…at least in Europe, need to start paying attention to the actions of neo-fascistic gay men:

“With the exception of Jean-Marie Le Pen, all the most high-profile fascists in Europe in the past thirty years have been gay. It’s time to admit something. Fascism isn’t something that happens out there, a nasty habit acquired by the straight boys. It is – in part, at least – a gay thing, and it’s time for non-fascist gay people to wake up and face the marching music.”

…very proud of the human race after glancing through the vast array of gross-out stereotype references contained at “The Racial Slur Database.”

…acknowledges there are as many as 20 Seattle barber shops specializing in “hip-hop” dos. Upon which one does the paper choose to focus? You guessed it: The one that’s in the north end and owned by two white guys.

SAD NEWS IN CULTURELAND: Northwest Bookfest has thrown down its last galley of type, and won’t be back this fall. That just gives us book-lovers the opportunity to start over and launch a brand spankin’ new Lit-O-Rama weekend.

I’d say: Forget about staging it in a funky but remote location such as Sand Point. Use the new library for a scaled-down fair; or bring the neo-modern aesthetic of the new library into the Convention Center, the Trade Center, the Seahawks Exhibition Center, or Key Arena. Make it festive, celebratory. Make it a fun gathering for people who will be spending the winter curled up at home with books.

…on her website (and soon to be book) Class Matters, that there are more “Others” in this nation besides just upscale women and upscale gays.

A fellow Stranger refugee stopped me on the street the other evening. He said he still enjoyed my writing, my vocabulary, and my sense of style.

But he also said he thought I’d limited my vision by holding to a rose-colored nostalgia for “the old Seattle,” a viewpoint that’s ill-suited toward effectively discussing today’s city of high tech and hipsters.

I beg, as I do so darned often, to differ.

You can’t really know where you’re going until you know where you’ve been.

The mindset that created the Century 21 Exposition, f’rinstance, is with us still. The magnificent Space Needle was built with private money on land essentially donated by the city. The publicly-funded exhibit buildings were either cheap “multipurpose” constructions (just like most local government buildings between then and the late ’90s) or repurposed older structures that weren’t that distinguished to begin with.

The old Seattle had its progressive, even radical ideas, alongside plain old fashioned racism/sexism. Some of its citizens held both types of beliefs at once. (I’m thinking of labor organizers who appealed to anti-Chinese hysteria among their flocks, and of “New Left” rabblerousers who defined “women’s liberation” as the right to give blow jobs.)

Today, Seattle loves diversity. Or rather, it loves the idea that it loves diversity; just so long as its white female children don’t have to go to the same schools as black male children.

The old Seattle had civic leaders who tirelessly struggled to have their burg seen as “world class,” but always by someone else’s standards. (Hence the ’60s campaigns to bulldoze the Pike Place Market, Pioneer Square, and large swaths of the Arboretum for parking lots, office towers, and highway lanes respectively.)

In more recent years, Seattle had civic leaders who saw every problem as solvable by a construction project. That’s why we can build new libraries and arts facilities, but can’t afford to run them.

The old Seattle’s governmental gears could grind very slowly; just as they can now. It took the “foodie” restaurant revolution of the ’70s before the city legalized sidewalk cafes. Now, we need, but are less likely to get, a similar outspoken demand before the city will allow new strip clubs.

If I may switch metaphors for a moment: Leonard Maltin’s book Of Mice and Magic, an invaluable history of the early animation business, refers at one point to the Warner Bros. cartoon studio’s desire in the thirties to “keep up with Disney, and plagiarize him at the same time.” Seattle’s assorted drives over the years to become “world class,” by imitating all the things all the other would-be “world class” burgs do, have often been just as self-defeating.

Warners conquered the cartoon world when its directors and artists stopped aping Disney and started to create their own brand of humor. LIkewise, Seattle will come into its own as it develops its own ways of doing city things.

We don’t have to have a cars-only transportation plan, or sprawling McMansions devouring the countryside. We don’t have to give in to corporate job-blackmail shakedowns. We can lead, not follow.

That’s not the “old Seattle,” but it’d be a better Seattle.

NEWSWEEK QUOTES a sorority leader who insists her organization no longer discriminates–at least not by hair color. (Scroll toward the bottom of the page.)

Symbols of empowerment or retro-kitsch?

…chastizes Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation for racist stereotypes: “The Japanese (characters) are ‘funny,’ two-dimensional, cartoon-like characters who can’t pronounce English words correctly and often mix ‘L’ and ‘R’ sounds.”

BILL MAXWELL ASKS, is the “Ghettopoly” board game really worse than gangsta rap? (He doesn’t mention that both products are sold to predominantly white suburban customers.)

…the fulcrum of the US economy, and hence of US culture, is flowing away from NY/LA/SF and toward the likes of second-tier cities such as Omaha and Orlando. (He doesn’t mention Seattle, except to claim Asian immigrants are increasingly settling in the Midwest instead of here.)

…below, some also-serious stuff.

I’m at this moment watching ABC’s Martin Luther King anniversary special. At last, a contemporary mainstream media source has depicted King as more than just the thinking-outside-the-box CEO’s role model he’s been depicted as in most January MLK Day billboards. He was a fighter, a tactician, and a truer American patriot than the Alabama government neanderthals who’d violently held on to segregation.

The subsequent two years’ worth of civil rights legislation broke the Democratic Party’s “solid South.” George Wallace’s third-party Presidential campaign in ’68 (the last such campaign to win any Electoral College votes) threw the White House to Nixon. Today, a more-or-less thinly disguised variant of Wallace’s old, cynical fear-mongering and race-baiting stands at the heart of Republican demagoguery.

King was no mere “dreamer.” His message is no mere relic from a long-gone era. We need to heed it more than ever.

…to Troy Hackett, co-owner of Philly’s Best cheesesteak shop on 23rd Avenue, easily the best indie fast-food place in Seattle today. I’d met Hackett a few times, both at and away from the restaurant, and always found him to be a gentle, well-humored gent with a mind set on building his business and his heart set on having fun. (This image depicts Philly’s Best’s mobile kitchen, which had already been installed at Seattle Center on Feb. 15 for a black community festival when an antiwar rally was booked for the same date.)

IF YOU SAW the movie Ghost World, you’ll remember a shot of the astoundingly racist logo for an old restaurant, the Coon Chicken Inn. A few of you might not know that was a real chain, which until the ’50s had a large outlet on Lake City Way, just beyond the old Seattle city limits–and just a half mile north of the offices of Fantagraphics Books, which published the original Ghost World comic. (Ying’s Drive-In now stands on the ex-Coon Chicken site.)

What’s more bizarre than the old Coon Chicken logo is the fact that modern-day folks are making counterfeit logo souvenirs!

Posting from a Net-cafe again today. My re-un-fixed laptop went back to the shop (actually to some central repair facility in Houston) today.

FUN QUOTE #1 (Snoop Doggy Dogg in the SeaTimes on women who’ve complained about his fully-clothed MC jobs on Girls Gone Wild videos–specifically, women who’ve complained about the lack of Af-Am breast-barers in the videos): “They’ve been complaining to me like crazy… They think I like the white girls because I’m on there with them, and I don’t, I just did that for money.”

FUN QUOTE #2 (Vendetta Red singer Zach Davidson in the same SeaTimes issue, on having become the client of an LA-based voice teacher): “He’s very good at that, how to preserve your voice. … When your voice goes, it’s like losing your penis.”

…since Planet Hollywood opened its first in-town Seattle outlet on Tuesday, run by the same regional franchisee whose Issaquah store’s become the target of sexual-harassment and racial-discriminaiton suits by Hispanic employees. I’ve no way of knowing whether the controversy dampened the Aurora branch’s opening-day hoopla, but I only had to stand in line 15 minutes (most of that time protected from the elements inside a logo-merchandise-filled tent).

Once inside, everyone got a free example of the chain’s signature product, the hot-glazed grease-and-sugar circle, fresh from the massive all-automated production line. It turns out to really be an extraordinary product, a ring of melt-away gooeyness that bears only a visual resemblance to a supermarket donut. (We refuse the pretentious “doughnut” for such an unpretentious product. We also don’t like how the flyer passed out to the patrons in line referred to the restaurant’s coffee-and-pop menu as a “beverage program.”) The same product, when served at room temperature, becomes a fluffy semisolid that hits you with a pronounced sugar rush after three bites.

Thus, it shouldn’t have been so surprising that the “greeter” lady who saw customers out the door reminded everyone that the store’s got a special unglazed version for diabetics.

The Krispy Kreme hype campaign is more than a publicity gimmick. It’s a vital aspect of the chain’s business plan as it expands from a cult-classic Southern regional circuit into a national powerhouse. The lowly donut stand has been a part of roadside and urban America for decades, but mainly in the form of independent operations (often immigrant-owned) or small regional chains. (Winchell’s and Dunkin’ Donuts have either scaled back or pulled out of their Norhwest regional operations.) Krispy Kreme has supersized the donut stand into a behemoth of relative Wal-Mart proportions (though each outlet is still little larger than McDonald’s largest urban branches). Everything about the restaurant, from the bright lighting to the cutesy T-shirts, reflects this re-imaging of a little ring of flour and lard into a destination entertainment experience.

Of course, the entertainment experience is taken to a new level by the franchisee’s current scandal. The combination of donuts and sleazy sex is such a rife opportunity for snickering jokes, which you are hereby allowed to imagine on your own. (Suggested premises: Holes, frosting, batter, mixers, beaters, roundness, crullers, dough, self-rising, “for here or to go,” drive-thru, cream filling, plain vs. chocolate, and, of course, sprinkles.)