Both the Vanishing Seattle book and the September Belltown Messenger are outta here and on their way to your adoring eyes. So I can now resume this here corner of what used to be euphemistically called “Cyberspace.”

Among the things I haven’t gotten the time to write about these past almost two weeks:

• The 25th anniversary of the first IBM PC. Personal computers had already been around a half decade. IBM saw the character-generating on the wall and realized it had to be in that market, before its own sub-mainframe workstation computers were obsolete. An “Entry Level Systems Division” was set up in Florida, far from IBM’s mainframe designers in upstate New York. A workable and expandable machine was swiftly designed, mostly from off-the-shelf parts. Corporate schmoozing between IBM bigwigs and UW Regent Mary Gates got Mary’s son Bill the chance to bid on the operating system contract. He bought the existing QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) from a couple of Seattle nerds. His then-small staff made two variants, PC-DOS (for IBM) and MS-DOS (which, under the MS/IBM contract, Gates & co. could sell to anybody). From this one deal arose the Puget Sound country’s new #1 economic force, the driver of real-estate hyperinflation and the flow of money into local “alternative” culture.
• 
  The first sign of hope for saving the Sonics and Storm. The Okie owners say they’d be perfectly happy with staying in Seattle Center, as long as it’s not in KeyArena. They suggested the Memorial Stadium land, already set to be cleared under a blue-ribbon committee’s master plan for the Center grounds. That’d be perfect with me. The high school football games can go to Husky Stadium or even Qwest Field. KeyArena can be re-remodeled as a concert and convention facility. We can get an indoor arena big enough for a National Hockey League team, plus the food-court and amusement-arcade sections the Okies want. I may be the only one I know who believes this deal can indeed be worked out without excessively draining local tax coffers, but I do believe it.
• 
  Safeco Insurance plans to leave the U District; the UW plans to buy the Safeco Tower. Let’s just make sure the U keeps the IHOP, next to the tower on Safeco-owned land.
• 
  A dog-days lull in the Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer soap opera. I’ve been talking with others who, like me, would like to be involved in starting a new local-news venture should the P-I call it a day. Should this project progress, and should I become a real part of it, I’ll wind up saying less and less about it due to the ol’ non-disclosure falderal.

…the last eight days, and what I’m doing at least the next six days: Finishing the huge Vanishing Seattle book project. That, and maybe a little bit of sleeping and eating.

But I can tell you there’s a new Belltown Messenger on the streets. And work on the Vanishing Seattle book continues apace. I still seek pix and mementos of several long-gone landmarks, including:

• The Last Exit on Brooklyn coffeehouse;
• Free Mars cafe/SCUD artists’ co-op (the “Jell-O mold” building);
• the original Herfy’s drive-in chain;
• punk and “grunge” era nightclubs;
• Jones Fantastic Museum; Seattle Center House;
• Orestes restaurant (“the Blob”);
• The Monastery disco;
• Trade Winds bar;
• the former downtown Nordstrom store;
• Osborn & Ulland sporting goods;
• the Vault and Penthouse jazz clubs.

Send any potential leads to this special email addy.

Our grandiose, bigger-and-badder-than-ever MISC@20 anniversary party has a home! It’ll be held Thursday, June 15 at the lasciviously delightful Grotto Room of the Rendezvous, Second north of Bell in Seattle. Further details TBA.

ANOTHER PLEA: Still lookin’ for Vanishing Seattle pix. So far, the Food Giant, Dag’s, and the old U District Herfy’s (yr. author’s first employer) remain the unfound holy grails of this search. The details are on the link at the upper-left corner of this page.

…about assembling a picture book about disappeared Seattle landmarks is the fact that more landmarks keep on a-dissapearin.’ Next: the Ballard Denny’s, which is both that chain’s next-to-last Seattle outlet (there’s still one on Fourth Avenue South) and the former last branch of the once-mighty Manning’s chain. O, when will the madness cease?

…I seek your help in assembling the ultimate Seattle memory book. Please add your own favorite long-gone landmarks to the ones on this big list.

I’m working on another book.

The tentative title: Vanishing Seattle.

It’ll be a picture book all about fondly remembered local bygones–restaurants, stores, TV/radio personalities, buildings, landmarks, tourist attractions, and more.

Suggest your favorite such topics today at this handy email link.

A little over a year ago, a tiny indie record label in Georgia asked me to help curate a compilation CD of ’80s and ’90s Seattle rockers. The result is now out. I didn’t pick the title Sleepless in Seattle. But I did help pick the music therein.

The label had originally hoped to attain tracks by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but found them beyond its budget. So instead, I fed the label’s people several hundred tracks by less-than-double-platinum acts. Several months’ worth of back-and-forth culling between me and them, and rights negotiations between them and the tracks’ original labels, resulted in 20 songs, mostly from the Sub Pop and C/Z archives. They represent a wide swath of Northwest noise, from the avant-art-noise of the Blackouts to the garage aggression of the U-Men to the acid-pop of the early Screaming Trees to the out-and-out assault of TAD and Coffin Break. There’s even one out-of-state band in the collection, Babes in Toyland.

There were, of course, some disagreements along the way. The LA-based independent promoter who’d been my original go-between with the label once asked, during the selection/culling of tracks, why I hadn’t included the “Seattle bands” Bush, Oasis, and Stone Temple Pilots. I had to explain to him those acts were really from such far-off places as London and San Diego, not here. I also helped persuade the label to axe its initial cover design, a cartoony sketch of longhair flannel dudes, in favor of a photo montage.

Now that it’s out, I like the fact that the compilation focuses on bands that didn’t “make it” globally. It’s more of a living artifact for concentrating on music you haven’t heard a thousand times. Parts of it could represent an average Thursday night at the Central Tavern in 1990.

There’ll be a release party and benefit concert in mid-April. More about that as it gets closer.

In the first day it’s been available, by new electronic book Take Control of Digital TV has sold a whopping 141 copies.

It’s all thanks to the well-crafted niche marketing operations at TidBITS Electronic Publishing. And it just goes to show you: Create a product that fulfills a consumer need, showcase it effectively, and watch the proceeds roll in. I’ll have to remember this lesson the next time I decide to devote a half year of my life to an artsy literary endeavor.

My latest verbal opus is finally available, and it’s a beauty. It’s Take Control of Digital TV, a beezy read telling you just about everything you need to know to join the high-definition video age. The book’s sold exclusively online, through my ex-Seattlite friends at TidBITS Electronic Publishing. Go on their site, buy it, download it instantly, and get started on the road to greater televisual splendor in your home.

…instead of writing to this Web site:

• Finished the fourth edited draft of my forthcoming ebook, Take Control of Digital TV. It’s gonna be a blast when it comes out, which will be before the end of the year.
• Finished the gorgeous November Belltown Messenger. It should be out this weekend, at all the usual dropoff spots.
• Recovering from one of them there eight-day cold or flu bugs. A nasty li’l bugger this one was. Last Friday and Saturday, when I was barely staying awake for an hour or two at a time, I was reminded of my father’s sleepy final years.
• Waited on a new day job, which I hope will appear damn soon. Otherwise, it’s the return of desperate fiscal straits, a situation I’m damned sick and tired of, as much as I’m sick of being tired and tired of being sick.

…my ongoing effort to get back to some of my dozen or so unfinished book ideas, I’m taking on yet another.

This would be a straightforward how-to title, for folks buying their first digital TV set. In the next few years, millions are expected to go through the same ordeal of tech-terminology and salesperson-doublespeak I recently faced (see a few entries below). If I can help just a few thousand consumers past this potential purchasing minefield, I can pay for my own recent DTV set.

Thus, I’m asking all loyal MISCmedia readers who’ve gone through this ordeal yourselves for advice on what should be in the book. As always, email your thoughts.

I arrived at the notorious “can of Spam building” on Howell Street, across from Re-bar, promptly at 7:15 a.m. Entercom now runs four stations from the building, including KNDD, where I was supposed to speak.

The 16th floor entrance beheld a permanent sign on the glass doors: DOOR IS LOCKED. RECEPTIONIST WILL OPEN. Only there was no receptionist. There was nobody in sight. Here it was, commercial radio’s most competitive day-part, and the joint seemed deserted.

After fifteen minutes of this ominous/glorious silence, Justin Chamberlin, KNDD’s morning show producer showed up at the door, let me in, and guided me down a thin, steep spiral staircase to the studio.

Down on the fifteenth floor were all the usual radio-station wall decorations—”goofy” promotional displays, Gold Record Awards honoring the station’s part in promoting assorted silly corporate-rock hits. After a short walk we were in the studio, overlooking I-5 and the west slope of Capitol Hill. DJ No-Name briskly introduced himself. I sat at a vacant microphone, quickly donned some headphones, and the interview was underway.

This is an hour at which, if I’m awake, I’m usually incoherent. Nevertheless, I managed to speak at least semi-lucidly for twelve uninterrupted minutes (a rare privilege in bigtime, morning-drive-time commercial radio, as I don’t have to tell you).

I talked about how Cobain wrote that he’d wished he could have been as audience-lovin’ as Freddy Mercury. I listed a few of the most important people in NW music history, such as early recording engineer Kearney Barton. I plugged Loser and The Myrtle of Venus. I mentioned my attendance at Neumo’s for Kim Warnick’s “retirement roast” the previous night. (More about that later, perhaps.)

Then it was time to play another Green Day oldie or whatever. Chamberlin efficiently saw me out the door. My bit to help save an endangered industry was through.

Yr. ob’d’t web-editor will be heard on KNDD-FM, 107.7, this Monday morning at the ungodly hour of 7:15 a.m. Interview topic: The past, present, and future of Seattle music. (I still predict a huge hammered-dulcimer revival in the 2010s, which will cause kids in the 2020s to yearn for the good old days of techno.)

OUR NOVEL The Myrtle of Venus is now available at Amazon.com. I earn more money if you buy it from my site, but you’re all still free, nay encouraged, to go to the Amazon page and contribute an unbiased rave review.