…from CBC’s now-on-hiatus arts series Zed: A RealVideo clip presenting the hauntingly beautiful song stylings of Northwest Territories throat singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, with a live electro-ambient backup band.

IN RESPONSE to many of your requests, we’re cutting down on the site’s ad volume (particularly those pop-ups nobody seems to buy anything from).

THURSDAY WAS A HUGE NEWS DAY LOCALLY. Here are just a few of the goings-down:

• SEATTLE’S BEST COFFEE got sold out from under itself by its Atlanta conglomerate owner. SBC and its Torrefazione Italia sub-chain will be absorbed into Starbucks’ operations, with only the brand names continuing to exist. Thus ends what had been one of Seattle’s hottest retail rivalries since the demise of the Frederick & Nelson department store. (SBC is technically a year older than Starbucks, tracing its roots to a 1970-vintage Seattle Center House ice-cream stand called the Wet Whisker.) The hipster crowd has already publicly eschewed both chains in favor of mom-‘n’-pop indie cafes. Last winter, the Stranger essentially chided local indie Cafe Ladro as being too chainlike to be truly cool, despite having a mere eight stores.
• APPLE COMPUTER said it would open one of its own retail stores in Bellevue Square, invading not only the home turf of Microsoft but also that of Computer Stores Northwest, one of the country’s top independent Apple-only retailers.
• THE SONICS’ SEASON ended quietly with a decisive, meaningless victory over the Phoenix Suns. The team’s ought-two/ought-three campaign really ended weeks ago with the Gary Payton trade; it’s been in rebuilding and reloading mode ever since.
• ACT THEATER said it had raised enough emergency donations to would survive for the time being, albeit with major cutbacks. Let’s hope it gets back to the funky, audience-friendly aesthetic of its heritage, after a half-decade of dot-com-era largesse and pretentions.
• KCTS KICKED its longtime president Burnill Clark into early retirement and fired 35 employees. Yeah, it’s a recessionary cutback, but it also marks the end, at least for now, of the Seattle PBS affiliate’s years-long drive to become a major player in supplying national network programming. The ambitious venture generated some great shows (particularly Greg Palmer’s Vaudeville and Death: The Trip of a Lifetime). The loss of KCTS’s network-production unit is another setback for the local film/video production community, already struggling under the dual blows of the overall economic ickiness and cheap Canadian filming.
• THE EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT announced it would replace its “Artist’s Journey” attraction, the least museum-like and most theme-park-esque of its offerings, with a separate museum of science fiction memorabilia. It only makes sense for an institution founded upon computer-nerd largesse to partially rededicate itself to the nerds’ most favoritist art form of them all. You might beg the question: Will it be tacky? I damn hope so.

…has done it again, by making and then not releasing a pro-peace music video in such a way that it would gain even more exposure. Too bad she still can’t act.

…”The war is getting messy, but the peace will be much worse:”

” The Bush administration’s plan to keep several hundred thousand U.S. and British troops for years in a divided, heavily armed Muslim country will make all Americans “targets of opportunity” for terrorists and become a rallying point for fundamentalist revolutionaries throughout the world.”

CAT POWER AND EUGENE CHADBOURNE are among the artists with lively tunes of dissent available for downloadin’ at Protest Records.

…here again is the big news about our big art show opening this Thursday:

City Light, City Dark has been moved to the Nico Gallery, 619 Western Avenue, Second Floor (one floor lower than the previously advertised location, in the same building). It still opens next Thursday evening, March 6, 6-8 p.m.

The exhibit features grouped pairs of images depicting similar subjects. One photo in each pair is set in the tourists’ Seattle of sunny days and mellow smiles. The other photo takes place in the “other” Seattle of low overcasts, long nights, and defiant nightlife.

Be there. Aloha.

A FASHION DESIGNER of my acquaintance recently told me she thought antiwar protestors ought to dress up more smartly. She believes if you’re trying to persuade outsiders to your cause, you should be dressed to impress. Make a visual statement of your intelligence, dedication, and awareness. Nix-nix on the ragged jeans and stringy facial hair; oui-oui to happy, harmonious looks that say you demand a happier, more harmonious world.

This student, at a student-oriented antiwar protest Wednesday at Westlake Park, has the idea.

So, in her own silver-and-red way, does this young speaker.

The protest gathered young women and men from grade school to grad school and beyond, from throughout the metro area. They were informed; they were impassioned. They’d rather not have their own asses potentially put on the line for the benefit of a few billionaires, thank you.

This particular protestor really dressed up. The plaque reads, in part:

1 ring =

100 Iraqi children killed by

US bombs since 1991

Duration: one every second

for 100 minutes

IF YOU LIKE THE PHOTOS on my site, you should come to my art show (see above.) You’re also bound to love another Seattle photojournalism site, Buffonery. Despite the silly name, it’s a very accomplished site with gorgeous local architectural photography. It’s all done by Manuel Wanskasmith, a 22-year-old UW sociology grad, and it’s all fab.

UPDATE TO A LONG-AGO ITEM: A year and a half or so after we discussed the end of what had been my favorite Net-radio operation, Luxuria Music is back on line. Sort of.

Clear Channel Communications, the 8000-lb. gorilla of the broadcast radio biz, bought and promptly killed Luxuria, which played a sprightly mix of lounge, swing, space-age-bachelor-pad, and ’60s pop tuneage. One longstanding fan of the station later bought the domain name, and finally has a music stream online again.

The new Luxuria plays much the same sorts of cool stuff the old Luxuria played. But its post-dotcom–crash startup budget doesn’t allow for live DJs (a vital part of the old Lux mix). And its third-party server software has some stringent requirements (a Mac user such as myself can only access it via MS Internet Exploder) and seems to cut itself off, and crash your browser, after a half hour or so.

Still, it’s a start, or rather a re-start, for the kind of programming creativity you not only can’t get on commercial broadcast radio but you also can’t get on those highly-formatted commercial online, cable, and satellite music services.

FOR THE SECOND CONSECUTIVE YEAR, Pioneer Square was essentially declared an official No Fun Zone by city officials. Police permitted would-be revelers to enter and leave the three-block bar strip on First Avenue South, but not to linger on sidewalks or to make spectacles of themselves.

The above shot is the only “crowd” picture I could get. It was a close-up of the tiny stretch of sidewalk from the J&M to Larry’s Greenfront. Many PioSq bars were closed altogether; those that opened had little more than their regular lineup of “blooze” bands.

The “mandatory mellowness” attitude of the Seattle civic establishment never cared for rock n’ roll nor for festiveness. The 2001 Mardi Gras, a spontaneous and unplanned street party that begat several drunken fights and a fatal beating, only affirmed the anti-fun resolve. It will be up to We The People to take back the streets for revelry as well as for political speech. But it’d have to be thru an event that’s just organized enough as to prevent/discourage violence.

As I said after the ’01 debacle: Plan it, don’t ban it.

The normally at-least-semi-lucid New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff has gone mildly insane in his most recent essay.

He took the firing of an editor at a big NYC book company, something that happens darn near every month at one of those places, and whipped up a big concoction of a piece claiming the whole book biz is an old-media dinosaur stuck in a permanent death spiral.

This is the sort of fluff I’ve been hearing for eight years from the Wired dorks (hey, just ’cause their own book division went sternum-up…) and for over twenty years from the disgruntled-hippie-curmudgeon set. But from where I sit, books (as a fiscal if not a creative endeavor) are about as strong as any media endeavor during our current Great Depression Lite.

When the Kmart Corp. began its current tailspin, what was the first asset it sold, the one most certain to fetch a premium price? The Borders bookstores. That tactic’s what the financially sicker-than-sick AOL Time Warner is doing now. The AOL Internet racket wound’t fetch ’em the price of a measly banner ad; but the conglomerate’s book units (including Little, Brown and Time-Life Books) would, so they’re what AOLTW’s putting up for sale.

The ol’ dead-tree-lit biz has certain advantages in the current marketplace. Unlike websites, it puts out a tangible physical product (that can even be resold on the used market). Unlike periodicals, its products have relatively indefinite shelf lives. Unlike periodicals or broadcasters, books aren’t dependent upon slump-prone ad sales. Books can be “affordable luxuries,” little treats you can give yourself or loved ones.

Wolff claims there’s no need to romanticize The Book anymore, because it’s become just another lowest-common-denominator, dumbed-down product. But then he claims nobody’s buying books (or at least caring about them) except a little Northeastern elite (that happens to coincide with his own readership). There wouldn’t be mass-market books if mass markets weren’t buying them.

There are a few problems besetting the book biz these days, above the general economic malaise. Wolff’s just mistaken about what they are.

First, book publishing can’t be run on a healthy, long-term basis on the kind of profit margins demanded by media conglomerates obsessed with The Almighty Stock Price. Thus, even the making and selling of highly commercial titles is best handled by independent firms. (Thus, the spinoff of AOLTW’s book arm might be better for both the seller and the sold.)

Second, there’s the little matter known as Serious Literature. Like “independent” film and “alternative” music, it’s a niche genre that appeals to customers who think they’re hipper and smarter than any dumb ol’ corporation. (Whether the customers really are all that hip or intelligent doesn’t really matter.) They’re a piece of the business even more apt to be better serviced by the non-conglomerates.

Wolff sneeringly dismisses serious-lit lovers as passé crackpots, out of tune with the 21st century. Actually these are the gals n’ guys who, when they’re doing their jobs right (as writers, editors, sellers, and readers), unearth and reveal the truths about our age.

It’s the media hype speed-freaks like Wolff who, from this corner, seem more like relics of a discredited time.

Last weekend, the newspaper pundits were full of ponderings concerning the state of “independent” film, following the end of the past Sundance Festival in Utah.

Reality check time.

Sundance, now either part- or majority-owned by Viacom, is not really about independent filmmaking and hasn’t been since at least 1997. At best, one can say it’s about “art house” film marketing, the sort of thing at which Roger Corman, Sam Goldwyn Jr., and their cronies used to excel. At worst, it’s just another excuse for celebrity gossip bullshit and studio dealmaking corruption—precisely what truly independent film is a rebellion against.

K Records cofounder Calvin Johnson has defined an independent record label as a record label that’s neither owned, financed, nor distributed by one of the five majors. A similarly simple demarcation could be made for independent movies, except for the huge gray area between a film’s production and its distribution.

The days of such indie-film companies as Goldwyn, Cinecom, Cannon, DeLaurentiis, Hemdale, and Atlantic Releasing have gone the way of RKO and Monogram. Nowadays, only three truly independent theatrical distributors in North America are big enough for Variety to notice—IFC Films (owned by big cable-TV-system operator Cablevision), Lions Gate, and Alliance Atlantis. All the bigger “indie” distributors are merely niche-market (and non-union) subsidiaries of the intellectual-property conglomerates: Fox Searchlight, Sony Classics, Miramax (Disney), New Line (AOL Time Warner), and Focus Features (Vivendi Universal).

These niche divisions don’t sit around buying up movies completed by rugged individualist filmmakers (despite the Sundance Festival’s mythology). More and more, they’re financing, packaging, and asserting total creative control over the products they release. (Miramax bankrolled the last Broadway revival of the musical Chicago to spur interest in its now-current film version.) They package mid-budget films as career-enhancing vehicles for stars under contract to the parent company. They crank out movies in fad genres for as long as the fads last (Pulp Fiction-esque hip violence, black-middle-class relationship comedies).

Some of the films but out by the big studios’ farm-team units are at least sort-of cool.

But they’re not independent films.

So what exactly is an independent film?

Here are a few guidelines:

• If it was made in Britain in the past ten years and doesn’t have James Bond in it, it’s probably independent.
• If it was filmed in Canada and actually set in Canada, it’s probably independent.
• If Tom Hanks was involved in any aspect of its production, it’s absolutely, positively not independent.
• If no cast or crew members have ever been on Jay Leno, it stands a good chance of being independent.
• If it stars a current or past boyfriend of Jennifer Lopez, it’s probably not independent (if it was made after or shortly before said Lopez hookup).
• If it’s all about the wacky travails besetting an independent filmmaker, it’s almost certainly an independent film (albeit a trite one).
• If it was directed by a woman who isn’t also an actress, it’s likely to be independent.
• If it was directed by an African American whose surname is neither Lee nor Wayans, it’s almost assuredly independent.
• If it’s about racial struggles but doesn’t have a noble white hero, it’s apt to be independent.
• If it includes a female character who both takes her clothes off and has actual speaking lines, it’s more likely these days to be independent.
• If it includes a male character who takes his clothes off (without being hidden by a dresser drawer or a potted plant), it’s undoubtedly independent.

…ever-so-slightly longer, but it still feels like early winter around here, socio-psychologically. Everywhere you look around these parts, there’s bad news.

Chubby & Tubby finally closes this week.

Fallout Records, the feisty indie music and zine store that supported the print MISC since its relaunch three years ago, is shutting down next month.

The Paradox Theater, which mounted underage rock gigs for the past three and a half years (at the old University Theater, where yr. web editor once promoted some silly little B-movie matinees), is shutting down this weekend; though its operators promise to promote all-ages shows at other sites.

The gorgeous streamlined ferry boat Kalakala is in danger of being sold out-of-state without a quick massive arrival of restoration funds.

Dozens more of Seattle’s most talented creative people are splitting town, including two of the print MISC’s most valued past contributors.

Boeing, now essentially a branch-plant operation of McDonnell-Douglas, continues to churn out massive layoffs while starting up a job-blackmail scheme in which its three or four production cities will surely be asked to pay subsidies for the right to have the company’s next passenger-plane assembly operation.

Even mind-numbing shit jobs are being lost in vast numbers across the local economy. Nearly 2,000 telemarketers have been canned in Washington, as various companies consolidate their “call centers” into low-wage states (or countries). And word has it that computer programming, seen only eight years ago as THE profession of the century, risks becoming a dead-end career, as big corporations ship whole information-tech departments off to India and Singapore.

The politicians around here are playing a game of one-downsmanship, each striving to combine the most brutal cuts against programs to aid the poor with the most pious public apologies for same.

Personally, I’ve gone from underemployed to unemployed. I only get sleep one night out of every three (no I don’t know why). I’ve felt like giving up the daily grind of submitting resumes to everybody in town, for jobs I don’t even want. But I don’t know what to give it up for.

And, of course, the national political/economic situation is as sorry as it’s been since at least the early Watergate era.

Maybe the Erotic Art Festival tomorrow at Town Hall can bring at least a little bit of life/hope back to the memescape.

…and I’m sure you’ll also go for the smart but not too-slick poster art of Jeff Kleinsmith.

There’s now a “Masturbate for Peace” website, replete with bumper-sticker designs and silly little jokes n’ puns (and links to Viagra-selling sites). But it also has a more serious tone in its intro:

“We’ve entered a time of wars and rumors of wars. Threats of terrorism and mass destruction have filled the world with fear and brought us perilously close to worldwide conflict.

There’s no greater antidote for war than love. Feelings of hatred and distrust form the necessary basis of armed confrontation. Replace those negative feelings with love and you’re halfway towards resolution of any conflict.

However, any real love must start from within. You can’t love others without loving yourself first. And, of course, masturbation is the greatest expression of self-love. So it’s natural that we, the citizens of the world, are joining together to masturbate for peace.

As we begin with this act of self-love, we encourage others to do the same, to take pleasure in life and to share masturbation’s positive energy with a world in need.”

Of course, I’ll say being joyful to yourself isn’t enough. We must go beyond our own selves, sowing Tears for Fears’s proverbial seeds of love.

…but still troublesome tragedies was the ongoing attempt by the corporate bullies to shut down Inernet radio. One of the casualties was Seattle’s own AntennaRadio.com, which streamed a dozen or more weekly shows in different, exotic and rare genres.

The good news: Otis Fodder (sometimes billed as Otis F. Odder), who curated Antenna’s cool-n’-strange show Friendly Persuasion, has resurfaced with a new project, 365 Days. For the next year, he promises to post one audio file each day from his personal archive of collected sound strangeness. Each file will be on the site for one week. Expect to have your mind proverbially blown away daily.

…Punk: Pistols to Present, a 25-year retrospective that actually includes some of the pioneer acts often forgotten in such retrospectives (Damned, Runaways, Buzzcocks). The VJ’s background set and the show’s “bumper” logos (what you see before and after the commercial breaks), however, look creepily like the work of a corporate ad agency trying to ape a punk look (PoMo-ironic drawings of safety pins, “graffiti” typefaces). The “…to Present” side of the show’s equation is heavy on the MTV-friendly side of ’90s alternarock. Green Day is playing as I write this; I fully expect to see the Offspring and Stone Temple Pilots by the show’s end. I also expect to not see Fugazi. SO: Decide for yourself. Tribute? Exploitation? All of the above?

(Update: Further on in the show, there’s a No Doubt video and a documentary segment about a display of oldtime punk DIY posters—at a Levi’s-sponsored summer package tour!)

(Further Update: The show concludes with the predictable pairing of “God Save the Queen” and the newly-released Nirvana outtake song.)

It’s been about a month and a half since we last had a new photo essay on the site. So let’s get caught up, starting with the ever-fiscally-important day after Thanksgiving. This particular day started in downtown Seattle the way most days start, with men waiting for the temporary main library to open. Some of these men are homeless, seeking a place to sit indoors while the shelters are closed. Others are simply retired or unemployed, seeking a morning’s worth of free entertainment and/or learning.

The “Buy Nothing Day” kids were out in force, denouncing squaresville commercialism without positing any positive alternatives. The sign depicted above was made, and then defaced, by a fan of Adbusters magazine pretending to be a conservative.

(Left-wing parodies of right-wing attitudes almost always get it wrong—nobody on the right ever speaks specifically for such lefty-insult terms as “commodification ” or “patriarchy.” Right-wing parodists are, natch, just as errant about lefty attitudes, wrongly imagining that anybody would speak in favor of such righty-insult terms as “special rights” or “takings.”)

Outside the Bon Marche, a busy crew was handing out free samples of Krispy Kreme donuts (I refuse to use the more formal “doughnut” for such an informal snack food). The chain, which in recent years has generated media hype far beyond its size (still fewer than 150 branches nationally, concentrated in the south) has been ringing Seattle’s far suburbs and will open its first in-town branch next year.

No snack product could live up to Krispy Kreme’s hype. But it is an impressive product. Its lightness, fresh aroma, and melt-in-your-mouth texture all belie the massive sugar rush that hits you after six bites.

One lady did offer a proactive alternative to the bigtime shopping mania, and didn’t need Photoshop to make it.

Among those who didn’t heed, or didn’t see, that lady’s message: The nearly 100 who camped out in anticipation of the Adidas Store’s moonlight sale.

THE NIGHT OF DEC. 7 featured hundreds of holiday parties around town. The one I went to was the opening of 13 Fridas, 13 Years, 13 Days, at muralist James Crespinel’s studio-gallery in Belltown.

Crespinel has been painting his own impressions of Frida Klaho over the years, and displayed some of them as a tie-in to the movie and the Seattle Art Museum’s current Mexican-impressionism exhibit.

The opening was a stupendous gala with authentic Mexi-snacks, singers (including our ol’ pal Yva Las Vegas, above), and dancers (below).

Later that same night, a somewhat different tribute to strength and beauty was offered at the nearby Rendezvous by the Burning Hearts burlesque troupe. This is one of the seven ladies who paraded around in whimsical mini-attire for a surly drunken Santa.

Other St. Nicks of all assorted sizes, shapes, and demeanors cavorted about the greater downtown area as part of the annual NIght of 1,000 Santas spectacle, enacted in cities across North America.

On one of Cinemax’s tertiary channels late Monday night, I finally saw Highway, a pathetic little action-thriller movie filmed three and a half years ago under the working title A Leonard Cohen Afterworld.

It’s an awful low-budget (yet completely corporate) “Gen X” movie like hundreds of others. It starts in Las Vegas with Jared Leto getting caught schtumping a mobster’s wife. Leto and pal Jake Gyllenhaal run from the mobster’s hired thugs by taking a road trip, ending in Seattle. Along the way they have unimaginative misadventures, punctuated by unimaginative cuss words that are apparently meant to be funny just because they’re really loud.

It only qualifies for mention here because of one scene toward the end—a full-scale re-creation of the Kurt Cobain memorial at the Seattle Center International Fountain. I saw it being filmed—that’s the only reason I can tell you it was a full-scale re-creation. All you see on screen are a few close-ups of the actors. Leto is heard complaining that Kurt’s death meant nothing to him compared with the demise of “that Led Zeppelin guy.” The thugs promptly show up. The dudes run off. One shot later and we’re a mile and a half away in Pioneer Square, where the thugs (in cars) finally catch up to, and beat the metaphoric crap out of, the dudes (who’ve presumably been running all that way).

Naturally, neither Nirvana nor any other Seattle act is heard on the soundtrack, a pseudo-“grunge” guitar pastiche created by a member of the more Hollywood-acceptable Black Crowes.

Not only does the story have nothing to do with Cobain, it contradicts almost everything he stood for. It treats its characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. It treats young-adult males in general as a target market to be cynically marketed to. It insults the intelligence of its would-be audience. It glorifies violence and stupidity. Its “heroes” are just the sort of jocks-in-punk-clothing Cobain had repeatedly denounced.

A much better version of the same premise can be found in the 1998 Canadian indie drama The Vigil (for Kurt Cobain).

The guys n’ gals on that film’s road trip are depicted as human beings, who loved Cobain’s music and learn to love one another. The Vigil doesn’t actually show the vigil. To re-create it the way Highway did would’ve busted The Vigil‘s tiny budget. So instead its road-trippers show up in Seattle a day late, but decide they’ve had an invaluable learning and coming-O-age experience from the journey itself.

Nobody learns anything in Highway, except perhaps not to get caught schtumping a mobster’s wife.

WEDNESDAY’S EDITION of the new Pyramid was a Seattle special. It was still taped in LA, but had KOMO-TV’s Kathi Goertzen and Steve Pool as the “celebrities,” and locals found at a recent audition as the civilian contestants. One category was “Things Associated With Grunge.” They were: “T-Shirt,” “Jeans,” “Flannel,” and “Tattoo.” Nothing about music was among the items on the list, at least not among those Pool and his partner could get to within the alloted time.