YESTERDAY AND TODAY, some recent departures from the pop-cult scene, locally and nationally.

THINGS THAT HAVE GONE AWAY #5: Our Love and War Man already misses Mike Mailway (real name Larry M. Boyd), whose locally-based syndie trivia column ended a week and a half ago. Always wished I could write like him. That staccato, crime-movie-soundtrack rhythm. The eternally provocative mix of historic, scientific, and just odd facts gathered from all times and places. Had the privilege of meeting him a few times; always the perfect gent. I wish him well.

THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #1: What with all the sanctimonious gnashing-O-teeth that’s gone on over the threatening might of big-box chain bookstores, you might not expect any tears for the demise of such an outlet. But loyal customers are indeed huing and ado-ing over the impending loss of Tower Books on lower Queen Anne. Cause of death: The usual (mercenary rent hike).

The store’s annual 30-percent-off pre-inventory sale is being extended until closing day, Feb. 4. It’ll be missed, partly because Tower’s one chain that acted sorta like an indie in its niche-marketing prowess. Because most of its other outlets were attached to Tower Records stores, it was big on the sorts of books CD buyers like. Glossy pop-star tomes, yes; but also coffee-table art and photography, sci-fi, erotica, student reference, self-help, astrology, comix, lefty-politics, Beat-generation nostalgia, and literary-hipster fiction. (Although the approach had its drawbacks, such as when they had to put the Bukowski novels behind the counter to prevent theft by suburban down-and-outer wannabes.)

Tower says it wants to eventually build a book annex on the site of its current record store six blocks away, but has given no timetable for the project.

THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #2: Puget Consumers Co-op is closing its oldest alterna-food and vitamin store, in Ravenna. Way back in the early ’80s, when PCC really was a cooperatively-run small merchant, Ravenna was its only space (it had previously been an even smaller food-buying club). It was a subculture, a ‘tribe’ if you wish.

As you may know, I’m something of a skeptic about many of today’s neo-Puritanical food religions (macrobiotic, organic, vegan, ‘live,’ etc.). But I had, and have, every respect for the healthful values of community, of being part of a circle of humans who care about one another. That’s something PCC gradually lost as it became a professionally-managed chain store.

THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #3: The Seattle Times Co., citing a need to cut costs due to recent circumstances (see below), is shutting Mirror, its eight-year-old monthly tabloid for teenagers.

I was a part-time assistant on Mirror’s first five issues. The yup-ladies who ran it had believed those mainstream-media scare stories that Those Kids Today were all a bunch of illiterate louts; so the yup-ladies thought they’d need an adult to write the paper. But the editors soon realized that many public high school students really can read and write (they just choose not to read the Seattle Times); so my services proved unneeded.

THINGS THAT ARE GOING AWAY #4: With the end of the Seattle newspaper strike comes the end of the strike paper, the Seattle Union Record.

As I’ve said previously, it was about two-thirds of the way toward becoming the real opposition daily this town needs. While the Newspaper Guild won’t be publishing the Union Record anymore (or drumming up other unions for sympathy ads), many of the Seattle Times strikers won’t be returning to their old jobs, and hence might be available to continue their Record work under new management. I’d love to be a part of making such a paper happen.

Let’s all talk about this again real soon.

TOMORROW: People you’re not better than.

ELSEWHERE:

• The worst movies of 2001! (found by Fark)….
• The religious origins of bland American foods….

LAST FRIDAY, we began a talk about how passe pop-culture genres are reguarly given an extra lease of life by being remarketed toward born-again Christians. Then we mentioned one particularly passe pop-culture genre (pornography) and how a Christian (or at least spiritual) focus might revive it.

That simple gimmick led me to pondering a whole bigger question–how to bring sex, and a healthy respect for it, back to Christendom.

This might seem either double-icky or sacreligious to some of you. I assure you I don’t intend to be either.

After all, many of the world’s great religions and cultures have embraced strongly sexualized images and messages–including the Euro-pagan cultures Christianity borrowed so much else from.

What I imagine, in 3 parts:

• 1: Artistic works supporting a lusty, zestful, sensual, playful faith.
• 2: Rituals (either in person or shot on video) in which couples, individuals, and even groups perform sexual rites dedicated to the greater being, to the interconnectedness of God’s creation.
• 3: Stories and essays describing sexuality, sexual acts, and sexualized relationships in this context. they could range from the high-literary to the low-paperback levels.

Examples and precedents from over the centuries:

• The sexy parts of the Bible, natch; from Ruth and the Song of Solomon to the various tales of seduction, masturbation, revelry, nudity, and such.
• The fetishist elements of old Catholic and Orthodox art; Mary’s pink full-body halo.
• The raunchy, fleshy tradition of The Canterbury Tales.
• The whole history of “naughty” religious-themed storytelling in art, prose, verse, and film, in which storytellers have tried to force sex back into religion, often with fetishistic, violent, and deliberately sacrilegous visions. Naughty nuns, naughty priests, naughty Catholic schoolgirls, naughty Victorians, eroticized versions of classic sacred iconography, etc.
• The examples of sex-spirit integration in the cultures and traditions Christianity borrowed pieces of itself from–Hebrews, Greeks, Celtics, et al.–and in some of the world’s other great cultures.
• Some of the recent prosex interpretations of Judeo-Christian teaching. These range from the mild spirit-body reconciliations of Thomas Moore’s book The Soul of Sex to the outspokenly gay-friendly advocacy of L. William Countryman’s Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament.
• More generalized sex-and-spirit advocacies, from George Battaille’s Erotism and The Tears of Eros to Rufus Camphausen’s Encyclopedia of Sacred Sexuality.
• A scene in the sketch-comedy film Amazon Women of the Moon, spoofing a centerfold video, in which the model is shown nude, in church, in a pew with her dressed and respectful parents.
• The closing of Russ Meyer’s last film, Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens, in which a radio faith-healer having ecstatic sex in her studio, to the strains of “Gimme That Old Time Religion.”

TOMORROW: The last of this for now, I promise.

ELSEWHERE:

• What the heck is emo music anyway? This site attempts to explain….

MANY ARTS AND THEATER PUBLICATIONS have come and gone, nationally and locally, over the years.

The local attempts have mostly foundered or struggled on a lack of cash flow. Artists and artsy-type folk are often considered insufficiently upscale for advertisers to bother with. Already-strapped funding organizations have had other priorities than merely documenting whatever visual or performing projects are already out there. That’s left these would-be documentors to work on an all-volunteer basis, with the personal-burnout rates and marketing weaknesses built into that concept.

One local outfit thinks it has the answer. Their magazine’s aimed not at artists, nor even at the bulk of their audiences.

Instead, Arts Patron (whose third issue should be out this month) is aimed squarely at upper-crust good-life-livers who (as a common stereotype goes) “Support the Arts” partly out of a good-works motivation, partly for the tax breaks, and partly for social status.

It’s mailed free to addresses on the fundraising mailing lists of ten participating theaters, museums, and hibrow-music ensembles. The rest of us have to read it online. (Thus keeping those downscale painters and actors and other assorted boho types from lowering the print edition’s advertiser value).

Seattle didn’t used to have very many of these patrons. Certainly not enough for a slick nine-times-a-year magazine to be aimed just at them. But post-Bill Seattle apparently has enough for publisher Jonathan Nichols to give it a shot. (If the concept works, Nichols may try to expand it to other towns.)

Should us non-gazillionaires care about the whole endeavor? From the looks of the first two issues, yes. Editor Douglas McLellan (who briefly was the best thing that had ever happened to the P-I arts section) has gone beyond mere PR hypeage for the mag’s participating institutions. Sure there are big pieces about the new Bellevue Arts Museum and the John Singer Sargent show at the Seattle Art Museum. But there are also big pieces about the Total Experience Gospel Choir, filmmaker Sandy Cioffi, the alterna-art space Howard House, and local mural-preservation advocate Roger van Oosten. McLellan himself contributes an important item about a UW study showing ballet dancers can have careers as short and injury-prone as pro football players (at far lower salaries).

So go to the site. Let its makers know you like it, and that you deserve the chance to see it in print even if you’re not a gazillionaire.

IN OTHER NEWS: Loyal reader Danny Goodisman writes, “Rumor has it, Paul Schell may run for re-election. To help him along, here are proposed slogans for Paul Schell’s re-election:

• 10. Still not a wimp.

• 9. Support international child labor.

• 8. Affordable housing for the rich.

• 7. Once a developer, always a developer.

• 6. Give corporate welfare a chance.

• 5. Blacks and Hispanics ‘raus.

• 4. Known round the world.

• 3. More ugly architecture for the Center.

• 2. King County multi-billionaires agree: Paul Schell for mayor.

• 1. Leadership which can bring tears to your eyes.”

TOMORROW: How to revive any waning popcult genre–make it Christian.

ELSEWHERE:

• A Brit looks at motels in the movies (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….

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….”

IT’S BEEN A WHILE since I did an all-list column, but this and the next will be such.

Today, in a post-Thanksgiving gesture of sorts, are as many Things I Like as I can think of right now (just to placate those readers who falsely complain that I never seem to like anything), in no particular order:

• Snow. Hope we get some in Seattle this winter.
• Discovering a great new band.
• Luxuria Music, a streaming net-radio station playing a mix of lounge, jazz, surf, bebop, soundtracks, and other “music to stimulate the entire organism.” It’s co-curated by The Millionaire, formerly co-leader of cocktail nation faves Combustible Edison.
• Brave New Waves, a nightly program of experimental and just plain odd music from the CBC (and streamed online at 9 p.m. PT).
• The inventive products of North America’s packaged-food and fast-food industries.
• Sex. (Well, duh….) Specifically, the kind of sex that brings two people closer together on psychic-emotional-physical levels.

  (Though there’s also much to be said for daydreamt fantasies involving Adrienne Shelly in a private railroad car with piped-in Bollywood movie music and a few cases of Reddi-Wip.)

• Harper’s Magazine.
• Collecting old magazines, especially the kinds that aren’t normally collected (Time, Seventeen, Family Circle).
• Pre-1970 nudist books and magazines. Hard to tell which aspect of these images is more worldview-skewing: The sight of pre-hippie-era grownups (of all ages, genders, and physiques) unabashedly nude, the sight of unabashedly nude grownups in deliberatley non-erotic (sometimes even anti-erotic) poses, or the accompanying text sermons defending the lifestyle as being just as clean, wholesome, and sexually repressed as any deserving aspect of mainstream American life.

  (The new “Imagined Landscapes” show at Consolidated Works includes a group of three hyperrealistic paintings by NY artist Peter Drake based on ’50s nudist-mag images, only with suburban front yards for backgrounds instead of open picnic grounds.)

• The new Office Depot at 4th and Pike.
• Unexpected phone calls from people I personally know who aren’t trying to sell me something.
• The recent election mess. No, really. It was one of those fun interruptions of the daily grind, and it kept going into ever-further absurdity levels like an Absolutely Fabulous script.
• Glow-in-the-dark green plastic. You can get it in everything from yo-yos to toothbrushes to Burger King promo toys. Heck, you can even get an Apple iBook in it!
• Grocery deliveries.
• Online reference libraries.
• Pyramid Snow Cap Ale.
• Digital video camcorders. The devices which just might yet kill Hollywood. (You’re getting me one for Christmas, right?)
• The recent Pac-10 football season, which came down to the last weekend with three (count ’em!) of the conference’s four Northwest teams battling it out for the championship–including the long-humbled, now-proud Oregon State Beavers!
• The conveniences of modern life; including but not limited to indoor plumbing, electricity, telephone service, public transportation, trash pickup, a division-of-labor setup wherein many of us don’t have to toil out in the fields tending crops unless we want to, digital cable, photocopiers, and electronic bill paying.
• Truly wacky ’70s movies, such as Lisa and the Devil or Dolemite.
• Money. Just love the stuff. Wish I had some now.

(If this amused you, there’s also a separate Things I Like page on this site, which duplicates almost none of the items on this list.)

MONDAY: Another list, this one of people who aren’t really better than you.

IN OTHER NEWS: Thursday saw a skinny scab-edition P-I but no Times, at least not in the downtown, Capitol Hill, and North End neighborhoods of my holiday travels. Today will likely see no Friday entertainment sections; causing movie-time-seeking readers to grab for weekly or suburban papers. What will the Sunday Times look like, aside from preprinted feature sections? We’ll find out.

ELSEWHERE:

• A former member of fun-punkers the Dead Milkmen talks about his lifelong appreciation for dumb children’s records….
• Too many chain stores?…

IN A SHORT-SHORT FICTION PIECE I haven’t uploaded to this site yet, I once imagined some potential Playboy magazine nudie features of the future: “America’s Sexiest Female CEOs,” “America’s Sexiest Female Judges,” “America’s Sexiest Congresswomen,” etc.

One I skipped: “America’s Sexiest Anchorwomen.”

It’s an odd omission. TV stations and networks have been hiring pretty ladies to share anchor desks with hairspray boys for decades. (One of Seattle’s most memorable, Sandy Hill, was an ex-Miss Washington who wound up co-hosting every newscast on the station from noon to 11 pm, before becoming Joan Lunden’s predecessor on Good Morning America.)

All this talk is a lead-in to discussing a peculiar softcore-fetish website, The Naked News.

It’s a 15-minute streaming video newscast, with a new edition each weekday. While it has no field reporters or on-the-scene footage, its four Toronto-based studio anchors read competently-written briefs headlining the day’s news, weather, and sports.

All the anchors are young women. All of them either appear on camera fully nude, or strip from dress-for-success outfits until they’re wearing only their microphones.

The concept’s borrowed from a Russian program that appears on regular TV over there. That show’s bare news readers have occasionally even staged (nude) on-location interviews with (clothed) major government officials.

The American Naked News anchors all keep straight, tho’ perky, faces during their readings. Their only variation from standard newsreader behavior is a short rump-wiggling walkoff at the conclusion of their segments. Their faces, hair styles, and (when they have any) costumes are standard-issue anchorwoman style, not stripper or porn-star or dominatrix style. If not for their perfect (perhaps surgically perfected) figures, they could be the sort of women a young-adult male Internet user might work alongside–or for.

Their straightforward demeanor also differentiates The Naked News from the constant, screeching hard-sell tactics common to sex sites. The streaming video contains commercials, but they’re relatively tame ones (for other entertainment websites). The site’s lack of constant selling is just as relieving as its lack of hardcore crudeness.

None of this means many female Net users would enjoy viewing The Naked News, or even approve of its existence.

The site’s stars might be pronounced non-bimbos, and they might project in-charge images, but they’re still portraying male fantasies, performing to be stared at.

To such potential critics, I might say that heterosexuality has always been with us and likely always will be. As long as most het-male brains are wired to respond to visual stimuli, such stimuli will be produced. They might as well be stimuli that emphasize beauty over crudity, with at least a modicum of brains and humor and friendliness.

And while The Naked News may be a trifle, a light-entertainment novelty work, it’s really no more entertainment-oriented than many news and “reality” shows on broadcast TV. (And it’s no less journalistically respectable than some of them either.)

IN OTHER NEWS: The first strikebound editions of the Seattle Times and Post-Intelligencer came out yesterday. They’re flimsy li’l 24-page things, full of wire copy, syndicated columns, and database features (weather, TV listings).

Because they were printed even earlier in the day than Tuesday’s last pre-strike papers, they didn’t include any evening sports results, stock listings, or even the Florida Supreme Court’s Presidential-recount ruling. Classified ads were truncated on a quota basis, unseen since the days of WWII paper rationing.

The result: Morning papers you didn’t need all day to read. A partial vindication for my long-held wish for a brisker, more immediate, even “alternative” daily; the sort of concept that could potentially bring true competition to the print-news biz and dislodge the local-monopoly papers such as those currently being struck.

(More strike news, and new material by picketing newshacks, is at The Seattle Union Record.

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: George Clark, who’s self-published several occasional parodies of The Stranger and The Weekly over the years (so typographically accurate, many readers originally thought the Stranger staff had actually produced them!), has issued another, spoofing both tabloids in a double-cover format. The issue seems to have been in the works for some time; it contains parodies of features The Stranger hasn’t carried for two years or more (including my old section, cutely relabeled “Miscellanal”).

TOMORROW: Some things I actually like.

ELSEWHERE:

• Remember the Joan Rivers movie Rabbit Test? Or the feminist bumper stickers, “If men could get pregnant….” Well, one man claims he is!…

TODAY’S PREVIOUSLY-ANNOUNCED CONTENTS have been postponed so we can instead discuss the biggest Seattle media story since the Kingdome boom-boom.

It’s the big strike by the Pacific Northwest Newspaper Guild. It’s the town’s first newspaper strike since ’53 (and, thanks to the Joint Operating Agreement, the first to hit both the Times and P-I).

Already, the effects have been felt. Monday’s papers included the big ad stuffers normally seen on Thanksgiving; Tuesday’s papers were printed early in the evening to avoid any truckers’ sympathy walkout, and thusly didn’t mention Monday Night’s NBA or NFL results.

The big changes start today, when the papers try to put out at least a semblance of their normal product; to be distributed for free and staffed by management and out-of-state scabs. (I briefly considered applying to be a replacement newshack, but quickly dropped the idea.)

Striking reporters, editors, ad sellers, and deliverers have already started an online strike paper, the Seattle Union Record. A print Union Record is currently scheduled to start next week.

The Union Record name, as editor Chuck Taylor describes it, comes from “a labor-backed paper during the time of the General Strike of 1919, during which 65,000 Seattle workers silenced the city for five days. Before it began, Union Record editor Anna Louise Strong predicted it would lead ‘no one knows where!’ We know how she felt.”

So how might the strike affect the local media landscape?

It will immediately hurt the papers’ finances during the start of the big pre-Xmas ad season.

If it drags on, it will further erode the Times/P-I consortium’s fat and non-sassy hold on regional discourse.

Locally and around the country, newspaper circulation’s failed to keep up with population growth. Local daily-paper readership hasn’t fallen as precipitously as local TV-news viewership, but it’s still flat. (When the Times moved to morning circulation earlier this year, it mostly took readers away from the P-I.)

And while the JOA might have a monopoly on bigtime daily circulation in town, its franchise is beset on all sides by insurgent suburban dailies, weeklies (“alternative” and otherwise), news and want-ad Websites, and the three big national dailies.

For a few years now, I’ve found rarified souls in the Capitol Hill-Belltown-U District belt who, when I tell them about something published that day in “the Times,” automatically assume I mean the New York Times. There were even a couple of early Stranger writers from out of town who took their refusal to read local papers as a matter of pride; even when the resulting ignorance led them to attempting to cross Fourth Avenue on the night of the Seafair parade.)

And if it really drags on, the Times-owning Blethen family just might finally give in and sell their controlling interest in the paper to the Knight-Ridder chain, which owns 49 percent of its stock currently. Knight-Ridder is partnered with Gannett in the JOA-run papers in Detroit, which have been stuck in a protracted strike/lockout mess that’s gone on for year after year, with no end in sight, to the papers’ detriment as well as the workers’.

Perhaps that looming threat will serve as enough incentive for the two sides in Seattle to find a settlement.

TOMORROW: A different way of exposing the news.

ELSEWHERE:

• Just in time for the holidays, the easy way to make deep fried turkey!…
• The lowly video game as an “art form for the digital age” (found by Arts and Letters Daily)….

SHORT STUFF TODAY, starting with another dare received on an email list.

A WILD BORE: Nickelodeon recently debuted Pelswick, a cartoon series created by our favorite Portland paraplegic satirist John Callahan. Its hero is a 13-year-old boy, who just happens to use a wheelchair.

One emailer on one of the lists I’m on noted that, not too long ago, such a character situation would never have been deemed an appropriate topic for a children’s light-entertainment series. This correspondent also asked if anyone could “name a subject that isn’t at least potentially entertaining.”

Here’s what I came up with:

• Claims adjustors.
• A year in the life of a flaxseed farm.
• A plastics chemist at Chrysler testing new PVC formulae for use in doorknobs and cup holders.
• A few hundred K of decompiled source code for HVAC systems-management software.
• A drizzly Tuesday night in late January in Aberdeen, Wash.
• A dark corner of outer space where no matter or light ever passes through.
• An all-New York City World Series.

(On the other hand, a drawn-out, never-concluding Presidential election is about as much fun as one can have with one’s garments currently being worn.)

YOU ROCK, ‘GRL’!: Media reaction to the ROCKRGRL Music Conference, Seattle’s biggest alterna-music confab in five years, was nothing if not predictable.

Before the conference, the big papers described it as an attempt to get a “women in rock” movement back on track after the end of Lilith Fair (which was really an acoustic singer-songwriter touring show, and which had included almost no nonsinging female instrumentalists).

During the conference, the papers tried to brand everyone in it as reverse-sexists, out to denounce “the male dominated music industry” and anything or anyone with a Y chromosome. Many of the speakers and interviewees, however, declined to fall in line with this preconceived line. Some at the panel discussions took time to thank husbands, boyfriends, band members, and other XY-ers who’ve supported their work. Others in interviews insisted their musical influences and life heroes weren’t as gender-specific as the interviewers had hoped. (Even at the discussion about violent “fans,” someone noted that stalkers and attackers can be anyone (cf. the Selena tragedy).)

And as for the music industry, it’s not built on gender but on money and power games; games which routinely prove disastrous for maybe 80 percent of male artists and 90 percent of female artists. (We’ll talk a little more about this tomorrow.)

THE END OF SOMETHING BIG: Saw Game Show Network’s hour-long tribute to Steve Allen a couple weeks back. Was reminded of how, seeing one of his last talk shows as a teenager, he was briefly my idol. He did silly things; he always kept the proceedings moving briskly. He also wrote fiction and nonfiction books, plays, and thousands of songs.

Of course, nobody remembers any of the songs, except the one he used as his own theme song. And the books and plays were essentially forgettable trifles. His main work was simply being funny on TV, and he was able to do it on and off for nearly 50 years.

As for his latter-day involvement with a right-wing pro-censorship lobby, you have to remember he was the son of vaudeville performers and was steeped in the old American secular religion of Wholesome Entertainment. To him, the past two or three decades’ worth of cultural bad boys and girls probably didn’t really represent a “moral sewer” but a mass heresy against what, to him, had been the One True Faith.

THE MARKETPLACE-O-IDEAS: The NY Times reports about some American leftist economists (including James Tobin, Jeremy Rifkin, and Bruce Ackerman) who’ve found an appreciative and excited audience for their ideas–in Europe.

You can think of it as the socio-philosophical equivalent of those U.S. alterna-music bands that could only get record contracts overseas.

You can also think of it as another of the unplanned effects of cultural globalization. Even avid opponents of a world system ruled by U.S. corporations are taking their ideas from Americans.

TOMORROW: Apres Napster, le deluge.

ELSEWHERE:

• Whack-a-President-elect wannabe….