Yr. obt. cor’s’p’n’d’nt is once again providing freelance book reviews to The Seattle Times. The first of the new batch is out today, concerning Chuck Klosterman’s essay collection Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto.

After three days, I’ve decided I sorta like the new-look Seattle Times.

The three-deck headlines on most major articles are a convenient and nearly-poetic throwback to the old days of newspapering. The newly consistent headline style on brief stories makes it easy to find what you might want to read. The new text typeface seems larger, without significantly reducing the amount of verbiage per column-inch. Even the photo reproduction seems higher-res.

No major move in a corporate enterprise takes place out of context. There are reasons for revamps such as that of the Times. The paper’s trying to put its joint-operating-agreement “partner,” the Post-Intelligencer, out of business. It wants the local reading public to believe the Times deserves to be Seattle’s only big daily paper.

From the ’50s through the ’70s, the Times was the fat and unsassy voice of the local business establishment, as dull as dishwater and as awkward as a bad karaoke singer. Redesigns in 1980 and 1992, and the JOA’s launch in 1983, put the paper on the road to higher readability. Now, it’s a real newspaper again. (I still don’t want it to become the only paper in town, though.)

I haven’t planned any big to-dos for the occasion, since I couldn’t think of a funky theme to go with the age of 47. But then, sure enough, the SeaTimes runs a piece about a Portland schoolteachers who’s got a fan club for the number 47.

So, for one night only, I’ll have my own 47 Fan Club.

Join me Tuesday night at Bill’s Off Broadway, starting at 7:47. I don’t know what we’ll do, but it’ll be prime.

The Seattle Times preview special is all about pitching; a major change from as late as 1994, when Mariner coverage was all about short-field home runs.

The section also lists where 23 of this year’s Ms live. Three spend the off-season in Seattle; two call the suburbs home. Three live in Arizona; two each in California, Florida, and the Dominican Republic; one each in Pennsylvania, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Jersey, Colorado, Illinois, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Kobe, Japan (guess who?). So, when Griffey moaned about wanting to live closer to his family, he might have either been less than sincere or was behaving as a stuck-up diva. (Not that I’d wish his injury-plagued post-Ms career on anybody.)

I AGREE COMPLETELY with Mark Rahner: The biggest threat from the mad-cow scare is having to face the smug crowing of fundamentalist vegans. Four close acquaintances have either emailed me vegan sermons or personally taken me to “raw food” restaurants for ice-cold carrot-and-eggplant soup. They remain close acquaintances, but they haven’t converted me.

Yes, the meat-processing industry’s rife with corruption and shoddy “efficiency” practices. But I’m not going to protest sweatshop clothing factories by walking around naked; at least not when it’s twenty degrees outside.

WE’VE BASHED The SeaTimes a bit this year, but we love the paper’s first (annual?) winter solstice contemplation.

A Seattle Times oped piece making nasty swipes at corporate welfare overkill.

POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST JOHN LEVESQUE points out the central irony of the P-I‘s strategy in trying to preserve the joint operating agreement with the Seattle Times: “The paper that wants to put the Post-Intelligencer out of business is responsible for selling ads in the Post-Intelligencer.“

To restate the obvious: This marriage cannot be saved.

Last month, the P-I won the first round of courtroom battles over keeping the JOA. The Times wants to kill the agreement and, at the same time, the P-I. The P-I claims it can’t survive without the JOA, in which its printing, sales, delivery, and PR functions (everything except the paper’s editorial content) is contracted to the Times. Given the lousy job the Times has done (deliberately or otherwise) at maintaining the P-I‘s ad volume and subscriber base, I’d say the P-I can’t survive with the JOA.

Seattle still needs two dailies. It needs two separate dailies.

The best-case scenario for settling this flap would be a compromise court settlement, in which the P-I gets its own sales force again, while the Times still prints and delivers both papers until new arrangements are made (such as the Times selling its job-printing subsidiary in Tukwila, Rotary Offset Press, to the P-I). But don’t expect such a rational move from a Times management out for blood.

Underlying the whole dispute, but not overtly mentioned by either party to it: The fact that the traditional big American daily paper is an industrial-age anachronism. As I mentioned around the time the Seattle dailies went on strike three years ago, I believe there is a way for newspapers to become more competitive, with one another and with other info/advertising media–if they became leaner and more specialized, and established a more direct rapport with their readership (without necessarily turning to Fox-esque sleaze).

If the P-I does succumb to the current courtroom wars, and even if it doesn’t, there’s a great opportunity to create a new kind of newspaper for a new media age. Nothing like this has been tried in the U.S. since USA Today was first formulated 20 years ago.

Wanna help create it? Lemme know.

Housing activist John Fox wrote an insightful letter to the Seattle Times, chiding the paper’s tabloidesque scandal-mongering attacks on City Councilmember Judy Nicastro.

It seems Nicastro and two other councilmembers got campaign funds from strip-club owner Frank Colacurcio Jr. (whose dad had been a big local political influence-peddler back in the “tolerance policy” days of the early ’70s).

Apparently in return, the three councilmembers voted yes on a minor zoning change, allowing Colacurcio to build a bigger parking lot outside his Lake City venue, Rick’s.

The Times and certain other local media are trying hard as heck to make this into a brouhaha of election-altering proportions. But, as Fox points out, there are many people who’d like Nicastro ousted, and many of those have bigger political connections than Colacurcio Jr. People such as the landlords and developers who’ve felt inconvenienced by Nicastro’s work as an advocate for affordable housing. Some of these people are putting big bux into the campaign coffers of Nicastro’s opponents, so they can get sweetheart deals that would make Colacurcio Jr.’s look paltry indeed.

My own take on this: I’m glad the council, or at least a piece of it, is willing to be seen doing something in favor of sexual expression (albeit the most commercialized form of sexual expression). Maybe now they’ll lift the city’s decade-old ban on new strip joints, and allow the kind of healthy thriving grownup-entertainment biz Portland’s got.

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

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

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

Seattle officials are planning to crack down on the unofficial open-air art market along Occidental Avenue during the Pioneer Square First Thursday art walks. They’re talking with gallery owners and official neighborhood booster groups, but apparently not with the outdoor art vendors themselves (except to give ’em stern warnings not to come back in July without a permit).

The SeaTimes quoted gallery owner Greg Kucera as saying the unauthorized, un-curated, un-mediated art sales on the sidewalks “erases the work we’re trying to do” as per “trying to get people to understand the difference between good art, bad art, high art, low art.”

If you ask me, erasing such hierarchical boundaries is a Good Thing. We oughta encourage more of it.

If the street art’s popularity is overcrowding Occidental, then expand it into Occidental Park across the street. But don’t have screening committees or “quality control” bureaucrats deciding who gets to sell what. We don’t need another exclusive spot that only offers the same slicked-up, blanded-down, tourist-friendly “fine” art you can already find at every summertime street fair.

That mellow-but-meaningless image, of course, is precisely what’s caused so many hipster critics and scenesters to scoff at Seattle’s most commercial contribution to the art world, glass art. This week’s international Glass Art Society convention here in town, and all the associated local gallery shows, might be changing a few minds about this. COCA and Roq La Rue have found plenty of pieces to display that show typical COCA and Roq La Rue subject matter, only in glass. The pliable, moldable, clear or semi-opaque material can be utilized for a lot more than just prosaic giant bowls.

In other words, glass artists don’t always blow.

Among the seminar speeches and dry-research releases put forth at the recent newspaper-biz convention in Seattle was one study that claimed the elusive youth market started reading daily papers more often during the Iraq war, but didn’t stick with the habit. The trade mag Editor & Publisher quoted the survey company’s boss John Lavine as saying:

“Coffee in a can is a dead ringer for where newspapers were: It was a mature product, it was dying, everybody said its time was over — and then Starbucks came along.”

We’ve already written that the current push by the Seattle Times to kill its joint operating agreement with the Post-Intelligencer, and by extension to kill the P-I itself, could instead be an opportunity to reinvigorate the P-I as a truly independent paper, and by extension to revive the newspaper biz.

I’m convinced it can be done. Yes, a JOA-less P-I would need to get its own ad sellers and delivery vans, and either buy or hire printing presses. Getting the financing for such a venture just might be easier if it were for a new paper for a new era, something this country hasn’t really seen since USA Today first targeted the everywhere/nowhere of shopping malls and airports 21 years ago.

A post-JOA P-I, or an all-new paper that could be launched in the wake of the current JOA mess, could be a paper devised from scratch to meet the ink-on-paper needs of the Internet age. It could be neither old-American-journalism boredom nor Murdoch sleaze, but something lively and forward-looking and written to be read.

I’ve freelanced in the past for the Seattle Times, and hope to do so again. But that doesn’t mean I want it to succeed at its current drive to become a true monopoly paper.

I opposed the original joint operating agreement between the Times and the Post-Intelligencer, which took effect 20 years ago this month. Unlike the JOAs in some two-paper towns, which set up a joint-venture agency to handle the papers’ non-news operations (sales, printing, distro, promotion, etc.), the Seattle JOA put both papers’ fates squarely under the Times’ control. The Times was free to undersell the P-I to subscribers and advertisers alike, or to be laggardly about trucking the P-I off to outlying corners of the region. All of which it’s been accused of doing at one time or another.

The 1999 revision to the JOA only increased the Times’ capacity for mischief. When the World Wide Web came along, the Times ruled that a P-I website would fall under the promotional duties ascribed under the original JOA’s terms to the Times. In other words, the Times got to choose what kind of website the P-I could have, and naturally chose a bare-bones PR page without any actual news items. In return for the right to put its full text online (and a slightly higher share of the JOA’s proceeds), the P-I agreed to a revised JOA that would allow the Times to (1) come out in the morning, and (2) invoke an escape clause should it report three consecutive money-losing years.

The latter clause, in retrospect, was a lot like the escape clause former Mariners owner George Argyros demanded from King County in the mid-’80s. Argyros claimed, and the Times and P-I editorially agreed, that the only way to keep the M’s in Seattle was to rewrite the team’s Kingdome lease so Argyros could more easily move the team to Tampa. (Really!) Argyros got his new lease, then promptly attempted to invoke his bug-out option at his first contractual opportunity; the team’s future wasn’t secured until the 1992 sale to the Nintendo-led group that still owns it today.

Similarly, the Times took an agreement that was ostensibly meant to keep both papers in business, and has reconfigured, interpreted, and exploited it in order to try to kill the P-I. The Hearst Corp., which has owned the P-I since 1921 while allowing so many of its other once-mighty dailies to die over the decades, is taking the whole mess to court.

It could end up in any number of ways. Times bossman Frank Blethen says he wants the Times to emerge alone from the fray, and he insists it’ll do so with his family still in charge. But there could conceivably also be a full merger of the papers into one lumbering goliath, or a Hearst buyout of the Times.

What nobody’s openly considering is a return to full competition, with Hearst or some future P-I owner amassing a separate load of presses, trucks, and ad sellers.

But that’s what I’d like to see.

It’d be a perfect opportunity to try and re-invent daily newspapers for the Internet age, when the tiny-print items that have continued to make dailies essential for urban society are more handily available online (movie times, stock prices, sports stats, want ads). In the TV age, dailies survived (albeit in consolidated, monopolized forms in most cities) as the only place you could get such data. With that advantage gone, what would a paper need? Perhaps a strong aesthetic, a sense of the zeitgeist, a coherent package of articles and pictures that at least pretends to try and make sense of a crazy world.

That’s where the P-I, the closest thing the Northwest has to a progressive daily, shines best. Its livelier copywriting and more aggressive feature coverage make it a more intriguing read than the Times has ever been (though both papers were sufficiently compliant suckers for the Bushies’ propaganda massages this past year).

I prefer the P-I as a news product, but I want both papers to live. Any industry that can’t figure out how to make that happen ain’t much of an industry.

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.

…”Seattle totally sucks, man” whining came today in the unexpected spot of the Seattle Times Sunday magazine section.

Writer William Dietrich compared Seattle’s downtown to that of Portland and Vancouver BC. He gave our town last-place marks in everything from public transit to residential development. He blamed Seattle’s perceived failings on a lack of a strong, paternalistic planning bureaucracy capable of deciding what’s best for everybody and acting freely on its decisions.

Reality check time.

Yeah, we’re over a decade late with starting a big multi-county transit scheme; but the Times doesn’t particularly love the one we’ve now got (Sound Transit) and opposed the grassroots alternative to it (the Monorail initiatives).

We’ve had bureaucrats with big designs for how we were supposed to all want to live. They gave us the “urban village” and Seattle Commons schemes, which many citizens denounced as giveaways to private developers. (Oh yeah: Dietrich’s story highly approves of government givewaways to private developers. He praises Vancouver’s heritage of politicians who’ve been exclusively devoted to such giveaways.) So now we’ve got unofficially planned zoning schemes to promote luxury condos on every block that isn’t reserved for single-family homes (i.e., any block where the non-affluent might currently live).

What Vancouver really has, besides the land giveaways and the SkyTrain: A downtown constrained to a two-square-mile isthmus, surrounded by a city equally water-confined, discouraging highways and sprawl. It also has a Canadian political system in which the “highway lobby” has traditionally had less clout.

What Portland really has, besides the light rail: A flatter central downtown with smaller blocks and no alleys, encouraging more foot traffic and tying the “hip” areas (Burnside and the Pearl District) closer to downtown than our Capitol Hill and Queen Anne are to our central business district. This lack of topological barriers between the business district and residential districts is the chief reason why Portland has a downtown high school and supermarket and we don’t. (Of course, it didn’t help that Seattle closed Queen Anne High in the ’70s.)

Seattle’s transportation and sprawl problems haven’t been solved, and probably can’t be solved, by professional bureaucrats acting by fiat. It’s the bureaucrats we’ve got who’ve made such a mess of Sound Transit, led the fight against the Monorail, and helped promote sprawl. (Remember that failed state transportation referendum last November, that would’ve given trickles of cash to transit and gushes of cash to more suburban highways?)

Dietrich, and the Times, want a Seattle with more potentials for insider dealmaking and fewer democratic checks and balances. I want better. So, I’m certain, do most area residents. And that doesn’t suck at all.