First came the highly unofficial Star Wars Un-Premiere Party, Thursday at the Rendezvous (which is still open despite a little kitchen fire last Tuesday, thank you). Singer Cheryl Serio was the most elegant hostess, accompanied by our ol’ friends DJ Superjew and DJ EZ-Action.

Among the audiovisual attractions displayed on the video projector: Mark Hamill’s appearance on The Muppet Show (above), the 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special (a truly bizarre spectacle indeed), and something billed as a Turkish language version of the original film but was really a whole different movie (a hilarious sword-and-scandal adventure) that happened to incorporate SW spaceship shots, with the SW producers’ apparent authorization.

ON SATURDAY, the 22nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens blowup was celebrated by Cheryl Diane (above) and three other singer-songwriter acts in Diane’s fourth annual Eruptive Revival cabaret. As you may recall, last year’s edition was cut short by that nasty fire at the Speakeasy Cafe (still a charred-out ruin today). No such mishaps marred this year’s show at the Cafe Venus/Mars Bar, thankfully.

SUNDAY AFTERNOON, the University District Street Fair was underway again, as tired and worn-out as I’ve always remembered it being. The products displayed at the “crafts” booths were barely distinguishable from those displayed in the smarmiest tourist “fine art” stores of LaConner. The food concessions were no different from the elephant ears and kettle korn sold summer-long from Puyallup to Ellensburg. The assorted musical acts tried to grab passersby’s attention, but (at least the acts I saw) failed to overcome the cloudy-afternoon ennui in full smothering force.

And, of course, the booths only temporarily hid the dozen or more empty storefronts along the half-mile strip known to all as The Ave. The city thinks it knows just what to do about the retail ennui–a construction project. To the City of Seattle bureaucracy, every problem is solvable by a construction project.

But it’s hard to imagine anyone other than a bureaucrat imagining that wider sidewalks and prettier street lights will draw non-student shoppers back from the malls; not while the daily papers continue to smear The Ave as A Problem Place with Those Problem People.

And as long as there’s no money to do the right things for the throwaway teens (often banished by middle-class parents over not fitting a proper upstanding image) but plenty of money to do things against them (police harassment schemes that only make things worse), this situation won’t change.

ON A HAPPIER NOTE, Sunday evening brought two of my all-time fave cartoonists, ex-local Charles Burns and still-local Jim Woodring, to a singing session at Confounded Books/Hypno Video.

You’ve gotta check out Woodring’s newest, Trosper. Painted in bright pastel colors you can eat with a spoon, and printed just like an old Little Golden Book, it’s a wordless, utterly engrossing little tale of a cute little elephant who just wants to have fun, in a world seemingly bent on frustrating him. It even comes with a CD by one of our fave neo-improv artistes, the incomprable Bill Frisell.

…an unusually lucid graffito (above); while (below) a produce store tries to drum up business with a less-than-weather-worthy banner.

…was an “alternative” fashion show held Thursday night at a packed Catwalk nightclub in Pioneer Square. Billed by its promoters as “the next level of multi-media art,” it comprised runway segments by 12 local designers (including print MISC writer Jennifer Velasco), all coordinated and sequenced to form one semi-continuous spectacle.

The clothes were all fun and well-constructed. Some outfits were more creatively designed than others; but even the nothing-you-haven’t-seen-before garments (PVC fetish dresses; pseudo-rustic “tribal” rave wear) were perfectly good examples of their subgenres.

The hour-and-a-half show began over an hour late, and was prefaced by a long set of annoyingly repetitive techno music and video projections of war, famine, and mushroom clouds. Then a solitary female model wandered onstage and sat herself down, expressionless and mute.

This depressing moment was followed by several runway segments devoted to similarly downbeat themes (described in the show’s flyer as “Anger,” “Deception,” “Future Fear,” and “Mourning.” I began to worry that the whole show would be another example of Seattle people thinking they could only be hip if they imitated a New York sensibility–in this case a cynical, everything-sucks type of New York sensibility.

Only in the eighth segment, entitled “Inspiration” and costumed by our pal Christina Collins (see picture below), did the mood lighten up. The rest of the show, thankfully, was about (as the flyer said) “the transformation from darkness to light, from winter to spring.” The music became more listenable; the video images became more hopeful. Models began to prance instead of sulk; some even smiled.

The next designers’ segments continued the warming trend. I-Ching Lao showed off funky multicult wear, on models of non-bulimic stature. Megan Wilson presented colorful, sheer “Girlie Fashions,” on models who visibly enjoyed living in their bodies. Then came Velasco’s brief segment (see picture below), with bright-and-bouncy clubwear in cool shades of white.

On the freebie table at the front of the Catwalk were stacked copies of what might just be the dumbest fashion/lifestyle magazine ever created (and I know that’s saying a lot). The San Diego-based Revolt in Style combines pictorials about swimsuits and boxing, profiles of allegedly rising stars in music and movies, and strip-club ads. The name itself, of course, is the dumbest aspect of the mag. If this country ever had a real revolution, it’d be against commercial tripe such as that represented in Revolt.

IT’S PHOTO DAY TODAY, starting with some more examples of American business standing up for our nation (don’t you dare imagine any commercial exploitation of the popular emotions could be involved.)

First, it’s good to know the bowling pins of America refuse to be knocked over by internal divisiveness…

…And almost as good to know that giant balloon eagles are valiantly defending our right to consume mass quantities of imported oil to power our big-ass RVs.

Meanwhile, some folks who had other ideas about America and commerce staged protests across the nation on Saturday. Locally, rallies took place at Westlake Park, the Seattle Central campus, and at Broadway and East Thomas Street (where activists staged a symbolic “Take Back the Streets” exercise in the middle of the intersection.)

Whilst phalanxes of cops protected oil-company assets, peaceful advocated advocated peace. Peace was about the only thing all the protesters seemed to be for (some attendeess also expressed support for the Palestinian cause).

The protests across the country were ostensibly about the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Protest leaders have depicted the organizations as loan sharks, ruining the economies of Third World countries for the benefit of big global corporations. But, as often happens in a lefty gathering, topic drift abounded.

So you got bashers of the Bush oil policy, the Bush Mideast policy, the sanctions against (and potential invasion of) Iraq, the war on drugs, SUVs, domestic banks, and capitalism in general.

Later on Saturday, about 100 fans of Alice in Chains singer Layne Staley held a quiet vigil at the Seattle Center International Fountain. Staley, 34, was found dead at his University District home late Friday night; probably from an overdose.

In his songs and in interviews, Staley frequently admitted that he’d used heroin and that it had turned his life into a living hell. His lyrical imagery was perfectly matched by the band’s music–heavy metal dirges, often slow and pounding.

By 1993 AIC’s brutal and tragic aesthetic, unrelieved by the pop-punk energy of Mudhoney or the cynical wit of Nirvana, had come to most purely embody what many people (including most rock people in Seattle) claimed they hated about the media’s “Seattle Scene” stereotype. By 1996, Staley had essentially retired from making music. He seldom appeared in public, stopped performing live, and contributed to only a handful of new recorded songs. The few friends who kept in contact with him didn’t talk.

A Stranger gossip item last year said he’d been seen, looking presumably healthy, at a local club. A lot of us wanted to believe it. Instead, it now turns out to have been one of many unsuccessful sobriety attempts.

Staley never glamorized drug use. His songs and interviews spoke plainly of heroin’s momentary joy and lingering sadness. He lived in a private hell; it ultimately didn’t matter that this hell was initially of his own making.

A LOT OF PEOPLE have told me they read the print MISC in the lavatory, but this is the first pants-down reader I’ve been able to document. Christine was one of the models for a body-painting exhibition last night at the Forgotten Works Gallery. (There were a total of two ladies and two gents with unclad but all-decorated physiques; though one of the guys kept a loincloth on.) All the models were bright and vivacious and (except for the loincloth guy) had no apparent qualms about total strangers seeing their total bodies (even bare feet) live and in person. You’ll be able to meet Christine, fully and fabulously dressed, on April 25 at the Fashion Underground show in the Catwalk club in Pioneer Square. (Yep, she not only wears clothes most of the time, she designs ’em.)

SPEAKING OF THE PRINT MISC, the Science vs. Science Fiction issue will be out next week. (Anyone who’d like to help with distro should email me.) We go straight into production from there on the More Sex, Less Gender issue. (Get your story ideas in now.)

And consider yourselves warned: There will be another public MISCmeeting soon after the new issue comes out. Among the topics: Figuring out how to make this quixotic venture at least a little more fiscally self-sufficient. (Despite apparent rumors to the contrary, I’m not independently wealthy and cannot keep running it at a loss indefinitely.)

SPRING HAS OFFICIALLY ARRIVED. Went to some friends’ annual Easter breakfast; got to smell cut lawn and see bright sunbreaks (as well as the gent seen above, getting into the true spirit of the season).

For the past week, sunsets finally sneaked past the 6 PM PST mark, putting an end to seasonal-affective-disorder season for another seven months.

And today, Mariner baseball returned. Our boys lost (since when did that ever happen?), but they played a hard-fought contest that literally went down to the final pitch. A good omen.

NORWESCON, the Northwest’s biggest science fiction/ fantasy fan convention, held its 25th edition last Easter weekend at a SeaTac hotel. This year’s theme was “The Road to the Emerald City,” taken from the official Seattle tourist slogan coined by an ad agency in 1982. Wizard of Oz author L. Frank Baum’s great-grandson was flown in as a guest speaker.

There were also the usual Star Wars and Doctor Who merchandise, homemade fan goods (including Klingon nutcrackers), role-playing-game tables, panels on breaking into the writing biz, Lazer Tag tourneys, video screenings, paintings of buxom droids and cosmic goth-dudes, and costumes everywhere (culminating in a Saturday-night masquerade ball).

Through these events, hundreds of everyday humans (many of whom had what the mainstream media would consider less-than-perfect physiques) get to be adventure heroes; they also get to dream of a more romantic world, freed from the inhibitions of the technocratic civilization science fiction once promised us in glowing terms.

THE SNAPSHOTS I took in NYC last week, after I lost my regular camera in a whitebread Conn. hotel, are now back from the lab, scanned, and submitted for your approval.

Yeah, I went to Ground-0. The memorial skylights, by the way, look from afar frighteningly like twin Bat-Signals–only, of course, there is and was no superhero to answer the call; only regular folk to recover and clean up.

After 28 weeks, the world’s most infamous hole in the ground is still a haunting, eerily quiet place, where the aggression and freneticism of the rest of Manhattan is completely gone.

In one of Ian Fleming’s original novels, an abducted and blindfolded James Bond realizes he’s been taken to New York solely on the basis of the background noise he hears around him. The master spy wouldn’t now recognize this particular part of New York, by sound or sight.

He would, however, certainly recognize the good old American spirit of commercial exploitation, alive even under the most morbid of circumstances.

For seemingly decades, NYC was regularly vilified and demonized by right-wingers as the home base of Those Damned Liberals and everything that could conceivably be blamed on same. NYC was also regularly denounced by heartland left-progressives as a cesspool of corrupt politicians, loose morals, and soot. (Neither camp, of course, was particularly fond of the city’s many unassimilated immigrant groups.)

The prog-left learned to love New York again sometime in the early ’70s, after Beat bohemianism and the anti-suburban backlash had pretty much taken over left-of-center aesthetics. The right’s reattachment to NYC took much longer, and is largely due to a few influential people–most notably Rupert Murdoch and his political proteges, who repackaged the Big Apple as national HQ of the rabid-right “news” media. (Though it surely helped that the late-’90s hypercapitalism was so thoroughly centered in the NYC financial markets.)

So when the terror attacks came, New York had already again become the cultural capital of both the “Blue” and “Red” Americas.

As late as the pre-Y2K scare, certain left and right radicals openly dreamed of a destroyed Manhattan that would give rise to a purer, rural-centered nation.

Now, the most aggressive campaign of “patriotic” jingoism in most of our lifetimes is premised upon sympathy for Manhattan’s victims and survivors.

If anything good can come out of this gruesome series of events (and the subsequent domestic authoritarian power-grab drive), it’s a partial erasure of the phony “culture war” divide used by cynical politicos (including the Murdoch proteges) to keep us apart and manipulable.

We really are all in this thing together, and we’ve all got to stand up in defense of freedom. Including (despite what the right-wing media says) the freedom to dissent.

COCA CLASSIC: Over a year since the demolition of the Center on Contemporary Art’s last exhibition space, the nearly 20-year-old anchor of Seattle’s “alternative” arts scene came roaring back to life this month. It opened a brand new headquarters in one of Capitol Hill’s last heretofore non-upscaled warehouse spaces, plentily conveniently situated for most of COCA’s longtime clique.

So there could be no more appropriate way to celebrate the end of the organization’s hiatus than by staging a massive party–at another, far more remote, location.

Thus, the opening fete for Black and Raw, the first show at the new COCA HQ, was mounted instead at the Big Building, a co-op studio space for iron artists and goth blacksmiths. Hundreds of past and present COCA friends had a smashing time in the big, drafty, beautifully dilapidated Big Building down in the Industrial District, beneath the Spokane Street Viaduct and across from the longshoremen’s union hall.

Among the evening’s delights were the Gothic Cheerleaders, doing their part to keep cartoony devil-worship alive…

… DJ (and fellow Stranger refugee) Riz Rollins…

…a skillful hula hoop demonstration…

…and the B-Hives, a (not only accurate but lively) B-52s cover band featuring, at left, longtime music-scene vet Alison Wonderland.

As was often the case at COCA’s previous incarnations, the party atmosphere outshouted the art on display. Those who noticed (and, yes, I was among them) saw a display of wrought-iron pieces, many by the metal artists who work in the Big Building. These ranged from the sublime (an orca’s tail) to the useful (a lot of candle holders) to the outlandish (fetish slave wear; the Henry Leinonen skull chandelier depicted here).

AFTER TWO DAYS official threats/promises, the ultra-rare March snow came to Seattle Thursday night. It was bee-yoo-tee-ful. I was out in it on my regular First Thursday gallery crawl, and saw the city itself become a temporary art installation, an arrangement of pointillist streaks and abstracted white textures. Of course it didn’t last; it never does. But during the mini-storm’s eight-hour life, it was a mini-vacation from dreary late-winter reality.

EARLIER THAT EVENING, I attended the release party for the Spring issue of Arcade, the Northwest’s regional architecture-design journal.

I knew some of my Signifying Nothing images would be in it, in de-colorized form. I was pleasantly surprised that one of them made the cover! The thing’s available for $6 at the Elliott Bay Book Co., Peter Miller Books, and a few other select outlets.

Friday night, I somehow managed to get into what was billed as the last local show ever by the world’s greatest rock n’ roll band, the Fastbacks.

The gig, at Ballard’s fab Sunset Tav, was only announced as the group’s farewell gig in the Stranger two days before; Kathleen Wilson wrote that singer-bassist Kim Warnick wanted to give up the grind (though she’ll continue with her own new band, Visqueen). Thus, apparently, ends 22 amazing years of Warnick, guitarist-songwriter Kurt Bloch, guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, 14 successive drummers, and some 160 (more or less) of the greatest happy/angry noise-pop created anywhere.

The show itself was sold out (I only managed to get in toward the end of openers Droo Church’s set). Many of the crowd had been FBX fans since the ’80s; others were young enough to have been conceived in the bathrooms during early Fastbacks shows.

It was a racous, intense, gorgeous night. Guys with middle-aged backs and knees were pogoing like the old days. Bloch, Warnick, Gargiulo, and alternating drummers Mike Musburger and Jason Finn were tight, loud, and completely Hi-NRG. Fun, sweat, and great memories were had by all, for nearly two hours.

But this is not to imply the Fastbacks are, or ever were, a nostalgia band. Their music is timeless; their basic sound has remained virtually unchanged all this time (except for becoming smarter and more professional). They never lost their classic garage-rock charm or sassiness.

The Fastbacks’ sound is built on simple, solid ingredients: Passionately belted vocals, alternately-keyed female harmonies, workhorse rhythm-section parts, deceptivel intricate guitar riffs, and, most importantly, the complementary interplay between happy music and sad/angry lyrics.

To have ever been a Fastbacks fan is to have fond recollections of having listened to, and identified with, Warnick’s spirited deliveries of Bloch’s negative messages. Typical topics include generalized loss and depression, loneliness, busted friendships, insufferable and/or uncaring authority figures, and frustration at the dysfunctional world of Reagan-Bush America (now more relevant than ever!).

On the bus over to the Sunset, I happenned to be perusing a John Gray self-help book I’d picked up at a bookstore remainder rack. In it, he talked about the need to express your angers and frustration, lest the negative energy build up inside you as a toxin to the soul. That’s the effect I’ve always gotten from the Fastbacks’ songs. They help me exorcise my depressions, and make me happy, at least for the moment.

And they always will, whether or not any more are released.

Though I’m certainly hoping more will be released, or at least “reunion” gigs will take place, or at least-least that Bloch can find a new performing outlet for his particular brand of genius.

THE NEW YEAR opened with almost exactly the same Space Needle fireworks routine (seen here from halfway up Queen Anne Hill) that began the last year.

It’s as good a time as any for a year-in-review. In 2001, this region faced:

• A spectacularly horrific mass-murder-suicide attack back East, leading to the U.S.-led overthrow of a particularly odious Third World dictatorship.
• A massive economic slump.
• Skyrocketing electricity prices.
• The loss of Boeing’s HQ, thanks to a CEO who thought he could re-image the company to stock buyers as a financial-services company that also happened to make stuff.
• A daily-newspaper strike that ended with few employee gains.
• A Mardi Gras riot, followed hours later by a massive yet fatality-free earthquake.
• The closure of the OK Hotel (to the earthquake), Tower Books, Pistil Books, the Frontier Room, the Speakeasy Cafe (to a spectacular fire), the Rendezvous Bar/Jewel Box Theater, the Ditto Tavern, the Korean-owned gangsta rap T-shirt store at 3rd and Pine, the Washington Film and Video Office, assorted dot-coms (including HomeGrocer, Kozmo, MyLackey, and MediaPassage), and a couple of upscale mags intended toward the dot-com crowd.
• The deaths of journalist-historian extraordinaire Emmett Watson and Two Bells Tavern owner Patricia Ryan.
• Tenth-anniversary-of-Nirvana hype in the national media.

On the at-least-somewhat brighter side:

• The Mariners had a once-in-a-lifetime regular season. (We’ll forget about the AL Championship Series.)
• The UW football team won the 2000-2001 Rose Bowl (we’ll forget about the 2001-2002 Holiday Bowl).
• Evictions and demolitions of funky old buildings slowed down, thanks to a collapsed market for shoddy-yet-costly condos.
• Our own delicious print MISC mag blossomed into an even tastier broadsheet with nearly two dozen contributing writers and artists (thanks, cats and chicks!).

THIS QUAINT FIGURE who appeared at Westlake Center on New Year’s Eve day is Captain Drift. He doesn’t speak much, but here’s part of what his accompanying written plaque has to say:

WHO IS CAPTAIN DRIFT?

The Captain was a humanoid from the universe next door, and a frequent visitor to planet Earth.

During the return voyage following his last visit, he collided spectacularly with his dream self and slipped into the inter-universal cosmic subconscious.

This portrait, commissioned by his clan, is an artist’s interpretation (based on heresay tabloid evidence) of what the Captain’s reincarnted self probably looks like.

AGAIN THIS YEAR, those fun-lovers at the Seattle Cacophany Society came out in force for “Santarchy” (aka “The Night of 100 Santas”), a Friday-night Belltown pub crawl.

The premise is extremely simple. Several dozen Santas (plus some elves, clowns, reindeer, and the occasional Mary and Joseph) walk from bar to bar, brightening the evening by their raucous presence.

They ask some random bargoers whether they’ve been naughty or nice. Those who say “naughty” get a small candy cane. Those who say “nice” are given a gentle lashing and a scolding “Wrong answer.”

Despite the costume-party parody aspect of the event, it’s one of the purest Christmas Spirit spreaders I know of. No sales, no soliciting, no pressure, no be-happy-or-else intimidation. Just good old kitschy joy.

(The Cacophonics do other stuff year-round, and can be reached at this link.)

Meanwhile, the most appropriate holiday greeting this year could well be the simple message at Ross Dress for Less: “Hope.” (It’s just too bad the sign’s tree-ornament caricature looks too much like a lit cherry bomb.)

‘TWAS A GLORIOUS 20th anniversary party Sun. night for the Pink Door, our official fave gourmet-Italian eatery. (And not just because the name discreetly alludes to something I always like to go into.) The event had the swingin’ acrobat depicted here, a stilt walker, an accordian-tuba combo, several torch singers, a sax player, and street-music vet Baby Gramps. Fun was had by all.

AN EGYPTIAN INTELLECTUAL claims “Terrorism is the antithesis of self-determination.” (found by Rebecca’s Pocket.)

ROGER EBERT’S glossary of movie cliches (found by Robot Wisdom).

With an uncomfortable Thanksgiving thankfully, now out of the way, the big Xmas shopping season is officially underway. Around here, it’s begun for the last seven or eight years with the Bon Marche Holiday Parade.

It’s a modest parade in comparison to its nationally televised big brothers (such as the one mounted in NYC by the Bon’s sister chain Macy’s). It runs for less than an hour and a half. Its floats and balloons are much closer to human scale. There are fewer celebrity guests, none of whom stop to lip-sync a song for the cameras.

But the Bon parade effectively accomplishes its job–to get a couple thousand or more folks downtown for the opening of the stores on Friday morning.

This year’s parade ended with a massive downpour of paper and foil confetti squares on Fourth Avenue in front of the Bon. Kids and adults alike reveled in the faux snow. But only for 20 minutes or so. In order to quickly reopen the parade-route streets to auto traffic, crews were set to immediately sweep up the confetti, a task they accomplished right on cue.

But by the time the confetti was all gone, so were most of the paradegoers. Whether due to the recession, post-9/11 jitters, or whatever, the stores on Day One of Xmas Shopping weren’t much busier than they’d been the previous Friday.

The downtown retail bosses planned for this situation by staging a second big event later that day, the lighting of the Bon’s exterior “star” lights and of Westlake Center’s big tree live on the 5 p.m. local newscasts. The regular downtown Christmas Carousel is back up, and the stores downtown and elsewhere are planning other crowd-drawing gimmickry over the next four weeks.

Hey, we could all use the free entertainment. Especially those among us who can’t afford all those fancy trinkets and baubles this year.