SEE IF YOU CAN TELL whether Minneapolis columnist, conservative blogger, and retro-kitsch art-book compiler James Lileks is sincere or not as he comments on Howard Stern’s latest dirty-words controversy.

Seattle Weekly’s had two strong cover stories in a row.

This week’s piece by Tim Appelo wondering why Ken Kesey ceased to be a great writer expressed (and, thankfully, didn’t try to fully answer) all the questions I had when Kesey died and all the obits ran paragraph after paragraph about his drugging and drinking and only a couple of sentences about his writing.

Appelo’s piece followed Philip Dawdy’s long, haunting pontification about last summer’s suicide by beloved KUOW personality Cynthia Doyon. We’re just a couple of months away from what will probably be a string of media hype pieces marking ten years since Kurt Cobain’s death. We seem not to have learned a damned thing since then about taking care of ourselves or one another.

…but here high atop MISC World HQ we’re sitting high-N-dry, watching the rain and flooding footage on cable, avoiding anything to do with the World Series, and pondering what kind of age we live in that finds both Rush Limbaugh and Courtney Love popping the same drugs.

…to the memory of Cynthia Doyon, host and creative genius behind KUOW’s The Swing Years And Then Some. She’d been at the UW’s other station at the time, KCMU (now KEXP), a couple of years before I was. She moved on to the UW’s “pro” station, KUOW, in 1979, just as public radio was really taking off as a national institution. Her Saturday-night show became a local institution for 24 years, honoring a 30-year era of music that created much of American pop culture’s most timeless classics. She deftly programmed a show that was neither rigidly “historical” (just about anything from the 78-rpm era could find its way into the show) nor timidly nostalgic (she took care, in her selections and her introductions, to make the music come alive for contemporary listeners).

But Doyon was only employed part-time at KUOW, and couldn’t find enough outside work to pay the bills. Apparently despondent over her personal finances during the Great Depression II, she allegedly shot herself on the UW campus, on what Billie Holiday once referred to as a “Gloomy Monday.”

FINISHING OUR RECAP of scenes documented but not uploaded back in June, here at last is the open house at Seattle Opera’s new McCaw Hall. (Yep, a giant theater named for a family fortune earned from every theater manager’s #1 bane, cell phones.)

The joint’s not paid for yet, even though its makers saved a few bucks by keeping the structural frame of the old Civic Auditorium/Opera House. And there’s no way of telling when or how it’ll be paid for, since there aren’t any governments in the immediate proximity that have a bunch o’ spare cash laying around.

There are still two arts-related construction megaprojects in Seattle, the new downtown library and the Paul Allen-supported sculpture garden near Pier 70. It’s now time (or rather way past time) to turn our collective fiscal attention toward arts funding that emphasizes art and artists, rather than the more politically expedient route of huge building projects.

The place itself is, as you might have expected all along, a clean, retro-modern looking joint, but with its own touches. The Seattle Symphony’s Benaroya Hall looks like a modern urban Protestant church. McCaw looks like a new suburban mega-church.

In place of the old Opera House’s steak-house crimson wallpaper, McCaw’s all done up in what Ikea would consider to be “warm” designer colors. It’s all so laid back and mellow and formally informal. I’m not sure that’s the proper milieu for opera and ballet, which are (or ought to be) all about big passions. At least they kept all the public art from the old space, including the Mark Tobey mural.

Oregon State U. prof Jon Lewis’s book Hollywood V. Hard Core, now out in paperback, claims the Hollywood studios aren’t and weren’t the free-speech crusaders they sometimes claimed to be. Lewis argues, according to the book’s back-cover blurb, that the studio-imposed ratings system and other industry manipulations served to crush the ’60s-’70s craze for sex films and art films, and thus “allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what movies got made and where they were shown.”

When the Independent Film Channel runs its salute next month to “renegade” type filmmakers of the ’70s, you can compare and contrast IFC’s take on the era with that of Lewis. IFC, I suspect, may describe ’70s cinema as a freewheeling revolutionary era, whose rule-breakin’ bad boys took over the biz and are still among today’s big movers-n’-shakers.

I’d give an interpretation closer to Lewis’s. That’s because I essentially came of age at the height of ’70s cinemania. My early college years (including one year at OSU) coincided with the likes of Cousin Cousine, Swept Away, The Story of O, All the President’s Men, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Dawn of the Dead, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Being There, Rock n’ Roll High School, Emmanuelle 2, and countless other classics that forever shaped my worldview.

But that was, to quote a film of the era, “before the dark time. Before the Empire.”

Lucas and Spielberg, those clever studio-system players who let themselves be marketed as mavericks, re-taught the studios how to make commercial formula movies. Before long, they and their imitators became the new kings of the jungle. Francis Coppola, Alan Rudolph, Richard Rush, Terrence Malick, and other medium-expanders were shunted to the sidelines of the biz.

The sorry results can be surveyed on any episode of Entertainment Tonight.

In related news, an alliance of Net-radio entrepreneurs is planning to sue the record industry, claiming the major labels have set royalty rates so high only big corporate stations can afford to legally exist….

…And Jeff Chester of TomPaine.com interprets Comcast’s lastest cable-contract wrangling in Calif. as a scheme to kill public access channels. I don’t think Chester’s allegation’s fully supported by the evidence he gives, but the situation’s still one to watch with concern.

A new alt-art boutique just opened on East Pine Street called the Bluebottle Art Gallery and Store. It’s a nice little place and you oughta see it, even though it’s only peripheral to today’s topic.

When I first went there a couple of months back, I asked the co-owner if the store was named after Peter Sellers’s beloved Bluebottle character on the old BBC Radio Goon Show. It was. I immediately appreciated the place even more, though I neglected to go into my impersonation of the character’s squeaky boy-falsetto (“Yew FEEL-thy SWINE! Yew have DEADED me again!”) on the store’s premises.

I instead went home and, over the several following weeks, downloaded and listened to all 150 or so still-existing Goon Show episodes.

Nearly half a century after they were made, these comedy classics still stand up. Not just because they were the famous Sellers’s first springboard to global stardom, and not just because their inspired nonsense heavily influenced everybody from the Monty Python boys to the Beatles (whose record producer George Martin and favorite filmmaker Richard Lester had been involved in Goon side projects).

The Goon Show is timeless. Even the topical references (such as those to consumer-goods shortages, “early closing days,” and other miseries of postwar Britain) have now seamlessly blended in with the rest of the show’s detailed (if irrational) fictional universe.

Absurdity and nonsense have long been staple ingredients of British and Irish humor (Lewis Carroll, Flann O’Brien, et al.). But the Goons (Spike Milligan, Harry Secombe, Sellers) put a modern spin on it. When it launched in 1951 it was a breakthrough of modern-day illogic against the stuffy Music Hall-era Brit comedy of the time.

Milligan wrote or co-wrote almost all the scripts (nearly 250 over 10 years). They were set in assorted times and places, but almost always revolved around the basic contradiction between WWII-era British heroic pomposity and the hellish realities of war, followed by the decade-long postwar recession.

Yet there’s an upbeat air to the show. The characters (even Milligan’s drag spinster Minnie Bannister) are energetic and boistrous. The “trad jazz” interludes and big-band musical scores are brash and brassy. I’ve written in the past that every successful satire contains, in its aesthetic, the spirit of the satirist’s preferred alternative world. In this case, The Goon Show’s sauciness posited a modernist, populist alternative to the tired, caste-ridden old Britain. Some critics have even traced the whole subsequent “Swinging London” explosion back to the Goons.

But Milligan’s perfectionism, and the sheer volume of the writing work involved, led him to a nervous breakdown midway through the show’s third season. He was hospitalized for over two months. After Milligan got back to the show full-time, he transformed its structure from a melange of self-contained skits into full half-hour adventure farces that built absurdities upon one another, complete with lengthy asides and subplots and sidetracks.

The underlying premise behind most episodes: Patriotic, ambitious everyman Neddy Seagoon (voiced in a melodrama tenor by Harry Secombe) wants to be a hero (or at least be perceived as one) by performing various courageous acts. But his own greed and vanity hinder him as much as the impossibility of his quests and the villainy and/or idiocy of the supporting players (almost all played by Sellers and Milligan).

The proceedings played out like an audio cartoon, buoyed by the familiarity-building catch phrases, the frequent asides for wordplay, the clever-silly sound effects, and the cheery upbeat attitude held by almost all the characters—even when threatened with what Bluebottle called (and usually received) “the dreaded deading.”

By 1960, the show was finally put to pasture. (There were three made-for-TV reunions, the last in 1972). Sellers’s astounding film career had already taken off. Secombe held a variety of TV jobs, before and behind the cameras, until his death in 2001. (Secombe’s son Andrew played the voice of Annakin Skywalker’s junkyard boss in The Phantom Menace.)

Milligan had several more manic-depressive episodes over the next four decades, but he also wrote more than 50 books (war memoirs, children’s nonsense verse, political satires, parodies of great novels, etc.), wrote and/or acted in dozens of radio and TV shows, and appeared in a handful of films.

When Milligan succumbed to liver failure in March 2002, an era passed with him. An era of sophistication and, despite everything, optimism in humor. An era when official corruption and the futility of war were such publicly-acknowledged “givens” that they fit right in on the same script with groaner puns and sniggering references to movie starlets.

At a time when radio comedy has degenerated to creepy insult gags and film comedy has degenerated to dorky gross-out routines, we could sure use more of the Goons’ progressive chaos.

(In addiiton to the file-trading networks, Goon Show recordings can be had at this site and on this streaming online radio station. Eighty-one episodes are also available, in pristinely restored versions, on import CDs.)

…things to say about this current mess, I’ve gone back to a couple of the past century’s most famous social thinkers. So have some other present-day commentators.

I’m about a third of the way through a dog-eared used paperback copy of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. The pop-critic’s best known “serious” book popularized the catch phrases “the medium is the message” and “global village.” But it also presented a detailed, reasonably coherent worldview, built around the human senses and how various generations of media effect/extend/attack/desensitize/alter them. He claimed it was the phonetic alphabet, more than roads or weapons or force of will, that brought about the Roman Empire, and by extension the later western powers’ conquests around the world. My the mid-20th century (the book came out in ’64; he was working on it as early as ’59), the “cool medium” of TV (as defined by the degree of the audience’s attention and involvement) was overtaking such “hot media” as radio and movies. This, McLuhan claimed, was starting to change North American society’s whole perceptions and attitudes.

A recent symposium in NYC discussed how these and other McLuhan theories could be used to try to make sense of the current nonsense.

Certainly, the war is the ultimate example of what later PoMo media theorists called “The Spectacle.” It’s both a real war with real death and a media event made with an eye toward home-front PR. TV has become a “hotter” medium since McLuhan’s time (more detailed, less aloof), and live war coverage is “hotter” still. Sleaze-talk radio, the Bushies’ favorite medium, is ultra “hot” by McLuhan’s definition: It not only gives a dumbed-down, one-sided worldview, it orders its listeners precisely how to respond—with anti-intellectual, passive-aggressive obedience.

I’ve previously referred to demagogue radio as a 24-hour version of the “Two-Minutes Hate” scene in George Orwell’s 1984. Lots of folk have noticed the increasing parallels between Orwell’s world and ours. Among them: A new satirical student group, Students for an Orwellian Society. (Slogan: “Because 2003 is 19 years too late.”)

Certainly we’ve got a milieu of economic catastrophe for all but the members of the “inner party,” a regime that loves war, loathes sex, vilifies rational thought, and thrives on fear. The regime wants total knowledge and control of every citizen’s thoughts, words, and deeds. It preaches eternal self-sacrifice for the masses but reserves untold priviliges for itself. Its media minions disseminate nonstop war “coverage,” deliberate detailed lies, exhortations toward “patriotic” fervor, and demonizations against all perceived opponents.

But today’s Republican INGSOC doesn’t yet have the total power its agenda ultimately requires. It might never attain that total power. In the Internet age, information and communication may be unstoppably diffuse, despite the monopolistic efforts of Fox and Clear Channel. Neotribalism, multiculturalism, and the media’s own push toward fractured demographics mean there’s no undifferentiated mass of “proles” to be easily controlled.

But a gang that can’t get total power can still inflict a lot of damage trying to get it.

THIS SUNDAY, the Seattle Times ran a long and lovely story about the Grand Illusion Theater, where I curated a strange-matinees series in 1987 and where, under the name The Movie House, the Seattle alterna-film exhibition scene began back in 1970. Under various owners over the years (it’s currently part of the nonprofit Northwest Film Forum), the 78-seat GI has epitomized the best of the Seattle filmgoing scene: Friendly curiosity, wild eclecticism, and a healthy indifference to celebrity BS.

The same day the times ran its Grand Illusion piece, Scarecrow Video held a public wake at its Roosevelt Way digs for the store’s founder George Latsois. (He’d died earlier in the month, from the brain cancer that had forced him to sell the store four years ago.)

Latsois essentially took the aforementioned Seattle film-consumption aesthetic and built a video-rental superstore around it. He’d started with a handful of Euro-horror titles he’d consigned to the old Backtrack Records and Video store north of U Village (a sponsor of my matinees at the Grand Illusion). From there he opened his own 500-title store on Latona Ave. NE, which by 1993 had grown to take over a former stereo store on Roosevelt.

He built it from there according to that mid-’90s local business mantra, “Get Big Fast.” It had 18,000 titles when it moved to Roosevelt and over 60,000 now. But like many other local ’90s entrepreneurs, Latsois spent more money on expansion than he was bringing in. He became ill before he could sort it out, but the new ex-Microsoftie owners have honorably continued the store’s operations and its wide-ranging buying policies (want DVDs of Korean films dubbed into Chinese? They got ’em!).

Scarecrow Video, and the Grand Illusion four blocks away on University Way, are hallmarks of the city’s intelligence and unpretentious sophistication. These qualities were quite ludicly expressed in the current Seattle Weekly cover story. In a lengthy essay originally commissioned for The Guardian (that Brit paper that’s become the newspaper of record for un-embedded war coverage), local UK expatriate

Jonathan Raban depicts a city where just about everybody (except the cops and the sleaze-talk radio hosts) is adamantly antiwar, from the coffeehouses to the opera house. Around here we don’t have to escalate Bush-bashing protests into disruptive confrontations, because we’d rather try to send a more positive message out to the world.

Compare Raban’s depiction of the local antiwar movement with that of the current Stranger, which trots out that ages-old self-defeatist whine that Seattle’s (fill-in-the-blank) isn’t an exact copy of a (fill-in-the-blank) in San Francisco and therefore automatically sucks.

I say Seattle people only accomplish anything when they don’t settle for imitating shticks from down south, but instead dare to create their own stuff. We don’t have to break things or shut the city down to get out point across. We can forge our own path toward a less-stupid, less-violent world. We can show, by daily examples large and small, individual and massive, that, as they said in the WTO marches, another world is possible.

…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.

…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.

ONE OF THE MOST-OFTEN-WRITTEN RULES of online discussions that you know a discussion board/newsgroup/chat room’s become useless once the guys in it start calling one another Nazis.

This is essentially what a P-I freelancer did in a scathing review of Dennis Miller’s current touring comedy act.

It’s too bad the reviewer stooped so low. The once-creative Miller’s current routine, all full of pro-war blather and the kind of aggressively bigoted “attitude” found in the worst “morning zoo” radio talk hosts, could have easily been effectively denounced without such a tactic. After all, if you’re complaining about Miller’s cheap shots and name-calling, it’s not wise to resort to cheap shots and name-calling yourself.

…the first nor the only person to equate G.W.B. with the moniker “King George” (see three items below).

There’s a whole anti-Bush site called “The Madness of King George,” another called “The Ribald Reign of King George the Second,” and regular references to the moniker on the satirical sites “GWBush.com” and “The One True Bix.” A Google search even find the moniker used in an essay by a self-described “conservative Christian” radio talk host, accusing Bush of trying to turn the US into a Stalin-style police state.

Talk-radio comic Pat Cashman, one of the airwaves’ last stalwarts of good ol’ Northwest Quirk humor, was fired from his third station. He’s shown above left, preparing greet a couple dozen of his loyal “Pat Pack” fans who stood outside the Tower Building on his last airshift today. (He’s accompanied by a frequent guest on his show, street musician Richard Peterson.) At least he’s being replaced by a local-news block, rather than by a syndicated bad boy or a right-wing demagogue.

This reminder of commercial radio’s ever-increasing vacuity, here and around the country, comes as the National Association of Broadcasters prepares to hold its big national convention in Seattle the week of Sept. 9-14. As you might expect, the anti-corporate folks are planning protests and counter-convention activities; you can learn about some of these at Reclaim the Media.org.

Certainly there’s much to complain about with the current radio-TV industry. Today’s hundreds of cable and broadcast TV channels are increasingly controlled by just a dozen big corporations. These firms, in turn, are increasingly obsessed wit. Broadcast news coverage has become an unquestioning lapdog for conservative and corporate views.

And the radio? Even worse. Even more tightly controlled by even fewer major players (led by the contemptable Clear Channel Communications, about whom we’ve previously ranted). Companies that care naught for local communities or for responsible broadcasting, and don’t even care much for drawing or entertaining audiences. Their obsessions are with further consolidating their stranglehold on the biz, with cross-division “synergies” and stock-price manipulations, with ruthless cost-cutting and centrally-planned station formats, with payola skimming, and with crushing any would-be challengers to their empires (such as independent Internet radio).

The result of all this manipulation? Not profits–Clear Channel’s bleeding cash, and the other giants (Viacom, Entercom, AOL Time Warner) aren’t doing much better.

No, it’s all about the big power grab, about the creation of an authoritarian, anti-freedom culture in which everyone will be isolated into advertiser-friendly sub-segments, all obediently viewing/reading/listening to their demographically-segmented branches of the same media combines.

It’s way past time to take back the airwaves, to bring locality and responsibility back to broadcasting. If not to make this country safe for democracy, at least to make it safe for the likes of Cashman.

…Die Now.” (Steven Levy, Newsweek)

JIM HOAGLAND ASKS, “Where is the populist outrage that would have swept the Capitol even a generation ago, when investment bankers and tycoons were more target than vital source of campaign funds?”