IT’S MISC. WORLD’S end-of-the-month clearance. Get the following Famous Maker commentary items now at big savings! (I’ve wanted to have a clothing company called “Famous Maker” even longer than I’ve wanted to have a band called “Special Guest.”)

A SLOW HAND, AND EVERYTHING ELSE: Saw a beautiful poster on Capitol Hill announcing, in neo-mod lettering, what from a far distance looked like “Butoh Erotica.” A closer reading, however, revealed the poster was actually advertising a performance-art evening of “Butch Erotica.”

While I strongly support tuff-gal lesbians’ empowered expressions of their sexual selves, I can’t stop imagining the possibilities of making specifically-sexually-themed works from the slow, deliberate, Japanese-born genre of Butoh dance, which already is often exquisitely sensuous (and occasionally flesh-revealing).

What would be the bad part about Butoh sex? Getting that white makeup on (or off of) the delicate areas.

What would be the good parts about Butoh sex? Flexibility, variety of positions, and never worrying about it ending in mere minutes (or even in mere hours).

DOMAIN THING: There are now separate Websites called seattlemusic.org and seattlemusic.com.

The latter site promotes a company that employs Seattle Symphony musicians to record background music for Hollywood movies (yes, Virginia, there are still a few movies being made that utilize real “soundtrack music” rather than cobbling together a bunch of would-be pop hits).

The former site’s one of several that offer promo and publicity for up-‘n’-coming rock-pop-jazz-whatever bands (others include Seattlesounds.com, The Tentacle, and Turmoil’s Seattle Music Web).

Last I heard, attorneys were in the process of sorting out whether seattlemusic.com will get to order seattlemusic.org to find a different URL.

THE NEXT ITEM UP FOR BIDS: For odd fetishists and home-decorators of particular tastes, Bonnie Burton of grrl.com offers Shop Til You Drop, a mailing list devoted to the weirdest items on eBay auctions.

“I’m not joking about weird either,” Burton promises. “We’re talking taxidermy reptiles and old medical tools here!” I’m still waiting to see steel ingots and decorative crankshafts. But I’m sure they’ll show up eventually…

CONJUNCTION JUNCTION: The complaints about Microsoft never stop! Besides the ongoing federal suits, there’s legal action taken by AOL against MS’s new ripoff of/competitor to AOL Instant Messenger, and rumored threats of action about Windows supposedly messing with files created for Adobe Acrobat Reader, leaving ’em unreadable.

But now here’s a flaw in MS software that just might be the weirdest yet. The company’s own MSNBC site reports, “Microsoft Word 97 for Windows may crash or you may receive an error message when you are typing a long sentence that includes several conjunctions (such as ‘and’ or ‘or’) along with at least one preposition (such as ‘to,’ ‘from,’ ‘of’ or ‘by’).”

I’ve heard of “grammar check” features trying to discourage all would-be Faulknerisms in the name of no-nonsense businesslike clarity, but this goes far beyond…

TOMORROW: The third annual Misc. World Midsummer Reading List.

A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

LAST FRIDAY, I related some of the things I told the Italian mag Jam about the Seattle music scene since the U.S. corporate media stopped caring about it.

Here’s some more of what I told that publication’s writer:

• Q: I think that one thing that united very different guys like Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder was their attempt to negoziate the role of the rock star in the music business (it’s common opinion that only Nirvana did, but let’s not forget that it was Pearl Jam who stopped to do press and video, not Nirvana). Do you agreed? Is it something that still has an impact on today’s music scene and attitude?

  A: Nirvana tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and failed. Pearl Jam, which in its first year was more aggressively promoted than Nirvana, tried to find its own way within the music-industry machinery and succeeded on its own terms. PJ became a major-label act with the fan devotion of an “indie” act. By under-using the industry’s mass-marketing tools, it maintained its status as a “people’s” band.

• Q: Talking about the fifth anniversary of the Kurt Cobain’s death you wrote that now the town is as dysfunctional as it were then. And that the wrong people has a lot of career opportunities (so it’s not true what they say, that as ye sow, so shall ye reap). Can you elaborate?

  A: Let me clarify: A few people here are now tremendously wealthy, but those of us who aren’t on the upper rings of the high-tech and software industries are still struggling as much as ever. With the price of housing here having skyrocketed, some of us have struggled even more.

• Q: One big misconception about the Seattle music scene was that it was all grunge. Of course, it was a lie, or maybe ingenuity. Are things still the same? I mean, is the music scene still varied, with a wide range of different music?

  A: Perhaps even more so. Besides local outposts of whatever national trends come and go (alternative-country, lounge, techno, etc.), there’s a vital and growing avant-improv and postmodern-jazz scene. But, yes, the national magazines like Wallpaper still look at anything in Seattle that contradicts the “all-grunge” stereotypes and act all weird: “This is in Seattle but it’s Not Grunge–how strange!”

• Q: A friend of mine who went to Seattle two years ago reported to me that there’s no big exploitation of the ‘grunge era’ in town, apart from the Sub Pop Mega Mart and other little things that probably cannot attract massive ‘rock tourism’. Is it true? If it’s so, the reason is the ‘underground attitude’ of the scene, that refused to exploit ‘grunge’?

  A: Don’t worry. That will all come by the end of next year, when the Experience Music Project museum opens, including a big permanent exhibit all about the G-word era.

  But for now, yes. The ‘underground attitude’ was officially opposed to tourist attractions, theme parks, or the like. And the powers-that-be in local business and political circles have continued to eagerly play the role of intolerant authority figures (what all would-be “rebels” need in order to have something to rebel against), so there was never any threat of any city-supported Grunge Festival or anything like that.

• Q: Is Seattle rock scene still away from the starmaking machinery (the one that rules in L.A., for example)?

  A: Perhaps further away than before. Of the bands I wrote about in ‘Loser,’ the only ones still on the major labels are Pearl Jam, Built to Spill, Candlebox, Alice In Chains (who haven’t put out a lot of new stuff lately), and Chris Cornell’s new solo act. There are still bigtime producers and managers and promoters around here, but they work as much with out-of-town acts as with local ones.

• Q: The whole ‘grunge story’ showed once again that in the rock field success is a very transitory thing, that is all about trends, that rock fans today they like Nirvana and tomorrow Offspring or anything else. I’m wondering if there has been a moment when you thought that the incredible Nirvana’s success could change anything in that field? Did you ever believe that most of the people who listened to Nirvana really shared something and not simply listened to the band that was supposed to be cool listen to?

  A: Nirvana meant a lot to a lot of people. More than the studio-manufactured pop combos before or since, and more than certain California bands that sound sort of grungy but have much more industry-friendly business plans (appearing at snowboarding festivals, selling songs for movie soundtracks, etc.).

  The Industry did regain control of pop music from the upstarts. But it might just turn out to be a temporary victory. One of the six major-label groups has merged itself out of existence. The remaining five groups are cutting divisions, firing staff members, dropping bands left and right, and publicly whining about Internet-based “threats” to its well-being. While the techno-dance genre is still almost all indie-label-based; and cheap digital recording, Net-based promotion, and a club circuit invigorated by the early-’90s indie-rock mania make it easier than ever to get an act established (if not wealthy) without the majors’ waste or overhead.

• Q: How heavily the Kurt Cobain story weighted on the city’s conscience and life?

  A: It certainly made everything seem a lot less fun for a good long while.

  It also convinced some people of the wrongness of the music-industry system. Cobain had clearly been burnt out by the stress, not of being “the voice of a generation” but of being the locus of a multimillion-dollar business that used to be a little punk band. Geffen demanded videos, interviews, and long, overseas arena tours, and Cobain apparently felt unable to say no to these demands. (Of course, he was also sufferring under the drug-addict’s paradox of needing more money while becoming less capable of working for it.)

• Q: Do you think that the most popular bands (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Soundgarden) departed from their background when they became successful? Or they kept on having a strong relationship with the city?

  A: None of them moved to L.A. (except Courtney Love and a couple of former Seven Year Bitch members).

  But it was traditional, in the pre-Microsoft years, for rich people in Seattle to withdraw from public life, to move out to gated suburbs or country homes and to stick to themselves. Some of the financially-successful music-scene people have done that, retreating to Idaho or Montana or the islands of Puget Sound.

  But others are still quite involved. Prime example: Krist Novoselic, who these days appears in public more often than he did during Nirvana’s heyday, and who’s been involved in anti-censorship drives and other political actions.

• Q: Do you think that the ‘Hype!’ movie correctly documents what happened in Seattle? If not, what’s missing? (Steve Fisk, for example, told me that the tragic death of Mia Zapata is underrated in the movie; he told it had a massive emotional impact on the sceners.)

  A: Anything running two hours or less, covering a topic so complex, will by necessity be a condensation.

  Home Alive, the women’s self-defense coalition formed after Zapata’s death, has had some attrition of volunteers and funding but is still active after six years. Zapata’s death, still unsolved, left a lot of people with a sense that they were in a seriously threatening environment; that death and violence weren’t just the stuff of goth or cartoon-heavy-metal fantasies.

• Q: Is the dj’s and electronic music big in Seattle now?

  A: You bet. It taps into one eternal Seattle schtick–the mistaken belief by would-be hipsters that everything in Seattle sucks, that the only really hip thing is to copy whatever San Francisco or New York says is hip. But it also taps into a certain spirit you can find in the Microsoft coprorate culture, where everybody’s young, ruthlessly “positive,” aggressively modernistic, and into hot-hot-hot hype.

• Q: What is now the impact and the role of Microsoft and Boeing in the city?

  A: Boeing’s corporate culture used to set the rules for mainstream society in Seattle–businesslike, rational, respectable, unassuming, consensus-oriented, square, and obsessed with quiet good taste.

  Today, Microsoft sets the tone–loud, fast, brash, aggressive, ambitious, arrogant, power- and success-oriented, and obsessed with ostentatious displays of wealth.

TOMORROW: Is irony dead, or just playing possum?

JUST WHEN YOU THOUGHT all that could be said and done about the early-’90s Seattle music scene had been said and done, here come more exploiters.

At 2 p.m. today, a crew from New Line Cinema will go to the Seattle Center Fountain outside KeyArena to, as a flyer soliciting extras says, “re-create Kurt Cobain’s memorial vigil for a new feature film.”

The movie, tentatively titled A Leonard Cohen Afterworld (after a line in Cobain’s song “Pennyroyal Tea”), is the first fiction feature directed by Todd Philips (who made the documentaries Frat House and Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies).

The script is by Scott Rosenberg, who was involved in the “hip”-violence travesty Things to Do In Denver When You’re Dead, and apparently involves a pair of troubled teens who have various misadventures while on the road to Seattle for the Cobain memorial.

Some movie-rumor websites claim it might also include “speculations” on what may or may not have happened among Cobain and his inner circle during the rocker’s last days–a plot-concept which should immediately make all of you collectively go “Ick!” or at least “Potential Ick!”

ON A SLIGHTLY HAPPIER NOTE, and as I’ve hinted at in prior installments, I’ve secured the rights to my 1995 book Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story back from the original publisher. I’ve also arranged financing for an updated second edition, which, if all goes right, should be available from this site and in stores in October, four years after the first edition.

While I never got rich off the old book, I did become known as a Seattle-music-scene expert, at least to European magazine interviewers. Since the Dutch magazine that talked to me over a year ago, I’ve since talked to a Swiss magazine and now the Italian mag Jam.

Here’s some of what I told that publication’s writer:

• Q: The common opinion is that Seattle music evolved in a certain way because of the town’s isolation from the music industry. Now that the ‘grunge hysteria’ is over, the scene returned to a certain grade of isolation? Or maybe the Nirvana/Pearl Jam/Soundgarden/Alice In Chains’ success changed things forever?

  A: Things changed. There’s clubs to play at now. And experienced producers and promoters and studios and indie labels. The reason there didn’t turn out to be a “Next Seattle” (the next town for the music industry to scoop up promising acts from) was because Seattle had been more than just a source of talent. It was a nearly self-sufficient infrastructure for making and promoting music.

  And that’s what’s largely survived the music industry’s retreat.

• Q: When the so-called ‘grunge’ became hyped, the Seattle community reacted with comprehensible hostility. Is anything changed now that the media hype is over, or what you call “timidity” (‘Loser’, Introduction) still rules?

  A: A lot of people here wanted to succeed but only on their own terms. They wanted to be known as artists and/or entertainers, not as media celebrities or as fodder for MTV. The last thing some of them wanted was for their messages of anger and angst to be re-interpreted as something hot and commercial.

• Q: Seattle now and then (then=beginning of the Nineties): is the economic and social situation different? If it’s so, what are the repercussions on the music scene?

  A: A decade ago, the conventional wisdom was that economic stagnation would be permanent, that young people had no real future.

  Today, there’s lots of money flying about, much of it held by college-educated white young adults working at software and Internet companies. The young successors to yesterday’s “going nowhere generation” are now (at least some of them) among the most privileged young people America has ever produced. This new audience has influenced the nightlife scene greatly. The dance club ARO.Space and the new Cyclops restaurant/bar, to name only the most obvious examples, are shrines to the new monied youth.

  But for those without high paying cyber-careers, wages have stagnated and the cost of living has risen (especially housing, which has become ridiculously expensive with the cyber-monied people willing to pay just about anything). It’s harder to be a self-employed artistic-type person (or an artistic-type person with an undemanding day job) here; even as the social pressure rises (even in “alternative” circles) to be upbeat and positive and success-minded at all times.

• Q: Maybe I’m wrong, but I think that mass media didn’t put much emphasys on the political consequances of an underground and decentralized music community like the Seattle one. I mean, when you put under discussion the starmaking process at every level, the consequences are political, economical and social. When you say “I don’t wanna be part of it”, you’re saying that something has to change. Do you agreed? If it’s so, do you think that nowadays is still the same in the Seattle musical scene? Do you think that, in this field, the incredible success of bands like Nirvana, and Pearl Jam brought positive things? Or it was all in vain?

  A: What was initially intended by most of its musicians to be a reaction against music-industry fads became promoted by the industry and the media as just another music-industry fad. In the short term, that had the effect a conspiracy theorist might imagine: Audiences tired of the hype and, around 1996-97, turned away.

MONDAY: More of this.

ELSEWHERE: Jessica Hopper, editor of the Chicago zine Hit It or Quit It (linked here via the indie-rock portal site Insound), has a quaint glossary of indie-scene terminology. Example: “Nature Melt: Hippies dancing or gathering en masse. A: ‘We had to leave Lilith Fair early, the nature melt was out of control.'”

LAST FRIDAY, we mentioned the recent explosion in “Weblogs,” sites that contain little or no original content but instead provide highly selective links to articles and stories on other sites.

MISC. World isn’t turning into a pure Weblog. Don’t worry; there’ll still be all-new stuff here all the time.

But, from time to time, we like to mention some fun and/or serious stuff being written elsewhere in Netland. Such as these pieces:

For everybody who loves/hates the inanity of misspellings on huge public signage, it’s the Gallery of “Misused” Quotation Marks. A recent item: “A billboard for a bank in Idaho Falls reads: ‘We believe that “PEOPLE” should answer our phones.’ ‘PEOPLE’ are about the same things as ‘robots with Gap clothing,’ right?” Speaking of inanities…

Rocket writer Jason Josephes has a hilarious listing of “The Top 20 LPs Among People Who Hate Music,” as determined by what he sees most in thrift-store record bins. (I personally disagree with Josephes’ #1 choice, Abba’s Gold. I recently listened to a cassette somebody in Belgium had made, collecting every known cover version of “Dancing Queen,” from elevator to punk, and was blown away by the tune’s sheer endurance capability.) Speaking of hatreds…

Now that press coverage of the delayed Buffy the Vampire Slayer season finale’s allowed journalists to revisit their post-Littleton pontifications, Philip Michaels has something called “Your Guide to High School Hate,” showing once again that the pontificators had it all wrong and Buffy has it metaphorically right–high school, too often, really is a Hellmouth. Speaking of teen insecurities…

Understanding Comics author-illustrator Scott McCloud is back with a wistful, beautiful reminiscence of his adolescent retreat from peer pressure into the ordered, rational universe of gaming, in “My Obsession With Chess.” It’s a comic strip meant to be read online, with panels arranged in the sequence of chess moves along a “board” that would be about 16 feet long in real life. Simply gorgeous.

TOMORROW: Continuing in this vein, some wacky search-engine keywords that brought people, perhaps mistakenly, to this site.

UPDATE #1: “Oh oh, must have been another Bite of Seattle riot!” That’s what certain Belltown bystanders muttered when they saw throngs of teens, about half of them Af-Am teens, streaming out of Seattle Center toward the surrounding sidewalks around 9:30 p.m. last Saturday night. But it wasn’t a riot. Center authorities had simply brought in cops to empty the grounds, including the Fun Forest amusement area, after the Bite’s scheduled 9 p.m. closing time. (The incident last year wasn’t really a “riot” either. Somebody made a noise in a crowded Fun Forest that sounded like gunfire but might have just been a leftover fireworks noisemaker, and a few dozen kids started running in panic.) Ah, the “enlightened, liberal, diversity-celebrating” city that still can’t grasp that dark-skinned teenagers are not necessarily gangstas… (sigh)…

UPDATE #2: In happier news, the Washington State Liquor Control Board, which previously was stripped of much of its entertainment-licensing authority by a federal judge, is now proposing rules that would allow afternoon or early-evening all-ages music shows in the dining areas of restaurant-lounge spots. The proposed rules would still be stricter than those in Oregon, but it’s a step.

ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.

Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.

Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.

Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.

“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”

Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.

Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.

If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!

To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.

Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).

But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.

If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.

I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.

TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.

A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.

Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.

But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.

(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)

Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.

And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.

But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.

As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.

As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.

(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)

This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.

Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.

Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.

Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.

Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).

So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.

(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)

TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?

ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”

FOR A RELATIVELY-SHORT but seemingly-endless time, the innocent citizenry of a once-remote place were under seige.

A would-be dictator, operating under the barest semblance of lip-service to democracy, fought with every means available to impose his personally-defined concept of civil order upon the populace. In motion after motion, he declared one specific segment of the population to be the only true and deserving citizens, and classified all the others to second-class status, to be harassed and “persuaded” to get out.

But then, a glimmer of hope appeared. The long-trod-upon people began to cautiously rejoice.

Mark Sidran’s reign might finally be ending.

Yeah, so this joke-comparison between overseas horrors and the machinations of Seattle’s city attorney are grossly distasteful.

But that’s the best way to describe what happened last Tuesday.

Here’s what happened. Essentially, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that a state law dating back to the post-Prohibition years, directing the Washington State Liquor Control Board to regulate “Added Activities” such as live entertainment at bars and nightclubs, was unconstitutional.

So now, the Liquor Board and local governments can’t tell bars what entertainments they can or can’t offer their customers.

Immediately, it means no more telling bars to stop playing music that might attract black people.

Sidran, who can’t stand the existence within the city limits of anybody who’s not an upscale, lily-white, professional-caste baby boomer such as himself, won’t get to use “Added Activities” to shut down black clubs or “persuade” them to move to white-oriented fare.

This also means no more liquor-board crackdowns on nudie art-pix at the Virginia Inn, no more worries about bad-word censorship at comedy clubs (as if anybody still goes to those places), and maybe, just maybe, looser dress codes at fetish nights and leather bars.

It doesn’t mean bars can start regular stripper formats, however; that’s still covered under those increasingly-draconian “adult entertainment” laws in Seattle and other localities. See the current issue of the journal Gauntlet for many tales of anti-strip-joint crackdowns across the country.

What will happen next? The Liquor Board apparently isn’t interested in promoting new legislation to replace the overturned “Added Activities” rules.

Sidran’s own, even-more-draconian “Added Activities” proposal (which, in its current draft, had depended upon regulatory precedents in the now-overturned state law) will probably die in the Seattle City Council; though he might still try other means to enforce Mandatory Mellowness via stricter noise and public-nuisance ordinances.

So the Sidran menace ain’t really over yet. But, between the end of “Added Activities” and a council increasingly fed up with his continuing attempts to be a de facto municipal head of state, he might find himself stuck in the uncomfortable position of having to work for the city rather than trying to run it.

The city attorney’s job is an elected position. Nobody ran against Sidran last time. Let’s get someone to run against him next year. Someone who’ll be a good government lawyer, and not some strong-arm enforcer of “civil society.”

TOMORROW: If we can’t have fewer cars, let’s at least have more smaller ones.

BOOKING A WOMEN’S CONVENTION by the religious-right pressure group Focus on the Family the same weekend as ArtsEdge was the best Seattle Center scheduling serendipity in years. Even better than situating the big Cobain memorial in ’94 right outside, and just after, a Sonics playoff game.

Alas, no catfights or shouting matches broke out between the blue-haired conservatives and the green-haired artsy-types–not even with the entrants in the tattoo contest, some of whom paid as little heed as was legally possible to the contest’s fine-print rule, “If your tattoo is in an area normally covered by clothing, please be prepared to wear clothing that reveals your tattoo but not the genital area. Ladies, that means nipples too–sorry, it’s the law!”).

The body art was among the highlights at the third ArtsEdge. Other notables: The parade of art cars, the Butoh Race (three women in angel-of-death-white makeup tried to run as slowly as possible without stopping), musical gigs by Rockin’ Teenage Combo and the Bosnian emigres of Kultur Shock, the neo-vaudeville of Circus Contraption and Cirque de Flambe, and Elaine Lee’s art installation in which short tales involving the artist’s “secrets” were stored inside beautifully-lit, small metal boxes.

A lot of it was fun and entertaining. Some of it was even art. Little of it, though, had any edge.

The problem: economics, natch. This year’s ArtsEdge, like the two prior installments, failed to attract many of the region’s best fringe art-theater-music people due to its policy of not paying them. (The event’s $100,000 budget goes entirely to Seattle Center staff and facilities services and to publicity.)

As long as the Seattle Center management’s allowed to think “edgy” art means art by young adults who’ll do anything for a public showcase, you’ll get an ArtsEdge that’s got little art and almost no edge. This year’s event proved it could be popular, even under less-than-ideal weather conditions. It could be more popular if more pro alterna-artists, with their already-built followings, were added.

Consider this another case of the “If-we-can-build-these-big-ass-sports-palaces-why-can’t-we-…” routine, which we’ll talk a little more about on Thursday and Friday.

Tomorrow: More reasons why Pokemon is such a hit with the kids and so incomprehensible to the grownups.

DISCIPLINE, I heartily believe, is one of the most important ingredients in any artwork. Especially in any artwork based on one of the “popular” (or formerly-popular) art forms. As any decent jazz teacher will tell you, you must know the rules before you can properly break them.

Herewith, some important disciplinary elements of time and space for the true pop-culture scholar.

0.2 seconds (five frames of film; determined by animation legend Tex Avery to be the minimum time for the human eye to “read” a motion gag such as a falling anvil).

0:58 (actual content length of a 60-second TV commercial, dating back to when most spots were edited and distributed on film, so local stations could splice spots onto one reel without worrying about the two-second differential between a frame of film and its corresponding soundtrack segment).

1:00 (standard length of a TV commercial break in the ’50s).

2:10 (average minimum length of a TV commercial break these days).

3:30 (more-or-less maximum length of a Top 40 single in the ’50s and ’60s, so radio stations could expect to fit 1:30 of commercials and DJ patter into a 5:00 segment).

4 minutes (limit of a 78 rpm record).

6 minutes (the final standard length of a Warner Bros. cartoon; 540 feet of film).

7 minutes (maximum length of a side of a 45 rpm record, without using analog sound compression).

10 minutes (standard length of an act in a vaudeville revue; later the maximum length of a one-reel film comedy or newsreel).

16-20 minutes (average and maximum lengths of a two-reel film comedy).

24 minutes (length of a half-hour TV show, minus commercials and credits, before they started cramming more ads into prime-time; nowadays a sitcom can be as short as 19.5 minutes).

30.5 minutes (maximum length of a side of an LP record when using analog sound compression).

72 minutes (maximum length of a standard audio CD).

80 minutes (considered the minimal length of a commercial studio feature film; the standard length of most U.S. animated features).

300-400 words (average length of a book page).

750 words (standard length of a newspaper op-ed column).

800 words (standard length of an old New Yorker “casual” humor story.)

1,000-1,400 words (typical length range of a magazine page).

5,000 words (standard length of an old Saturday Evening Post short story).

90,000 words (maximum length of a mass-market-paperback novel in the ’50s, when publishers were still trying to stick to a 25-cent price).

6 episodes (minimum duration of a BBC sitcom season).

13 episodes (standard duration of a ’30s movie serial).

39 episodes (original duration of a TV season on the U.S. big-three networks, derived from the days of live radio; now whittled down to as few as 20 and as many as 30).

65 episodes (standard duration of the first season of a weekday animated series; the episodes may be in production over two years before premiering).

100 episodes (generally considered the minimal duration of a TV series to succeed in syndicated reruns; also the typical duration of a Mexican telenovela).

Monday: More on the end of Another World.

YESTERDAY, WE BRIEFLY MENTIONED potential musical role models for sensitive hetero males. My idea of such might start with the current crop of romantic troubadors, many of them from around here.

We’ve already talked about one of my faves, Green Pajamas frontman Jeff Kelly. Much like the now-discovered ex-Portlander Elliott Smith, Kelly makes hauntingly beautiful ballads of desire and loss. He uses intelligence to express beauty, makes pain sound pleasurable, and conveys the risks and losses of love and of the search for love as being troublesome but also important and necessary for the fully-lived life.

A similar tack is taken from a most unlikely source, former Pure Joy/Flop power-popper Rusty Willoughby. On his self-titled, self-released solo debut, Willoughby proves himself as perfectly capable of the wistful remembrance and the tender glance as he is of the peppy cynicism for which he’s better known. This short, nine-song disc probably won’t bring Willoughby the renown he’s long deserved, but it’s still a gorgeous little suite of some of the best rainy-afternoon music you could ever hope to hear on a too-hot summer evening.

Marc Olsen, long ago in the combo Sage, has been known for several years now as a solo ballad-rocker of uncommon depth and insight. His newest release, Didn’t Ever… Hasn’t Since, shows him re-integrating some of his former band’s careful sense of strength-in-reserve. His new disc rocks louder than his last one, but that doesn’t make the work any less “sensitive.” Rather, the counterpointing of passionate parts and delicate parts enhances the beauty and delicacy of the whole. Olsen’s clearly a man who knows you can love women without hating yourself (indeed, you can only truly love another if you at least like yourself).

On another level, and in spite of (or rather enhanced by) its rockin’-er moments, Olsen’s disc is also an achingly-gorgeous work of what was known a few years ago as “ambient” listening, before that term became exclusively applied to big-beat electronica.

One of Seattle’s longtime champions of ambientness, multi-instrumentalist Jeff Greinke, has now teamed up with Sky Cries Mary frontwoman Anisa Romero on Hana. While Greinke plays most of the instruments, Romero’s a lot more than a studio singer here. Her compositional influence lifts Greinke from the skilled spaciness of much of his work, into something closer to the ethereal lilts of the early 4AD Records gang (while maintaining his own trademark of seemingly structureless structure). There are no “songs” here, unlike SCM’s own works. Think of Hana as a single 50-minute work in eight seamlessly-connected parts. Also think of it as perfect soundtrack music to a black-and-white, expressionistic heaven-and-hell movie playing exclusively in your head.

IN OTHER LOCAL MUSIC NEWS: Management at the 3rd & Pine downtown McDonald’s has started piping old-country music tapes outside. The idea, like the years-old idea of loudly playing easy-listening music outside convenience stores, is to make the joint’s outside less attractive as a hangout for aimless youth.

UPDATE: The Dutch magazine writer I mentioned in Tuesday’s report emailed the following addition on Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”

Tomorrow: A visual-art zine with no pictures; plus Starbucks’ in-store mag Joe.

YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.

Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.

(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)

I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.

This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.

Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.

A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”

The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.

But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…

Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.

This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.

That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.

Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.

The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.

Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.