A former supermarket tabloid stringer finds solace in berating his youngers for finally getting old.

Sheesh.

Yeah, Cobain’s image has been showing up on tacky nostalgia-kitsch merchandise. But it has been almost since his death.

Elsewhere in the no-shit-Sherlock realm, David Bowie just turned 60. Debbie Harry already passed that milestone. Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone didn’t get the chance to do so. Macauley Culkin’s been married and divorced. And the Earth revolves around the sun approximately once per calendar year.

“Gen X” never vowed to die before it got old. Rather, it (or some of its more vocal members) vowed not to look ridiculous while doing so.

…(besides the beautiful, beautiful snow, of course): “GE buys aerospace division of Smiths Group.” I needed a buyout, and then I got a buyout, and heaven knows I’m miserable now….

…got you down? Take a short hop to FaLaLaLaLa.com and relive “the memories of Christmas vinyl past.” Highlights include links to an astonishing 51 different versions of Leroy Anderson’s “Sleigh Ride” song.

In keeping with her well-contrived “hot mess” public image, it’s a disjointed scrapbook of images and random thoughts. Salon’s reviewer can’t seem to get out of the cookie-cutter mode of feminist analysis, spending paragraph after paragraph discussing whether the book proves or disproves Love as being some sort of role model for All Females Everywhere. Silly reviewer: Of course she’s not. That’s part of her appeal, or at least it used to be.

Forbes now claims Kurt Cobain is now America’s most lucrative dead celebrity, having passed Elvis Presley with some $50 million in earnings. You may now make your own sick comment about what the poor lad would’ve done with the dough.

TIME MARCHES ON DEPT.: USA Today has discovered that a lot of those kids today are politically active and socially concerned. But writer Sharon Jayson felt obligated, alas, to insert the boilerplate disclaimer inserted into all mainstream media stories about youth activism lo these past three decades: “They may be less radical than baby boom activists in the 1960s and 1970s, whose demonstrations for civil rights, women’s equality and protecting the environment and protests against the Vietnam War became flashpoints for their times….”

The venerable national music chain has been sold to a liquidation company, and will promptly begin its going-out-of-biz sales.

Both of Tower’s Seattle stores, on east Queen Anne and in the University District, moved to new buildings in recent years; the separate Queen Anne Tower Books outlet shut several years ago. But through these changes, and the onslought of music downloads (paid-for and other), Tower remained the most “indie” of the big chains. While Musicland/Sam Goody (now also disappeared from Seattle) would hype the latest already-overhyped N’Sync or Jessica Simpson product, Tower would give big display space to the likes of Beck and the Donnas. Its staff over the years probably included more future rock stars and future rock critics than any other U.S. company. I had a once-comfy gig feeding local music-scene briefs to its venerable in-store magazine Pulse!.

Now, the leading music retailers in Seattle (besides Amazon, of course) are the locally-owned Easy Street and Sonic Boom, the locally-founded, now Portland-owned Cellophane Square, and the CD shelves at Borders and Barnes & Noble. B&N’s about to start building a new book palace at Northgate; just why book sales attract more corporate investment than music sales is a topic for another time.

I’m home waiting for the installers to show up for my Internet phone service. I’m watching MTV on its 25th anniversary day. Surprisingly, for an institution that usually can’t stop cvelebrating its own self-proclaimed fabulousness, the channel and its Web site are nearly ignoring the birthday.

(MTV’s Web site does offer a selection of ’80s oldies videos, but in an annoyingly Mac-incompatible format. Rival site Fuse has no such discrimination.)

I happened to tune in during a show called The Big Ten, in which the channel reverts, for at least one hour, to its former shtick of playing music videos. (Remember those?) Madonna’s still on the roster there. So are the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Justin Timberlake, Mary J. BLige, Christina Aguilera, Beyonce, Nelly Furtado, Green Day, Beck, the Goo Goo Dolls, Snoop Dogg, and even Mariah Carey. As for the up-n’-comer acts on the show, they fall into definite generic categories. There are corporate-friendly Cobain impersonators, gold-chain-twirlin’ white and black gangstas, bootay-shakin’ soul divas, boys wearing eyeliner, metal-rap-punk fusion confusions. You’ll be comforted, I’m sure, to learn the primary video-imagery cliches still revolve around big cars and small garments.

But, as I’ve sure you’ve heard, MTV’s main fare these days is young-adult “reality” shows. These still include such workhorse concepts as The Real World, Cribs, and Pimp My Ride. There’s also My Super Sweet 16, in which a different rich girl in each episode spends more on her birthday party than you’ll make this year.

MTV’s “remit,” or corporate mission, has always been to own the advertiser-beloved teen and young-adult audience, without spending a lot of money to do so. As this prized audience gravitates further away from TV viewing toward other leisure pursuits, and as better-funded TV ventures take aim at the same target, this task keeps getting harder.

So, like an aging pop star desperate to stay on the charts, its every attempt to prove its continued youth and vitality only shows off how old it’s gotten.

The paparazzi have finally begun to descend on Frances Bean Cobain, now 14. (No, I don’t know what deodorant brand she uses.) (Warning: Linked page may include really annoying “blink” ads.)

(via Arthur Marriott):

The piece in the P-I about the “white-ification” of the neighborhood surrounding the Jimi Hendrix memorial is rather coincidental with a photo in the Sunday Times accompanying an article about several local high-school jazz bands’ participation in the national “Essentially Ellington” competition. It showed the Garfield band, and except for Clarence Acox (the director) everyone on stage was white.

…a Jimi Hendrix park in Seattle, some two-decades-plus after it was first proposed. Oh yeah, and the immediate neighborhood of the place—now all white.

I haven’t been in contact with the promoters for more than a month, but the big CD release party for the grunge-years compilation I helped curate starts dark-and-early at 8 p.m. tonight at the Premier club, 1700 1st Ave. S. (that’s somewhere between Krispy Kreme and Sears).

…list-O-linx today, shall we? We shall:

• In the news today, the art deco ferry Kalakala finally gets a piece of good news, in the form of official historic status…. Mayor Nickels’s plan for a Boston-like strip-club zone in the Industrial District moves forward, despite the need to preserve the area for industrial employment…. The Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will indeed move to the Seattle Center Snoqualmie Room after all, but not until this fall….
• Christopher Frizzelle’s Stranger essay on the doomed-for-development, 100-year-old building housing Seattle’s most hardcore gay bathhouse is notable for several reasons. Chief among them: The research Frizzelle put into the story, giving a sense of history and continuity to a place known for the most fleeting and anonymous of social encounters.
• Virginia Belle asks Democrats to stand up and take pride in themselves for once.
• I’d already been reading online about the amazing bus-only transit system of Curitiba, Brazil, when Jaime Lerner, the architect and ex-mayor who masterminded the thing, came to Seattle to promote his lessons learned. The Curitiba system can basically be described as like a light rail system, only it uses buses on bus-only road lanes instead of trains on tracks. Seattle already has one “busway,” down the industrial district south of the now-shuttered transit tunnel. Future busways could take the place of the now-aborted monorail project, across from the south end of the existing busway into West Seattle, and up through Elliott Avenue/15th Avenue West into Ballard. Bus-only lanes could be added beside, above, or beneath current streets/bridges, or (even cheaper) rededicated from current auto use. Worth thinking about, at least.
• Remember what I said last week about the ’06 Mariners looking pretty good? Strike that; reverse it.

…was so much fun, I think I’ll do it again:

• Right-wing hate radio: Now even more racist than ever?
• First preachers, now political operatives— just what is it about positions of authority and child abuse?
• One of my alma maters, Oregon State, is dumping its cheerleader squad. For once, no team-name puns here.
• Gene Pitney, one dead rock star who got to live a full life.
• Wal-Mart’s sales, profits sluggish— so much for the almighty juggernaut out to take over the world.
• Went to Drinking Liberally last nite; got to meet that week’s special guest star, Darcy “C.D.” Burner. She’s the highly touted Demo candidate in the 8th Congressional District (the Eastside). She’s smart, witty, and forward-thinking. She’s got a good chance of being a big part of taking back the House this fall.
• While there, one DL participant told me his little conspiracy theory about the U.S. government’s attempt to retain control of the Internet’s top-level domain names. This guy claims the Feds just might be preparing to use this power so they can crack down on lefty bloggers. I’m not so sure the Bushies are that smart. That conspiratorial perhaps, but not that smart.
• Tom Stewart, the former state GOP bigwig and medium-time sleaze, is “protesting” Washington’s estate tax by pulling his corporate offices to Arizona. I won’t miss his campaign-law violations or the ludicrously huge U.S. flag atop his Delridge office building. Now if we could only get the hipster and gay restaurants and bars in this town to stop feeding money to his Food Services of America….
• A longer version of my piece about the Capitol Hill shooting victims’ memorial is in today’s print version of the Capitol Hill Times, but not online, at least not yet.

…the big Capitol Hill afterparty memorial service early Tuesday evening. It was large, it was (mostly) somber, it was sad.

But it was also a celebration of life, of the “peace, love, and unity” ethos oft proclaimed by the techno world these past dozen years or so (almost the entire lifetimes of two of the shooting victims).

You’d think that after all these years, the oft-justly-vilified “MSM” (that’s blog-talk for “mainstream media”) would’ve figured out that the dance-music scene ain’t no big bad den of iniquity, except by the standards of far-right prudes. But the ol’ temptation of easy stereotypes reared its ugly head again, as local papers and broadcasters this past week filled too many of their dispatches wtih easy-to-write, easy-to-understand inaccuracies.

The shooting is a one-time event that could have happened in a school, church, shopping mall, or freeway overpass. The music-dance scene in Seattle (particulalry the commercial and nonprofit events with pro security) is about as secure as any young-rebel-hedonist scene anywhere has ever been. And it’s a lot more tolerant and mutually supportive than a lot of the more officially-approved-of youth activities.

This was proven as the memorial service ended and the sun went down. A group of ravers broke up the mass sadness by opening the doors of a parked car, cranking up the car’s stereo, and inviting all to dance the tears away.

Over the years, some music critics have scorned the techno genre for its alleged emotionless monotony. If any of these critics had seen this act of spontaneous defiance/celebration, they’d be singing the proverbial different tune.

No doubt you’ll be hearing about the Capitol Hill house party murder-suicide for weeks to come. I only wish I knew what to say to all my acquaintances in the techno-party world, except: Stay safe. God-as-I-understand-him loves you. Life is just about always worth living. The answers to That Empty Frustrating Feeling don’t come in a bottle, a pill, or a bullet. Be well with one another.