, male depression patients.

The Times claims a Louise Bourgeois sculpture, being commissioned for the under-construction Olympic Sculpture Park thanks to a donation from a Safeco Insurance manager’s estate, will be Seattle’s “first outdoor nude.” It’s not, thankfully. (Though it will be the first to be city-owned, and it will be the most prominent local example of that rarest of genres, male figures by female artists.)

…I can heartily endorse: Guys Read, a literacy and reading-promo program aimed at the young male mind. (Yes, males do have minds!)

The essays, speeches, and books by the right wing’s favorite radical feminist were at least as intolerant and diversity-hostile as those of John Paul II. But unlike JP, Dworkin wasn’t an outspoken anti-Communist, so it’s apparently OK for the mainstream media obits of her to be less than unanimously laudatory.

Other feminists, before and after Dworkin, devoted themselves to liberation, as they variously defined it. Dworkin would have none of that positivity, none of that hope. She was a purist dystopian. Just like the right-wing extremists, she craved the simplistic power of absolutism. In her vision, the entire planet was populated by only a few human character types. All Women were either pathetic victims or strident avengers. All Men were either beasts or domesticated beasts. This one-dimensional zeitgeist had its logical conclusion in the premise that women could only be freed if men were strictly suppressed.

As her many critics frequently stated, her sexism (and, let’s face it, she wasn’t anti-sexist, she was sexist) didn’t allow for the existence of non-rapist men, non-lesbian women, non-violent pornos, heterosexual couples who actually liked one another, and many assorted other wide swaths of the whole mongrel human condition. But to simply repeat these obvious flaws is to ignore the white-hot emotional power of her writings.

I recently reviewed several novels by the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz. He’d survived Nazi slave-labor camps in his teens, and his tragic characters never got over the horror. Dworkin claimed to have suffered through a young life of domestic abuse, insults, and put-downs. She clearly never got over that, either by happenstance or by choice. Kertesz’s protagonists lived out their whole lives still emotionally imprisoned by their victimhood. So did Dworkin. As Regina Hackett wrote in a P-I profile of Dworkin in the ‘90s, there was no sunlight in Dworkin’s writing. She lived in a world defined strictly by fear and hate, a world she could not break out of. Until last week.

…American politics will only be healed when sane people take back the Republican Party:

“In a very real sense, the health of our democracy may hinge on the conscience of Republican moderates. Only they can keep their party from being hijacked by crony capitalists and gay-and-feminist-bashing evangelicals. If they stand by and let Cheney reinterpret the free market as a playground for corporations who need not worry about competitive bidding or honest accounting, if they let the fiscal conservatism that was once the hallmark of their party be drowned in red ink, if they stand by and watch the Patriot Act be used to squelch dissent, if they let neoconservative advisers hand our foreign policy over to a militarized corporate elite, then there will be no stopping the continued descent of American politics into the slough of megalomania.”

…about the fairness of comparing certain politicians to fascists, Lawrence W. Britt at Free Inquiry has a handy list of 14 common characteristics of fascist regimes. Among them: “Powerful and continuing expressions of nationalism,” “disdain for the importance of human rights,” “identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause,” “avid militarism,” “rampant sexism,” “obsession with national security,” “religion and ruling elite tied together,” and “disdain and suppression of intellectuals and the arts.”

…concerning the sexual harassment suit placed against Bill O’Reilly by a disgruntled female staffer. The charges, if true, are despicable; but, as we’ve all seen, such behavior is too sadly common among egotistical powermongers of assorted ideological persuasions.

However, I was intrigued by a remark by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann (what the hell is this guy with at least two thirds of a brain still doing on a channel that’s actively vying to become more dumbed-down than Fox?). Olbermann compared O’Reilly to one Boake Carter, a controversial ’30s radio commentator totally forgotten today (except for one quotation—”In the time of war the first casualty is truth”).

Boake Carter’s life story, as told by Olbermann and confirmed by a quick net search, has little in common with O’Reilly’s. But it’s still fascinating.

In the early years of network radio, Carter had risen from a local reporter in Philadelphia to a network “editorialist.” By 1932 he had a regular 15-minute opinion show, in which he lectured on the events of the day. As the ’30s depressingly wore on, Carter’s ideology apparently became more stridently anti-Semitic, anti-FDR, anti-liberal, etc. In 1938 his sponsor chose not to renew his contract.

It took a year for him to find another home, on Mutual (the WB of radio networks). On his new show he was pro-Roosevelt and pro-Jewish. He even announced his allegiance to a “Biblical Hebrewism” sect, the Society of the Bible in the Hands of its Creators. But that turned out to be a personality cult of the basest kind. Carter lost his professional reputation, wife, home, and fortune to the cult’s leader. By the time Carter died in 1944, he’d already become a has-been.

…was first sold, P-I cartoonist David Horsey depicted a rude businessman walking into a store and asking if there was a “WonderJock.” Well, now there is. (Viewer discretion advised.)

Here’s a link to a video clip, presumably from a Japanese reality-TV show, featuring male strippers, censored hetero-sex scenes, and an all-female studio audience. (View at your own discretion.)

I found this after coming home tonight from a discussion with a female friend who, like many women I’ve talked with over the years, complained that the media didn’t do enough to depict men as sex objects. But, like all the women with whom I’ve had this discussion, she admitted she didn’t care to view male nudity. It wouldn’t be a direct turn-on for her. She just felt it would be politically fairer for men to have to subject themselves to such treatment.

I tried to tell her that many men would love the chance to be ogled at by women who just wanted one thing from them (if that one thing wasn’t money). I also tried to explain that the traditional male body-image stereotype wasn’t that of a sex object but that of a work object. Lift that barge, tote that bale, go off to war and die for somebody else’s profit. In this muscle-bound context, flopping genitalia are the most un-“manly” body parts imaginable.

So, I’m asking all my dozens of female readers: Do you enjoy male nudes? With or without the “fairness” issue, are you actually interested in such sights? I won’t promise to put any on this site, but I’d like to hear what you have to say about the matter. Include your name (real or fake), and note whether you’d like your response posted on the site.

The NY book-biz buzz this spring has apparently been about the much-hyped rise and spectacular thud of something called “Lad Lit.” It’s apparently supposed to be publishers’ dreams for a male-oriented counterpart to the “Chick Lit” novels of the Bridget Jones flavor. The much-advertised premier titles of the would-be fad have apparently flopped in the stores.

I’ve only seen one of the buzzed-about titles, Scott Mebus’s Booty Nomad, and can easily see why it’s not a bestseller. Mebus’s antihero isn’t a character, he’s a demographic marketing fantasy. The protagonist is essentially Maxim magazine’s target reader; which is to say a dumbed-down boorish stereotype of bad behavior. It’s hard to imagine female readers (the overwhelming majority of fiction buyers) could fantasize about a guy like this, even to dream about civilizing him. (As for male readers, the book biz still expects them to only care about violence/action stories.)

It is possible to write compelling tales of adult male characters imbued with intelligence, human emotions, and romantic confusions. Writers have done this for centuries. You don’t need a goofy promotional handle for it either.

…the pix of grinning female US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners as a sign that women aren’t necessarily more “moral” than men after all:

“A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world….”In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.”

A fellow Stranger refugee stopped me on the street the other evening. He said he still enjoyed my writing, my vocabulary, and my sense of style.

But he also said he thought I’d limited my vision by holding to a rose-colored nostalgia for “the old Seattle,” a viewpoint that’s ill-suited toward effectively discussing today’s city of high tech and hipsters.

I beg, as I do so darned often, to differ.

You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

The mindset that created the Century 21 Exposition, f’rinstance, is with us still. The magnificent Space Needle was built with private money on land essentially donated by the city. The publicly-funded exhibit buildings were either cheap “multipurpose” constructions (just like most local government buildings between then and the late ’90s) or repurposed older structures that weren’t that distinguished to begin with.

The old Seattle had its progressive, even radical ideas, alongside plain old fashioned racism/sexism. Some of its citizens held both types of beliefs at once. (I’m thinking of labor organizers who appealed to anti-Chinese hysteria among their flocks, and of “New Left” rabblerousers who defined “women’s liberation” as the right to give blow jobs.)

Today, Seattle loves diversity. Or rather, it loves the idea that it loves diversity; just so long as its white female children don’t have to go to the same schools as black male children.

The old Seattle had civic leaders who tirelessly struggled to have their burg seen as “world class,” but always by someone else’s standards. (Hence the ’60s campaigns to bulldoze the Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and large swaths of the Arboretum for parking lots, office towers, and highway lanes respectively.)

In more recent years, Seattle had civic leaders who saw every problem as solvable by a construction project. That’s why we can build new libraries and arts facilities, but can’t afford to run them.

The old Seattle’s governmental gears could grind very slowly; just as they can now. It took the “foodie” restaurant revolution of the ’70s before the city legalized sidewalk cafes. Now, we need, but are less likely to get, a similar outspoken demand before the city will allow new strip clubs.

If I may switch metaphors for a moment: Leonard Maltin’s book Of Mice and Magic, an invaluable history of the early animation business, refers at one point to the Warner Bros. cartoon studio’s desire in the thirties to “keep up with Disney, and plagiarize him at the same time.” Seattle’s assorted drives over the years to become “world class,” by imitating all the things all the other would-be “world class” burgs do, have often been just as self-defeating.

Warners conquered the cartoon world when its directors and artists stopped aping Disney and started to create their own brand of humor. LIkewise, Seattle will come into its own as it develops its own ways of doing city things.

We don’t have to have a cars-only transportation plan, or sprawling McMansions devouring the countryside. We don’t have to give in to corporate job-blackmail shakedowns. We can lead, not follow.

That’s not the “old Seattle,” but it’d be a better Seattle.

THE PORTLAND AREA’S been stricken lately with an economy even worse than Seattle’s, a basketball team filled with ungrateful bad boys, and lower-than-expected levels of Lewis & Clark Bicentennial tourism.

But, like the clever and hearty pioneers they are, Oregonians always find some new economic hope. This week, it’s in the form of joining the same-sex-marriage bandwagon.

Multnomah County’s officially invited girl-girl and boy-boy pairs to rush to the Rose City, pay modest license fees into the local gov’t. coffers, get their simple declarative ceremonies, and freely spend their honeymoon bucks at the region’s hotels, restaurants, shops, and entertainments.

I predict it will only be days before enterprising entrepreneurs offer weekend package tours geared for non-heteros in love. Amtrak or Horizon Air fares, accomodations at a fine downtown hostelry, a prepackaged ceremony in one of several styles, two-for-one meal coupons, maybe even a Powell’s Books gift card to start your no-sales-tax shopping spree.

And, of course, a complementary video of My Own Private Idaho for the gents, or Personal Best for the ladies.

(Actually, it turns out the Portland tourism people already had a web page, even before the gay-marriage thang started, promoting their town as a cool destination for the GLBT set.)

P.S.: Why hasn’t Wash. state joined the bandwagon? For one thing, same-gender marriages are more explicitly forbidden in Washington’s legal code than in Oregon’s. To change this would require legislative action, a ballot initiative, or a thorough court challenge.

The world of alterna-comix is filled with endearing characters on the page and intriguing characters off the page. One of the trade’s oddest tales is that of Dave Sim. In 1977 he started Cerebus the Aardvark, a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian. A year or two into the title, and supposedly after an acid trip that sent him to a hospital, he proclaimed he’d put out 300 issues and then kill off the title character.

A quarter century later, he’s done it. Along the way, he’s turned into a recluse, an outspoken misogynist, and one of the industry’s top advocates for creators’ rights. His comic book has veered from social satire to epic adventure to meandering ideological rants. By the end, its circulation had dropped from 35,000 to 7,000.

The Canadian newspaper supplement Saturday Night ran a fascinating piece about Sim’s triumphs and struggles, suggesting the stress of his self-imposed task pushed him to the edge of insanity. The comics weblog Sequential has posted image files of the five-page article (one, two, three, four, five).

Here’s Sim’s own “Hail and Farewell” essay from a wholesaler’s catalog.

I was never into Conan, or parodies of Conan, so Sim’s early work made no impact on me. The later, longer stories became so slowly-paced, you pretty much had to read them in the paperback reprint collections for them to make sense. But Sim’s brave and/or silly perserverence as a writer/artist/self-publisher may never be repeated.

Should it?

Sim employed several strategies to survive as a self-publisher. He started at the beginning of the specialty comic-book-store circuit, and maintained his place within it, even as he alienated most of his now-former friends and industry allies. He kept his famous-among-a-cult-audience title and lead character, long after he’d outgrown talking-animal stories. He wrote, drew, inked, and lettered 12 issues a year, usually with 20 pages of art plus a cover, collaborating only with background artist Gerhard; thus pushing as much quantity of product out at his audience as he physically could produce. He maintained his creative freedom and achieved a solid middle-class income; at the expense of potentially greater works he might have done if he’d had longer lead times and didn’t have to stay in the Cerebus universe.

…the new girls?”