OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea (see below).

YESTERDAY, we discussed some essays by Henry Hughes and the aforementioned Dennis Rea in The Tentacle, Seattle’s periodical guide to avant-improv and other “creative” music.

Writing about their experiences during the anti-WTO protests, Hughes and Rea posited that global business and the governments it owns are just the logical result of what Hughes calls a system of “hierarchical power relations.”

They then present the type of avant, free-improv, and experimental music praised in The Tentacle as exemplifying a different model for social relations–one based on equality, shared pride, spontenaity, and free expression.

Hughes and Rea could have listed some other potential sociocultural lessons from avant-improv:

• Working for the love and pride of it, not just for the paycheck.
• A lifelong commitment to one’s work. (Improvisors might “compose on the spot,” but they devote every gig and practice toward finding neat things to do at the next gig.)
• Taking control of the means of one’s own production. (Some “creative” musicians book their own gigs, run their own concert series and record labels, or even design and build their own instruments.)
• Taking the long-term view. (While the terms “avant garde” and “experimental” imply something new and groundbreaking, these musicians readily acknowledge their debt to innumerable forebearers, living and deceased.)
• Taking the ground-level view. (You’re not going to become a Rock Star and you don’t want to. What you want is to make something that’s really important to those who do hear it.)
• A different kind of thinking-globally and acting-locally. (These gals ‘n’ guys may tour in China, sell most of their CDs in Europe, and take musical inspiration from everybody from Harry Partch and Arnold Schoenberg to the Throat Singers of Tuva. But everywhere they go, they play directly to the people in whatever room they’re in, without “mainstreaming” their work or depending on marketing hype.)

But can the “creative music” aesthetic really work as a metaphor or object lesson for larger society?

Probably not. But that’s at least part of the whole point.

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

ELSEWHERE:

• The PacNW’s becoming quite the politically influential place; except that one clueless N.Y. columnist still hasn’t heard….
• If Desmond Morris’s mom hadn’t eaten everything she liked, she might have lived longer than she did–99! (found by Arts & Letters Daily)…./UL>
  

OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack and musician Dennis Rea.

SOME EVEN MISC.-ER ITEMS to peruse on your real-Washington’s-birthday non-holiday:

THE SECOND ISSUE of MISCmedia, the Magazine should be at subscribers’ mailboxes any day now. Thinking of subscribing? Here are some reasons why you should.

Reason one: If more once-a-month distro-pals don’t start helping out, we’re gonna have to cut back on the delivery of free copies around town.

Reason two: Subscribe during the March issue’s delivery cycle (approximately the next four weeks) and you’ll receive a cute little toy or trinket from our grab bag o’ goodies; including several giveaway doodads from the last High Tech Career Expo.

AD VERBS: The nationwide Azteca mexican-restaurant chain has discovered a shtick for associating its TV commercials with “authentic” Mexican culture of the pop variety. The spots closely resemble those telenovelas soap operas on Univision!

The stoic line readings, the over-drenched color schemes, the tearjerker situations–they’re all there.

The only differences are that the actors are speaking slightly-accented English and the ads are intentionally funny.

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: Redeye is a thick photocopy zine full of neo hiphop-graffiti style art and lettering, and articles about such popular national young-lefty topics as Mumia Abu-Jamal, “materialism and the lack of consciousness in hiphop,” coming of age in L.A., and Allen Ginsberg.

It’s also got a one-page essay repeating the fun but totally false rumor that the KFC restaurant chain changed its name from “Kentucky Fried Chicken” because the critters it serves up have been so genetically modified as to no longer legally qualify as chickens.

The tale’s gotten so widespread, the company has felt it necessary to put up a page debunking the hoax. The University of New Hampshire, referenced in some of the e-mail versions of the story, also has its own debunking page. Another telling of the story behind the story comes from About.com.

So you can be assured: KFC’s serving real chicken. Real often-greasy chicken, in often-small portions, served up by a global giant currently using a (re-)animated icon of its dead founder talking like a dorky white mall-rapper.

(Another untrue rumor Redeye didn’t know about: the one that claimed KFC’s profits went to the Ku Klux Klan.)

TOMORROW: Search engine fun.

ELSEWHERE:

• The ever-popular Lizzie Borden syndrome….
• Another collection of real (though likely facetious) eBay ads; including several offering humans for sale….

FIRST, A BIG THANX to all who attended our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine last night; and to the Two Bells Tavern staff (especially Mark Harlow) for making it plausible.

YESTERDAY, we suggested proclaiming a year-long or longer Seattle Jubilee Year, climaxing with the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding at Alki Point, as a way to make up for the canceled Seattle Center New Year’s party.

We mentioned that this should be as big a bash as we can arrange; but that we shouldn’t depend too much on city funding.

What we didn’t mention was that the city’s millennium project had been a botched affair even before its climactic evening was shut down. The canceled party was a lot smaller in scale than first planned; associated schemes to light up the town eventually whittled down to the lighting of a single bridge.

Mayor Schell, the story goes, had apparently handed off to the Seattle Arts Commission the task of raising private dough for this, but gave the commission no help to speak of. The city’s old money, seldom interested in public gatherings, didn’t contribute much; the city’s new money, mainly interested in permanent architectural monuments to itself, also largley demurred from the opportunity.

But I’m pleased to report of at least one new-money figure in this town who’s putting his cash into a populist spectacle.

Seems there’s this Microsoft stock-option tycoon named Chris Peters. His idea of gaming has always had nothing to do with Tomb Raider and everything to do with tenpins. He’s now offered to lead an investor group to buy the Professional Bowlers Association and its national championship tour.

The PBA, heretofore member-owned since its 1958 inception, has fallen upon hard times. It lost its network TV contract in 1996; ABC apparently thought the sport wasn’t hip enough to draw the ever-prized young demographics. The PBA board decided that bringing in private owners was the only way to save the tour–and, perhaps, to give pro bowling a newer, younger, hipper image for the cyber-age.

The only problem with this scenario is bowling’s already way cool; precisely because it’s not frenetically “hip.” Happenin’ local nightspots like the Breakroom and Shorty’s are full of bowling imagery. The Soundgarden/Mudhoney guys are avid bowlers. The Jillian’s sports-bar chain’s supposed to start work this summer on building a new near-downtown alley, Seattle’s first new bowling joint in decades.

It’s not youth disinterest that caused the closing of Village Lanes, Bellevue Lanes, Lake City Bowl, and Green Lake Bowl since the early ’80s. It’s real estate. A bowling alley uses vast (by urban standards) square footage, which developers believe is more profitably used for retail (or for other recreation concepts, such as video-game parlors). The Jillian’s folks think they can make bowling pencil out by making it part of a whole leisure-time complex, including pool tables and full booze service, and by renting out the space in whole or in part to dot-com companies’ staff parties.

Chris Peters doesn’t have to make bowling cool. Indeed, any attempt to market it as something loud and “X-treme” would ruin the coolness it’s already got.

What Peters will need to do is more effectively market the sport in all its existing glory–loud shirts, whispering announcers, and all.

TOMORROW: Late-’90s nostalgia.

ELSEWHERE:

• Max Headroom has arrived and is a “cyberbabe”….

THE WEB’S A GREAT WAY to disseminate writing, 2-D art, and music.

It’s just, so far, a problematic way to turn a buck from these things.

In the Web’s first half-decade, the only online “content” Net users would directly pay for thus far mainly involved porn, sports-betting statistics, and investment statistics–categories that offer direct material benefit.

More recently, many dot-com entrepreneurs have been trying to sell downloads of MP3 music files, digitized movies, and “electronic books;” the jury’s still out on these ambitious eforts.

Banner ads on websites, that legacy of the original Prodigy service, are selling well; but there are just so many damn sites out there that few can generate the kind of hit-counts needed to make ads really pay off.

What has worked, for many content-oriented sites, is using free web content as teasers to promote hard-copy books and magazines, videocassettes, and CDs.

And that’s what we’re trying here at MISCmedia.

The Big Book of MISC. has sold well. The updated second edition of LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story looks like it may sell even better.

So, we now move on to the next step: Getting this here online column back into periodical print form.

Starting this weekend, the new MISCmedia Magazine will be available for $15 U.S./year by First Class mail. You can email a subscription request and be billed upon receipt of your first issue; or you can send cash, check, or money order to MISCmedia, 2608 2nd Ave., P.M.B. #217, Seattle WA 98121 USA.

Single copies will also be available at a few select in-person outlets throughout the Seattle metro area.

Why We’re Doing This (besides the reason listed above):

While the online column’s readership has been steady and growing (up to 10,000 “unique visitors” some months), I keep running into people who’ve refused or neglected to have anything to do with that increasingly-hyped computer revolution; or who say they just can’t get around to aregularly accessing websites, fearing their time-wastin’ potential.

Also, we needed a way to promote the books that stood out from traditional advertising-marketing schemes. A regular dose of this kind of skewed worldview just might be it.

The first issue of MISCmedia magazine will mostly contain recent episodes of the online column, plus some recommended books, CDs, videos, and websites. As the print product evolves and (with hope) grows, it will likely add arts previews, cartoons, classifieds, and the works of other writers and artists. Our ultimate goal: To build it into a 21st-century version of the great early- and mid-20th-century smart-humor magazines, like the old versions of The New Yorker and Punch.

Please join us in this new adventure.

TOMORROW: The right and wrong reasons for pushing a certain mayor out.

IN OTHER NEWS: Justice for the Permatemps! Congrats to all; you deserve the victory.

IN OTHER OTHER NEWS: Breaking up is so verr-y hard to do. But sometimes, it’s really best for everyone concerned, especially the kids.

ELSEWHERE:

• Let’s hear it for those unsung heroes who brighten almost everybody’s day, The Flavorists!…
• “The Smurf Village as a Marxist Utopia” (found by Running Tally)….
• For the armchair traveler in everyone, classic neon signage and coffee-shop architecture await at Roadside Peek….

ONE YEAR AGO THIS WEEK, I hung up the modem and received a phone message. The tabloid paper that had been running weekly Misc. columns since the paper’s ninth issue in November 1991 didn’t want to run them anymore.

It was a surprise, to say the least.

And it was the start of a topsy-turvy year here at MISCmedia.com HQ.

The loss of a nearly-full-time income forced me to pursue any and all potential extensions of whatever reputation I’d attained.

This website was revamped twice, and got its own domain name. It now boasts new material every weekday, plus a new X-Word puzzle every week. Its popularity has grown to over 10,000 visits a month, and continues to grow.

MISCmedia, the company, has also grown. The Big Book of MISC. was successfully launched in June, with almost the entire first press run now either sold or in stores. The relaunch of LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story is still on track for a late-’99 release. Further book projects, including several by other authors, are in the planning stages. And our freelance content-creation service for other people’s websites, launched just last month, is blazing away.

Still, there’s always room for more.

You may have already noticed this site got another complete redesign two weeks ago.

The old wood-grain veneer background images and the “rusted metal sign” digital effects on the header graphics had served their purpose in their day.

But with most of the site’s users now accessing it from 800 x 600 screens, and an increasing number of you even using 1024 x 768 screens, a bolder and simpler look seemed appropriate.

Another subtle change: The short-lived “Misc. World” title (a relic of the site’s very early days, when it was called “Misc. World HQ”) has also been retired. Now the online column, and the site which hosts it, are both entitled MISCmedia.

After all, most of what gets written about here has to do, at least indirectly, with life in a media-saturated world.

And we’ve become a “My Netscape Channel,” with a little reminder of each day’s new installment which you can stick onto your customizable Netscape portal-page (which you can get and use even if you’re using somebody else’s browser software).

You can expect even more tinkering and improvements to the site in coming weeks. Can’t say just yet what they’ll be (decisions to be made, contracts to be signed), but they should be a blast.

There will be more live events and readings on behalf of the new and new-old books, and perhaps a regular series of tie-in parties and spoken-word spectaculars.

And another print-periodical venture might be in the works for late this year or early next. Just might.

None of this, of course, could ever have been possible without the support of you loyal readers. You who’ve bought copies of The Big Book of MISC.; you who’ve given constructive feedback on the site’s alterations; you who’ve emailed your continued interest in making sure the column continued; you who’ve clicked on our sponsors’ banner ads and bought Amazon.com stuff thru our links.

So my deepest thanks to all of you.

Now get back to work. You don’t want the boss to think you’re wasting paid hours reading funny websites on your office computer.

IN OTHER NEWS: A woman tells other women how to dress with dignity– skirts, not pants. So much for the idea that the less skin showing the more respect given. Of course, she said this while clad in one of those huge body-denying robes meant to totally de-emphasize one’s non-intellectual self.

MONDAY: “Diner” food makes another comeback, or did it ever really leave?

ELSEWHERE:

• Learning “Bad GIrl Lingo” in one easy lesson….
• “The only interruption you have is that annoying little thing your body demands of you each night called “sleep” – correct?”
• The Love-O-Meter says “Go For It!”…

HERE’S THE SECOND essay I wrote this summer for Seattle magazine. (The mag’s under new management; I don’t know if the new folks will want me back.)

The occasion of my new book collection of old newspaper columns gives me an excuse to look at the art form’s sorry current state.

I don’t claim to write the funniest or wisest or sharpest columns around. I just wish more of today’s working columnists tried (or were allowed) to be better than they currently are.

The newspaper column just might be America’s greatest literary invention. Yet, like so many great American inventions, America seems to have largely forgotten how to do it right.

Seattle’s dailies haven’t had a columnist worthy of the title since the Times either allowed or persuaded professional gadfly Terry McDermott to move on a year or two back.

Back in the day, when Emmett Watson was in his prime and the likes of Byron Fish and even John Hinterberger were going strong, the P-I and Times relied on columns the way buildings rely on them–to prop up the whole superstructure of the edifice.

Even stronger stuff could be had in The Washington Teamster, wherein editor Ed Donohoe’s weekly “Tilting At Windmills” corner poked light fun at politicians who supported the union’s agenda and struck heavier barbs at politicians who didn’t.

Now, though, the columns in the local dailies are mightily staid affairs.

Latte jokes. Slug jokes. Endless paeans to why the baby-boom generation is even more darned important to the course of western civilization than it already thinks it is. A woman who claims it’s safe to walk the streets of Bellevue, as if anyone ever does. Political harrangues about why citizens are too chicken to dream bold dreams unless they go along with the latest scheme to subsidize private developers. Tirades about how Those Kids Today are either too lazy (unlike the diligent kids from The Sixties Generation) or too work-driven (unlike the value-centered kids from The Sixties Generation).

And, of course, oversimplified ideas about modern society, told in one-sentence paragraphs.

Really simple one-sentence paragraphs.

At least the sports pages still have the likes of Laura Vescey, Art Thiel, and Steve Kelley. But it’s sadly telling that the papers will only permit really good columnists to do really good work if it’s about a topic that doesn’t really matter.

The situation’s not much better in the “alternative” press.

My ex-stomping ground, The Stranger, was once full of strong, personal voices, from Anna Woolverton to “Spikey’s Coffee Corner;” but now apparently prefers formula concepts like restaurant briefs and a police blotter.

Seattle Weekly’s “columns” are essentially beat-reporting corners, not classic columnar-style commentaries.

Why this state of affairs? As print media become ever more corporate and bureaucratic, it’s harder for idiosyncratic voices to please the powers-that-be. You’ve gotta be either predictably “analytical” (bland) or predictably “outrageous” (dumb).

Yet it’s just these individualists who add the spark of personality to a paper, who make it a must-read even on slow news days.

There are still a few great ones churning out verbiage across the country. The feisty Texan Molly Ivins is a national treasure. The P-I’s new syndicated contributor Sean Gonsalves has the rare audacity to criticize not just politicians but the economic interest groups who own them. And Larry King’s weekly “King’s Things” in USA Today show he’s as skilled at short-form writing as he is at long-form talking. On the conservative side, at least George Will still tries to rationally argue his points, without succumbing to Limbaughesque bully tactics.

These, and a few others, know that a great column should have its own point of view, not merely rehash what all those other media commentators are doing. (A good case of the latter came back in April, when most everybody in the papers and on the air made the same three or four, equally misinformed and inane, arguments about violent suburban teens.)

It should tell a story, or several stories. It should provide insights into the day-to-day flow of events that straight reporting or dry analysis just can’t.

And it should make its points with personality but also with efficiency, and then stop.

IN OTHER NEWS: A short while back, I suggested the violent atmosphere that led to the Woodstock ’99 rapes might have had something to do with the aesthetic of amoral aggression propagated by the likes of Limp Bizkit. Similar allegations have now been separately made, in a libelous email supposedly from a certain ex-Seattleite rock star (found by Metascene).

TOMORROW: A look at some of the city’s remaining (for now) old buildings.

PASSAGE (from Lindsay Marshall): ” If the word ‘moving’ appears on the cover and the book is not about transport then avoid it like the plague.”

ELSEWHERE:

• They’re the all-purpose nemeses to all “alterna” minded-folks, and they’re on the prowl: It’s the “Attack of the Big, Loud White Guys”….
• The course of true love? About 30 months, if you believe these folks….
• And you thought Y2K was scary….

THANKS TO ALL who’ve asked about the progress of the updated second edition of LOSER: The Real Seattle Music Story.

The book’s coming along, and should be off to press by month’s end (knock-on-Formica).

Some of the new material might appear on these pages in forthcoming weeks.

Until then, please enjoy the following music-related fun links.

• Local label Laundry Room Records has a less-than-positive image of major-label employment policies…
• There is no finer music zine published in the PacNW than Cool and Strange Music…
• According to Silkworm’s Tim Midgett, “A few of these records really are necessities as far as I’m concerned. Maybe not on food-water-shelter level, but as close as a record can get….”
• Why should one going-nowhere-fast indie label try to sue another one? You guess’s as good as mine….
• From Skratchcast, Seattle’s world-dominatin’ hiphop streamcaster: “If that 75-year old white woman at every single Seattle show can make it, then so can you….”
• A random band-name generator…
• All that can be said is thank goodness Vancouver’s infamous singer/producer/DJ/interviewer Nardwaur the Human Serviette is recovering from his recent, sudden medical scare, so he can keep on forcing “celebrities” to converse like normal men and women….
• Hooray for flexi-discs!
• And a few words on behalf of the REAL monsters of rock….
• A handy glossary of rock-talk cliches: “Interesting: Trying to be unusual; wrong (as in that’s an interesting chord)…”
• Not exactly a whole lotta love…
• Ready for Backstreet Boys porn? “Angie started her path down Nick’s body again. She unbuttoned his pants and unzipped his zipper. Nick moaned softly….”
• …And a whole site devoted to making fun of the Backstreets and other “boy bands”….
• The almost-linear path from the Partridge Family to N’Sync….
• From Forbes, of all places, a look at Internet CD sales from the alternating POVs of a double-platinum band and one that wishes to be (no “art for art’s sake” DIY viewpoints allowed here, natch)….
• Something that to my knowledge has only been done in my town once, but Phoenix has a full-time band devoted to: Punk Rock Karaoke!…
• This strange-music collector lets you look at his LP covers but not listen to any of the records themselves (the tease)….
• But this site, on the other hand, gives you about as many seconds of each unclassic disc as most of you can probably stand….

IN OTHER NEWS: Phones ‘R’ US just changed all the prerecorded announcement pieces on its voice-messaging system to a less businesslike, more sultry feminine voice. If the old, pre-breakup AT&T was “Ma Bell” and the spun-off regional phone providers of ’84 were the “Baby Bells,” then this company might now be a “Horny Teen Bell.” (The kind who always unloads big traumas upon those responsible for paying her bills.)

TOMORROW: A revisionist look at Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner.”

ELSEWHERE:

• Have fun with the Alta Vista translation engine;…
• …Or learn to cuss in Turkish….
• “I would love to hear from people who have stolen girlfriends or from girls who have been ‘stolen’… I don’t want to hear from any boyfriends who want to complain about losing their girlfriends.” (Found by Memepool)
• “The American fear of seeming too smart or thinking too hard….”

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, thanx and a hat tip to all who attended my second live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. last night at Elliott Bay Book Co. Further events TBA.

(ADVISORY: The rest of today’s edition contains tasteful language about topics some of you might find borderline-icky. But that’s America for you.)

In his new book For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals, the author-cellist Wayne C. Booth quotes Walt Whitman liking Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writing for the “amount of passion–the blood and muscle–with which it was invested, which lay concealed and active in it.”

That’s as close to a workable definition of “amateur” as I can find these days. The previously-dominant definition, of working without financial renumeration, was pretty much buried a few Olympic Games ago.

The “passion” definition’s also better than the “unpaid” definition to describe the thousands of “amateur adult” Websites out there these days.

Yes, a good proportion of those sites are trying to earn money. Many of them charge for access, to everything or to extra-hot “members’ areas.” Many of them sell videos, CD-ROMS, photos, autographed mementos, and/or undergarments.

But these sites (or at least the better ones) offer something you can’t get from the formulaic rites of corporate porn.

Call it a spirit, a joie de vivre, a feeling (even if in some cases it’s just an affectation of a feeling) that these women really like to do their varying degrees of wicked things (from nude posing on some sites all the way to, well, all the way on other sites) and to let you see them doing them.

Three of these webmistresses recently made a pair of joint public appearances in Seattle and suburban Des Moines, WA. One of them, Oasis, was having a west-coast tour of these “bar meets” with fans; two others, the local Gina and the Portland-based J, accompanied her on this stop.

All three have husbands (Gina for 20 years) who attended the bar meet; all have “open” relationships, at least for the purpose of gathering photo and video material for their sites. Oasis even invited some of her bar-meet guests to an “after-party” safe-sex photo shoot back in her hotel room. (I didn’t attend or ask to.)

All three women were extremely nice and personable. Even while legally dressed in the bars, they exuded an open sensuality and an enthusiasm for life. They were perfect hostesses, graciously leading the shier computer-nerd fans into the bar-table conversation. The women talked a lot about how they love bodies (their own and other people’s), they love sex, and they want to use their sites to help people overcome their own inhibitions and lingering prudish repressions.

But, just like “indie” rock, “amateur” webmistressing is still show business, which means it’s business. Oasis conducts her bar-meet tours so she can personally bring in new fans, so she can turn current occasional viewers into paid members, and so she can make cross-promotional photo ops with other webmistresses across North America. She and her hubby have also worked as consultants and server-providers to other amateurs. Their site claims,

“If you can be a consistant model, have the desire to attend functions, meet new people and promote a website then you could be an internet star! We won’t shit you, the pay-off is much faster being a model, but the long term investment is greater to have your own site. Don’t believe any of the ‘get rich quick’ crap you read on other sites… It takes a while to establish a website and turn a good profit. But if you have the drive, patience and charisma you can earn big bucks with your own website.”

MONDAY: A little more of this.

ELSEWHERE: Some ex-Yugoslavs dream of Cyber Utopias; while others retreat to the paranormal… Probably not the ultimate ad-placement abomination, but the lowest for now…

BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE TODAY, here’s one last reminder to get thyself and thy loved-ones out to our live reading and promo for The Big Book of MISC. tonight, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. ‘Til then, please enjoy the following…

IMP-ERATIVES: Let us now praise two not-very-famous men, both of Chicago: Cartoonist-illustrator-calligrapher Chris Ware and his recent biographer-explainer, Daniel Raeburn.

Raeburn is the publisher of The Imp, an occasional one-man zine devoted to a single, full-length profile of a different comics creator each issue. The first Imp was an authorized career-study of Eightball creator Daniel Clowes; the second, a highly unauthorized (yet not-completely-condemnatory) look at Fundamentalist tract king Jack T. Chick. These were published in the respective formats of a comic-sized pamphlet and an oversized Chick tract.

For his Ware tribute, Raeburn has pulled out all the stops. He’s issued his work in the form of a fake turn-of-the-century tabloid magazine; apparently drawing particular layout inspiration from The Youth’s Companion, a boys’ adventure-fiction mag published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the Perry Mason Company of Boston. (Yes, Erle Stanley Gardner named his whodunit hero after the publisher who first turned him onto formula fiction as a kid.)

This small-type layout means Raeburn can cram his full 40,000-word bio, with dozens of pix and fake ads (more about them later) into 20 tabloid pages (plus a two-page center section containing four other cartoonists’ full-color tributes to Ware). It’s also a perfect match to Raeburn’s subject.

Ware, as any reader of his Acme Novelty Library comix (or their current syndicated source, Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) knows, is a devout lover of pre-modern American ephemera, design, architecture, and music (particularly ragtime). Loss in general, and in particular the loss of so much of what was great and beautiful about North America, plays a huge role in the Corrigan saga.

The Ware issue of The Imp covers most every facet of the young cartoonist’s productive career, and many (though not nearly all) of the issues and themes leading into and out from Ware’s elegant, sad works. Of particular interest to the pop-culture student such as myself are the sections on Chicago architecture (particularly that of the 1893 Columbia Exposition), the old Sears catalog (possibly Chicago’s most important print product), and the Sears book’s “evil twin,” the still-published-today Johnson Smith catalog of novelty toys and practical jokes.

That latter essay forms a center and counterpoint to the fake ads along the sides and bottoms of most of the zine’s pages, in the tiny-print style of old newspapers and magazine back-pages (a design look familiar to many people today from Wendy’s tabletops). These ads (some of which previously appeared in the endpages of Ware’s comics) are dense with copy that melt away the bombastic promises of advertising better than the entire run of Adbusters Quarterly:

• “Things That Look Like Other Things. The EVER-POPULAR FAD. A Heartless Practical Joke… Plastic that looks like wood. Buses that look like trolley cars. Adults who look like children. It’s all the rage!… Also, new for this season: Little girls who look like prostitutes, little boys who look like killers.”
• “The sexual partner of your choice, sent directly to your door, ready and willing with no reservations… Hurry! Because after three to six months, you’re going to get sick of them and you’ll want a new one all over again. No end to the fun!”
• “CERTAINTY. Wow! Here’s your chance to eliminate doubt forever. Never be wrong again, either in your principles, or in petty arguments with your inferiors. What could be better?”

Appropriately enough, on the night I finished reading The Imp, the Disney Channel ran an awkwardly computer-colored version of Galloping Gaucho, the second-ever Mickey Mouse cartoon (1928). It had been produced as a silent, but had music and sound effects tacked on just before its release. Ub Iwerks’ original Mickey character design bears a slight resemblance to Ware’s early character Quimby the Mouse.

But more importantly, the early Mickey films represent a transition from the imagination-crazy days of silent animation toward the hyperrealistic, desexualized, formulaic slickness Disney would soon turn into. Seeing this with bad latter-day color schemes added only made it even more of a Chris Ware moment.

(The Imp has no known website; copies of it, and of Ware’s comics, can be ordered via Quimby’s (a Chicago store named after Ware’s mouse character and utilizing Ware-designed graphics), Last Gasp, and Atomic Books. Ware’s works are also available direct from Fantagraphics.)

TOMORROW: If an adult website charges money, how can it be “amateur”?

ELSEWHERE: Seattle’s mayor sez he wants to launch a new crusade for “the arts.” Considering the extent to which past “arts” crusades have generated more and more cash for big institutions and construction projects, and less and less cash for artists, excuse us if we’re a bit skeptical until we see the details… Creative uses for AOL CD-ROMs and diskettes… The search continues to find anybody who likes Microsoft who isn’t being paid to like it; while MS is quoted as calling itself nothing less than “The Most Important Company in the History of the World”…

SOMETIME LATE LAST YEAR, erstwhile Stranger music writer Everett True called for a “Campaign for Real Rock” (inspired by the British beer-lovers’ lobby, the Campaign for Real Ale).

True’s premise: Just as the great British brewing traditions were being threatened by callous cost-cutting measures at big corporate breweries, so was classic American hard rock n’ roll threatened by the commercial-pop acts manufactured by the major record labels.

True’s gone back to the U.K.; but without him, real rock (or, as Backfire zine editor Dawn Anderson calls it, “Rawk”) is back. Alas.

Lost in most mainstream-media coverage of rape and pillaging at Woodstock 99 was the fact that the festival bore only a trademark connection with the ’69 original. This festival was not a corporate exploitation of “Peace and Music” but a showcase for harder, louder, more aggressive acts, especially on its last night.

Now there’s a radio station devoted entirely to the likes of Limp Bizkit, KORN (the group which relegated BR-549 to being only the second most popular band with a Hee Haw-derived name), Eminem, Kid Rock, etc. etc.

It’s called “The Funky Monkey,” though its official call letters are KKBY. It had been a fairly progressive, Tacoma-based R&B station, but hadn’t turned a profit with that format; so it’s now going straight for the white-gangsta-wannabe market.

The contrast between the station’s new and old formats couldn’t be much more stark.

The old KKBY had played music by and for African-Americans who’d long ago gotten weary of gangsta rap, that “authentic ghetto voice” concocted or at least pushed by Hollywood promoters eager to nakedly exploit white mall kids’ stereotypes of young black men as sexy savages.

The new KKBY plays mostly white artists who’ve taken the gangsta acts’ “Xtreme” hiphop (via such crossover pioneers as the Beastie Boys and Jane’s Addiction) and removed all blackness except for a thin veneer of supposed street-credibility. White artists “admiring” their black gangsta forebearers for fostering an image of doped-up, violent, woman-hating jerks with a finely-tuned fashion sense.

In other words, “Angry White Rappers.”

A mostly-white continuation of former black-music trends many black listeners had rejected. (Which is nothing new. Black audiences have long rushed to the Star-Off Machine after a black-music subgenre had been infiltrated, then taken over, by white acts, from big-band to doo-wop.)

This new white-rock-rap genre (KKBY calls it “the new heavies”) is at least as stoopid as most other Rawk waves over the past three decades. What’s different is the level of personal aggression–a rage often not against the machine but against one’s peers and the opp. sex. Rock n’ roll used to be about trying to seduce, to woo, to attract sex. The “new heavies” are often boasting to other males about their sexual prowess, while snarling at females to shut up and take it.

I’m really trying not to sound here like an old fogey–or worse, an old rock critic. There are too many parallels in what I’ve written above to the ’50s critics who loved authentic black R&B but loathed that commercialized white teenybopper corruption of it known as rock n’ roll.

And, there are some signs of non-idiocy within the genre. Eminem, at times, approaches the electro-laconic wit of, say, MC 900 Ft. Jesus. And those old-school new-heavies, the Beastie Boys, know the ultimate idiocy of the “Wigger” stance (and also shouldn’t be blamed too much for having some of the same retro-fetishes as Quentin Tarantino).

But compare these SK8-rappers to the best real hiphop and a wide creative chasm remains. Even the most corporate of fin-de-siecle R&B product-suppliers, such as Missy Elliott or Sean Combs, has a sense of the complex potentials of their music you can’t find in Insane Clown Posse, and certainly not in white doodz who wish they were Insane Clown Posse.

TOMORROW (in person):Get everyone you know, plus any strangers you might run into, to get to the big promo event and reading for The Big Book of MISC. tomorrow night, Aug. 26, 7:30 p.m., at the venerable Elliott Bay Book Co. Be there or be isogonal.