aol radio blog

• Overhyped meme of the day: Following last night’s Grammys, teens and young adults by the dozen are supposedly Tweeting® “Who Is Paul McCartney?” As if the entire world hadn’t been force-fed the Sixties Generation® and its incessant proclamations of itself as the apex of humanity from which all before and since is a mere subspecies. As if Sixties Generation® superstars, even those famous for singing about dogs and butter pies, haven’t been repurposed everywhere from Simpsons cameos to Guitar Hero® games. Have at least a few dozen young Americans actually found a way to mentally shut out the tactics of Nostalgia, Inc.? Could they actually be more interested in creating their own culture, their own world?
• Adultery. Sex scandals. Obsessions with sales-hustling, upscale material goods, and “branding.” Shady business practices. Welcome to the all-American materialistic world of yoga.
• Just in time for v-day, gays will be able to get married, in just a few months. As long as the out-of-state bigot megabucks campaign, just starting, doesn’t reverse it.
• The Belltown Community Center is finally set to open in June, at the former Zum upscale gym at Fifth and Bell. The building of Bell Street’s “park boulevard” makeover (specially wide sidewalks and special street lighting) starts later this year; piggybacking, as it had always been planned to, on street work City Light was going to do on Bell anyway.
• Is Rick Santorum really an extremely bigoted ass, or simply cynically pretenting to be an extremely bigoted ass?
• Going everywhere by car: it’s just sooo less popular these days.
• The drive for NBA and NHL teams in Seattle now has a “fan lobby.” It’s called Arena Solution. Its board and advisory committee includes everybody from ex-Seahawks coach Tom Mara and Sonics legend Shawn Kemp to Capitol Hill bar owner Marcus Lalario and “Seattle’s Biggest Sports Fan” Lorin Sandretzky. This group seems willing to have a new arena in either Sodo or Bellevue, as long as we get the teams to play in it.
• Working moms are often perceived as giving less than 1000-percent undivided fealty to their employers. They are role models to us all.

fdin.org.uk

• Did you know Heinz had a soup factory in Kent? Emphasis on the “had.”
• Just when you thought you’d seen everything, something unexpected comes. Today’s edition: A poet who’s actually got people listening to him. Meet the Tacoma guy behind the viral video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
• A Facebook ad said an Issaquah heavy-metal guitarist with the stage name Steve Thunderbolt was looking for bandmates, but insisted on “no blacks”. Not ’cause he was a racist or anything; it was just “a drug issue and a safety issue.”
• It’s not just Ron Paul. The national Republican Party as a whole seems to just luuuuuv them some white supremacists.
• The UW president, the state’s highest paid employee, claims finding answers to education funding in Wash. state is “above my pay grade.”
• Soul divas aren’t supposed to die this young.
• Let’s hear it for last week’s #1 selling musical star on Amazon’s CD and download charts: Leonard Cohen! (Really.)
• Let’s close, just for the heckuvit, with Mike Wallace in a shortening commercial.

gasoline alley antiques

• Last time, we discussed what any potential Seattle NHL hockey team should be called. “Go 2 Guy” sports commentator Jim Moore has a simple answer—the Totems. That was the name for Seattle’s teams in the old Western Hockey League. (That league disbanded shortly after Vancouver, its marquee franchise, joined the NHL.)
• Mayor McGinn has promised that city tax money won’t go toward building a new basketball/hockey arena. This does not mean it will be an all private-enterprise endeavor, or that it would be cost-free to Seattle taxpayers.  The city will have to vacate at least one long block of Occidental Avenue South, essentially giving that land to the arena developers. It might also have to move in on any holdout landowners at the site, essentially forcing them to sell. The project might involve city-backed bond sales and/or tax breaks on construction and ticket sales. And certainly a new arena will compete with the city-owned KeyArena for the Storm, Seattle U basketball, the Rat City Rollergirls, concerts, corporate meetings, evangelical crusades, etc.
• David Meinert, meanwhile, believes McGinn might actually get a second term in ’13.
• The unionization drive at the new Longview grain terminal finally succeeded.
• The truckers’ strike at the Port of Seattle is having effects.
• The state legislature might approve textile-based traction devices, invented in Europe. Get ready for “tire socks.”
• A Vancouver USA attorney wants to overthrow the state’s Congressional redistricting scheme. He alleges the new districts are too incumbent-friendly.
• The one, way insufficient, state tax reform scheme in the current Legislative session is getting bogged down in the specifics.
• The pseudo-“religious” anti-gay bigots may not show up at the Powell children’s funeral after all. (The tragedy that led to this is, as we all sadly know, the work of a criminally insane straight guy.)
• Anthony B. Robinson ponders why Wash. state’s Democrats can accomplish gay marriage and other “social agenda” things, while the state government’s revenue system sends it, and us, ever closer to civic oblivion.
• Charles B. Pierce at Esquire is succinct: “Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Destroying America.”
• Health insurance rates keep rising, as the insurance giants pocket more and more of that increased cash inflow.
• What happens to pizza-parlor robot rock bands after they die? Avid collectors, including some in Seattle, try to reanimate them.

west seattle blog

This Sunday’s Grammy Awards telecast will feature the three living original Beach Boys, reunited on stage for the first time in a couple of decades.

The performance kicks off a short tour promoting the group’s 50th anniversary and its recent Smile Sessions box set.

Probably the last major release by Capitol Records before Sony devours its parent EMI, the box set presents, in as complete form as possible, the most legendary unreleased album in pop history.

•

The story of Smile is long and convoluted. Whole books have been written about it.

To make this long story short:

In 1966, the pop music scene was changing. LPs and “album rock” FM radio were becoming more important than singles and top-40 AM. Pop combos like the Beach Boys were threatened with irrelevance.

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ composer-producer, had already quit touring with the band to be in the studio full time. With the Pet Sounds LP, he’d turned away from the Boys’ early songs about surfing and cars, toward more complex subjects and arrangements.

Then with the single “Good Vibrations,” Wilson experimented with “modular recording.” Using L.A.’s top session players for all the non-vocal parts, he recorded (and re-recorded) different sections of the tune in different studios, then mixed-and-matched them for the final hit.

Wilson decided to make an entire LP the same way.

What’s more, it wouldn’t be a set of self-contained songs, but a concept album (the term was just coming into use).

The concept: a “teenage symphony to God.” Themes and motifs would flow, blend, cut away, and recur.

As with “Good Vibrations,” Smile’s instrumental tracks were recorded in the form of dozens of fragments, some as short as five seconds. Some fragments were more or less intended to be merged into standard-length songs. Others were stand-alone musical miniatures.

Wilson had composed and arranged these bits without a running order in mind (for the individual bits or for the LP as a whole), planning to figure that out later.

Wilson’s chief compatriot in the project was Van Dyke Parks, a young L.A. scenemaker. Parks wrote conceptual, sometimes surreal lyrics to Wilson’s melodies, and sat in with Wilson at the instrumental sessions.

These tracks were ready when the Beach Boys returned to L.A. from a long tour. At first, the Boys didn’t “get” Brian’s pop-symphony ambitions. Lead singer Mike Love especially felt Parks’ abstract, allegedly drug-inspired lyrics were too removed from the Beach Boys’ format (what would now be called their “brand”).

Vocal recordings were about three-quarters completed, then suspended.

Parks singed a singer-songwriter deal with Warner Bros. Records and quit the Smile project, with at least one song lyric unwritten.

A few months later, the Boys’ press agent issued a statement saying the album had been scrapped.

Some of its tracks were reused or re-recorded on later Beach Boys releases. Others made their way onto the tape-trading circuit, and eventually as CD bonus tracks.

Then in 2004, Wilson and his current solo band premiered a full reconstruction of Smile on stage, followed by an all newly-recorded CD.

Critics adored it. They called it a timeless work, beyond mere “oldies” status. It deftly mixed different pop sensibilities with modern classical and experimental “musique concrete” influences.

Now we have the “official” Beach Boys Smile CD, assembled in the order Wilson had used in 2004, supplemented with several discs of outtakes and alternate tracks.

•

Several factors contributed to Smile’s original scrapping, including Love’s opposition and the group’s ongoing beef with Capitol management.

The probable real reason, I believe: Wilson didn’t know how to assemble all the bits into a coherent whole. He was slowly but steadily “losing it” mentally, due to drugs and/or clinical depression. (I suspect the latter was the greater reason.)

Nobody else knew how to assemble all these bits either.

The following is how I conjecture it could have been completed (I’ve probably got some historical details wrong, but go along with me).

•

[alternate-history mode]

After Parks quit the Smile project, Capitol bosses examined the hours of recorded bits and pieces. They decided the project needed adult supervision, if the label stood a chance of making back its investment.

The label brought in a “record doctor.” We’ll call him “Mr. A.” He was familiar with both pop-rock and the outer reaches of modern jazz.

Mr. A’s nominal job was to replace Parks as Wilson’s uncredited co-producer.

His real job was to create a shippable product.

He was respected enough within the business to gain Brian Wilson’s trust, at least at first. The Beach Boys were more reluctant to accept him, but agreed under the condition that, once this quagmire was out of the way, the group would have their own (i.e., Mike Love’s) way on their next LP.

First, Mr. A scheduled two vocal sessions to wrap up Parks’ last unrecorded lyrics. Only the first session required the whole group at once, recording six group parts for four tracks.

The second session involved solos and duets, for three or four standard-length songs and three fragments. Love declined to sing any more of what he called Parks’ more “trippy” lyrics, so those parts were divvied up among the other group members.

While Brian conducted those sessions, a crew of assistants re-logged all the instrumental and vocal fragments, built “scratch track” vocal/instrumental mixes, then redubbed all these onto radio-station tape cartridges.

Mr. A sat Brian down in a mixing booth, where he used these “carts” to play the bits in different sequences. He started with the tracks that most closely resembled traditonal song structures (“Surf’s Up,” “Wonderful”).

Wilson signed off on each approved sequence, under daily and weekly deadlines imposed by the label. As this work dragged on, Wilson reportedly became less active in suggesting or rejecting different options.

Mr. A and Wilson eventually reached a track for which Parks hadn’t written a lyric. Pet Sounds lyricist Tony Asher was quickly brought in to supply words, under the new title “Hawaiian Islands.” Love agreed to sing on this one, because it updated the classic Beach Boys topic of wholesome recreation. Brian took advantage of this extra studio date to redo some already-recorded vocal bits, punching up some and smoothing out others. But the label steadfastly refused to budget any more studio time after that.

Next came the placing of the one-minute-or-less song bits. Mr. A labeled these “M&S” on log sheets, for “medleys and segues.” Higher-ups at the label, during interoffice chatter, unofficially reversed the initials.

Under Capitol’s dictates, the fragments were used more sparingly than Wilson wanted. This was particularly true of the all-instrumental bits. The label’s reasoning: This was a Beach Boys record, not a “Brian Wilson Orchestra” record.

What Wilson had vaguely planned as three sides running 49 minutes became two sides running 43 minutes.

During the tedious final mixing sessions, Wilson allegedly nodded off in the booth at least once. Later rumors claimed Mr. A forged Wilson’s initials signing off on some of the track mixes.

Upon hearing early versions of the mixes, Love allegedly felt surprised. This music wasn’t druggy; it was dense and cerebral. But that, he’s said to have said, still wasn’t Love’s idea of a proper Beach Boys record.

Smile was released in the fall of 1967, a year after the first instrumental sessions. The previously-printed LP covers got pasted over with sheets listing the final song titles in order, and including the small-type credit: “Mixed by Brian Wilson with Mr. A.”

Some critics called Smile a “flawed masterpiece.” Others called it a more intellectual, but less emotionally involving, work than the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, released earlier in the year.

It undersold its predecessor Pet Sounds.

In later years, pop historians noted that many of the era’s “concept albums” supplied reassuring (even if loud) music to get stoned by. Smile failed miserably at this use, with all its abrupt changes of melody and mood.

The Beach Boys’ next LP was the back-to-basics Wild Honey. It was recorded without outside musicians, and mostly without Brian’s songwriting. It was the Boys’ last Capitol release.

In 1968, the group negotiated with Warner Bros. to distribute their own Brother Records. The Brother roster included Brian as a solo act. However, WB did the least it had to do in regard to funding (and, later, promoting) Brian’s solo debut.

That debut, You’re Welcome, didn’t come out until 1970, and included several leftover compositions from Smile (re-recorded, since Capitol claimed rights to the tapes).

Wilson, like Scott Walker (another top-40 balladeer who’d moved into loftier creations), would be viewed as a post-pop innovator whose releases steadily became more creative, less commercial, and much less frequent.

When CDs came along, Capitol reissued the LP version of Smile, in both the original mono and in a reconstructed stereo version. Several years later came a “director’s cut” version, with many tracks lengthened and restored.

[/alternate-history mode]

•

The later career and personal trajectories of the Beach Boys and of Brian Wilson would have probably been about the same as they wound up in real life.

The only difference was that Smile would have existed as a critics’ darling and as a curious artifact, not as a legendary unheard “ghost record.”

entertainment weekly via getty images

Our ol’ pal, Posies singer-songwriter Ken Stringfellow, is quoted at the East Portland Blog as saying the Madonna/M.I.A. halftime show at Super Bowl LSMFT was all OK but doesn’t really signify “empowering women.”

That sort of “feminist victory,” Stringfellow claims, will only occur when “50 percent of the media companies are owned by women.”

“Ownership,” of course, is a slippery thing with NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies.

Such companies could easily be more than 50 percent “owned” by women. Overall, a sizable majority of all corporate stock shares officially are.

But this “ownership” is often filtered through pension systems, trusts, mutual funds, broker-managed accounts, and other schemes that don’t infer practical control.

Of the major media companies operating in the U.S. today, only a few have any significant degree of individual or family ownership. Among them:

• Viacom (Paramount, et al.) and CBS, now separately managed but both controlled by movie-theater mogul Sumner Redstone and family;
• Warner Music Group, now controlled by Russian-born chemical titan Len Blavatnik;
• Hearst Corp. (Cosmopolitan, A&E, et al.), wholly owned by that family’s fourth- and fifth-generation members;
• Advance Publications (The New Yorker, The Oregonian, Puget Sound Business Journal, et al.), owned by the S.I. Newhouse family;
• and, of course, News Corp. (Fox, et al.), controlled by the Rupert Murdoch clan.

Redstone’s and Murdoch’s daughters have taken major roles within their respective aging dads’ companies, and may take greater roles in the future.

But they’ve shown every sign of supporting regular showbiz-content gender roles, including the roles Stringfellow derides as “T&A” and “soft porn.”

I, and I suspect many of you, wouldn’t count that as a “feminist victory.”

sherilynn fenn in 'two moon junction'

The former bit actor (born Zalman Lefkovitz in 1941) made his first big career splash in 1988 when he wrote and produced the softcore classic 9 1/2 Weeks.

That film’s success led to a career as America’s premiere erotic filmmaker of the time, with the minor classics Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction (Sherilynn Fenn’s springboard to fame), and Delta of Venus (arguably a better Anais Nin adaptation than the higher-budgeted Henry and June).

Even before Henry and June‘s disappointing box office led Hollywood’s theatrical distributors away from sex flicks, King had branched out into late night cable shows, starting with the still-famous Red Shoe Diaries (David Duchovny’s springboard to fame).

In a sub-genre known for some of corporate media’s shoddiest production values, King’s shows and TV-movies stand out. They display lush (if clichéd) lighting/photography and poetic dialogue/narration. The sex scenes are choreographed to convey warmth more than “heat,” accompanied by King’s trademark fusion-jazz sax soundtracks. King helped fund these projects by distributing them on video, emphasizing distribution at Blockbuster and other outlets that didn’t carry hardcore porn.

A devoted family man in spite of his subject matter, his wife and two daughters were key members of his production team.

From time to time he branched out beyond the skin-flick genre, including documentaries about dancers and surfers. But those were sidelines to the sex stuff. Battling cancer in recent years, he kept producing and sometimes directing more TV-movies and series. A pay-per-view website for these was announced last year but never launched.

And yes, he died at the age of 69.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!

webpronews.com

The premise of Soul Train was elevator-pitch simple: an American Bandstand for soul music. A hip but authoritative producer/host. Kids, dressed in the latest teen fashions, dancing in a studio to the latest hits. Two or more in-person guests each show, performing live or lip-syncing.

Anybody in the industry, including Bandstand impresario Dick Clark, could have launched such a show.

But nobody had (on a national level) until Cornelius came along.

Cornelius had been a news reader and backup DJ on Chicago radio, and had hosted teen “record hops” in the area. He started Soul Train on a local Chicago TV station in 1970. The following year, it moved to syndication (and to Hollywood). Within a year from that, it was on in 25 cities.

By 1974, when its theme song “TSOP” became a top 10 hit, it was an institution. It easily buried the rival show Soul Unlimited (Dick Clark’s imitation of Cornelius’s imitation of Bandstand).

For two more decades, the show was the showcase for soul, R&B, and the emerging hiphop and breakdance scenes.

By 1993, rap and its related dance moves had steadily gotten more “hardcore,” far from Cornelius’s personal tastes. He hired a series of replacement hosts while continuing to own and run the show, which aired on fewer stations in more obscure time slots.

Soul Train wound to a close in 2006. Reruns aired for another couple of years. After that, Cornelius sold the rights to an outside company, which has put out DVD sets and a YouTube clip channel. (Cornelius had tried to keep Soul Train performances off the Internet, employing staff to hunt down, and order the deletion of, any such clips.)

In his later years, the man who’d preached prosocial messages to his young audiences was accused of domestic violence by his estranged second wife.

But the legacy of his career shines on.

“And as always in parting, we wish you love, peace, and soul!”

• The City of Seattle and the Port of Seattle are getting together to publicize local music at Sea-Tac airport. The campaign will involve piped-in music and in-terminal announcements read by local music stars, plus videos, still images projected on screens, and a local music feed on the airport’s WiFi network. There’s an opening party with four live bands on Saturday. That’s all nice, but what would really make it rock would be Maktub covering Brian Eno’s Music for Airports!
• In the ashes of Masins Furniture’s departure from Pioneer Square and the loss of the nearby 619 Western art studios, ambitious developers say they want to turn two of the three adjoining Masins buildings into “PiSquare Arts,” a complex of work and live/work spaces. The developers vow to make the units “as affordable and artist friendly as we can.” Can any non-subsidized remodel create actual artist spaces, not just architectural offices falsely billed as “artist spaces”? We shall see.
• Who doesn’t like the state’s apparently about-to-pass gay marriage bill? Catholic leaders. Who doesn’t like the Catholic leaders’ dislike? Catholic laypeople.
• Some wags are snickering at Michelle Obama’s current Reader’s Digest cover. They claim she’s making a hand gesture that looks like the American Sign Language image for a certain body part. Of course, she could just be giving a shout-out to her brother, who coaches a certain college basketball team with a certain team name.

bill gates mansion; from cybernetnews.com

• John Burbank says something that needs to be repeatedly said: Washington is a wealthy state with a starved civic infrastructure, due to our over reliance on the regressive sales tax.
• Before this week’s winter weather, our pals at Capitol Hill’s Ghost Gallery got flooded by a leaky ceiling. The landlord won’t even help pay to fix it. They’d like our help.
• It was planned in expectation of just another Seasonal Affective Disorder winter, but it’s still welcome in the aftermath of Snowtopia. Local artists Susan Robb, Sierra Stinson, and  Jim Demetre have schedule an arty Seattle version of a winter carnival. They call it “ONN/OF.” It incorporates a number of installations and performances, all using “light” as a theme. It takes place in Ballard (specifically 1415 NW 52nd St.), Jan. 28-29. Contributors include ex-Seattle musician Otis Fodder (now based in Montreal, where they’ve always had a winter carnival) and his band the Bran Flakes.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: As a Stranger snark video shows, the Weekly has adopted an ugly squat-square page size, in keeping with other New Times Village Voice Media papers. That wasn’t enough to keep this week’s edition from topping off at a mere 48 (smaller) pages.
• Update: The outdoor feeding program for the homeless, the one the city wanted to shut down? A compromise arrangement may be in the works.
• Thing you might not have expected five years ago: Microsoft’s quarterly profits are flat, as fewer new PCs get sold. It’s not just a matter of new digital platforms. It’s also a matter of companies and individuals deciding the PCs they’ve got are good enough to keep until finances improve.
• William Greider points with thinly disguised glee at Mitt Romney’s primary opponents claiming to despise “vulture capitalism.”
• The copyright lobby didn’t need draconian censorship bills to nab file-sharing giant Megaupload, for better or (in my opinion) for worse.
• More deadly seriousness from “humor” site Cracked.com: “The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Poor.”

light in the attic records

The dean of Seattle record producer/engineers passed away peacefully Tuesday at age 81.

Barton spent more than 50 years recording just about anything there was to record here, from jazz and opera to radio shows and commercial jingles. This included several band-released soul 45s from the early 1970s, whose rediscovery spawned the ongoing Wheedle’s Groove project.

But he will be forever known as the “father of the Northwest sound.”

Peter Blecha’s astounding profile of Barton at HistoryLink.org barely scratches the surface of all he did.

For now, let’s just list a few of the many artists with which he worked, many of whose sonic “voices” he’d helped define:

The Kingsmen, Sonics, (Fabulous) Wailers, Frantics, Ventures, Fleetwoods, Little Bill, Don and the Goodtimes, Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, Bonnie Guitar, Stan Boreson, Pat Suzuki, Danny O’Keefe, Brothers Four, Dave Lewis Trio, Dynamics, Galaxies, Daily Flash, Springfield Rifle, Black on White Affair, Lewd, Girls, Young Fresh Fellows, and so many many more.

revel body, via geekwire.com

• Seattle’s really got some high-tech hardware geniuses. Among them: the folks who’ve taken the same principles behind the Sonicare toothbrush and applied them to create advanced 21st century vibrators! (Really.)
• We’ve previously mentioned the strong presence of women’s erotica among Amazon’s e-book sales. Now come charges that some of the self-published smut books are stolen from stories posted for free viewing on erotica websites. (These allegations are against the small-time publishers, not Amazon.)
• Crazy Wall St. idea of the week (thus far): A local corporate-buyout analyst showed up on CNBC and said Microsoft should buy Barnes & Noble.
• Here’s one way to make money off of the walking renaissance. Make a big venture-funded software thing to help folks find homes to buy in walkable neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish believes the state budget mega-crisis might, just might mind you, lead to talk, or even actual action, toward reforming Washington’s mighty regressive tax system—by far the principal failing of a local “progressive” politic that never dares challenge big business.
• On a related matter, state House Speaker Frank Chopp is floating the idea of Wash. State running its own bank, just like North Dakota. Or something as close to a bank as the state constitution now permits.
• The Mariners lose one really good pitcher, gain one maybe decent-hitting position player. What could possibly go wrong?
• Who knew the original Ladies’ Home Journal was so prescient? A 1911 list of “What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years” predicts “telephones around the world,” airplanes used as “aerial war-ships,” automobiles “cheaper than horses,” “trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour,” grand opera “telephoned to private homes,” photographs “telegraphed to any distance,” “cameras electrically connected with screens at opposite ends of circuits,” ready-to-eat meals in stores, genetically modified foods, and even global warming. Writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. did get a few things wrong, such as “hot and cold air from spigots,” the deliberate extinction of mosquitos, and the removal of C, Q, and X from the alphabet. Watkins also didn’t predict that his magazine would still be in business today, after many of its compatriots went to the great newsstand in the sky.
• Clever videomakers in Montana have released a thoroughly obliterating parody of a particularly dumb “rebel lifestyle” pickup truck commercial.
• And a great big thank you for those who attended the Seattle Invitationals Sat. nite, at which I performed what I hope was a respectful, straightforward rendition of the Presley classic “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care).” Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, I’d wanted to perform the best song from It Happened at the World’s Fair. But the live band didn’t know it. So here it is for all of you, in the original rendition.

grouchymuffin.com

Don’t ask me how or why, but I’ve again gotten volunteered into performing at this year’s Seattle Invitationals, a contest for Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs). It starts at 8 p.m. tonight (Sat. 1/14/12) at the Experience Music Project within Seattle Center. Be there or be Pat Boone.

• It was that rare example of a small entrepreneurial outfit thriving within the nesting arms of a global brand. But no more. Raise a pure-cane-sugar-sweetened toast to the demise of Dublin Dr Pepper.
• What if they gave a gay-marriage debate and none of the “antis” came?
• A Wall St. Journal essayist believes Eastman Kodak might have survived the film-to-digital metamorphosis if only it hadn’t been HQ’d in the company town of Rochester NY, where management felt too beholden to company-owned factories and U.S.-based union workers. I say bosh. Kodak once had great marketers and designers who knew the shtick of “planned obsolescence,” issuing new consumer film formats every two years (and pressuring local processing plants to re-gear for each of them). The digital realm, where obsolescence is a natural byproduct of rapidly improving technologies, should’ve been perfect for them. But they let Japanese companies out-market them. A shame.
• Wendy Gittleson at AddictingInfo.org exaggerates a little when she claims Bain Capital (Mitt Romney’s former corporate-raidin’ firm) “owns most conservative and some liberal radio stations,” and that these forces are helping make Romney’s nomination a done deal. Bain is a non-controlling shareholder in Clear Channel (owner of some 1,000 radio stations of various formats, including KJR-AM-FM here) and Premiere Radio Networks (syndicator of many conserva-talk stars, plus libs Randi Rhodes and Jesse Jackson). And many Premiere conserva-talkers have been part of the right’s “anyone but Mitt” crusade.
• Another state’s Republicans want to force mumbo-jumbo “creationism” down public school students’ throats. And college students’ throats too.
• In 2006, the Federal Reserve Board fiddled while the housing bubble prepared to burst.
• Mr. Krugman explains better than I: “America Isn’t a Corporation.” Running government “more like a business” never works. Especially when the model for “business” is today’s dysfunctional, hyper-corrupt corporate world.