As longtime readers know, I’ve never been a huge fan of Dale Chihuly’s art. But today he’s done something I can appreciate and applaud. He got the phrase “pig shit” printed, unbleeped, on the front page of a major daily paper!

…respond when it can no longer ignore progressive online writers? Depict them as emotionally unstable.

What with all the backward-thinking and dumbing-down of the body-politick these days, it was inevitable that someone on the edge of “mainstream” thought would bring up that ultra-right-wing notion that slavery was good for the slaves. I didn’t suspect the one to do it would be Adele Ferguson, the ancient local political commentator whom I didn’t even know was still alive.

The highly recommended new version of Doctor Who premieres tonight on the SciFi Channel.

MEANWHILE IN PRINTLAND, I’ll have a couple of big announcements next week about a current produce future project. Until then, let’s get caught up with some of the new paper periodicals showing up around town.

Even as the daily-newspaper biz is wreaked by decline and consolidation, slick magazines are suddenly finding financial backing. At one time, almost nobody even tried to charge money for a local mag (except Seattle and Washington CEO). Now there are two new entrants this month alone.

First out of the gate: Seattle Metropolitan. It’s from the pubilshers of Portland Monthly, staffed largely by Seattle Weekly refugees, and promises to be out every damned month.

The premiere issue’s splashy enough, but a bit weak in the enthrallment department.

There’s a laughingly awful “return to elegance” fashion spread, a predictable Charles Cross essay about Beatles nostalgia, and a drab cover hyping a list of the “65 Best Ways to Love Our City.” (I normally like pieces like this, but this one seemed off a bit. Too staid.)

On the plus side, there’s a poignant MIchael Dougan cartoon depicting the spirit of Seattle as a female rock singer who became “America’s darling” at the cost of her soul. And a long but sprightly piece depicts the devolution of Bruce Chapman from political progressive to religious-right demagogue-for-hire.

Yet, for its misses, Seattle Met at least tries to be about something. Its reach exceeds its current grasp, but that’s good.

And that’s more than can usually be said about today’s Seattle magazine, which usually settles for such formula product as “the (insert number here) top (insert upscale profession here) in (insert name of city here).” Seattle recently celebrated what it claimed to be its 40th anniversary. That’s a little specious and a lot convoluted. Let’s try to delineate:

• In 1966, KING-TV founder Dorothy Bullitt helped start Pacific Search, a regional environmental/outdoors newsletter. (Bullitt had also subsidized the first Seattle magazine, which ran from 1964 to 1970.)
• Pacific Search evolved over the years into Pacific Northwest, a slick upscale-lifestyles magazine covering a region defined broadly enough to include large swaths of northern California. Pacific Northwest never really gelled as either an editorial or an ad-sales concept, and stumbled along through the ’80s.
• The Pacific Northwest subscriber list was eventually taken over by a new venture, Seattle Home & Garden. Circa 1993, that was split into two mags, Northwest Home & Garden and the new Seattle. This mini-empire’s now part of the Minnesota-based Tiger Oak Publications.

The above is a brief recap of a complex print-family tree; I ask your advance forgiveness for missing a vital detail here or there. Even in this short form, it’s a more intriguing story than most of what Seattle has run lately.

I’ve got this theory about compelling media content: You’ve gotta have some. It’s not enough anymore to simply identify a wealthy segment of the populace, proclaim yourself to be that segment’s “voice,” and watch the ad bucks roll in. You’ve gotta make readers want you and keep wanting you, despite the plethora of other local and national media choices out there.

Seattle Met, for all its initial failings, gets this. Will Seattle learn it in response? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Elsewhere in the same city, Seattle (Sound) breaks all the rules of local music media established back in the late ’70s by the late, lamented Rocket. Seattle (Sound) is a slick mag, not a newsprint tabloid. It charges a cover price. Because it only comes out every two months, it can’t even pretend to offer complete club listings. It doesn’t devote its cover to an out-of-town superstar act. It includes all genres, from rock to rap to classical.

And it works.

The mag’s presence alone is one big statement to the world: Seattle music’s still here dammit, and it’s stronger and broader than ever.

It treats the entire combined local music sub-scenes as one big community. It dares to define its niche big yet specific–as everyone who’s even peripherally involved with local music of any kind, as a player, a listener, or a behind-the-scenes support person.

Its debut cover story’s another list piece (“Seattle Music: 50 Most Influential”). But, unlike Seattle Met‘s big list piece, Seattle (Sound)‘s list is coherent and consistent, even as it darts from the Seattle Opera to Barsuk Records to up-n’-coming production wizards.

There are a few weak spots in the first issue. (KEXP’s John Richards has remarkably little to say about the local hiphop scene.) But on the whole it’s a great intro to a great new concept. Kudos to everyone at Media Index Publishing Group (publishers of Media Inc., the essential trade mag for the Northwest’s still-struggling audio-visual and ad-production industries).

(Full disclosure: The back page of Seattle (Sound) contains a short, favorable review of a compilation CD I helped curate. More about that next week.)

…a long New Yorker review of yet another Playboy photo-retrospective book, critic Joan Acocella stumbles upon what I’ve long said is the secret behind the current centerfold “look”: Today’s Playmate spread is an advertisement for an unavailable “product,” presented with all the slick manipulation and “reverence” given, on other pages, to images of cars and whiskey bottles.

…offers a handy roundup to the still-bubbling-under murmurs of the hope for a Bush impeachment.

My thoughts upon reading Francis Fukuyama’s NYT Mag essay on the end of neoconservatism: ‘Bout time, I say. Alas, the damage done by this unrepentant gang of imperialist plotters will take decades to heal, and some of the soldiers and overseas civilians injured and maimed and PTSD-damaged by this stupid, stupid war won’t ever be the same.

And sure enough, Fukuyama doesn’t have any specific answers for what should replace neocon ideology, besides something more realist, more multilateral, and less hubris-tainted.

Here’s my highly vague, formless attempt at an answer:

American industrial capital, the real source of power and money propping up our imperially-minded national political machine, is in its endgame, knows it, and is running scared, in aggressive-defense mode.

It wasn’t sex and hedonism that killed ancient Rome. It was the fact that the empire had finally reached further than its infrastructure could hold; while the pagan natives began to successfully fight back, the Roman establishment, which had been built upon the notion of eternal expansion, turned upon itself in corruption and intercene squabbles until the whole thing became progressively less manageable.

I’ve long held that politics is part of culture, not the other way around. Your typical Capitol Hill (Seattle, that is) leftist would interpret all of human affairs as the manipulating machinations of the owner class vs., not the valiant struggle of the workers (Seattle leftists are terrible square-bashers), but the cogent protests of We Who Know Better.

I see a more nonlinear (or at least more multilinear) world. A MISC world.

Our governmental situation is the result of multiple sources and influences. In the case of our current national governmental situation, our supposed “leaders,” for all their swagger and pomposity, are the sniveling whores to their backers.

Who are these backers? Follow the money and you’ll find a few old men with wealth from highly consolidated and/or “dinosaur” industries—oil, mining, drugs, entertainment/media, banking, discount retail, armaments, etc.

These guys don’t like the instability of competitive markets. They also don’t particularly like organized labor, environmentalism, consumer action, or any other impediment to their continued hold on the sources of their affluence.

Add some cold-war nostalgists, some grafters, and some religious authoritarians, and you have not a slick neo-Nazi spectacle but a gaggle of Bull Connors out to hold onto obsolete power through any means necessary.

As Wired magazine once said, power corrupts, obsolete poewr corrupts obsoletely.

Replacing a couple of this machine’s political stooges won’t change things enough.

More importantly, the very sociocultural presumptions of the Seattle left won’t change things; but then again they’re not meant to.

So what will?

A new way of thinking, or at least a different way of thinking.

For one thing, we don’t have to bash Christians anymore. Progressivism is more Christlike than the fear and bigotry propagated by the sleaze machine.

And we don’t even have to bash capitalism, either; at least we don’t have to confuse the current U.S. economic system with capitalism.

As some of my Libertarian friends (with whom I have other arguments that are outside the scope of this discussion) point out, the influence-peddling and palm-greasing that characterize today’s federal system aren’t the purist rule of business values but the mercantilist collusion of corporate and governmental power.

Real prosperity, for workers, managers, investors, and the rest of us, will return as our current economic and industrial infrastructure is replaced, piece by piece, with something saner.

This is big-big-big picture talk, at which I’m less comfortable than I am with very specific topics.

So bear with me.

But for now let me posit one thing: Politics, particularly oppositional politics, isn’t the answer. It isn’t even the problem. It’s a symptom.

…this year’s stars of stand-up-to-the-powers-that-be journalism, tells you what you’ve probably long expected about “how the White House is playing the media–“ i.e., by treating reporters like stooges.

• The NBC coverage so far has, as my fave TV critic Aaron Barnhart calls it, “less fluff, more stuff.” Fewer interminable human-interest profiles of the participants, more footage of them participating. They’re even showing the greatest winter sport of them all, curling, live on CNBC! (Too bad NBC’s HDTV transmission can be so spotty at times, due to excess signal compression.)
• The opening festivity was a mishmosh of Cirque du Soleil-esque pomposity and truly heartfelt symbolism, such as when the Olympic flag was carried in by eight women from around the countries (though you had to have watched the CBC telecast to have learned about some of these women’s intense political activism).
• Two-man luge!
• Did I mention lots of curling in the US coverage? (But strangely enough, almost none on CBC, which farmed that part out to Canadian cable channels which we can’t get down here.)
• The downhill ski courses with painted boundaries, which the skiers have to keep from crossing.
• Women’s hockey.
• Women’s speed skating.
• The incredibly complicated (and therefore funner) new figure skating scoring rules.
• Just enough return-from-gruesome-injury moments to keep from overdoing the shtick.
• Non-USA athletes are winning a lot, and we even get to see it.

…another era ended last week with the last telegram.

Toward the end of last night’s Drinking Liberally meeting, I talked to two ’60s-generation defenders who said protesting could have results. I said protesting wasn’t enough, then eased into my next question: What are leftists today FOR? And I don’t just mean being in favor of being against things. What’s our agenda, beyond stopping the other guys’ agenda? They had no good answers.

With what would we replace the DC culture of corruption? Bush, as everyone who doesn’t watch Fox “News” knows, is merely the transparently incompetent figurehead atop a whole all-encompassing machine of bribery, influence-peddling, warmongering, and the crass exploitation of bigotry and fear. Impeaching Bush alone, or even Bush and Cheney as a team, would only bring new figureheads to deliver the sound bites.

The DLC “centrist” Democrats see no future for the Democratic Party as an organization without corporate money, so they willingly take a donor-chosen role of the all-too-loyal opposition.

The Northwest Democrats and the other progressives around the country? Protesting, marching, sporting angry T-shirts and bumper stickers, staging symbolic acts of dissent like the futile Alito filibuster.

And blogging. And talking at meetups.

At least the bloggers are constantly unearthing and disseminating new damning evidence of the Sleaze Machine’s nefarious actions, and occasionally get the bigtime media to acknowledge this evidence’s existence.

But there’s still damn little discussion on what we’d do instead, aside from not doing most of what the Republicans are doing.

So I ask all of you: Imagine progressive Dems (not just near-right Dems) stand a highly realistic chance of retaking Congress this fall and the White House two falls from now. (I happen to believe this is possible, especially if state-level progressives in certain “battleground states” push through some needed electoral reforms.)

Next, imagine you’re hard at work in some campaign strategy office, trying to make this dream come true. The opinion surveys keep coming back with one public demand: What’s your platform? The kind folk out there in swing-voter-land want to know what you’ll do. Not just what you won’t do, but what you will do.

Now tell us your answers.

Just as the MSM (“mainstream media” in blogspeak) treat the national political battle as the Republicans vs. those other guys, so have they treated this week’s upcoming football matchup as the Steelers vs. those other guys.

Once again, I’m proud to be one of those other guys.

At the National Review site, Michaek Novak suggests we root for the Steelers in the Super Bowl because their unnamed-by-Novak “opponents” “will be wearing the colors of — hard to comprehend this — Hamas!”

…to Charles Herring, Seattle’s and the Northwest’s first TV newscaster (at KING from 1951 to 1967), who passed away this Monday.

Herring’s solid, if square, demeanor helped give the new medium of local TV news a brand of credibility, back in those pre-sound-bite, pre-helicopter days. He’s best known today for his live coverage of the 1962 World’s Fair, preserved on kinescope films and excerpted in many subsequent documentaries.

His final newscast was immediately followed by his appearance in a filmed commercial for White Front, a discount-store chain expanding into the area from California. Herring’s straight-shooting reputation didn’t do much to boost White Front, which folded within six years. (A small subsidiary chain, Toys “R” Us, survived.)

Around the time White Front disappeared, Herring’s son Chuck briefly ran a bookstore on Capitol Hill and self-pubilshed his own essay book, If I Don’t Do This, I’ll Never Do Anything. The “this” the younger Herring was struggling to do? Pubilsh that very book.

The elder Herring ran a mom-and-pop radio station in Port Angeles, then returned to Seattle and worked in Boeing’s industrial-video unit until 1987.

…but the January Belltown Messenger is now out, complete with a big cover story and pix by yrs. truly.

Also, Messenger correspondent Megan Lee will be on KOMO-TV’s Northwest Afternoon this Friday at 3, as part of a story about “The Truth About Tabloids.”