TODAY, some non-caption-requiring people shots from the Forklift Festival.

They were partying like it’s 1999 again last Friday when another WTO protest march took place. This one didn’t directly connote the anniversary of the Seattle trade-meeting debacle but rather noted this year’s meeting in Qatar, a land that doesn’t let such foolishness as freedom or democracy get in the way of making deals and bucks.

Of course, here in the U.S. it’s quite harder these days to demonize something with “World Trade” in its name, without giving an audience all sorts of other unfortunate memories. Thus the banner proclaiming WTC and WTO to be equally disastrous. The rest of the visuals in the march rehashed common protest topics not directly related to word trade (the Iraq sanctions, the drug war, and, of course, Mumia Abu-Jamal).

They’ve torn down the Flag Plaza Pavilion at Seattle Center. Another of the Center’s dwindling inventory of 1962 World’s Fair buildings, it hosted everything from cat shows and rave parties to the touring King Tut artifact show. Bulldozers are now at work preparing the lot for the replacement, Fisher Pavilion (KOMO’s parent company bought the naming rights).

The comforting sights of the Standard Time rainy season in the great PacNW include those of kids defiantly playing at the Center’s International Fountain and a Metro bus’s unwiped windshield portion glistening in another vehicle’s taillight.

In Monday’s email, I received the Museum of History and Industry’s long list of nominees for “MetropoLIST,” the MOHAI/Seattle Times scheme to name the 150 “most influential” people in Seattle and King County, tying in with the city’s upcoming 150th birthday. (I get to be one of the voters on the final lineup.)

The long list has over 450 people on it. My first cut dropped a bunch of old-family lawyers and Boeing executive vice-presidents and suburban hospital administrators, but still left 192 people I thought worthy of the list. I had to chop that down to 150 to vote for, including any write-in suggestions of my own (the long list didn’t even include such big names as Eddie Vedder, Dyan Cannon, and Mary Kay LeTourneau!).

I’ll get my final votes done and sent into MOHAI probably by the end of today. The final roster, as voted on by the whole panel, will appear in the Times on Sept. 30.

Two weeks later, our own MISC roster of famous/infamous Seattleites will appear, in illustrated-poster form, as a centerspread in the next issue of our print mag.

For 31 of Seattle Center’s 39 years of existence, Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival has been its biggest annual event.

Devised from the start to encompass the entire former World’s Fair grounds (except the now separately-run Space Needle and Pacific Science Center), it’s also the last of Seattle’s annual lineup of big populist summer gatherings (starting in May with Opening Day of Boating Season and the Film Festival, then continuing with Folklife, the Bite of Seattle, and Seafair).

Bumbershoot’s premise: An all-you-can-eat Vegas buffet of culture. A book fair in one corner, short plays in another, contemporary art installations in another. At the big stages, bigname music celebs. At smaller stages scattered about, secondary performers of all types.

And between everything, the familiar sideshow attractions of Thai-food booths, street jugglers, balloon sellers, and fenced-off beer gardens.

In its early years, Bumbershoot was strictly aimed at a specific socioethnic caste then taking control of the city’s cultural identity–aging, increasingly square baby-boomers. Nonwhite performers were largely limited to boomer-friendly blues bands; mainstage shows were heavy on the likes of Bonnie Raitt and James Taylor.

In the late ’80s, that started to change slightly. Younger, hipper, and more diverse acts have steadily gained their way into the mix.

A bizarre P-I preview story called this year’s lineup “Bumberpalooza,” comparing it to the ’90s Lollapalooza rock package tours. I initially thought the article’s writer used the analogy to claim the festival was becoming more corporate-mainstream.

But the writer, still believing Lollapalooza’s original “alternative” hype, really wanted to say B’shoot had become edgier and more experimental. Fortunately, she was right.

With more hip-hop acts, a whole electronica stage, and a mainstage lineup ranging from Loretta Lynn to G. Love and Special Sauce, Bumbershoot 2001’s fulfilling its name’s promise of an all-covering umbrella of expression.

In these images: Happy crowds; the Book Fair (including, this year, only one small press with the word “heron” in its name!); local collectors’ caches of electric mixers and Harlequin Romance cover paintings; an information booth at the start of the slinking line into KeyArena; Posies legend Ken Stringfellow; a hula-hoop demonstration on the main lawn; and, below, our ex-Stranger colleague Inga Muscio.

Muscio, scheduled to perform on the Starbucks-sponsored literary stage, peppered her half-hour slot with plugs for smaller coffee brands. She ended it with a story about dreaming Starbucks boss Howard Schultz was her S&M slave.

Of all the annual summer mega-events in Seattle, the Bite of Seattle is the most divergent from its officially hyped image.

In the media previews and recaps, it’s almost always billed as a perky-bland, homogonous ritual in which nice upscale suburban families can partake of the finest dishes from the region’s finest restaurants.

It’s really the one big free annual gathering of KIng County’s middle-class and lower-middle-class masses (the people Sidran would like to deport from the Seattle city limits).

They come to pig out on empty calories from a larger array of the same junk-food and fast-food booths you see at any street fair; to collect freebies and promotional trinkets; and to listen to the region’s most pathetically smarmy oldies-cover bands.

Yeah, it’s a “family” event. But it’s one for real families: screeching kids, horny/sullen teens, ulceric grownups, and cranky oldsters.

And I love it.

Along with Seafair, it’s one of the last truly populist huge happennings in a town that’s increasingly at odds with its industrial roots and frightened of non-affluent people, particularly if said non-affluent people are darker-skinned.

During the post-Mardi Gras rancor this past February, certain talk-radio goons branded the Bite as a “gangbangers’ ball.” Bah. It attracts regular ol’ folks of all kinds, some of whom are young and/or black. And like working-class teens of all ethnic types, they can act loud and boistrous if given the opportunity to do so.

IT’S QUITE EASY to bash the Bumbershoot arts festival these days.

There’s the admission ($16 per person per day, if you don’t get advance tix, which are only available at Starbucks, that nonsupporter of alternative voices).

There’s all the corporate logos and sponsorships (radio stations “presenting” musical artists they’ll never play on the air in a million years; the auditoria labeled in all official and unofficial schedules with company names they never hold the other 51.5 weeks a year; and everywhere dot-coms, dot-coms, dot-coms).

There’s the big lines at the food booths where you get to pay $4-$7 for hastily mass-prepared fast food entrees.

There’s the annual whining by the promoters that even with all this revenue, the thing still barely breaks even, because of all the money they spend for big-name stars to attract mass audiences and all the logistics needed to handle these same mass audiences.

There’s those mass audiences themselves (who’s more troublesome: the fundamentalist Christians or the fundamentalist vegans?) and the complications they create (the lines, the difficulty in getting between venues on the Seattle Center grounds, the lines, the lack of seats or sitting room, the lines).

There’s the annoying rules (I missed all but the last 15 minutes of Big Star’s gig because I couldn’t bring my Razor scooter into KeyArena and had noplace to put it).

Then there’s the whole underlying implicit demand that You Better Start Having Fun NOW, Mister.

But there’s still a lot to like about the festival, Seattle’s annual big unofficial-end-of-summer party.

Principally: It’s a big Vegas-style lunch buffet of art. Those high admission prices give you all the culture you can eat. You can sample some “controversial” nude paintings, a slam poet or two, a couple of comedians, some of that electronic DJ music the kids are into these days, an ethnic folk ensemble or two, an hour of short art-films, and (particularly prevalent this year) late-’80s and early-’90s rock singers rechristened in “unplugged” form.

(Indeed, this year’s lineup included a whole lot of acts aimed squarely at aging college-radio listeners such as myself–the aforementioned Big Star, Tracy Chapman, Ani DiFranco, Modest Mouse, Sleater-Kinney, Ben Harper, Pete Krebs, the Posies, Quasi, Kristen Hirsch, etc. etc.

For its first two decades, Bumbershoot was programmed clearly for relics from the ’60s. Now, despite promoters’ claims to be after a youth market, it’s programmed clearly for relics from the ’80s and ’90s. Mind you, I’m not personally complaining about this at all. I like all these above-listed acts quite a bit.)

Some genres don’t work in the buffet-table concept. Classical music’s pretty much been written out of the festival in recent years; as have feature-length films, full-length plays, ballet, cabaret acts, and panel discussions. Performance art, modern dance, literary readings, and avant-improv music are still around, but in reduced quantities as organizers try to stuff as many crowd-pleasers onto the bill as they can afford.

Other genres have been shied away from, especially in the festival’s past, for skewing too young or too nonwhite. (I’m currently at home listening to the streaming webcast of DJ Donald Glaude mixing it up on the festival’s closing night; not many years ago, Bumbershoot would never have booked an African-American male whose act wasn’t aimed at making Big Chill Caucasians feel good about themselves.)

But all in all, the concept works. It’s a great big populist spectacle, a four-day long Ed Sullivan Show, a vaudeville spread out over 74 acres.

There are, of course, things I’d do with it. I’d try to figure a way to charge less money, even if that means booking fewer touring musical stars. I’d try to figure a re-entrance for classical, and bring back the “Wild Stage” program of the more offbeat performance stuff.

But, largely, Bumbershoot has turned 30 by actually gaining vitality, getting younger.

(Or maybe it’s really been 30 all along; changing fashions to keep up with its intended age like Betty and Veronica.)

(P.S.: The Bumbershoot organizers booked Never Mind Nirvana novelist Mark Lindquist at the same time and 500 feet away from the rock band whose singer’s real-life legal troubles are believed to have been roman a clef-ed for Lindquist’s story. But an attendee at the festival insisted to me that, despite what I’d written about the novel, Lindquist insisted he’d thought up his plot over a year before the real-life legal case, which occurred while he was trying to sell his manuscript to a publisher.)

TOMORROW: Riding the Mariners’ playoff roller coaster.

ELSEWHERE:

• Could Gore-Lieberman be more liberal than Clinton-Gore?…
• If it’s not a major (i.e., corporate) newspaper, you won’t find it at Starbucks….

FIRST, A BIG THANX to all who attended our fantabulous dual premiere event for the new LOSER book and MISCmedia the magazine last night; and to the Two Bells Tavern staff (especially Mark Harlow) for making it plausible.

YESTERDAY, we suggested proclaiming a year-long or longer Seattle Jubilee Year, climaxing with the 150th anniversary of the city’s founding at Alki Point, as a way to make up for the canceled Seattle Center New Year’s party.

We mentioned that this should be as big a bash as we can arrange; but that we shouldn’t depend too much on city funding.

What we didn’t mention was that the city’s millennium project had been a botched affair even before its climactic evening was shut down. The canceled party was a lot smaller in scale than first planned; associated schemes to light up the town eventually whittled down to the lighting of a single bridge.

Mayor Schell, the story goes, had apparently handed off to the Seattle Arts Commission the task of raising private dough for this, but gave the commission no help to speak of. The city’s old money, seldom interested in public gatherings, didn’t contribute much; the city’s new money, mainly interested in permanent architectural monuments to itself, also largley demurred from the opportunity.

But I’m pleased to report of at least one new-money figure in this town who’s putting his cash into a populist spectacle.

Seems there’s this Microsoft stock-option tycoon named Chris Peters. His idea of gaming has always had nothing to do with Tomb Raider and everything to do with tenpins. He’s now offered to lead an investor group to buy the Professional Bowlers Association and its national championship tour.

The PBA, heretofore member-owned since its 1958 inception, has fallen upon hard times. It lost its network TV contract in 1996; ABC apparently thought the sport wasn’t hip enough to draw the ever-prized young demographics. The PBA board decided that bringing in private owners was the only way to save the tour–and, perhaps, to give pro bowling a newer, younger, hipper image for the cyber-age.

The only problem with this scenario is bowling’s already way cool; precisely because it’s not frenetically “hip.” Happenin’ local nightspots like the Breakroom and Shorty’s are full of bowling imagery. The Soundgarden/Mudhoney guys are avid bowlers. The Jillian’s sports-bar chain’s supposed to start work this summer on building a new near-downtown alley, Seattle’s first new bowling joint in decades.

It’s not youth disinterest that caused the closing of Village Lanes, Bellevue Lanes, Lake City Bowl, and Green Lake Bowl since the early ’80s. It’s real estate. A bowling alley uses vast (by urban standards) square footage, which developers believe is more profitably used for retail (or for other recreation concepts, such as video-game parlors). The Jillian’s folks think they can make bowling pencil out by making it part of a whole leisure-time complex, including pool tables and full booze service, and by renting out the space in whole or in part to dot-com companies’ staff parties.

Chris Peters doesn’t have to make bowling cool. Indeed, any attempt to market it as something loud and “X-treme” would ruin the coolness it’s already got.

What Peters will need to do is more effectively market the sport in all its existing glory–loud shirts, whispering announcers, and all.

TOMORROW: Late-’90s nostalgia.

ELSEWHERE:

• Max Headroom has arrived and is a “cyberbabe”….

ALL LONGTIME READERS of this print-turned-online report have read of my early-childhood visit to, and continuing fascination with, the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.

Its theme: How wonderful everything was going to be in the 2000s.

At the time, I used my already blossoming mathematical skills to figure how old I was going to be in the year 2000 (nobody then used unelegant rubrics such as “Y2K”). Turned out I’d be in the alleged prime of my life. I could hardly wait.

Hence, when the big 0-0 finally approached, I knew exactly where I’d be. Despite having a paid-up credit card and no work or family obligations to speak of, I could only see myself being at the site of the fantasy Century 21 to celebrate the arrival of the real Century 21.

(And yes, I know there are literalists out there who insist the century doesn’t start ’til the following year. I treat these people with the same distanced acknowledgement with which I treat people who complain about explosions in outer-space movies making sounds.)

Only it ain’t happening.

Just like my folks used to announce cool vacation trips and then announce the week before that I couldn’t go along, Seattle Mayor Paul Schell cancelled the big free Seattle Center New Year’s bash on just three days’ notice.

The official reasoning: An international gadabout, with suspected terrorist ties, was caught trying to enter Wash. state from Canada on 12/14, with stuff in his car that might be useful in making bombs. He also turned out to have had a motel reservation near the Center for 12/31.

Since then, and despite highly media-publicized border crackdowns, no further evidence of any plot to blow up civilians in Seattle has been revealed. Nonetheless, and after several days of promising not to, Schell canceled New Year’s.

The free, open-to-the-public New Year’s, that is.

Paid-admittance events elsewhere in town, including some run by Schell’s pals in the local mover-‘n’-shaker community and costing from $50 to $500, will continue to occur.

If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m still not), I’d ponder whether Schell and his upscale-baby-boomer cohorts wanted to jump-start ticket sales at these costly commercial bashes; some of which are nowhere near selling out.

Or, I’d at least ponder whether the nouvelle cuisine-chompin’, Lexus-drivin’ corporate stooges surrounding Schell just didn’t really care about keeping a for-the-people New Year’s, as long as the hi-ticket private parties they’re going to stay on track.

The media spin on the cancellation, and Schell’s own official statement, are invoking the WTO-protest-response fiasco from Nov. 30 and Dec. 1 as a contributing factor to Schell’s decision.

In that disaster, you recall, Schell and his team over-reacted to a few deliberately-planned (and announced-in-advance) acts of “anarchist” property damage against big chain stores by sicking large goon squads, with tear gas and pepper spray, on non-vandalous protesters and civilian bystanders.

That was a panicky over-reaction; evidence of a lack of trust by the city’s elite toward its populace. So is this.

Despite this Grinchesque act, the new century will still start on time. I, for one, refuse to give up the dream of a better “World of Tomorrow.”

Already, before the terrorism hype, a friend had invited me to a private party in an apartment-building basement, to be redecorated as a mock Y2K-survivalist “concrete bunker.” I’ll probably go to it for a while. But I also insist we still have a public celebration, at the proper time if not at the proper place.

We should all gather as close to the Center as they’ll let us. Let’s surround the gated Center grounds with a human chain of defiant frivolity. No drinking or drugging or vandalism–just an insistence on enjoying a good loud midnight, whether the powers-that-be want us to have one or not.

I don’t expect Schell’s heart to grow three sizes that day, but it’s worth trying.

TOMORROW: Remembering the ’90s, a time segment lost in the century/millennium hype.

IN OTHER NEWS: Here’s a look at part of what was canned: Local art veteran Carl Smool’s Fire Celebration. It’s a funky, populist spectacle; and hence expendable in the eyes of the Brave New Seattle’s power structure.

ELSEWHERE:

• I suppose if Bill Gates can put out his own dictionary, so can this other sorry character….
• Can the Cubans save world music? (Found by Arts Journal)….
• The Powerpuff Girls: post-Riot Grrrl role models or pre-sexual Xenas?

TO OUR LOCAL READERS: You’ve still one week to see the Pacific Science Center’s traveling exhibit honoring the career of Japanese cartoon pioneer Osamu Tezuka.

The exhibit (organized by the official Osamu Tezuka Manga Museum in Japan) is a small one, but it’s packed with power, pathos, and inspiration–just like Tezuka’s most enduring character, the flying child-robot hero Mighty Atom, a.k.a. Astro Boy.

The exhibit consists of four video screens, a couple dozen panel displays, and a giant Astro Boy balloon figure “flying” on the ceiling. The panels chronicle Tezuka’s best known print and TV cartoon series through original cels and comic-book art. The video monitors play prime examples, not only of Tezuka’s own works but of the Japanese animation industry before and after his influence took hold.

A trained M.D. and a devout post-WWII pacifist, Tezuka (1928-89) brought a sense of morality and beauty to his work. His stories were “educational” without being preachy, because he used childlike characters such as Astro and Kimba the White Lion (the all-but-official inspiration for The Lion King to teach the kids about the complexities of life and of caring for one’s fellow creatures.

If Tezuka was a prime example of postwar Japanese antimilitarism, he was also a prime example of postwar Japanese capitalism. He had several serials running in different children’s magazines simultaneously, keeping the reprint and character-licensing rights.

The exhibit claims he produced 150,000 comic-book pages over his 41-year career. That averages out to almost 75 pages a week, a figure almost impossible without a cadre of assistants.

But he didn’t just produce quantity. He added many “cinematic” visual techniques and complex storylines (some of which stretched out over years) to what had been a formulaic manga scene.

Some critics might argue that manga’s still a formulaic scene; but Tezuka added many more ingredients to the formula. His influence brought a popularity (and an adult audience) to comics in Japan that the medium still has to fight for here.

These advances in technique worked to prepare Tezuka’s team for moving beyond elaborate-but-still drawings into primitive animation. Starting in 1961 (Astro Boy was Japan’s first TV cartoon series), he adapted many of his works for the small screen, produced by his own studio using, and expanding upon, Hanna-Barbera’s newly-established time-and-money-saving techniques (collectively known as “limited animation”).

Having already worked for over a decade at making print comics seem “cinematic,” Tezuka and his team were able to create stirring adventure stories and likeable characters on paltry early-TV budgets.

And as the boss of his own studio, animating characters already well-known in print form, Tezuka held a degree of both creative and business control U.S. TV animation has almost never seen, then or now. He used that authority to “smarten up” his shows with complex storylines, involving characters audiences could identify with.

Today, Tezuka is revered in his homeland and among the global manga/anime cult as “the God of Anime.” A review of the exhibit bore an unfortunately misleading headline, which may have sent kids in expecting to see Pokemon characters. Tezuka didn’t create Pokemon; he merely established the story structure, drawing style, and aesthetic tone which Pokemon, and dozens of other Japanese print, TV, and theatrical cartoon products have followed, to varying degrees of success.

If there’s a note-O-irony in this story, it’s that Tezuka, who regularly placed environmental messages into his stories, almost singlehandedly created an industry that destroys old-growth forests throught Asia (and imports whole logs from the U.S. Northwest) to make millions of throwaway, phone-book-sized manga magazines every week.

TOMORROW: Top candy picks for this Halloween.

ELSEWHERE:

• “No fat guy would ever dream of making a move on a girl without first feeding her a nice meal….”
• Bread that’s way past its pull date….
• Who could possibly be against tributes to motherhood?…

YESTERDAY, we discussed how Y2K survivalists are becoming less communitarian and more capitalistic.

In a way, it’s a hopeful sign that more folks are seeing the supposed global computer crash (which I don’t think will happen on the scale the scaremonges hope for) not as the end of the world but as just another opportunity to sell stuff.

But I’m still longing for an older, more optimistic future.

The future we were promised at the 1962 Seattle World’s Fair, a.k.a. the Century 21 Exposition.

I’m far from the only one with such retro-futuristic longings. Manray, a new predominantly-gay “video nightclub” on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (one of several clubs started this year to siphon audiences from ARO.Space), takes its logo from a slightly-altered version of the Fair’s logo, an oval with an “arrow of progress” pointing up. (Local label Up Records also uses a version of the fair’s symbol.)

Alas, the Manray folks tell me most customers think the logo’s just a “male” symbol. But the thought’s still there, and that’s what counts.

The rest of the bar’s equally Jetsonian, by the way, with recessed white lighting, Eames-esque furnishings, and curves instead of corners just about everywhere.

IN OTHER SPACE-Y NEWS, I recently attended what might be the last “Gothic Surf Shop” art party, at a group of four houses in Lower Queen Anne all occupied by visual artists (painters, photographers, installation-builders, and at least one car customizer) and sharing a common back yard.

You can guess the story here: At least one of the houses is being threatened with condo-replacement. The Gothic Surf artists are hoping to pitch in and buy the place, but nothing’s certain yet.

Anyhoo, the Gothic Surf complex is a simply gorgeous hidden treasure in the heart of the city. Between the different plywood-based installation pieces, the gardens, the “art cars” parked in front, the separate bar building (reused from an old COCA installation), the woodshop/studio in an old carriage house, and the many art collections inside the houses (including both the residents’ own works and collections of such artifacts as bakelite radios and Asian masks), it’s a site that should be saved.

It’s also a potential harbinger of the future. As the yupscale “urban revival” continues apace, here and in select other urbs across North America, less-than-wealthy creative types may end up living in the older suburbs, the already-decaying beige-rambler subdivisions surrounding airports and ex-industrial sites. It’s easy to imagine artsy folk combining their resources to buy up several adjoining cul-de-sac properties and spending the rest of their lives transforming them into neo-art-colony spaces, with folk or “naive” art decorations and self-built alterations all over.

(You can see some other examples of the endangered species that is local, affordable artist’s space during next weekend’s “Art Detour,” a program of self-guided studio tours around town.)