LAST FRIDAY, I began a recollection of what Seattle was like in the fall of 1975, when I first came to the allegedly Big City after a childhood in much smaller burgs.

I’d already mentioned the only “alternative” paper at the time, The Seattle Sun; and its target audience niche, a Capitol Hill-centered clique of 25-to-35-ers who just wanted to settle down after doing whatever they’d done in The Sixties.

The mainstream media in town were also fairly tame at the time.

The Seattle Times, still an afternoon paper, was still as wide as the Wall Street Journal and as plain-looking as a cheap suburban tract house. It always ran a half-page photo on Page 3, which was almost always of a dog or Mount Rainier. Its features section, then called “View,” had many cute stories about somebody doing something important who was–gasp–a woman!

The P-I, meanwhile, was a feisty archrival to the Times in those pre-Joint-Operating-Agreement days (well, except for the editorials, which usually touted the same Chamber of Commerce party line). It still had some of that old Hearstian spunk in it; at least in the sports pages, which were then mostly about the Sonics, college sports, and out-of-town stuff. There were no Mariners or Seahawks yet; though the P-I’s lovable geezer Royal Brougham (who’d been at the paper since WWI) was already drumming up oldtime rah-rah support for our soon-to-be local heroes.

Local TV was a far different animal then than now. Newscasts were heavy on in-studio commentators and grainy 16mm film. Portable video cameras were just being introduced, and were largely used as gimmicks (as they mostly still are). That meant a lot of interviews, press conferences, and staged media events (held before 1 p.m. so the film could be edited by 5); interspersed with a few of the fires and police chases that now dominate local newscasts across the country.

And there was still a good deal of non-news local TV. J.P. Patches and Gertrude still ran a bizarre, funky kiddie show on KIRO, whose influence on the local theatrical and performance scenes lasted for decades. KING had morning and evening talk shows, providing endless interview slots to all the itinerant book-pluggers crisscrossing the nation. KOMO had a “religious program” called Strength for These Days, which ran at 5:45 a.m. weekdays and consisted entirely of the same film footage of ocean waves and windblown trees every day, accompanied by choir music.

Seattle radio was an even odder beast. For one thing, AM stations still dominated.

For the grownups, KVI’s dynamic eccentrics Bob Hardwick and Jack Morton engaged a spirited ratings battle against KOMO’s personable square Larry Nelson and KIRO’s fledgling news-talk format.

For the kids, KVI and KING-AM played an odd top-40 melange of anything that happened to be popular (Dolly Parton, Lynard Skynard, Helen Reddy, Barry White, Edgar Winter, Tony Orlando, Donny Osmond).

For the older kids, the FM band found KISW and KZOK blasting Led Zeppelin, AC/DC and their metal brethern out to Camaro-drivin’ teens from Spanaway to Stanwood.

The UW, meanwhile, had a little FM operation, KUOW, which played blocks of classical music (competing with the then-commercial KING-FM) and that newfangled network newscast with those really soft-talking announcers. (The U also ran a smaller operation, KCMU, as a laboratory for broadcast-communications students to play Grateful Dead songs and mumble their way through the weather report.)

And there was an honest-to-goodness radical community station, KRAB-FM. Its announcers often hemmed and hawed their way through a set list, but they played everything from Thai pop to big-band to political folk. It had talk blocks, too: Vietnamese children’s fables, classical lit, rambling speeches by already-aging hippie celebrities about why Those Kids Today had become too apathetic. KRAB stumbled through internal politics and mismanagement until 1984. Its frequency is now occupied by KNDD.)

TOMORROW: The Seattle arts scene at the time.

IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a fun rumor for all you conspiracy theorists (which I’m not): Could OPEC countries be scheming to raise oil prices and engender U.S. voter restlessness against Gore/Lieberman? (found by Progressive Review)

ELSEWHERE:

• Got one of those new telephone prefixes that never had a name to go with it? Add your own, from this official 1955 Bell System list of “Officially Recommended Exchange Names” (found by Clarke Stone)….

LAST FRIDAY, we looked at Unleashing the Ideavirus by Seth Godin, one of those bestseller-wannabe business books with a really simple idea.

In this case, the idea (as explained on Godin’s website) is that simple ideas, themselves, are the key to making it in today’s marketing-centric world–as long as the ideas are snappy, catchy, and capable of spreading contagiously.

Over the years, I’ve seen principles similar to Godin’s at work in that other “market,” the so-called Marketplace of Ideas:

• Ending capital punishment is a noble cause that seldom has a convenient poster-boy.

  But “Free Mumia” has an articulate mascot/spokesman, a focused agenda, and, at least as portrayed by his supporters, clear heroes and villains. (Never mind that the circumstances and events surrounding his case are way more complex.)

• Human bodies, and the care and feeding of same, are among the most researched, most documented topics of study in our species’s short history. The result of this work ought to be an appreciation of the body’s many intricate systems and their multilayered interactions.

  Yet far too many of us bounce along from one religiously-embraced faddish regimen to another (the Atkins Diet, The Zone, veganism, Ultra Slim-Fast, et al.).

• Why kids behave the way they do is another topic with assorted major and minor causes all interfacing in myriad ways.

  But it’s too tempting to seek a singular cause for any misguided youth behavior; preferably a cause originating from outside the home. (Video games made him violent! Fashion magazines made her anorexic! Commercials are turning them into soulless materialists! The liberal media’s turning them into valueless hedonists!)

• The Puget Sound area’s transportation problems are elaborate, and compounded by ever-further sprawl and the lack of a comprehensive public-transit system.

  Tim Eyman’s Initiative 745, which would force 90 percent of all transportation funds in Washington to go to road construction, will only make all that worse. But it sounds good on talk radio.

  (Indeed, most talk-show-led crusades (killing affirmative action, flattening tax rates, lengthening jail sentences, censoring the Internet) involve really easy-to-grasp solutions that either do nothing to solve the underlying “problems” or actually complicate them.)

• And if anything’s elaborate, it’s the ways women and men relate to one another. It’s a topic whose assorted permutations have kept many a playwright, novelist, songwriter, and therapist fed and housed over the past few centuries.

  But these elaboratenesses seldom matter to the followers of John Gray, Laura Schlessinger, Tom Leykis, Andrea Dworkin, and the many other allegedly “nonfiction” writers who’ve created mythical characters called “All Women” and “All Men,” and then proceed to endow these stick-figure creations with behavior and thought patterns so rigidly defined, perhaps no actual woman or man has ever completely fit them.

The too-simple response to this addiction to too-simple ideas is to dismiss it as something only “Those People” embrace. You know, those dolts, hicks, rednecks, and television viewers out in Square America. Us smarty-pants urbanites are far too enlightened to fall for such nonsense.

That is, to put it simply, a crock of shit.

• Many of the most popular all-time Boho-bookstore faves are guys (and a few gals) who marketed themselves, or allowed themselves to be marketed, as brand-name celebrities, whose most popular works were essentially commercials for their public images (A. Ginsberg, H. S. Thompson, A. Nin).
• In the Way-New Left, some of the causes and sub-causes that attract the most zine ink and volunteer support are those with really simplified storylines, slogans, and actions. (Hemp si! McDonald’s no!)
• I won’t even start in on the too-simple ideas that have ebbed and flowed in popularity among college professors and administrators in the past half-century. Many, many conservative authors (themselves mostly victims of their own too-simple ideologies) have raked in big bucks snorting in print and on the lecture circuit against Those Silly Liberals.

Still, it’s the propagators of simple and too-simple ideas who get the NPR interview slots, the Newsweek and Salon profiles, the “New and Recommended” blurbs at Barnes & Noble.

Should I “reinvent myself” into a marketable “brand” built around a simple and catchy idea? And if so, what should it be?

TOMORROW: Some more of this.

ELSEWHERE:

LI>It’s Super Strawberry!…
• Your “All-purpose anti-Bush portal site….”

THE MONORAIL ADVOCATES refuse to quietly go away, even though Seattle’s political powers-that-be want them to.

For those of you who just tuned in, Dick Falkenbury and Grant Cogswell launched a grass-roots initiative drive back in the late ’90s, to build a 50-mile citywide monorail system. The politicians, the newspapers, and the business establishment all denounced the scheme as impracticable, not cost-effective, and (most accurately) a wrench in the civic leaders’ carefully planned-out, lobbied-for, and funding-applied-for regional transit scheme.

The initiative passed. The city govt. followed the letter of the new law and absolutely nothing more, in establishing an agency to “study” the scheme’s viability. (In Seattle governance, to send a project to be “studied” is to politely kill it.)

Sure enough, the study group gave the city what the cit wanted to read–a report claiming a monorail would be impracticable and not cost-effective.

Under the initiative’s text, the city was permitted to revise the original citywide monorail scheme starting this summer if the study group decided it couldn’t work out as the initiative originally stated. That’s what the city council’s been doing the past month or so–“revising” the monorail plan into oblivion, by sticking it under the administrative thumb of regional transit-planning bureaucrats who’ve already said they don’t care much for it.

Even before this latest action-in-favor-of-inaction, the original initiative’s backers had been back on the streets with a new initiative. Under the petition slogan “We Said MONORAIL,” the new initiative calls for a more emphatically defined monorail-building organization, one the bureaucrats can’t legally quash so easily.

What the planning bureaucrats don’t understand is a basic facet of human nature. People like things that are attractive. They’ll be much more likely, I believe, to get outta their wasteful cars and onto a transit system if it’s fun and futuristic and streamlined and gets you around within your community. That’s what the Monorail Initiative’s backers want to see built (with private funds as much as possible).

The Sound Transit system, already begun by the bureaucrats, will utilize “light rail” vehicles running sometimes at street level, sometimes in tunnels (tying up lots of real estate for construction staging areas, while giving few or no scenic views to riders); along routes devised more for commuters than for in-town residents. (Sound Transit is taking tax $$ from three counties; while the monorail scheme is purely in-Seattle).

There’s no real reason two transit concepts can’t both work. Their mapped-out routes cover largely different destinations, and are intended largely for riders with different purposes. The plain ol’ light rail line could work for plain ol’ work trips. But a citywide monorail would be something people would want to ride. It could even become a tourist attraction.

ALL THIS COULD BE MOOT, however, if professional demagogue and John Carlson pal Tim Eyman gets his way. Eyman’s Initiative 745 will be on the statewide ballot this November, giving voters in economically depressed regions outside Puget Sound a chance to “stick it to” those haughty Seattleites by killing all mass transit programs statewide.

Officially, it would require 90 percent of all transportation money raised anywhere within the state to be used exclusively on roads and highways; effectively, it would divert funds from needed transit projects in and around Seattle and put it into make-work roadbuilding schemes in counties that haven’t seen as much growth (or as many traffic jams).

It would take the Seattle area’s now-horrible commuter traffic and guarantee it would only become worse; which just might be what John “I Hate Seattle” Carlson would want anyway. Carlson is a master of the politics of divisiveness and cruelty; one more reason he should not become Governor.

TOMORROW: Fashionable magazines depict ordinary people’s bodies as oddities.

ELSEWHERE:

• More things you’ve read in emails which are not true….
• A vicarious tour of Washington state highways (found by Anita’s List of Links)….

AS PROMISED about a month ago, here’s my reiteration of my sordid past with current Republican gubernatorial candidate and sometime talk-radio hatemonger John Carlson.

It’s a tale that goes back two decades and a few months, to the start of his career.

I was editor of the UW Daily. Carlson was an up-and-coming political operative who, thanks to a little frathouse gladhanding, had become a student representative on the Board of Student Publications.

Two of Carlson’s buddies had submitted freelance pieces to the paper. One was a dull profile of country singer Larry Gatlin, written on one of those old script-typeface typewriters. The arts and entertainment editor, Craig Tomashoff (later with People magazine) asked the writer to resubmit it on a regular typewriter, with changes. The revised version was still in script-type and was only marginally better; Tomashoff declined to use it.

Carlson’s other pal submitted a “humor” piece for the opinion page about Ted Kennedy (then challenging incumbent President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination). I forget the specifics of the “jokes,” but I think one of them was that a President Ted would have no qualms about sending our boys into war, having already been a killer. I ran it, but with the more gruesome and potentially libelous remarks toned down.

I would soon learn that no matter how glibly Carlson boasted about his hobnobbing with the rich and powerful, he could instantly turn into a sniveling self-proclaimed victim when he didn’t get everything he wanted.

He put in a motion to the board to have me fired as editor, proclaiming me a one-man PC Thought Police out to spitefully stifle his noble friends’ courageous voices of dissent.

At the board meeting, only Carlson’s two freelancer pals spoke in favor of his motion, which was defeated (I either don’t remember the vote tally or never knew it).

It soon came out that this was all part of a larger scheme of Carlson’s. He was raising money from rich guys to start his own right-wing paper, The Washington Spectator. Its content was fashioned after similar unofficial right-wing papers at Dartmouth and a few other campuses; lotsa cheap insults, borderline-racist “jokes,” wholesale character-assassination attacks on just about everybody who wasn’t a conservative, all of it in the supposed name of protecting family values or Christian heritages or the free-market system.

Carlson went back to the Board of Student Publications when his Spectator was ready to roll. He wanted to use the Daily‘s on-campus dropoff spots for his paper on Daily non-publication days. The board turned him down. He threw another tantrum, calling on the moneyed and powerful men he was already sucking up to to try to force a deal through the UW bureaucracy.

Even without the coveted Daily drop boxes, Carlson’s Spectator got enough attention to help Carlson get funding for his own conservative think tank, which led to his newspaper columns, his radio bully pulit (emphasis on the “bully” part), his KIRO-TV commentary slots, his campaigns to kill affirmative action and public transportation in Washington state, and now his drive to become the state’s chief executive.

It should be said that Carlson’s own signed material in the Spectator wasn’t as insulting or as bigoted as some of the material in the other off-campus conservative papers during the Reagan era. Carlson probably was wary of anything that could haunt him in a future run for high office.

And I don’t believe he personally disliked me, or even really wanted me ousted as Daily editor.

He was simply perfectly willing, at the time, to step over anyone on his way to the top.

Some who’ve known him in more recent years tell me he’s become a civil, polite gent in private, even as he remains a smirking demagogue in public.

But if, through some unfortunate happenstance, he becomes governor of the state of Washington, we all could be in for a wild ride. The moment any legislator or separately-elected department head says anything different from his line, the second one piece of his legislative agenda gets voted down, will he turn on the crocodile tears to his zillionaire benefactors again? Will he whine about being the trampled-upon little victim, just because he wanted to give more powers and privileges to those who already have most of these?

TOMORROW: Can Stephen King jump-start the e-book biz? Should he?

ELSEWHERE:

• The next great post-Napster hope?…

LAST FRIDAY, I began to discuss my recent move from a Belltown apartment to a Pike-Pine Corridor condo.

I’d first moved into the Ellis Court building in September 1991. As you may recall, several other things happened in Seattle that month. Nirvana released Nevermind, Pearl Jam released Ten, KNDD brought commercial “alternative” radio back to Seattle airwaves for the first time in three years, and a certain tabloid newspaper, for which I would end up devoting seven years of my life, began publication.

When I first moved in, Ellis Court was a regular commercial apartment building. I hadn’t known that it had been a favorite of drug dealers. The first clue of that came on my first night as a resident, when the intercom would BUZZZZ loudly all through the wee hours, by men who invariably gave, as their only name, “It’s Me, Lemme In.” Fortunately, the owners had just begun to clear the building of crooks; by my second month there, nearly a third of the apartment doors bore foreclosure notices.

By 1993, the building was being managed by Housing Resource Group Seattle, a nonprofit agency doing what it can to meet the ever-escalating need for “below market rate” (i.e., for non-millionaires) housing in our formerly-fair city.

Belltown was a happenin’ place at the time I moved in. While several artist spaces and studios had folded due to already-rising rents, there were still many (including Galleria Potatohead and the 66 Bell lofts). The Crocodile Cafe nightclub had just opened. The Vogue was in the middle of its 17-year reign as Seattle’s longest-running music club. The Frontier Room, the Two Bells, the Rendezvous, My Suzie’s, the original Cyclops, and the venerable Dog House were serving up affordable foods and/or drinks; to be soon joined by World Pizza.

By early 1995, the Speakeasy Cafe and the Crocodile had become the anchor-ends of a virtual hipster strip mall along Second Avenue, which also included Mama’s Mexican Kitchen, World Pizza, Shorty’s, the Lava Lounge, the Wall of Sound and Singles Going Steady record stores, the Vain hair salon, the Rendezvous, Black Dog Forge, and Tula’s jazz club.

But the place got a far pricier rep soon after that. In block after block, six-story condo complexes replaced the used-vacuum stores, recording studios, band-practice spaces, old-sailor hotels, and old-sailor bars. About the only spaces not turned into condos were turned into either (1) offices for the architects who designed the condos, and (2) fancy-shmancy $100-a-plate restaurants (the kind with valet parking, executive chefs, and menu items designated as “Market Price”).

The demolition of the SCUD building (home of the original Cyclops) in ’97, followed in ’99 by the condo-conversion of the 66 Bell art studios, provided more than enough confirmation that Belltown just wasn’t my kinda scene no more.

Moving on time was well due.

Maybe past due–aside from people in the same apartment building, by this spring I only knew five people who still lived in Belltown. Everyone else had either gone to other established boho ‘hoods in town or had joined Seattle’s new Hipster Diaspora, scattered to Ballard, Columbia City, Aurora, or White Center.

More about that in a few days.

TOMORROW: A few moving misadventures.

IN OTHER NEWS: The icon of many a blank-generation boy’s dreams is alive and well and living in Kelso!

ELSEWHERE:

• In the spirit of the random band-name generator sites, here’s a random electronica-genre name generator….

THE NEXT FEW INSTALLMENTS of these virtual pages will discuss a topic seldom discussed here–my personal life. You are hereby warned.

I’M NOT SURE when I first became aware that I had misgivings with “America’s love affair with the automobile.” I only know it came at an early age.

I grew up in what at the time was the countryside of Snohomish County, over a mile away from even a convenience store, dependent upon grownups’ cars to even see a movie (the area had no transit system at the time, and the rudimentary one it later obtained has recently been decimated by the first of KV-Lie favorite Tim Eyman’s kill-transit initiatives).

I developed a lifelong disdain for the supposed paradise of the exurbs. I longed to live in a real neighborhood in a real town, even a small one. The countryside became something I wanted to escape from, not to. A sidewalk, a street grid, neighbors, stores that faced a street instead of a parking lot–these were my initial basic icons of a true civilized community (though I wasn’t educated enough yet to actually use such hi-falutin’ words as “community”).

In real farm territories, the automobile was a symbol of freedom and progress. From my vantage point in the far suburbs, it represented enforced isolation and loneliness.

I seemed at the time to have been the only kid anywhere who believed this. Eventually, I’d learn that many, many adults who’d come of age in the Blank and X generations felt the same. (Hence, the hyperinflated housing prices in “real” neighborhoods, and the economic rise of “restored” downtowns at the expense of malls and strip malls.)

But returning to the topic at hand, I finally escaped, eventually settling in Seattle. As a poor college student and an even poorer college graduate, I never got around to buying a car.

It meant that I was dependent on rides to and from places in the far suburbs (such as Boeing Surplus), and that certain other tasks have always been more problematic than they might otherwise have been (such as distributing magazines).

But it also meant that I could read while commuting to work, and that I never had to worry about the little things car owners seem to always worry about (gas prices, new tires, insurance, parking).

One Saturday earlier this month, I borrowed a friend’s late model station wagon. It was my first time behind the wheel in years. To my surprise, it was as easy as ever (even parallel parking). The leisurely, non-traffic-jam drive was even relaxing in a semi-hypnotic sort of way. I instantly understood the lure of the words “Road Trip,” beyond the urge to actually get anywhere.

I’m afraid to make it too big of a habit. I remember the cautionary words from Repo Man: “The more you drive, the less intelligent you become.” (And Repo Man came out before the invention of hate-talk radio!) I suspect the kind of attention safe driving requires might rewire the brain over time, discouraging a certain type of wandering thought process in which certain great and/or stupid ideas can develop.

And as for acquiring my own low-mileage Clarkmobile, that won’t happen just yet. I’ve other major expenses these days, as we’ll discuss tomorrow.

TOMORROW: Misadventures in the housing market.

ELSEWHERE:

• More collectors of unpopular popular culture: OOK (of particular interest: the essay “There’s No Such Thing As a Bad Movie”)….

Further Confessions of a Boss Chick

by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies

(LAST FRIDAY, our guest columnist began her reminiscence of being a lonely teenager in Philadephia during the Bicentennial summer of 1976. She’d befriended Kathy, a party-in’ girl who had few girlfreinds but many guy friends. They’d gotten summer jobs together at Philly’s legendary top-40 station WFIL. After one day in the back offices, Kathy had been promoted to a Boss Chick–a public promo person for the station, not unlike the KNDD jobs held by the Real World: Seattle cast.)

ONE NIGHT, at about 7 o’clock or so, that guy who hired me and Kathy, who I really pretty much hardly ever saw again, found me in the Addressograph room. “What time do you have to be home?” he asked.

I wasn’t even sure he was speaking to me until he threw me a “uniform” and offered me double my salary to fill in for a Boss Chick who was out sick. “Be in front of the station in a half hour”, he said.

I was about to spend the evening asking grown men to dance at WFIL Night at the Windjammer Room in the Marriott on City Line Avenue.

For a shy 16-year-old girl with braces, a night from hell.

There’s nothing like putting on hot pants in a bathroom stall while thinking up a lie to tell your mom to make you feel like an authentic red-blooded American teenage girl.

I fit my pack of Marlboros perfectly in the pocket of my handbag, slid my lighter into my boot, and boarded the bus filled with veteran Boss Chicks. They were all blonde and beautiful. Mostly between 18 and 20. None with braces. They were having so much fun being them. No sign of Kathy; I figured she must be the one I was filling in for.

I thought she was ill; but I later found out that she was keeping a low profile while healing from a shiner, which she occasionally got from Mommy’s boyfriend.

The gals tumbled off the bus together like a spinning pinwheel. I watched them bounce through the lobby of the Marriott in front of me while I strolled behind them. As we passed the restaurant I caught a glimpse of where, not long ago, me and my mom sat eating sundaes at our favorite window table, looking out onto the pool in the summer and the ice rink in the winter.

I entered the Windjammer Room to the classic “sounds of Philadelphia”. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes featuring Teddy Pendergrass “Bad Luck”–an ominous sign.

The other “chicks” began dancing as soon as they entered the room. One by one, they grabbed one of the guys at the bar, which was filled with traveling salesmen and lecherous locals who came out that night to dance with hot-panted-bell-heel-booted girls.

The guy that hired me came up to me and said, “Debra, you have to go ask one of those guys to dance with you–that’s why you’re here.”

I was horrified. I looked up and down the bar trying to find the loser who least disgusted me. They were all equally creepy.

The first guy I asked was slobbering drunk and kept falling into me during “Soul City Walkin’.” The next guy groped me all the way through “Me and Mrs. Jones” and proceeded to call me “Mrs. Jones” the rest of the night.

Finally, I found one guy who seemed just to be interested in dancing and having fun. He had lots of energy. And lots of coke, which he proudly snorted in front of everyone from a vile and spoon around his neck (which kept getting tangled up in his Italian Stallion medallion).

Suddenly he went nuts during “I Love Music” and shook his Pabst Blue Ribbon and sprayed it all over my T-shirt, screaming like a pig. I went to the bathroom and didn’t come back out ’til it was time to board the bus back to the station.

Needless to say, they never asked me to do the “Boss Chick” thing again. I resumed my survey and Addressograph work, which I liked a lot better, even if it was only half the pay.

Soon they asked me to assist a university student named Mark Goodman with telephone research. He and I became great friends. In my senior year of high school, he helped me obtain an internship at the leading FM rock station in Philly. Mark went on to become one of MTV’s very first VJs. WFIL went on to become a Christian talk station.

The summer ended and I returned to school with a new feeling of confidence. I quickly made a new set of friends.

One early fall night I was out with Flufffy, my evening ciggarette and my WFIL handbag. Kathy was on her steps in her Catholic school uniform, and a plaid waisted coat with a fur collar.

She was kissing Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.

TOMORROW: The magazine glut.

ELSEWHERE:

• A would-be bible for sensitive straight guys everywhere, The Wussy Boy Chronicles (found by Arts and Letters Daily)….

Confessions of a Boss Chick

by guest columnist Debra Bouchegnies

ALL THROUGH JUNIOR HIGH, Kathy liked to get drunk and fuck.

She was, as you can imagine, pretty popular with the guys. Especially Raymond, the boy I had a crush on.

As unlikely as one would expect, Kathy and I found a common bond and became inseperable in the summer of ’76.

Understandably, Kathy didn’t have alot of girlfriends. She lived around the corner from me but went to Catholic school; so the only time I ever really saw her was on summer nights after dinner when I would be out walking my sister’s ugly dog Fluffy so I could sneak a smoke.

One night, early into the summer, while I was out with Fluffy, I discovered the pack of Marlboros I had stashed in my sock was empty. I figured I’d bum a smoke from the first one in the neighborhood I saw.

And there was Kathy, sitting on her steps, smoking a Salem 100 and drinking an iced tea. She was so girly—red, white and blue pinstriped polyester hot pants and a pale yellow halter top. Painted toes. A charm bracelet and an ankle bracelet and a cross around her neck.

Somehow, through some mysterious unspoken connection, we knew we needed each other. Somehow, Kathy knew I had entered the summer friendless.

She didn’t know the details; that I had been cruelly ostracized during spring break from my group of do-gooder straight-A students who fell in love with a water bong in Ocean Shores, NJ. Having been a stoner at 11, by now I was cleaned up and getting serious about school and my future.

So, having refused to get high, I found myself a lonely 16-year-old girl with dreams and braces and a long hot bicen-fucking-tennial east coast summer ahead of me.

And, somehow, I knew Kathy had been through some adolescent trauma; though I didn’t know her mother’s boyfriend was fucking her.

By the end of that ciggarette she was offering me a friendship ring, which was this gaudy cluster of rhinestones that obscured half her finger. And from that day on you couldn’t pull us apart.

Well, at least not until the “Boss Chick” incident.

I had decided to try to get a summer job at a local radio station, WFIL. 540 on the dial. The number one Top 40 bubblegum radio station in Philly. Their catch phrase was “Boss Radio.”

When I told Kathy my plans, of course she begged to tag along. I knew it was going to be hard enough to get my foot in the door; now I was having to get in two.

The receptionist was kind enough to get some guy to come out and speak to us. Between Kathy’s looks and my determination, a half hour later we found ourselves sitting in a room filled with boxes of promotional LPs around us. Our job: To cut one corner from the jacket of each record, turning them into official “giveaways.”

Kathy was starstruck. She was thrilled to rub elbows with Captain Noah (the star of WFIL-TV’s local children’s program) or the weatherman or news anchors in the hallway. None of this impressed me, as I somehow placed myself in the same league. By mid-day, Kathy was spending more time “star-searching” than in with me and our scissors and pile of vinyl.

They asked us to come back the next day. After about an hour, the guy who’d hired us came into the room and asked Kathy to come with him. He said he’d be back for me later.

I got home that night and called Kathy. “Debra! You won’t believe it! They made me a Boss Chick!”

“Boss Chicks,” for those of you who don’t know, were the gals they’d send out to promotional events. They wore hot pants and white knee-high crushed leather boots and Boss Chick T-shirts.

And they got a really cool WFIL handbag–the only part of Boss-Chickdom that interested me.

The next day I was back at WFIL. They were finding all kinds of work around the office for me. I learned how to use the Addressograph, and helped compile survey information brought in from the local record stores.

I didn’t see much of Kathy. She worked at night mostly now. A lot of Phillies games and WFIL nights at local clubs.

I ran into her one afternoon. “Debra! Oh my God! This is the best job I ever had! And I’m making twice what they were paying us when we started!”

Of course, my salary hadn’t budged.

Needless to say, I didn’t see much of Kathy the rest of the summer.

MONDAY: More of this, as our guest columnist goes from being the pal of a Boss Chick to becoming one herself.

ELSEWHERE:

• An untapped potential for local-news web sites: local news!…
• There’s gotta be a woman out there who’s not dissatisfied with her breasts….

THE COMMIES USED to deride Western modern art as decadent and elitist, a tool of imperial idologists.

Turns out they were right, at least partly, about the latter accusation.

Frances Stonor Saunders’s new book The Cultural Cold War relates the now-it-can-be-revealed tale of how the Central Intelligence Agency organized and funded a series of foundations that funnelled cash into museums, galleries, publications, and arts promoters.

The CIA’s purpose: to promote a vision of American arts and letters as a font of modern progressiveness, boldly looking forward into a future of vigor and abstract sophistication.

The intended audience: Not really Americans, but ’50s-early ’60s European intellectuals tempted by the egalitarian promises of Soviet Communism (and by the more practicable, less cruelty-laden realities of the milder Euro-socialism).

If Saunders is to be believed, not just the success of certain artistic styles but the careers of specific individuals, most notably Jackson Pollack, could be credited to the spy agency’s indirect and uncredited support.

It wanted to brand America as a land of free thinkers and big ideas, of clean lines and industrious energy–as contrasted to those clumsily censorous Soviets with their oh-so-passe heroic realism and their brutalist architecture.

Other U.S. agencies were doing similar jobs at the time, more overtly. The U.S. Information Agency, the Voice of America, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe regularly promoted the U.S. in western and eastern Europe in just these ways. The aspects that made the CIA program different were its scope, its covertness, and its role as an cultural patron (not just as a publicist).

From the present-day viewpoint, it’s ironic-‘N’-odd to imagine the federal government (particularly one of its most reactionary, militaristic segments) as a friend and proponent of rebellious creative folk. Thirty-two years or so of anti-government and anti-authority attitudes in much of the arts world, plus twenty or so years of anti-modernist and kill-the-NEA attitudes among prominent politicians (some of whom seem to prefer a Soviet-realist style aesthetic!), have put many in the boho-world onto a permanent distrust of federal largesse.

Besides, the real money these days, for any and every nonmilitary endeavor, really comes from big business.

Warhol, you may remember, was a mostly un-ironic champion of logos, brand names, and guys with money. More recently, that oh-so-controversial shock-art show in Brooklyn, N.Y. may have been housed at a partly government-supported space, but it was organized and funded by a British ad agency.

While much has been made lately of the problems some arts funders are having in raising money from the dot-com nouveau riche, overall it’s still business that’s increasingly the main patron of bigtime contemporary arts iin the U.S.

Why’s business doing this? The same reason the CIA used to: Branding.

Global marketers have long relied on images of America as the land of the open road, rock ‘n’ roll, blue jeans, and self-styled “rebels.”

By funding and promoting brash, loud art, corporations are further promoting this image of America–or at least of the America corporations would currently like to help create.

Again, artists are being utilized as part of an ideological crusade.

But these days, the mythical warrior figure is the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Cultural Rebel–first cousin to the bureaucracy-bashing, ego-loving, rule-breaking Corporate Rebel.

MONDAY: American Psycho as anticapitalist tool.

ELSEWHERE:

• Direct from the IBM department of baffling conundrums, a monthly math story problem to ponder….

YOU KNOW I LOVE JIM HIGHTOWER, that Texas tornado of progressive commentatin’.

So you can expect I’d recommend his latest book-length screed, If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They’d Have Given Us Candidates.

Alternately angry, cynical, skeptical, alarmist, and hopeful, Hightower wittily offers detail after sordid detail on just how politics in the U.S. of A. has gotten so pathetic.

The short version of his argument is just as you might expect: All the past primary season’s main presidential candidates and both major parties are wholly-owned subsidiaries of corporate money, managed by slick consultants, and completely out of touch with the non-wealthy.

The nation’s fastest-rising political bloc, Hightower continues, is that of disgruntled non-voters. But the parties don’t mind this; because, like so many other corporate enterprises, they no longer care about “the masses” and only wish to persue niche markets (i.e., identifiable “likely voters” who can be easily manipulated by target marketing, attack ads, and loud speeches on non-issues such as flag burning).

So far, so good (or rather, so bad).

But then Hightower introduces one of his frequent radio topics: Two-Party-System Nostalgia.

He repeatedly insists that there was once a time when the Democrats stood for something more than just winning elections and building party bureaucracy at any cost.

As a Texan, living all his life on the edge of what used to be the territory of segregationist Dixiecrats, he oughta know better.

Through most of the past century, the Republican party has had three traditional constituencies, which sometimes have had contradictory goals but which have more or less stuck together in the party fold: Big business, rural churchgoers, and the Rabid Right.

The Democrats’ history is a lot more complicated.

It’s been the party of FDR and JFK, of George Wallace and the senior Richard Daley, of the AFL-CIO and AOL-Time Warner, of Tammany Hall grafters in New York and pious reformers in Minnesota.

Its chief organizational imperitave, through all these factions and eras, has been to amass whatever combinations of voting blocs, no matter how transient or fluid, could be cobbled together to win elections.

Many individual Democrats and groups within the party over the years have, of course, sincerely sought to improve the environment, help the poor and the working class, end bigotry, and/or promote world peace.

But the party’s also had plenty of cold-war hawks, Chamber of Commerce toadies, corrupt ward-heelers, Military-Industrial Complex lackeys, panderers to racism, and funnelers of public subsidies into private retail projects.

Currently, the party’s national bureaucracy’s thoroughly run by corporate butt-kissers. If you ask any of them why they’re such money-stooges (and I have), they’ll tell you the only way to hope to beat the Republicans is to play by the Republicans’ rules–to raise big money, spend it on ads and consultants, and upon election to do whatever the big money wants.

But it doesn’t necessarily have to stay this way.

And it might not stay this way anyway.

Ultra-big-money campaigning games, as currently constructed, are predicated on Reagan-era presumptions about the social and media landscapes.

In particular, they’re built on the dichotomy of the corporate Mainstream Media (three TV networks, monopoly daily newspapers) and the parallel Conservative Media (talk radio, televangelists, “action alert” newsletters), with no true liberal-advocacy counterpart.

In the Cyber-Age, this doesn’t have to last. Over the next few years, no matter who’s President, we’ll see a flowering of thousands of local and national niche-movements. Many of them will be progressive. Many others will comprise ideological conservatives who don’t want to feed money and votes to corporate Republicans anymore. The WTO protests included a loose coalition of dozens of niche movements and sub-movements, which may or may not agree on any other issue besides the power of global companies.

Hightower, I’m glad to say, does recognize at least some of this stirring-O-discontent, and sees how it might be put to effective use in organizing for a post-corporate politics.

His book’s last line insists it’s a great time to be an American. I couldn’t agree more.

MONDAY: Remembering when downtown retail wasn’t just for the gold-carders.

ELSEWHERE:

• Annoying e-mails are everywhere these days, but the worst of the worst are all at Spam Roasters….
• Even some dedicated conservatives think John Carlson sucks….

YESTERDAY, we mentioned some of the big-money, big-power shticks being used by Big Media companies in the U.S., to try and hold on to their position of profitability and influence.

It’s not just that they’re acting like bullies.

They’re acting like scared bullies.

As well they should.

The various centralization moves within the media biz aren’t happening half as fast as the various decentralization moves within the larger cultural universe.

And your ob’d’t MISCmedia site’s rarin’ to be part of it.

Starting this very day (if everything goes right), there’ll a streaming Net-radio station as the newest piece of your favorite popcult site in the world.

MISCmedia Radio will focus, initially, on Northwest indie pop, power pop, punky pop, and ballady pop. (There are many other musical genres I adore, but this is what we’re starting with.) We’re assembling a massive library with hundreds of Hi-NRG faves, to give you a boost through your computer-workin’ day and your home-entertainin’ evening.

It’s all legal, being run thru a server that’s got the proper ASCAP/BMI licenses and everything.

The one thing holding up the project’s completion, besides the time investment in assembling everything: Much of my personal music library’s on vinyl and tape. If any of you out there in Readerland have an analog stereo hooked up to a computer and can help me get this fabulous tuneage digitized, email me.

For now, though, please listen to what we’ve got so far by pointing your MP3 player (RealPlayer, Macast, SoundJam, WinAmp, et al.) to http://166.90.148.106:8458. You can also access MISCmedia Radio thru our server supplier, Live365.com. (Just enter “MISCmedia Radio” in the search box.)

Artists and labels that would like their stuff played on the station can send such stuff to MISCmedia, 2608 2nd Ave., #217, Seattle WA 98121. As you might expect, we’ll listen to everything but can’t promise to play it.

(NOTE: At the time this is being written, a 30-minute test broadcast is currently up on the station’s server. With any luck, a full playlist will commence later today.)

TOMORROW: Were the Democrats ever as progressive as Jim Hightower wishes they’d become?

IN OTHER NEWS: Waiting for the threatened big e-tail collapse.

ELSEWHERE:

• The Shakers’ garbage shows they were as materialistic as anybody! (Found by Found Objects)….

CONTENT MAY OR MAY NOT BE ‘KING’ in today’s Cyber-Epoch, depending on who’s playing the role of cyber-economy pundit today.

But even if “content” isn’t the most important piece of the media-biz recipe, it’s still a prized one.

And the folks hoarding the biggest content-stockpiles, the media mega-conglomerates, are doing their politician-buyin’ best to make sure they can hold onto their chokehold of control and even grab a little more.

We’ve regularly written in this space about the media giants’ continuing attempts to consolidate, to grow ever more gargantuan in spite of much fiscal evidence that the buzzworded “synergies” of such mergers seldom pan out.

We’ve also written about the FCC’s bold attempt to open up the FM airwaves to low-power community broadcasters, and of the media giants’ intense lobbying efforts to get that quashed. So far, the FCC’s stuck to its guns. We’ll see whether the corporate-owned Congress succeeds in overturning the commisisoners’ will on this.

There’s another front on which the corporate warriors are battling to capture more territory: copyright law.

Last fall, Congress was PAC-persuaded to rush through yet another extension to copyright laws, giving company-owned works even more years of ownership (as well as extending the scope of such ownership privileges).

It was lobbied for mainly by the big movie studios, which want to make sure all talking pictures remain under copyright protection forever. While the trademarks and merchandising rights to such characters as Mickey Mouse and Superman go on for as long as their owners keep them in use, the films themselves were to have passed into the public domain after 75 years–which would have let anyone make and sell a copy of, say, the original Lugosi Dracula by 2006.

Now, it’ll be a couple decades more. And by then, if not sooner, the studios will be back to Congress pleading for one more extension.

As ex-local writer Jesse Walker recently noted, the media giants are pushing the intellectual-property envelope on many other fronts as well. They’re threatening the makers of fandom websites for TV shows, trying to narrow the “fair use doctrine” that lets reviewers and scholars quote from copyrighted books, cracking down on music MP3 trading and home-taping, and even rewriting recording contracts so CDs become “works for hire” the recording artists will never be able to regain control of.

When anybody complains about the power of Big Media in this country, the media companies either make pious First Amendment arguments about the need for a “press” unfettered by government constraints or points with scorn to the supposedly shoddy and unpopular products of subsidized/regulated culture industries in places like France.

They don’t like it when you point out that America’s own culture industry’s heavily, though indirectly, subsidized by all these sweetheart laws.

Or that there’s a difference between keeping investigative journalism uncensored and keeping the Rupert Murdochs in their Lear jets.

TOMORROW: The Soundtracking of America, and my attempt to add to the cacophany.

ELSEWHERE:

• Implode Your Own Dome!
• The most current list of forbidden phrases for the year 2000 (found by Obscure Store and Reading Room)….