Radiohead.

For more than a decade, they’ve been a band on the cutting edge of music, or at least of music marketing.

So what do they do to give their new CD/LP/download product the splashy promotion they believe it deserves?

They come out with that most modern of media products.

A newspaper.

Specifically, a 12-page tabloid, handed out for free in select major cities, including this one. Online reports say copies went fast in many of these pass-out spots. (Last I heard, you could get one at Sonic Boom Records in Ballard, but only while supplies last.)

This sign of newsprint’s continued attention-grabbing viability comes two years and two weeks after the last print edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Yes, I still mourn it.

I even dream about it. But I won’t get into that.

I will say I still believe there’s a P-I sized hole in the local media landscape. PubliCola, Seattle PostGlobe, Crosscut, and now SportsPress Northwest only fill pieces of that hole.

The SeattlePI.com website not only doesn’t fill its former parent journal’s role, it doesn’t even fill the role it could fill, as the go-to online local headline source.

It’s still designed like a newspaper’s web presence. The front page, and the second-tier directory pages, are each cluttered with 100 or more links, mostly to syndicated and wire pieces and to the contributions of unpaid bloggers. There’s no direct way to find the site’s own staff-written material (which remains remarkably good).

What’s worse, PI.com, as it’s currently structured, has little growth potential. It’s already generating as many “hits” as it did when it had a whole newspaper to give it content. It’s either just breaking even or is perpetually about to, according to which rumors you care to believe. There’s not much further revenue it can attract as a website with banner ads.

PI.com needs to find its next level.

With its current minimal staff, it likely couldn’t create a web app or a mobile app that could command a price from readers, a la Rupert Murdoch’s iPad “paper” The Daily or the newly paywalled NY Times site.

But it could repackage its current in-house content, plus the best of its bloggers’ contributions, into a free web app and/or mobile app.

This would make PI.com’s articles and essays better organized, easier to navigate and to read.

This would also offer advertisers with bigger, more productive ad spaces that would compliment, not clutter up, the reading experience.

Then of course, there’s always the possibility of moving the P-I back into print. Perhaps as a colorful freebie tabloid, one that could siphon off home and car ads from the SeaTimes and lifestyle ads from the slick regional monthlies.

Alternately, some of the local philanthropists who’d offered to take over the P-I from Hearst in 2009 could start their own paper, creating a new tradition.

• Ida Kay Greathouse, who ran or co-ran the Frye Art Museum for more than four decades, died at the impressive age of 105. With her husband Walser (executor of meat packer Charles Frye’s estate), then on her own after Walser’s death in 1966, Greathouse kept the Frye free, and kept its laser focus on “realist” art. She paved the way for later curators’ expansion of the museum’s mission into more contemporary genres.
• The 619 Western art studio building lives! Probably. State transportation planners, who still want to dig the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s replacement tunnel beneath 619’s less than totally solid foundations, said they’ll now try to work out a plan to shore up the building without upscaling it out of the artists’ price range. We shall see.
• The Red Dress concert special, a Seattle Channel/KCTS presentation that aired this past week, can still be viewed online at Seattlechannel.org. The show highlights a rock/punk/blues/funk fusion outfit that’s still as vital as it was three decades ago. Who’d like to scour for donations, so’s we can have more showcase concerts like this on local public TV?
• The Neptune Theater in the U District closes this weekend as a cinema, to reopen later on as a live performance space. I remember the Neptune’s heyday in the ’80s as a “repertory cinema,” showing a different new or classic bill every night. There was a suggestion book at the concession counter. I used to write in silly double bill ideas like M and Z. If the book were still there, I’d now be suggesting a twin bill of 127 Hours and A Farewell to Arms.

…but somewhere on the first page of Flickr’s “Seattle Invitationals 2011 Pool” you can find a shot of me in my best oversize thrift store stage suit.

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

I’ve been recruited into singing at this year’s Seattle (Elvis) Invitationals. The annual impersonation (or “tribute artist”) competition takes place this Saturday evening, Jan. 8, at Club Motor, 1950 1st Ave. S.

It will be my first singing in a public, non-karaoke setting in at least a decade.

Unlike many of the Invitationals’ entrants, I’m no professional tribute artist. I don’t expect to win this thing. I’m just in it for the show-biz-ness of it all.

Be there if you dare.

The legendary musician-artist, who passed away last week, began his 1965-82 recording career by fusing two seemingly incompatible baby-boomer fads, beatnik “jazz poetry” and hippie “dirty blues.”

Somehow he made it work, through his own, firmly enforced, artistic vision.

What might have sounded like wild improvisations emphatically weren’t. Like his high-school buddy and sometime colleague Frank Zappa, Van Vliet was a control freak. He would riff out the melody lines for a whole album in a single day, then spend a year coming up with the elaborate arrangements, which he would painstakingly teach note-by-note to his sidemen.

He never sold many records, but was cited as an influence by countless later acts that sounded nothing like him, or like one another.

I got to meet him backstage after a 1981 Showbox concert. It was his 40th birthday. He wasn’t tremendously lucid. I promised his manager I wouldn’t print the interview.

A year later, he released his last album. He had another career, painting, where he felt he was treated better.

Coindicence, or…? dept.: Van Vliet died on the same day as Larry King’s last show. Both were associated, at different times, with legendary Hollywood agent-lawyer Herb Cohen.

MTV.com has, today, finally posted all of $5 Cover Seattle.

Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton completed the “webisode” music/drama series over a year ago. But the MTV bureaucrats sat on it ’til now.

If only Shelton had had someone in her life who could have warned her about working with this company.

Oh, wait….

Mayor McGinn found places at Seattle Center to put both a for-profit Chihuly glass-art gallery and a new home for KEXP.

The latter, which will include a live-performance studio with viewing windows, will be built out with no city funds. Expect even-longer pledge drives on the station starting next year.

The space will be in the Northwest Court buildings. That’s where the Vera Project is now and SIFF Cinema will be soon.

Of course, this means all of the Northwest Court’s rental spaces will be taken over by permanent tenants. Hence, they are no longer available for Bumbershoot’s visual and literary arts exhibits. This will result in these programs either getting diminished, or relocated to other Center spots. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

I was in the UW Daily newsroom that Monday night when the first bulletins came in on the already-archaic AP teletype machine, reporting first that John Lennon had been shot, then that he had died.

Within minutes, every radio station that even half-claimed to play rock music, and many that didn’t (in commercial radio, remember, this was the nadir of the soft rock era), went to all Lennon/Beatles and stayed that way for the next day or longer. I remember going up two flights of stairs in the Communications Building to the studios of KCMU (KEXP’s precursor), to hand deliver copies of the wire reports to the DJ on duty.

This was one month after the election of Ronald Reagan, the moment many of us campus libs feared would bring the beginning of the end of progress and democracy in America. (Turns out the only thing my more cynical/fearful lefties had wrong about that was how slow the nation’s fall from middle-class economic security would be.)

Then, with the assassination of the man who’d done as much as anyone to “invent” rock n’ roll as people my age had known it, it seemed to some of us like the end of the world.

But life, as Lennon himself had sung, went on.

As it will after all of us have left its stage.

• A bunch of preppy white people, some pushing 50, lip syncing to the Black Eyed Peas, or
• The nation’s oldest and most established mass media conglomerate stealing shticks from Shoreline and Shorecrest high school video classes?

ARI UP OF THE SLITS: Some of the first-generation punk rock women copied, mocked, or expanded on the then-traditional bad-boy rocker tropes. Ari Up, with her bandmates, did something different. They created a sound that was neither “fuck me” nor “fuck you.” It was totally rocking, totally strong, and totally feminine. And it’s seldom been matched.

BOB GUCCIONE: His masterwork, the first two decades of Penthouse magazine, was not merely a “more explicit” imitation of Playboy, as some commentators have described it. It had its own aesthetic, its own fully formed identity.

And so did its originator. If Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was more like William Randolph Hearst (a hermit philosopher secluded on his private estate), Guccione was more like Charles Foster Kane (living with gusto, building and losing a fortune). A Rolling Stone profile, published just before Guccione reluctantly gave up control of what was left of the Penthouse empire, depicts the open-shirted, gold-chain-bearing mogul as a man who poured millions into “life extension” research, even while he smoked the five packs of cigarettes a day that took much of his mouth in 1999 and his life last week.

TOM BOSLEY: Now we may never know what happened to Richie’s older brother.

(Cross-posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Sally Clark had seen the Capitol Hill Block Party.

She’d seen the exuberant crowds bringing life, and business, to Pike/Pine.

She saw that it was good.

She decided she’d like more of it.

All year round.

In July, even before this year’s Block Party occurred, the City Councilmember floated the idea of closing one or more blocks in the Pike/Pine Corridor from vehicular traffic, one or more nights a week.

Her inspiration came partly from the Block Party and partly from the example of Austin. The Texan nightlife hotspot, once billed in the ’90s as the “Next Seattle,” shuts down Sixth Street (its main nightclub drag) on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from 11 p.m. to closing time. The result: A bustling, vibrant street scene along this part-time pedestrian mall.

Councilmember Clark’s first choice for a year-round block party site here was East Pike Street, from Broadway perhaps as far east as 12th Avenue.

The concept hasn’t progressed very far since it was initially offered. Councilmember Clark says it would need the approval of, and tax assessments from, area businesses.

Still, at this fledgling stage, the every-weekend block party has already attracted detractors.

Writing at PubliCola.net in mid-September, urban planning maven Dan Bertolet (who has described himself as a devout “car hater”) nevertheless disapproved of the street closure concept.

Bertolet believes a late night street party every weekend just couldn’t attract enough regular patrons to be worth the traffic disruptions.

He’d rather have a more modest set of pedestrian amenities on East Pike, such as wider sidewalks and a wider range of permitted foods for street vendors to sell.

I disagree.

I’ve seen the weekend night scene along First Avenue in Belltown (which will get its own quasi-Block Party space next year, when Bell Street gets refitted with wider, landscaped sidewalks).

The late-night scene on First can occasionally get wild and rowdy, particularly in the hour just before and after closing time. But it can also be a blast, an entertainment destination in its own right.

Something like that on The Hill, with its own unique milieu, would be its own kind of blast. Particularly if it’s enhanced by the freedom of milling about without fear of traffic.

Of course, Seattle has something Austin (and New Orleans and Miami) don’t have.

A rainy season, commonly known as winter.

Would The Hill’s party-minded young adults, hipsters, gays, etc. want to wander about on a closed-off street during a drizzling Northwest monsoon season?

For a potential answer to that, don’t look south. Look north.

A long stretch of Vancouver’s Granville Street has been car-free (except for transit buses) for three decades now.

And it works.

Day and night, week in and week out, Granville is alive with diners, drinkers, clubgoers, and assorted revelers of all types.

Pike can become more like that.

We could at least try it out.

Close East Pike to cars one Saturday night a month for six months.

Festoon the place with awnings and tents in case of rain.

Bring in artists, a music stage, street performers, fire eaters, and vaudeville/burlesque acts.

Park some mobile vending trucks. But leave out the beer garden. The object is to bring more business to Pike/Pine’s bars, not to compete with them.

If these trials work out, if they attract enough regular revelers, turn them into regular events.

I can see the slogan now:

“Yes, We’re Closed!”

Last night, I attended the highly anticipated premiere of I Am Secretly an Important Man, the long in-the-making biopic about Seattle poet/author/musician/actor/performance artist Steven J. “Jesse” Bernstein.

Documentarian Peter Sillen had been collecting footage and reminiscences of Bernstein since the year after Bernstein’s 1991 suicide. Only now, after directing four other films and performing camera work on several others, has Sillen finally assembled this footage into an 85-minute feature.

He’s done a spectacular job.

The finished work captures, as well as any mere 85-minute feature can, the immense creative range, depth, and contradictions within Bernstein, which I won’t attempt to describe in this one blog entry.

(Of course, it helps that Bernstein recorded so much of his life and work in audio tape, video tape, and film, much of it taken by artists and collaborators from across the Northwest creative community.)

Suffice it to say you should see An Important Man during its engagement later this autumn at the Northwest Film Forum.

“A smart heroin addict is still a heroin addict.”

A Facebook correspondent said that to me, after I rebutted his anti-television screed.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I’m writing to confess something.

Yes, I am an addict.

Specifically, I am addicted to what members of certain online message boards call “stim.”

That’s short for “stimuli.”

In my case, for a broad array of mental/emotional stimuli.

Among many other things, I am addicted to:

• The beat and the chords and the melody of a great pop song.
• The urgency of news headlines, as delivered in any medium.
• The telegraph-inspired urgency of old network radio “news on the hour” themes.
• The scrolling headlines and stock tickers on cable news channels.
• The wild juxtapositions of time/space/narrative in an old newspaper.
• The similar juxtapositions in a well-curated blog.
• The sound of a phonograph needle hitting the scratchy outer groove of a vinyl record.
• The frenetic beauty of a Merrie Melodies cartoon.
• The typography and design of old magazines and newspapers.
• The look and build of an old building, even one that was considered ordinary in its time.
• The all-out attempts at persuasion seen in old advertisements, pamphlets, political badges, and printed pop ephemera of all types.
• The glow of a neon sign; the stasis of its daylight background base.
• The noise, beats, sights, and smells of many industrial processes (including those that were sampled in the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack).
• The poignancy of urban decay, of streets and structures whose once-noble aspirations have faded with time.
• The “instant insight” of a well turned phrase.
• The “gotcha” moment of a particularly awful pun.
• The sight of a female figure, revealed in artistic, alluring, and/or fun ways.
• All of the sounds, touches, tastes, and scents associated with heterosexual pleasure.
• A sugar rush.
• A caffeine rush.
• The sated feeling after a big meal.
• The exotic thrill of a foreign film, particularly a foreign mass-entertainment film. The song-and-dance spectacles of Bollywood, in which generalized sensuality triumphs over sexual prudery. The audacious blare of an Italian “giallo” soundtrack. The milieu of early British Hitchcock films, just foreign enough to unsettle.

Strangely enough, several genres and industries designed wholly around “stim” don’t particularly enthrall me. Casino gambling; modern video games; big budget special effects movies—I just don’t respond to ’em.

Main stage at Seattle Founders Days

Seattle Founders Days, Belltown’s entry in the neighborhood summer street fair game, have come and gone.

And, in my opinion, they succeeded.

Its instigators were wise not to attempt the scale of the U District or Fremont fairs, at least not in Founders Days’ first year. They were also mindful to concoct a name with potential citywide appeal, and to have both day and evening event schedules.

There was a single main performance stage, right at Second and Bell. It was flanked on Second’s surrounding blocks by a couple dozen tented merchant booths.

In lieu of a separate, fenced off beer garden, attendees were invited into the street’s existing sidewalk bar tables and to the Buckley’s patio (with its own tiny live-music stage).

Along with the on-stage acts, costumed performers milled about. There were civic pioneer characters during the day, more nightlife-esque characterizations by night.

The main stage performers were a good mix of top local bands, rising stars willing to work cheap, and extremely talented friends (Mark Pickerel) and relatives (Ramona Freeborn) of the fair organizers.

Thus, on two of the year’s hottest days, a few dozen to a few hundred people at any one time milled about along the closed street blocks. They enjoyed the sun, the music, the food and drink, the art, and the low-key fun atmosphere. The evening sessions complemented, and contrasted with, the more high-energy partying along First Avenue.

It was all a big advertisement for Belltown, specifically for the artier, Second Avenue aspect of Belltown.

And it said to the rest of the city: Come on down and have some fun. Belltown’s not really that mean, scary place in all the news reports. It’s safe. We’ve got more cops now. We’ve always had great food and different kinds of bars. We’ve got a whole lot of things to do, even if you don’t like to get all pushy and rowdy.

In all, it was a great debut for what organizers plan to be an annual affair.

Yet there’s plenty of room for future growth, even with the single stage layout.

There could be more merchant booths and food booths. Now that Founders Days will be on the regular regional street-fair schedule, the event can attract some of that circuit’s regular vendors. It can also lure in some of the vendors from the Punk Rock Flea Market and from Occidental Park’s monthly art bazaars.

And once Bell Street’s been rebuilt into a “park boulevard,” with less car space and more people space, Founders Days will get space for still more growth. (Though I’d like to see the Second and Bell intersection still closed off, and I’d like to see the Second Avenue bars and galleries still incorporated into the fair’s site.)

Indeed, the future Bell Street can become a site for year-round (or at least dry-season-round) outdoor events and performances of all types.

And Founders Days can become the keystone event of this seasonal series.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)