AT FIRST, I’d not planned to mention rain in my new Seattle picture book. It’s a cliche, I thought; the topic of too many cutesy-wootsy “jokes” in newspaper living-section columns and dorky greeting cards.

Then something happened. The rain went away, and stayed away most of this past winter.

Dunno ’bout any of you, but I came to miss it. Without the rain and the overcast, winter in Seattle is merely a slightly warmer version of winter in Liverpool.

It was as if all the changes wrought upon the city in recent years had altered not just its economy, its ethnography, and its cost of living but its very climate. All became bright, sometimes glaringly so.

Our usual, predictable seasonal-affective-disorder season got supplanted by nine-hour days of Technicolor brilliance interrupting fifteen-hour nights of crisp (but above freezing), starry skies. Instead of the grim, fatalist aesthetic of Cobain, Lynda Barry, and Ray Carver, we had a cheery, thought-free, go-for-it look and feeling better suited to techno music, glass art, and demographically-correct magazines. (Too bad the economy couldn’t keep up with the sunny disposition, particularly those once high-flyin’ tech companies.)

It was a disconcerting experience for someone accustomed, both psychologically and physiologically, to spending week after week under the low silver canopy of overcast (which inspired the surreal image of a giant indoor city in Stacey Levine’s novel Dra-).

The main salient feature of western PacNW rain isn’t really the precipitation. It certainly isn’t the volume of downpour, which even in an average year is less than NYC and several other big cities. It’s the dim, diffused light that makes going from indoors to out seem like those early Masterpiece Theatre shows where the interiors were in brightly-lit video and the exteriors were in drab 16mm film. (On a heavily overcast day, my new digital still camera insists on flash outdoors at high noon). It’s the lo-visibility “grey-out” conditions on the water. It’s the water-torture drip drip drip. It’s the mildewy scent that gets in your clothes and never goes away.

This past week, the drizzle came back, at least for a few days. Not enough to relieve the alarmingly low levels in our hydroelectric lakes, but enough to remind us what it’s like.

NEXT: Millions are reading and writing more than they ever did before. That’s supposed to be bad?

ELSEWHERE:

• What, you expect to always get tons-O cool shit on the Net for free?…
• Could the movies be an innately right-wing medium? (found by Arts & Letters Daily)….

OUR PROBLEM COULD BE YOUR OPPORTUNITY.

We’ve got about three dozen copies of Loser that got hurt in, or on their way to, bookstores. They don’t have any faults that would make them any less enjoyable, only less saleable (little bends on the cover, scratches on the spine, etc.) (I know, I know, people have been calling me slightly bent for years, but that’s not the issue here.)

These books have gotta go, and we’re willing to let ’em go cheap. If you already have the 1995 edition, this is your chance to get the new material in the update chapters. If you haven’t yet obtained your own copy of the most complete history ever written about the Seattle rock-music scene, here’s your best chance.

Deal #1: Start or renew a subscription to MISCmedia the print magazine, at $15 a year, and get a slightly-hurt but still ultimately readable Loser for just $10 more (yep, that’s a grand total of $25 US, postpaid.)

Deal #2: Not quite as great a deal as Deal #1, but still worth your trouble. Get an almost-imperceptibly blemished Loser on its own for $14 US postpaid, a whole third off the normal price for a perfect copy.

NEXT: Are self-published books any worse, on the average, than self-released CDs?

IN OTHER NEWS: The wrestling biz plays Monopoly, with WWF taking over onetime arch-rival WCW. Several readers tell me I should care about this.

ELSEWHERE:

• As one who’s regularly reminded of his own spelling boo-boos (thank you, loyal readers, really), I can’t help but snicker at a site full of online typos….
• Yes, there are fans of the original Lost in Space series, and one of them has collected the definitive list of Dr. Smith’s insults to the Robot….

AMONG THE MOST ENDURING CLICHES in business guidebooks is “branding.”

No, I don’t mean that kinky fetish from The Story of O. I mean the far kinkier, and more humiliating, ritual of treating a brand name as one’s most important asset, of treating everythiing you’ve got (especially yourself) as a “brand” to be marketed, and of building a line of goods and services around that brand.

You’re not a widget maker using the name Brand X, you’re a marketer of the Brand X name and image, which could start out attached to widgets but then be expanded into doodads, thingamajigs, and whatsits. (After a while you could even consider dropping the original widget business entirely, or at least farming it out to overseas subcontractors.)

With this in mind, let us consider the brand that is MISCmedia. (We’ve done this before about a year ago; but this is one of those exercises the guidebooks say one should regularly reprise.)

Our products, such as they are, are packages of written words, in both online and printed form. But what does the Mm brand really stand for under these guidebooks’ rules? And, based upon that, what other products might it be slapped onto?

Sure, Mm stands for witty oration and smart-alecky pontification. But it also represents a worldview, a zeitgeist of bemused befuddlement. It says to the world, “I want to understand you, world, but it’s just too darned complicated, and I can’t pretend it’s not too darn complicated; all I can do is laugh a quick laugh and get on with it.”

From this brief imaging statement could conceivable arise an entire line of Mm goods. Some of these just might include:

• The lecture series. Yr. ob’d’t online columnist, and a hand-picked group of guest lecturers, will speak at churches and hotel meeting rooms. You’ll learn how to talk Seattle (the “a” in “Ivar’s” is that upside-down-e schwa sound). You’ll hear a rousing acclamation of the U.S. of A. as one of the three or four greatest nations in all of North America. You’ll understand just why understanding is a futile quest.
• The home-study course. With our eight-CD box set of audio lessons, augmented by 12 videocassettes and three work-study books, you’ll undergo a world-spanning history of misunderstanding–from the Tower of Babel, to the landmarks of India that Columbus should’ve known he wasn’t seeing, to everything Reagan couldn’t remember even when he could, to that big dispute a couple years back about what the meaning of “is” is.

  Don’t have time for the full course? Then check out our short-cut guide to utter confusion, Stupidity for Dummies.

• The PBS miniseries. A reasonable Bill Moyers facsimile (Richard Dysart of LA Law, perhaps?) will interview everybody from stock clerks to politicians about the vital issues affecting 21st-century humanity–the NASDAQ collapse, why anybody outside the music industry should be expected to care about the Grammys, how global corporate power might be kept in check, and the glut of daytime judge shows.
• The motivational posters, key rings, and badges. Our exclusive line of “Unsuccessories” will remind everyone that their last paycheck is just around the corner.

  One design might depict the (admittedly already stale) image of a former future dot-com millionaire on the streets, shivering in his Casual Friday attire, holding up a perfectly desktop-published sign offering to write CGI-BIN scripts for food.

  Another, slightly less didactic, design might display a leggy sueprmodel clad in the latest styles, seated at a downtown library table, pondering a weighty tome by Hegel and pondering (according to the poster caption) whether there really is a perfect antithesis for every thesis, and who or what might be the ideal antithesis to her.

• The animated series. Our 13-episode Adventures in Befuddlement will feature a quintet of race- and gender-balanced cute little kiddies exploring a vast cartoon universe filled with loyal friends, treacherous enemies, treacherous friends, loyal enemies, cute little monsters with trademarked names, unbilled cameo appearances by ex-Presidents, painful life-lessons about the heartbreak of psoriasis, and short speeches to the audience at the end about how you really shouldn’t believe everything you hear in short speeches to the audience by cartoon characters.

Or, I could just put out some T-shirts and coffee mugs.

NEXT: The most eternal, unsung aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist–whining.

ELSEWHERE:

• You show me a historical pattern of white hipster-wannabes pretending to be black, and I’ll show you a “minstrel cycle….”

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)….

SOME SHORTS TODAY, starting with some great news.

THE NEXT MISCmedia book project is provisionally entitled City Lite (until we think of something better).

It’s my tribute to the city I have a lifelong lover’s quarrel with, in words (by me) and pictures (by hotshot photog Lori Mason).

It’ll be a personally guided tour-in-print of Seattle’s people, places, things, group gatherings, workdays, and playtimes.

With any luck, it’ll be out in time to coincide with Seattle’s 150th birthday in September 2001. If we can get the right financial backing, it’ll even be in color.

What we need from you now: Please feel free to send in your ideas of what images, scenes, scenic views, buildings, personalities, signs, and spectacles ought to be in it. Leave your suggestions by email to clark@speakeasy.org or on our luscious MISCtalk discussion boards.

HEY KIDS, WHAT TIME IS IT?: Yep, time for the annual MISCmedia In/Out List, another chance to ask your input. Send in your nominations for the people, places, things, fads, fashions, foods, and socioeconomic constructs you predict will rise or fall in prominence over the coming year (not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot right now).

NEWSPAPER STRIKE WATCH: The scab dailies are veering further and further rightward. Most blatant example: A Seattle Scab Post-Intelligencer front-page piece on Wednesday which began by quoting a few leftys who’d like a WTO-anniversary event every year–then, after the story jumped inside, audaciously compared it to Detroit’s once-annual arson sprees! (As if to imply the WTO protestors were out to destroy stuff, not to construct a more democratic or eco-friendly society.)

All character-defamation aside, an annual celebration of global solidarity/economic democracy/eco-awareness/worker rights/etc., celebrated here and wherever else enough gatherers can gather, could be a great thing. It needn’t, and shouldn’t, directly have to do with the WTO protests; but can instead use “N30” simply as a convenient date on which to publicly question the machinations of Global Business and to renew the spirit of empowerment and action. In a generation or two, it could even become the next big national holiday.

MONDAY: The rearing of Generation S&M.

ELSEWHERE:

• No products, no employees, no customers, no business plans; nothing but domain names for sale on eBay, all promising smash revenues…
• How would Machiavelli view Recount 2000?…

BACK ON FRIDAY AND MONDAY, we discussed whether I should “reinvent” myself and my written/published/posted work, according to the principles of Seth Godin’s business book Unleashing the Ideavirus.

That book claims the key to success in business today is to have a strong, easy-to-understand, and easily-spread idea.

Other business guides, including Tom Peters’s The Brand Called You and Rick Haskins’s “Branding Yourself” courses, insist that individuals have to start thinking about themselves as if they were products, and devise brand images and marketing strategies thusly.

My problem with that is my “product,” comprising the words you read here, is difficult to define in a sound bite or a Hollywood “pitch line.” The points of view expressed within these words are also hard to succinctly summarize.

So: How to accomplish this “self-branding” thang? (And doesn’t that sound too much like a scarification fetish?)

1. I’ve got a slogan already. “Popular Culture in Seattle and Beyond.” But that’s deliberately broad and vague.

2. The Seattle side of the premise is comparatively easy to explain. We’re chronicling the ongoing evolution (and, in some aspects, devolution) of one of North America’s great cities–particularly as these changes affect the arts-‘n’-entertainment scenes and assorted “youth” and “alternative” cultures.

3. The national pop-cult topics discussed here are more nebulous, but potentially could become more popular than the local parts (due to this ‘Net thang being so borderless and all). The MISCmedia title accurately implies a melange of many culture-and-media related topics.

But a little bit of all sorts of things is precisely what these “branding” experts warn their readers against. The well-branded enterprise or individual has to be about one really simple thing.

4. But much of the cultural philosophy expressed in these cyber-pages involves rants against too-simple thinking.

5. This insistence upon the value of complexity might actually be the most apt “simple idea” with which to describe this ongoing work. As the back cover blurb of The Big Book of MISC. says,

“Confused by today’s ever-morphing, ever-bifurcating, ever-weirder culture?

Good.

Get used to it.

Learn to love the chaos.”

Maybe my next book oughta be a manifesto specifically about the transition to a more “Misc.” world, and why that’s nothing to fear. (Unfortunately, the phrase “Chaos Culture” has already been in use, by commentators specifically discussing rave-party culture or trends in conceptual art. But other, equally-appropriate slogans are surely out there.)

TOMORROW: The greatest Northwest reference book ever written.

IN OTHER NEWS: The great Josie and the Pussycats creator’s-rights lawsuit.

ELSEWHERE:

• Al Gore, Jeffersonian intellectual?…
• It’s not “America’s only indigenous art form.” It’s just hot music, and there’s lots of it at Jazz Steps….

THE SIXTH ISSUE of the print MISCmedia magazine should be out to subscribers by now, after (yet another) delay.

I’m learning this thing as I go along. One of the things I’m learning is I can’t put out this thang at its current size on its originally-promised monthly schedule, without the budget to hire additional help in the editing, layout, and distribution sides of the operation.

There will be at least one more issue under the current format. After that, it’s hard to tell. It’s not going away, but it is at a crossroads. Either it becomes smaller and stays monthly or it comes out less often and stays the same size (or, if operating capital can be raised, perhaps even grows into a bigger and slicker thang).

What is becoming clearer as I go along is what I’m trying to do with it. (And before you ask, none of the following is to be considered a “mission statement.”)

• I want it to be a “must read” for all the intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals, and pseudo-pseudos out there.
• I want to draw readers in with a retro-classic design, clean graphics, and articles that at first appear to offer entertaining affirmations of hipster-party-line thought–but which then subtly veer off into actually challenging the reader’s received ideas.
• I want it to promote an exchange of ideas about the city’s future.

  Seattle’s on the verge of greatness. Seattle’s also on the verge of losing it all to rampant upscalism and sprawl. We could become another Paris or Rome (or at least another Vancouver); or we could instead just become another Aspen or Phoenix.

• I want it to promote a way of thinking, of looking at issues beyond the oversimplified dualities of us/them, hip/square, female/male, black/white, stoner/redneck, etc.
• I want it to have fun, and to encourage readers to look at life in a slightly more lighthearted way.
• And I want it to earn its fiscal keep, and perhaps eventually turn enough of a profit to support me when I become too old to, say, work on merchant ships.

Of course, to achieve any or all of these goals, I may have to start running the magazine more like, dare I say, a business. And that might mean reading, and heeding, more of those goofy business pep-talk books.

More about that tomorrow.

TOMORROW: Seeking a cure for the “Ideavirus.”

ELSEWHERE:

• Erotic fan fiction for the show you’d least expect anyone to write erotic fan fiction for, Jack Webb’s Emergency! (found by Memepool)….

IN THE FOUR MONTHS OR SO since we started the MISCmedia print magazine, we’ve been trying to resolve some of the differences between the print and online versions.

Right now, a lot of material appears online (including some stuff I’m rather proud of) that doesn’t make the cut for the limited print space we can currently barely afford to create.

One answer would be to revamp the online version.

All the print content would still appear on the site, but the concept of a full-length column every weekday would change–into something more like the group of short comments idea behind the original Misc. column.

I’ve been toying and experimenting offline with a site revamp that would have links to the print magazine’s pieces along one side of the page, and an ever-changing daily column thang on the other side. This would be made like those “Weblog” sites, with new items added at the top daily and old items eventually scrolling off the bottom.

On the ever-proverbial other hand, there is something nice about this here site being a refuge for semi-serious argumentative thought on the Web, where so much else seems to be a deluge of briefs, half-thought-out Attitude statements, and links to links to links.

Thoughts or ideas on any of this? Lemme know.

IN OTHER NEWS: Saw the Fremont Solstice Parade on Saturday. Besides the clever and fancy human-propelled floats (including a locomotive decorated with high-rise condos threatening to run over humans dressed as little houses) and the tight performing groups (including two dozen belly dancers in choreographed formations), the event was highlighted, as always, by the now world-famous Naked Bicyclists. (I met several spectators from out-of-state who’d read about the bikers in nudist-advocacy magazines and had gone to the parade just for them.)

This year, the bikers expanded upon their act. Most of the real nudies (as usual for the event, about two-thirds male) wore elaborate body paint; the faux-nudies in the group donned fig-leaf decorations atop their flesh-tone body stockings. As they’ve done in prior years, they not only appeared at the parade’s start but weaved back and forth, through and between the “official” parade attractions.

The regular parade performers also got into the act this year. Several troupes included one or more women wearing decorative pasties in lieu of tops. The final float starred a bare-breasted woman with henna body paint standing proudly atop a tall float (a la the Rio samba parades), waving to spectators young and old as the goddess she knew she was.

All in all: A great way to celebrate the human form and the summer sun, to playfully “rebel” for a moment against social put-ons, and to help teach children that bodies are nothing to be scared of or offended at.

(More about this tomorrow.)

TOMORROW: Will the real Idiots please stand up?

ELSEWHERE:

• Anybody remember Y2K?….
• The results are in: “most Americans are not that interested in Canada” (found by A Boy and His Basement)….
• There are not only fan sites for soft drinks, there are fan sites for soft drinks’ store-brand imitations! (found by Slumberland)….

ANOTHER YEAR, another MISCmedia anniversary party, another in-person questionnaire.

Here, in no particular order, are a few highlights of the two dozen or so responses filled in by attendees at last Thursday night’s big event at the Ditto Tavern:

Favorite food/drink:

• Artichoke-jalapeno dip/Coors Light
• Whoopass Energy Drink
• Corn/hot tea with milk
• Wine/champagne
• N.Y. steak and fries
• Mac n’ cheese/whiskey

Favorite store:

• Eagle Hardware
• Target and Value Village
• Bartell Drug
• Hot Topics

Favorite website:

• eBay
• Findagrave.com

Favorite catch phrase:

• “Whoa!”
• “Fuck my ass”
• “Hey girl”
• “Hi-eee”
• “What’s up?”

What I’d like on the MISCmedia website:

• “Advice column”
• “3-D rotating graphics”
• “Cartoons”

What I’d like in MISCmedia magazine:

• “Photography”
• “A horoscope”
• “A travel section; what people do and see”
• “Large, colorful, glossy ad inserts and CDs”
• “More of the same, and then some better beer”

The chief legacy of the WTO protests:

• “Immunity to gas”
• “Nothing changes”
• “Misinformed graffiti; a taste of martial law”
• “People stopped shopping so much at the Gap”
• “Seattle is NOT nice!”

What should happen to Microsoft:

• “Concentrate on multimedia”
• “Become a subsidiary of Washington state”
• “Leave capitalism alone”
• “Become a religion”

The Experience Music Project building books like:

• “Aerospace design goes gay!”
• “Fun”
• “A great piece of art”
• “A Tom Petty video”
• “A beautiful, crushed TP tube”
• “A ‘swoosh’ gone wrong”

What this town needs (other than construction projects):

• “A conservative influence”
• “Public art”
• “Posters on telephone poles”
• “A gigantic greenhouse with exotic plants from all over the world and 60-foot ceilings”
• “Spanish as a first language”
• “Deconstruction projects”

If this region has so much wealth, why can’t we…:

• “…afford to get out of here more often?”
• “…clean up the blankety-blank alleys?”
• “…smile more?”
• “…not tear up all the streets downtown?”
• “…build a pretty building?”
• “…rip out the fountain at Seattle Center and install a huge roller coaster?”
• “…keep the party going ’til midnight?”

TOMORROW: Short stuff, including that other monopolistic company Paul Allen used to be involved in.

ELSEWHERE:

• Have a guess which tech company will collapse next? Join the Dot-com Death Pool….
• One group’s pick of the top 40 toys of all time (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)….

A FINAL REMINDER to make plans for our MISCmedia@1 party on Thursday, June 8, starting around 7:30 p.m., at the quaint Ditto Tavern, 5th and Bell. Yeah, it’s 21 and over.

YEP, IT’S A BIRTHDAY for the current business incarnation of MISCmedia (1 year), this website (5 years), the ongoing Misc. project (14 years), and yr. ob’t. corresp’n’d’t (a whoppin’ 43 years).

And while I’ve made every attempt to stave off the threat of looming geezerdom, sometimes I can’t help but go all back-in-my-day-Sonny. (You think a 56K modem’s slow? You never had to use a 300-baud acoustic coupler!)

And there are definitely certain activities which just seem a lot less fun if practiced while in ones forties, such as:

• Explaining to people repeatedly that your name isn’t “Humphries,” you’re not William Steven Humphrey, and getting called Clark Kent is neither new nor particularly clever.
• Awakening after a night spent sipping a sequence of ten or more Electric Iced Teas.
• Wearing the same socks for four days straight.
• Breathing second-hand cigarette smoke.
• Breathing second-hand pot smoke.
• Eating mayonnaise straight.
• Eating an entire bag of iced animal cookies in one sitting.
• Eating heavily greasy foods. (I don’t remember the Kentucky Fried Chicken from my youth as having been the total grease sponge it is today.)
• Running breathlessly after a bus that’s starting to leave the bus stop you’re still across a just-turned-green light from.
• Getting lightly nudged in a crosswalk, on a cold and rainy night, by a car whose driver’s looking strictly the other way, looking just for other cars and not for people.
• Watching hardcore pornos.
• Watching softcore pornos.
• Watching Entertainment Tonight.
• Sleeping at a woman’s place for the first time, and getting pawed all night long not by her but by her ultra-sharp-clawed cat.
• Standing in a noise-and-smoke-filled club through three mediocre bands, while waiting for one great band to start its set.
• Waiting for someone to not phone you back.
• Listening to an excited person who thinks they’re the first to tell you the good news about Amway.
• Listening to an excited person who thinks they’re the first to tell you the good news about Werner Erhard’s Landmark Forum.
• Listening to an excited person who thinks they’re the first to tell you the good news about hemp.

On the other hand, many activities are just as exciting now as ever:

• Sex.
• Looking for sex.
• Drinking diet root beer ’til you burp.
• Watching Cartoon Network.
• Listening to the Fastbacks.
• Drinking a whole pot of coffee and writing until three a.m.

ELSEWHERE:

• Snickeringly “naughty” sound bytes from the classic Match Game!…