TODAY, The Seattle Times publishes its final afternoon edition after some 103 years.

The paper’s switch to morning publication, along with the threatened closures of the San Francisco Examiner and Honolulu Star-Bulletin, leaves the Atlanta Journal and the labor-lockout-stricken Detroit News as the only remaining big (circulation over 100,000) U.S. evening dailies. (P.M. dailies are still a big business in Canada.)

Afternoon papers used to be “home papers.” The businesspeople and the commuters got their news in the A.M.; working stiffs and their families (as well as horse bettors) got their news in the P.M.

But P.M. papers also promised “Today’s News Today” (a longtime Times slogan). That meant their editors always scrambled for the newest angle, the approach to the day’s events that wasn’t in the morning papers.

If there wasn’t a new big front-page event to cover that had occurred since the morning papers had gone to press (a stock-market slide, a plane crash, a war), then they’d have to come up with at least a slightly different spin on the same items that were already on the A.M.s’ front pages. Thus was born the now-routine exercise known as “instant analysis”–the on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that, what-might-it-all-mean pontificating that most papers started emphasizing by the ’70s.

In 1960, evening papers outnumbered morning papers by almost five to one. As late as 1975, almost 60 percent of the copies of daily papers distributed in the U.S. were evening papers. But the main papers in most cities were always the morning papers.

The first waves of industry consolidation in the ’50s and ’60s bore the gravestones of such now-forgotten evening dailies as the New York World-Telegram, the Los Angeles Mirror, and the Washington Times-Herald.

As the biz continued its brutal march toward local monopolies in most cities, readers lost the Chicago Daily News, the Spokane Chronicle, Portland’s Oregon Journal, the Dallas Times-Herald, the Minneapolis Star, and the Miami News.

Small-town and suburban papers that used to publish in the evenings (partly to avoid direct competition with metropolitan morning papers) switched to mornings; including the Everett Herald and the Tacoma News Tribune.

With the Times’ switch, P.M.s will still account for about half the nation’s 1,400 or so dailies. But almost all of them are small-town and suburban papers. In the major metro areas that still have evening papers, those papers are the decidedly weaker halves of two-paper monopolies (as in Atlanta) or of joint operating agreements (as in the once-mighty Las Vegas Sun and Cincinnati Post).

Seattle was the last U.S. city where the evening paper had more readers than the morning paper. (The last other one was Milwaukee, before that town’s two-paper monopoly merged its properties.) Another of those “only in Seattle” things that’s disappearing.

The Times’ publication schedule was an integral part of the city’s daily rhythm. The first edition showed up downtown around 10 a.m. and across the city shortly thereafter; meaning you always had something new to read for lunch. Editions came out as late as 3 p.m. (schedules varied from day to day), which meant the “Night Final” (formerly known as the “Night Sports Final” back in the days of afternoon baseball) had that day’s closing stock prices and whatever national stories the network TV evening newscasts would probably cover.

And a late riser could take pride in the number of days in a week he could get out of the house before the Night Final appeared.

Now, there’ll be no more of that. The Times will get trucked around the region in the same shipments as its JOA mate, the Hearst-owned Post-Intelligencer.

The Times has already changed its advertising image from that of a leisurely home paper to “The Hard-News Newspaper.” The P-I (which approved of this change in the JOA contract in order to have a full website) insists it will remain a strong quasi-competitor; but already, some speculators are wondering how long it will be before the morning Times becomes the only paper in town.

I believe it’s quite possible for two morning papers to coexist, so long as they continue to have at least somewhat different editorial visions and to seek somewhat different market niches. As I’ve written before, I believe the real reason fewer people read daily papers (readership’s gone from 77 percent of the population 30 years ago to 57 perent today) is because papers have become bland, dull, one-size-fits-all nonentities. In a world of increasing media choices (on the air, on cable, on the Net, etc.), the big dinosaur daily is an increasingly unattractive choice.

No matter when it comes out.

MONDAY: MTV: over one million served.

ELSEWHERE:

• Where Lemonheads come from….
• “Inside this treasure chest aremore than 40 different hard-to-find candies!”…

OUR NEXT LIVE EVENT will be a reading Sunday, Feb. 27, 7:30 p.m. at Titlewave Books on lower Queen Anne. It’s part of a free, all-ages group lit-event including, among others, the fantastic Farm Pulp zine editor Gregory Hischack.

YESTERDAY, we discussed the putting-up-for-sale and potential loss of the Frontier Room, downtown Seattle’s last truly great dive bar and a gathering place for everyone from young punks to old pensioners.

That sale is probably predicated (the Frontier’s runners aren’t officially talking) by owner burnout; unlike most of our formerly-fair city’s cool-place disappearances.

The latest apparently doomed outpost of non-mellow life: The five-story Jem Studios and Galleries in the historic Washington Shoe Building.

For nearly 20 years, Jem’s been the heart and soul of the Pioneer Square Art Walk and a landmark in artist-controlled exhibition space. It got to be that way under the benign landlordship of Sam Israel, who was notorious for buying old buildings, renting them out cheap, and performing the least maintenance and upkeep on them allowed by law.

Israel’s will assigned his properties to a newly-formed nonprofit group, the Samis Foundation, to provide income for local Jewish schools. The Samis board has treated maximum income as its only operating goal for the buildings.

That’s meant the dislocation or annihilation of the Red White and Blue Restaurant, the Colourbox rock club, the ex-Pioneer Square Theatre, and all the small public-interest agencies that used to have offices in the historic Smith Tower (now mostly occupied by dot-coms).

Now, Samis has gotten around to the Shoe Building. The place is to be gentrified into hi-rent Internet offices, plus a luxury “loft” penthouse suite. (The latter, according to some rumors, is intended as a home for Samis’s president.)

The Times did a glowing, pro-gentrification article in its Sunday real estate section in late January. The story (no longer available online) talked about how the “art-loft lifestyle” was the latest In Thing among the fashionable New Money crowd, and the developers who are kicking out all the working artists as somehow bringing new energy to the arts scene.

To its credit, the Times ran a letter to the editor that called crap on all that. And to its credit, the Times also ran a weekday arts-section piece days later telling a more realistic take on the Jem story.

The Jem resident artists and gallery operators held a press conference at the most recent First Thursday. They wanted to raise public awareness about the plight of artist housing (and, by extension, all non-millionaire housing) here in City Extra-Light.

Jem’s current manager talked about getting a new studio-space complex in the city’s far south end (which would protect artists’ work spaces from gentrification for a little while but would be a lousy public gallery location). Some other speakers even set the audacious goal of trying to buy the Shoe Building from Samis (which insists it won’t sell).

The save-Jem-Studios drive might be a tiltin’-at-windmills effort or a publicity stunt. But the situation remains.

This town that used to pride itself on supporting “The Arts” is fast becoming a soulless blank, populated by hot-shots who have “lifestyles” but not lives.

TOMORROW: Cussing around the world.

ELSEWHERE:

• That Onion fake headline last year about billions in surplus Phantom Menace merchandise turns out to be true (found by Arts Journal)….
• Good job kids; keep it up (except for all that icky cigarette smoking)….

AH, THE NINETIES. Weren’t they just such A Simpler Time?

Only a mere 32 TV channels. Telephone modems that ran as fast as 28.8 kbps, and connected you to bulletin-board systems and the original Prodigy. Easy-to-hiss-at national villains like Newt Gingrich. Crude but understandable gender politics (anything “The Woman” did was presumed to be always right). A Seattle music scene in which all you had to do to be considered cool was to pronounce how Not-grunge you were.

All this and more was brought back when I re-viewed Kristine Peterson’s 1997 movie Slaves to the Underground, finally out on video.

It was a make-or-break “art film” career-change for director Peterson, who’d moved from Seattle to L.A. in the ’80s and had been stuck ever since in the career purgatory of directing direct-to-video horror movies, “erotic thrillers,” and Playboy Channel softcores. Its largely-local starring cast also all moved to L.A. after making the film. I don’t know of anything either they or Peterson has done since.

The plot is relatively simple. A Seattle slacker-dude zine publisher reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, who’d left him when they were both Evergreen students after a mutual acquaintance had raped her (she’d never told the ex-boyfriend about the attack). Now, she’s playing guitar in a riot grrrl band fronted by her lesbian lover. The ex-girlfriend leaves the lesbian lover, and the band, to re-hook-up with the ex-boyfriend, who vows to do anything for her (even go to work at Microsoft to support her musical career!).

All this is a mere premise for the film’s real purpose–depicting Peterson’s vision of oversimplified riot grrrl/slacker boy stereotypes. They’re basically the same old gender roles, only completely reversed. All the riot grrrls are depicted as stuck-up brats and/or sexist bigots. All the slacker dudes are depicted as shuffling, submissive cowards, deathly afraid of ever doing anything that might incur a woman’s wrath.

(Non-slacker males are shown in the form of the rapist “friend,” who appears briefly at the film’s start, and assorted right-wing authority figures; all of whom are depicted as fully deserving the riot grrrls’ vengeances. Non-riot-grrrl females do not appear at all.)

Aside from this annoying Hollywood oversimplification of sex roles, the rest of the film’s depiction of the seattle scene at the time is fairly accurate. The scenery (the Crocodile, Fallout Records, Hattie’s Hat restaurant, and the late Moe’s club) is right. So are the characters’ stated motivations–to make music and art and political action, not to Become Rock Stars. (A subplot toward the end, in which the riot-grrrl band is courted by an L.A. record label, is Peterson’s one betrayal of this.)

Slaves to the Underground is OK, but would undoubtedly had been better had Peterson not felt the need to dumb down the characters and the sexual politics to a level stupid Hollywood financiers could understand. The best fictionalization of the ’90s Seattle rock scene remains The Year of My Japanese Cousin (still not out on home video), made for PBS the previous year by Maria Gargiulo (sister of Fastbacks guitarist Lulu Gargiulo, who was the film’s cinematographer).

TOMORROW: Low-power radio, high-powered lobbying.

IN OTHER NEWS: Seattle Times wine columnist Tom Stockley was on the doomed Alaska Airlines flight from Mexico. I’d known his daughter Paige at the UW; my few recollections of him are of a decent enough gent, even though my punk-wannabe ideology made me pretty much opposed to the whole concept of wine writing…. Turns out a friend of mine had flown on that route just days before the crash. This is the third such near-miss among my circle. In ’96, another friend flew TWA from Paris to N.Y.C. en route to Seattle; that plane’s N.Y.C.-Paris return flight (which my friend wasn’t on) crashed. In ’98, I was on Metro bus route 359 exactly 24 hours before a disturbed passenger shot the driver, sending the bus plunging off the Aurora Bridge.

ELSEWHERE:

• Banner ads in review….

TWO POLICE PROFESSIONAL-ASSOCIATION GUYS wrote a Seattle Times op-ed piece last week, asking Seattle Mayor Paul Schell to step down.

They said Schell’s handling of the World Trade Organization convention, the protests against it, and the police response to the protests was all wrong.

So far, I’ve no disagreement. But then these two go on to explain how and why they think Schell failed. They apparently believe the Schell-led police response wasn’t brutal enough.

No, no, no!

The cops, and the rent-a-cops trucked in from other jurisdictions (whether or not Schell was still in full control of their actions by then, which remains to be investigated), first “did nothing,” or at least very little, to the strategic vandals and random looters. Then, as if by excuse, they spent the following three days tear-gassing and pepper-spraying everybody in sight, as far as a mile or more away from the convention site.

Then, just to show himself to be even more afraid of people and of public life, Schell canceled the Seattle Center New Year’s Eve. (The free, public New Year’s Eve, that is; $50-$150-and-up events elsewhere in town went on, as did the public bashes in Tacoma, NYC, Jerusalem, Belfast, etc.).

In the days after this decision, his excuses for it got ever lamer, to the point where he actually proclaimed himself to not be a wuss.

As my mom always said, if a boy thinks he has to tell you how tough he is all the time, it just shows he’s the real weakling.

Schell did indeed botch the WTO-protest response. But that response was excessively, not insufficiently, forceful. And it was an over-reaction to the results of the municipal power structure’s own narrow vision. Everybody knew there were going to be self-styled anarchists showing up here. It was all over the TV news in the weeks before WTO.

But Schell’s bureaucrats might not belong to “everybody.” Knowing their heavy upscale-baby-boomer makeup, they could very well be part of that certain subculture that only listens to NP-fucking-R and only reads the New York-fucking-Times.

But even if they’re not extreme, Schell and his minions are definitely Out Of It.

They’re near-quintessential Pro-Business Democrats. They’re so concerned with placating downtown chain stores, condo developers, and the affluent that they not only don’t care about the under-50-grand-a-year folks, they seem to actually wish we no longer existed.

But I’d hate for any potential Schell recall movement to degenerate into a two-sided battle between the elitist Democrats he represents and the demoagoguian Republicans the aforementioned police-association men represent.

If there’s something more dangerous than leaders who only listen to NPR, it’s leaders who only listen to Rush Limbaugh and company.

MONDAY: If dot-com hype can fade away, can cyber-futurist hype do the same?

ELSEWHERE:

• Get your preteen daughters off of drugs or bulimia and onto a more potentially healthy overriding obsession….
• The potential next step in indie-moviemaking: Quick-Cam Cinema!…
• It’s your special day; try not to look too dorky (found by Pop Culture Junk Mail)….

TODAY, A BREAK from the heavier topics we’ve covered of late, for some slightly-odd short stuff.

FASHION-VICTIM ASSAULT WEAPON OF THE WEEK: Rolling Stone magazine now has its own brand of sunglasses. Presumably just the thing if you want to look like a washed-up, clueless, verbose rock critic (you know, the oldest and squarest guy at the concert).

WHICH PAPER D’YA READ?: Times headline, 11/12: “University District: Rail’s last stop.” P-I headline, following day: “Support for Northgate link gains momentum.”

ART UPDATE: Several weeks ago, I wrote about a poster advertising a “Butch Erotica” cabaret, which looked from afar like it was instead advertising “Butoh Erotica.” At the most recent First Thursday art openings, I finally saw some Butoh erotica.

It took place at the Jem Studios (currently doomed-for-gentrification), in a room filled with video monitors showing footage of one nude model moving about extremely slowly. In the middle of the room, the artist/model herself appeared, “dressed” only and entirely in white body paint (applied by a male assistant with a house-paint roller). She then slowly walked about the room, slowly climbed a step ladder, slowly smoked a cigarette (handed to her by another male assistant), and slowly gazed at the art-viewers.

She became the voyeur; we became the spectacle. Nothing had turned me on as much in months.

WORST JUNK EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (needless to say, from a “friend” I’ve never heard of, at an apparently nonexistant email address)

Subject: hey wassup CLArK 😉

From: asynergy@quixnet.net

To: clark@speakeasy.org

Hey yaw, you not gonna beleive this yo. I found this place that gives ya access to like soooooo many hacked membership based sex/xxx sites for free man, no shit!! It’s like, no banners, no popups even, no credit card, no membership and no bullshit yaw~~~~!!!! f*ck me dead dude ;).

Anyway, the secret address is [name deleted] ok? You jsut go there, click on any site you want and you get secret membership access, for free, too about (i think) 350 different sites.

when i see ya at school tomorrow, make sure you bring the damn bio sheets ok? btw, wtf r u doing using speakeasy.org anyway?? wtf is up with that yaw, waj ya chage your addy? newayz, later… im off to that [name deleted] site again ;), catcha in class tommorow.

BEST EMAIL OF THE WEEK: (from a David Foster Wallace mailing list)

Subject: wallace-l: Advertising overkill

From: Hamilton, Cathy, [address deleted]

To: ‘wallace-l@waste.org’, wallace-l@waste.org

Wanna hear something frightening? I just got a joke forwarded to my Inbox that was sponsored by – I kid you not! – Polo ™ Sport Condoms! Talk about being a slave to fashion – this must mean that the Tommy Hilfiger (incidentally the most overrated designer in the world!!) flag pattern condoms can’t be far behind. It’s so important to be properly accessorized!

I wonder if in the near future, that “space” will be rented out by condom companies for advertising, you know like: “Dominoes we get it to you in 30 minutes or your pizza is free!” or “Call Roto Rooter toll free for your really bad clogs.” And how exactly will they be able to estimate the space for billing beforehand…?

I can see it now. Probably colors, patterns, and logo “wallpaper.” I think we can all imagine some of the advertisers more likely to use this medium:

• “Nokia. Making Connections.”
• “Boeing. Bringing People Together.”
• “Bacardi Rum. Mixes With Everything.”
• “Borders Books. Come Inside.”
• “Final Net. Holds Up Longer Than You Do.”
• “MCI WorldCom. How the World Connects.”
• “Nortel Networks. Come Together.”
• And, of course, Ball Park Franks.

TOMORROW: I’ve complained about rude, pretentious San Franciscans. But are Seattleites these days any better?

ELSEWHERE:

• If fan pressure could bring back America’s Most Wanted, could it also Revive Almost Live?…
• A critic who hates the “new” animated Col. Sanders (found by Metascene)….
• “Everything good is the Beatles, everything awful and bogus and pretentious and gross and condescending is the Rolling Stones. Okay?” (found by Robot Wisdom)….
• Maybe Japan’s surplus girls could eventually meet up with rural China’s surplus boys and help overcome that WWII-invasion-era animosity thang….

IT’S AN AUTUMNAL-EQUINOX MISCmedia, the online column that thinks warning labels may have gone a little too far when Frito-Lay feels obligated to print “NOT A SODIUM-FREE FOOD” in big fat letters on the bag of its bags for Salt and Vinegar flavored potato chips.

WHEN I WAS FREELANCING in early ’93 for the Seattle Times’ high-school tabloid Mirror, I was asked to write a preview blurb for the Coneheads movie.

I began, “Around the time some of you were born, Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin began this occasional TV skit….”

The yuppie ladies who ran Mirror wouldn’t believe it, until I showed them the math and convinced them that, indeed, 1977 was 16 years prior to 1993.

This generation-gapping has since become officially recognized by Beloit College in Wisconsin. For at least the second year, Beloit has released a list of cultural reference points that differentiate students born in the early ’80s from their presumably-older instructors.

Beloit’s 1998 list states that then-first-year students born in 1980 “have no meaningful recollection of the Reagan era.” (Of course, these days neither does Reagan.) These now-19-year-olds “are too young to remember the Space Shuttle Challenger blowing up;” “have never seen a TV set with only 13 channels;” and have always known the AIDS crisis. To them, “The Tonight Show has always been with Jay Leno” and “there has always been MTV, and it has always included non-musical shows.”

Its 1999 list states that for “the first generation to be born into Luvs, Huggies, and Pampers,” “John Lennon and John Belushi have always been dead.” These new adults “felt pretty special when their elementary school had top-of-the-line Commodore 64s,” and “have always been able to get their news from USA Today and CNN.”

Also for this year, the college included a second list compiled by students of things they get that their teachers don’t: “They know who Tina Yothers is;” “They know what a ‘Whammy’ is;” “Partying ‘like it’s 1999’ seemed SOOO far away.”

Besides giving the teachers a quick and needed jolt-O-reality (yes, you are getting old, no matter how much skin creme you use or how many miles you jog), such lists teach a valuable lesson: Even within the realm of North American “mainstream” culture, even within the small slice of that culture that’s likely to end up at a whitebread private college in the Midwest, different folks have different backgrounds and different worldviews. Diversity already exists, darn near everywhere.

If we’re really lucky, such lists might also dispel certain boomer-centric myths. As I’ve ranted before, kids today don’t know the Beatles as “the band Paul was in before Wings.” They’ve had Beatles nostalgia shoved at them all their lives, but have never heard of Wings.

Indeed, we must remember that the popcult past gets recycled so much more thoroughly these days, that college freshmen probably know a lot more about their teachers’ coming-O-age cliches than vice versa. Oldies radio and Nick At Nite keep instructing new generations in the lyrics to “Takin’ Care of Business” and the phrase “Kid Dy-No-Mite.”

But will the profs bother to learn about Beck or Clueless?

As IF!

MONDAY: Some more of this, including some of your suggestions about what youngster things oldsters don’t get and vice versa.

ELSEWHERE:

• PBS mistakenly thinks the way to get younger folks into politics is to treat those younger folks as idiots….
• Will this stop the insuffrable Frisco-elitists from forever whining to me about how everything in their town’s so goddamn superior to everything everyplace else? Probably not, alas….
• James Fallows’s long, thorough Y2K-mania examination….
• More proof that noisy motorcycle jocks are no longer “rebels”….

HERE’S THE SECOND essay I wrote this summer for Seattle magazine. (The mag’s under new management; I don’t know if the new folks will want me back.)

The occasion of my new book collection of old newspaper columns gives me an excuse to look at the art form’s sorry current state.

I don’t claim to write the funniest or wisest or sharpest columns around. I just wish more of today’s working columnists tried (or were allowed) to be better than they currently are.

The newspaper column just might be America’s greatest literary invention. Yet, like so many great American inventions, America seems to have largely forgotten how to do it right.

Seattle’s dailies haven’t had a columnist worthy of the title since the Times either allowed or persuaded professional gadfly Terry McDermott to move on a year or two back.

Back in the day, when Emmett Watson was in his prime and the likes of Byron Fish and even John Hinterberger were going strong, the P-I and Times relied on columns the way buildings rely on them–to prop up the whole superstructure of the edifice.

Even stronger stuff could be had in The Washington Teamster, wherein editor Ed Donohoe’s weekly “Tilting At Windmills” corner poked light fun at politicians who supported the union’s agenda and struck heavier barbs at politicians who didn’t.

Now, though, the columns in the local dailies are mightily staid affairs.

Latte jokes. Slug jokes. Endless paeans to why the baby-boom generation is even more darned important to the course of western civilization than it already thinks it is. A woman who claims it’s safe to walk the streets of Bellevue, as if anyone ever does. Political harrangues about why citizens are too chicken to dream bold dreams unless they go along with the latest scheme to subsidize private developers. Tirades about how Those Kids Today are either too lazy (unlike the diligent kids from The Sixties Generation) or too work-driven (unlike the value-centered kids from The Sixties Generation).

And, of course, oversimplified ideas about modern society, told in one-sentence paragraphs.

Really simple one-sentence paragraphs.

At least the sports pages still have the likes of Laura Vescey, Art Thiel, and Steve Kelley. But it’s sadly telling that the papers will only permit really good columnists to do really good work if it’s about a topic that doesn’t really matter.

The situation’s not much better in the “alternative” press.

My ex-stomping ground, The Stranger, was once full of strong, personal voices, from Anna Woolverton to “Spikey’s Coffee Corner;” but now apparently prefers formula concepts like restaurant briefs and a police blotter.

Seattle Weekly’s “columns” are essentially beat-reporting corners, not classic columnar-style commentaries.

Why this state of affairs? As print media become ever more corporate and bureaucratic, it’s harder for idiosyncratic voices to please the powers-that-be. You’ve gotta be either predictably “analytical” (bland) or predictably “outrageous” (dumb).

Yet it’s just these individualists who add the spark of personality to a paper, who make it a must-read even on slow news days.

There are still a few great ones churning out verbiage across the country. The feisty Texan Molly Ivins is a national treasure. The P-I’s new syndicated contributor Sean Gonsalves has the rare audacity to criticize not just politicians but the economic interest groups who own them. And Larry King’s weekly “King’s Things” in USA Today show he’s as skilled at short-form writing as he is at long-form talking. On the conservative side, at least George Will still tries to rationally argue his points, without succumbing to Limbaughesque bully tactics.

These, and a few others, know that a great column should have its own point of view, not merely rehash what all those other media commentators are doing. (A good case of the latter came back in April, when most everybody in the papers and on the air made the same three or four, equally misinformed and inane, arguments about violent suburban teens.)

It should tell a story, or several stories. It should provide insights into the day-to-day flow of events that straight reporting or dry analysis just can’t.

And it should make its points with personality but also with efficiency, and then stop.

IN OTHER NEWS: A short while back, I suggested the violent atmosphere that led to the Woodstock ’99 rapes might have had something to do with the aesthetic of amoral aggression propagated by the likes of Limp Bizkit. Similar allegations have now been separately made, in a libelous email supposedly from a certain ex-Seattleite rock star (found by Metascene).

TOMORROW: A look at some of the city’s remaining (for now) old buildings.

PASSAGE (from Lindsay Marshall): ” If the word ‘moving’ appears on the cover and the book is not about transport then avoid it like the plague.”

ELSEWHERE:

• They’re the all-purpose nemeses to all “alterna” minded-folks, and they’re on the prowl: It’s the “Attack of the Big, Loud White Guys”….
• The course of true love? About 30 months, if you believe these folks….
• And you thought Y2K was scary….

SIX MONTHS AGO, you couldn’t see a string of TV commercials without at least one website address flashing on-screen.

Today, you’d be hard-pressed to see a string of TV commercials (except maybe on Pax TV) without at least one ad that’s all about a website.

Yet despite the hype over e-commerce and the dubya-dubya-dubya as a marketing tool, the Web remains what I hoped it would become five years ago–an all-accessible repository for great, immediate writing.

Herewith, a few examples of fine online verbiage that are not Salon and heavens-not Slate:

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Accompaniment to the print somewhat-less-than-quarterly McSweeney’s alterna-lit journal, but sharing no content with the paper version–just the same sense of literate whimsy and post-postmodern graciousness.

Rat Bastard. Washington, DC-based Don Bruns doin’ the personal-net-diary thang, with self-effacing wit to spare.

Exquisite Corpse. Andrei Codrescu’s little paper litmag is now indeed a corpse, but he continues to present brash-yet-thoughtful voices online.

My current fave: James Nolan on American doublespeak in the age of spin-control (a topic that gets beaten to death every election cycle, but he manages to bring it back to life).

Bittersweets. Each day, a one-paragraph narrative or observation about the wistfully-regretful side of life.

The Napkin. Like Bittersweets, but shorter, usually less bitter, and sometimes even cosmic (in a nice way).

Word. Besides the fun contemporary-art pages, the pages of found-objects pix, and the “Junk Radio” section full of moldy-oldies in streaming audio, the words on Word are themselves darned interesting and lively. Current best example: Philip Dray’s probably-fictional yet realistic reminiscence of being “a Jewish caddy at a WASP country club.”

You can tell the folks running Word have the right attitude if you hit “View Source” on your browser when you reach its homepage. There, amid all the HTML codin’, is this hidden (until now, anyway) treat:

“META NAME=”Description” CONTENT=”Forget about whatever you were searching for. It’s not important. You may not be aware of it consciously, but you really want to read Word instead. So go on — click here. You’ll be glad you did! Satisfaction guaranteed!”.”

Random Story Generator. I know it’s just an automated version of Mad Libs, but damned if it’s not a total laff-riot each and every time.

ELSEWHERE: There’s a big convention of ethnic-minority journalists in my town this week. The Seattle Times has been dutifully covering and previewing the event, but its big Sunday feature story tie-in was strictly about the “minority” the Times, and Seattle, are most comfortable with–upscale, white women (preferably blond and blue-eyed); in this case, TV anchorwomen.

TOMORROW: David Foster Wallace’s new fiction collection is anything but ‘hideous.’

PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).

Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.

“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”

Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.

(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)

At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.

Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.

In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.

I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).

The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.

What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:

“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”

MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…

MISC. really tries to point the way toward a post-irony age, but can’t hemp noticing when the downtown-Seattle Borders Books outlet holds a promo event this Saturday for the video release of You’ve Got Mail, that romantic-comedy movie predicated on the presumed evil of huge chain bookstores like Borders.

YOU MAY HAVE NOTICED the new URLs on this page and throughout the rest of the venerable Misc. World site. We’re now at Miscmedia.com, so adjust your bookmarks accordingly and tell all your friends. It’s all part of a big scheme tied into our new print venture; speaking of which…

UPDATE #1: The ultra-limited first edition of The Big Book of Misc. is a mere five weeks away. You can now pre-order your copy by following the instructions on this link. Act now to get your own signed and numbered copy of the 240-page, illustrated collection of the best items from 13 years’ worth of reportage about the wacky-wacky world that is American culture. The release party’s tentatively set for Tues., June 8 at the new Ditto, 5th & Bell.

UPDATE #2: When we last reported on the Sugar’s strip joint in the newly-incorporated suburb of Shoreline, it smanagement was trying to fend off municipal regulations by launching an initiative to change the suburb’s governmental setup toward one less likely to restrict the club’s ability to earn a buck. That drive made it to the ballot but lost.

Now, the club’s trying another tactic. It’s declared itself a non-profit “private club,” and hence not subject to any Shoreline regulations i/r/t commercial adult-entertainment businesses. To go there now, you’ve got to fill out a very short membership application, then return a week later to find out if you’ve been accepted, then pay $50 a year (installments accepted), all for the privilege of spending more money on table dances.

An explanatory flyer offered at the door claims all the membership fees get donated to assorted kids’ charities, and that the whole setup’s a small but necessary step to keep America from succumbing to “a Brave New World in the form of a Christian conservative state.” Actually, the flyer’s author (club attorney Gilbert Levy) got it wrong. The dystopian future in Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World had plenty of commercial porn and sexual “freedom” (all the better to prevent the formation of intimate or family bondings that would threaten individual subjugation to the mass society). It’s George Orwell’s 1984 that had the Anti-Sex Leagues running about to forcibly stamp out all human passion other than hate and blind obedience. Speaking of which…

FOLLOWING THE WAKE OF THE POST-AFTERMATH AFTERMATH: You’ve read the media analysis of the Littleton, Colo. teen tragedy, and by now you’ve even read the analysis of the analysis. A few things to remember, some of which didn’t make it into some of the analyses:

• Real goths don’t collect assault weapons. They might get into fantasies about vampires and post-nuclear zombies, but their real-life personas tend to be far more pacified. (South Park, set in a Littleton-like Colorado town, employed Cure singer Robert Smith for a guest voice as an action hero precisely because the role was so out-of-sync with Smith’s non-action image.)
• As noted in the Weekly, the Euro metal-punk band KMFDM (whose headman Sascha moved to Seattle as the band’s career was winding down) played aggressive music but was always opposed to real-life violence. In its biggest U.S. hit, the band referred to itself as “The Drug Against War.”
• The Trench Coat Mafia boys had their own tribal thang going on. They took bits and pieces from various subcultures and stitched them together to form their own particular monster. Besides industrial and heavy-metal music, they took notions and concepts from neo-Nazis and militia cults. The racist aspect of their ideology is something you just don’t find in more orthodox nerd or goth cliques (which tend to be pasty-face white but to profess solidarity with other outcast groups, including minorities).
• The conservative commentators, as might be expected, went all over themselves to get nearly everything wrong (“Guns don’t kill people, video games and Internet chat rooms and liberal moral relativism and do”).
• The middle-of-the-road commentators (particularly the likes of Dateline NBC) got almost as much wrong. By stereotyping goths, punks, nerds, geeks, smarties, role-playing-game players, video-game players, and just about anyone else who’s not a jock or cheerleader as walking time bombs, the media know-nothings are only encouraging the school officials and the “popular” kids to dehumanize and persecute the unpopular kids even more harshly.
• The liberal and quasi-left commentators liked to compare the Littleton massacre to what they see as America’s “real” culture of violence–the one that presently gives us bombers over Serbia and Iraq. I wouldn’t quite take it that directly. Kids have been cruel to one another in times of relative military peace (like most of the Clinton years), and in times of military conflict (like the Vietnam and Desert Storm eras). Besides, our supposed objective in the Balkans is to stop the kind of ethnic-purity crusade our homegrown neo-Nazis like to dream about.
• Violent media don’t kill people; violent people do. (Note Japan’s relative lack of youth violence and its abundance of youth-oriented-media violence.) Right-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Spawn and Doom. Left-wing media bashers might love to blame Littleton on Schwarzenegger and the World Wrestling Federation. Corporate media defenders might love to blame Littleton on cultural phenomenon outside of corporate control (especially on that bad-ol’ Internet). All these blowhards have done is exploit 15 senseless deaths to promote their own agendas. Some of these agendas are as potentially divisive as that of the Trench Coat Mafia.
• If anything can be learned from the horror, it’s that kids can be, and are, cruel. Especially Caucasian American kids (perhaps a legacy of Britain’s even crueller boarding-school culture). As seen in very mild form in the current crop of teen movies, the typical high school caste system rewards the conceited, the athletic, and the “beautiful,” and disdains anybody with more than half a brain or more than half a conscience.

  Certainly in my own teenhood, and later in two day jobs dealing with teens, I’ve found little support or recognition within the system for any kid who wasn’t a potential star on the playing field or the sidelines. The media largely follow the inequity: One local TV newscast used to have a “Prep Athlete of the Month” segment, another used to have a “Student Athlete of the Week,” but nobody in local news (until this year’s revival of the Washington Spelling Bee) paid any notice to non-athletic young scholars. A truly progressive school system wouldn’t just be where it was OK for a girl to be good at sports; it would be where it was OK for a boy to be bad at sports.

• Perhaps we could use a new kind of PR campaign. One that celebrates the brainy ones, the nonconformists, what that Apple commercial called “the crazy ones.” I wouldn’t go the way of Times columnist Jerry Large, who once called for papers to promote community-volunteer kids as sexy role models. Instead, I’d honor the girls and boys who neither followed role models nor tried to be them. After all, it’s the geeks and the brains these days who (given at least a modicum of adult or peer encouragement) grow up with a chance at creative lives and/or hi-tech careers. It’s the girls who stop worrying about becoming popular who’re more likely to get to 18 childless. It’s the boys who face the taunts and the name-calling who’re more likely to successfully weather the slings and arrows of grownup office politics. It’s the kids who think learning’s too square who end up clerking at Kmart. But it’s the brainy outcasts who are constantly harassed and put down who can end up with the lifelong scars.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, call TCI to demand it resume feeding the public access channel to Summit Cable customers, and take to heart these words by E.B. White: “A despot doesn’t fear eloquent writers preaching freedom–he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.”

THE WINTER OF MY DISCONTENT: I’m making a rare exception to my normal self-imposed ban on weather comments. I loathe the cutesy rain jokes someone like Jean Godden might spread, and believe most Seattle winters are, like southern-English winters, spectacular only in the degree of their unspectacularness. But things have been a little different this time.

As early as mid-January (around the time Canadians hold “Winter Carnivals” to force themelves out of S.A.D.-ness), I found myself counting the weeks and days until the halfway point toward the vernal equinox; once that point was reached, I started checking the weather pages for the daily sunset time, as it ticked a minute or two closer each day toward the magic 6 p.m. mark. I’ve been going to some restaurants and bars, and avoiding others, on the basis of how brightly lit they were inside. I’ve been cranking my 3-way bulbs in the apartment up to the 150-watt level, even at noon. I’ve been playing the loudest, poppiest, least-depressing music I’ve got (Pizzicato Five si, Built to Spill no).

Granted, there are reasons for me to be a bit less than perky these past few months, what with this column suddenly going to online-only status and all. But I’ve been unemployed or underemployed in previous winters and didn’t noticeably feel like this. Let’s just say that since this dimmer-than-normal, way-damper than normal winter, I now understand why the new Nordstrom store’s got such garish lighting, why I keep meeting people who talk about canceling their cable TV so they can save up to visit Mexico, why those “herbal energy” capsules are so darn popular, and why heavy, spicy drinks taste so darn good these days.

NOW, TO THE GOOD NEWS: The Best-Of-Misc. book’s plowing steadily ahead. I’m currently working on proofreading, cover design, interior art, and–oh, yeah–raising the capital to get it printed and distributed. As yet there’s not a final title or release date; but it will be made available to Misc. World readers first. (It will likely come out simultaneously with the long-awaited reissue of my old book, Loser: The Real Seattle Music Story, of which I still can’t legally say any more.)

During the book’s production, there might be a slight slowdown in the production of Misc. World material. A few of you might have already noticed the Cyber Stuff section’s short website reviews haven’t been updated lately. At a few points over the next few months, you might not see a new Clark’s Culture Corral essay each and every week. But rest assured, the Misc. column and the X-Word puzzle will continue to shine forth from your monitors in all their hi-res, eminently print-out-able glory.

SUDSING OFF?: Us magazine recently claimed TV’s eleven current daytime soap operas just might constitute a doomed art form, destined to go the way of the radio soaps that preceded them. The magazine makes the very rational point that with dozens of cable and satellite channels competing for viewers’ attention, network ratings will continue to slip, past the point where it’ll no longer be feasible to spend $200,000 or more per hour on daytime-drama episodes that’ll only be shown once.

Any eventual decline or ending to classic 260-episodes-a-year soap production wouldn’t have to mean the end of televised, serialized drama. There are many other possible serial formats, used here and abroad. There’s the famous Mexican telenovela concept, a maxi-series that runs for up to a year toward a predetermined ending, as opposed to the open-ended American soap model. Or, like prime time’s Homicide or Wiseguy, daytime stories could be arranged in self-contained “arcs” that would allow for hiatuses or repeats. Of course, that would likely mean the end to the annual summer ritual of explaining away actors’ vacations by having characters talk about absent actors’ characters being off to visit their relatives in Seattle. Speaking of industries in decline…

BOTTOM OF THE BARREL, TAKE 2: Visited the probably-doomed Rainier Brewery last Friday. The last time I’d been there was when I took the factory tour during the year I turned 21. The ol’ place hadn’t hardly changed. Even the trophy cases in the front office, with souveniers of high points in the company’s history, hadn’t been substantially added to in 20 years. What had changed in those years were my preferences in malt-and-hop matter. The seven beers on tap at the Mountain Room were, to my current microbrew-hooked palate, either beer-flavored water (classic Rainier, Schmidt) or alcohol-enhanced, beer-flavored water (Mickey’s, Rainier Ice). Rainier, once one of the most innovative marketers in the industry, is now on a death watch, as everyone awaits the finalilzation of current owner Stroh’s tentative plans to sell the brand names to Pabst, while keeping the plant site (which, except during Prohibition, has been making suds for 121 years) for separate real-estate speculation. It may have been inevitable. You could blame Bud and Miller’s big ad budgets for the decline of smaller mass-market beers, but really it’s an industrywide death-spiral situation. Total alcoholic-beverage consumption hasn’t kept up with population growth for over a decade; and tastes among many drinkers have permanently switched away from old-style 3.2 American beer toward microbrews, wines, and (as will be mentioned in our next item) mixed drinks.

Still, it would sure be a shame to see this beautiful structure go away, and only slightly less sad to see it converted into condos (E-Z freeway access, solid old-time construction). Speaking of business sites going away…

WATCH THIS SPACE: The Vogue’s probably moving to Capitol Hill, specifically to the former Encore/Safari disco site across from Value Village; thus ending the tradition at the venerable dance club’s current First Avenue location begun with WREX in 1980, which will close just before people conceived in its bathrooms in the early years could legally start to go there. It’s fared better than some other beer-wine clubs in recent years, partly because it had the town’s premier fetish night for several years and partly because it owned its own building. But the big thing these days in Seattle clubs is to serve hard booze, which requires at least a semblance of food service, which the current Vogue’s narrow space couldn’t really accommodate. And besides, the dance-club scene in Belltown’s become so squaresville in the years since the Weathered Wall’s closing that the scruffy-yet-chic Vogue increasingly looked like an outsider in its own neighborhood. Speaking of the sense of place…

LOCAL PUBLICATION OF THE WEEK: The Vashon-Maury Ticket is a semi-monthly Vashon Island community tabloid from sometime poetry-slam promoter Hamish Todd. As one might expect from such a literarily-minded publisher, it’s not your typical throwaway neighborhood paper. Recent issues have featured a profile of the 70-year-old Vashon Hardware store, a “Remembering Vietnam” verse by “author and retired veteran” Rick Skillman, a Valentine’s-week guide to herbal aphrodisiacs, and a call-to-action to save the island’s only movie theater. I’m a bit disappointed, though, at the paper’s “Y2K” issue, in which contributing author Robert Gluckson seems to believe the survivalists’ predicted Collapse of Urban Civilization next 1/1 is not only inevitable but is to be hoped for. (It should be noted that certain hippie poets, like certain right-wing militia cults, can have wet dreams about big cities burning up while the Righteous People out in the countryside survive to forge a purified society under their control.) (Free at about 20 dropoff spots on the island; at the Crocodile, Shorty’s, the Elysian, and the Globe Cafe in Seattle; or by subscription from P.O. Box 1911, Vashon WA 98070.) Speaking of local scenes…

WALKING THE WALK: Nicole Brodeur, the new Seattle Times columnist freshly shipped in from out-of-state, recently wrote she couldn’t understand why Seattleites she meets are so dismayed and disapproving that she set up her new household in Bellevue. Among her points in defending her domicile on the Darkest Eastside was the old untruth that, unlike Seattle, “you’re not afraid to walk anywhere” in Bellevue.

This begs the eternal question: Who the hell ever actually walks in Bellevue? (Building-to-parked-car strolls don’t count; neither do exercise jogs in driven-to park areas.)

Misc. hereby challenges Brodeur to produce tangible, unstaged, photographic or videographic evidence of any adult other than herself found walking out-of-doors, under his or her own unassisted foot power, between any two different places (i.e., not within a single strip-mall or office-plaza setting), neither of which can be a motor vehicle, anywhere within the “city” limits of Bellevue. I double-dare you.

‘TIL NEXT TIME, spend plenty of time in brightly-lit places, uphold your right to live in town, nominate your favorite beautiful “ugly” building via email or at our Misc. Talk discussion boards, and consider these words from the highly maneuver-able Dr. Henry Heimlich: “If all of your peers understand what you’ve done, you haven’t been creative.”

MISC., your post-print column for (what the Times Personal Tech section calls) the post-television age, was amused by the double standards and double dribbles in that front-page P-I headline on 12/22/98: “Reign star Enis judges basketball, parenthood.” Y’ever see a headline like that about, say, Shawn Kemp?

Alas, that P-I story was one of the last written in the local dailies about the Seattle Reign before the team’s parent American Basketball League announced its sudden, permanent shutdown, leaving fans as bereft of pro women’s b-ball as it is of the men’s game. One could lay the blame for the ABL’s demise on the rival WNBA, with its megabucks backing, its marketable-superstar orientation, and its stranglehold on sponsors and TV outlets. But a less-discussed factor was the league’s management structure. While it claimed to be a grassroots, fan-level outfit, it was really a centralized company which owned all its teams, hired and assigned all its players, and otherwise tightly ran all operations and marketing–just like the Roller Derby, Arena Football, and other assorted marginal team-sports ventures of the past three decades.

The graveyard of new team-sports organizations in North America is full of four decades’ worth of great and less-great visions, from the American Basketball Association to the World Football League and the U.S. Football League, to World Team Tennis and several attempts at indoor soccer. Aside from the American Football League (which got all its teams merged into the NFL in the late ’60s), none were long-term successes. (The only current such ventures with a chance at making it are Major League Soccer and the aforementioned WNBA.) None of those attempts found the formula for nationwide popularity and profits; though some tried to find such a formula thru centralized management. A single-ownership league structure (like that of the ABL) can present a unified public image and prevent a single well-heeled team owner from attaining an uncompetitive dynasty situation (like that which ruined the old North American Soccer League). But it also means local team managers can’t build their own squads, around personalities or playing styles popular in their own towns. And when league HQ runs out of cash and/or ideas, there aren’t local team owners (or buyers) to come up with individual solutions other teams can copy.

But for now, the WNBA (with its emphasis on megabucks and celebrity-driven advertising, and its neglect (or worse) of any lesbian fan base) is the remaining structure for women’s pro hoops, at least until the parent NBA can no longer afford to subsidize it (which, if there’s not even a mini-NBA season, might be more likely and sooner). Wish I had more encouraging news for stranded Reign fans, but a pro league of any sort, especially one with teams scattered across the continent, is an undertaking requiring immense logistics, savvy, and long-term backing. The ABL way didn’t work, and neither has just about any other way.

THE HOLIDAY TRADITION CONTINUES: For the 13th consecutive year, here’s your fantastical Misc. In/Out List. Thanks to all who contributed suggestions via private email and the public Misc. Talk discussion boards; and apologies to those whose board postings I accidentally erased last week. (I think I’ve gotten the hang of the discussion-board software scripts by now.) As always, this list predicts what will become hot or not-so-hot over the course of ’99; not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you think every person, place, thing, or trend that’s big now will just keep getting bigger, I’ve got some Tickle Me Elmo dolls to sell you.

UNTIL NEXT WE MEET in the year so great there’s a Washington highway named after it, pace yourself by toasting the New Year once for each North American time zone (starting with Newfoundland at 7:30 p.m. PST), and ponder these thoughts attributed to Lillian Helman: “If I had to give young writers advice, I’d say don’t listen to writers talking about writing.”

IT’S A COOL, DAMP, MISTY PRE-WINTERTIME MISC., the pop-culture report that always knows the launch of arrival of high shopping season when the regular downtown freaks are pushed aside by the seasonal-specific freaks. (For our own special gift to you, read on.)

HISTORIC PRESERVATION IN OUR TIME: Despite what it seems, not every old, lo-rise building in greater downtown Seattle’s being razed for cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. At least a dozen have been meticulously saved from the wrecking ball, so they can house the offices of the architects designing the cheap office buildings and glitzy condos. I’m reminded of a slide lecture I once saw by Form Follows Fiasco author Peter Blake. Among his examples of bad modern architecture was a mid-size city in central Europe with narrow, winding streets faced by quaint, homey, romantically worn-down buildings. When the socialists came into power, they hated the place. They had a new city built across the river, designed on all the efficient, rational, no-frills principles of Soviet-inspired central planning. The only government workers permitted to still live and work in the old city? You guessed it–the architects who designed the new city.

SUBLIMINAL SEDUCTION IN OUR TIME: Ever notice how the 1-800-CALL-ATT long-distance logo, with a light-blue circular shape gently rising from within a dark-blue square, looks, at first glance, a heck of a lot like a condom wrapper?

AD OF THE WEEK: Future Shop, which publicly stopped selling Macintosh computers back during Apple’s pre-iMac sales doldrums two years ago, now prominently uses the Mac screen-window design in its current CD sale flyer.

HEADLINE OF THE WEEK (Times, 11/29): “Drunk Driving Made Easier.” The story was really about a new state law that’ll make drunk driving arrests and prosecutions easier.

MEN AT WORK: The old truism that men will pay for sex but women will pay only to “look sexy” may be changing, at least among certain affluent women in remote locations. A loyal reader recently told of her recent trip to Jamaica, where she and her adult daughter were regularly propositioned by male locals on the streets and public beaches. But she says the solicitations weren’t expressions of harassment but of commerce. Hetero-male hooking’s apparently become such a big tourist draw on the island in recent years, the Jamaica Rough Guide travel book even lists the best spots for European and American women to rent what the book gingerly calls “Jamaican steel.” Some of the gated seaside resorts are discreetly offering bus tours for the ladies to go partake of a tall, dark toy-boy, then return to the hotel in time for scuba lessons.

This is a different phenomenon from the also-booming business of “swingers’ resorts” across the Caribbean and Mexico, where the sex is just as casual but is restricted to one’s fellow paying tourists. It’s also a phenomenon of potential interest to North America’s own remote, economically depressed regions, regions which tend to have ample supplies of rugged if less-than-gentlemanly men. You’d have to get some anything-for-a-buck politicians to change a few laws, then put the recruited men through some Full Monty-esque makeovers and charm lessons; but from there, the only limit would be one’s ambition and one’s marketing budget. I can easily imagine big layouts in the continental fashion mags, inviting the pampered ladies of Italy and France to really experience the rugged, robust America they’ve only known through movies and ads, by enjoying a real Akron factory worker or a real Detroit homeboy or even a real Aberdeen lumberjack!

SLICKSVILLE: Earlier this year, business analysts were talking about the mergers of the seven Baby Bells into four as presaging a potential reassembly of the Bell System. Now, with Exxon and Mobil combining and BP taking over Amoco, we might be seeing the reassembly of the old Standard Oil! (Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, and BP’s current U.S. division are all descended from pieces of John D. Rockefeller’s old monopoly.) The headline in last Friday’s Times claims the merger would “benefit consumers” somehow–even though it would result in further station closures across the country (neither company has much of a presence left around here) and mass layoffs, and even though today’s low oil prices are the result of the collapse in OPEC’s ability to set prices for its member oil-exporting nations.

The first hints of a possible merger made the news the same day as the fatal explosion at the Anacortes refinery built in the ’50s by Texaco, but now operated by Texaco and Shell under the joint-venture pseudonym “Equilon.” All these spinoffs, mergers, joint ventures, and consolidations in the business have scrambled what had been clear vertically-integrated brand identities. (Could the Anacortes plant’s management change have influenced conditions that led to the freak accident? In all probability, no. The coking tower that blew up was designed and built when Texaco still fully owned the installation.)

Still, doesn’t anyone remember back in the ’70s when TV oilman J.R. Ewing became the world’s image of a slimy businessmen? When oil companies were popularly thought to be the bad guys, and the bigger they got the badder they were presumed to be? The oil giants turned out to have profited then from circumstances beyond their control; they’re now struggling from circumstances equally beyond their control. But these are still global collossi whose only true loyalties are still to (1) the stock price, (2) executive salaries and perks, (3) promoting government policies favorable to the first two priorities, and (4) their public images. Everything else (environmental protection, resource conservation, fair labor practices, preserving neighborhood service stations) the companies either pays attention to when doing so fits priorities 1-4 or when they’re forced to. And as we’ve seen in places like Kuwait (where women still have virtually no civil rights) and Nigeria (where opponents to the Shell-supported dictator are harrassed and shot), these companies are still perfectly willing to associate with less-than-admirable elements as long as it’s lucrative.

SCARY COINCIDENCE #1: In this space last week, I promised this week I’d list things I was thankful for. Little did I know I’d be grateful to the fates for some relatively lucky timing. I was on the southbound Metro #359 bus at 3:15 p.m. Thursday, heading back from the ol’ family dinner–exactly 24 hours prior to the incident in which a presumably deranged passenger shot the driver on a southbound #359 on the northern reaches of the Aurora Bridge, just above the Fremont Troll. (The bus crashed through the guard rail and plunged to the ground below. The driver fell out and died.)

Scary coincidence #2: A KIRO-TV reporter, mentioning cops scouring the wreckage site for evidence, noted how investigators spent months combing the seas off Long Island, NY after the TWA Flight 800 crash several years ago. A friend of mine had been on that plane from Paris to NYC that day; the fatal flight was to have been the plane’s return trip.

Scary coincidence #3: As part of the part-time duties I’m still handling for The Stranger, I’d scheduled to turn in a website review this week about www.busplunge.org, a site collecting every English-language news story containing the words “bus plunge.”

Scary coincidence #4: The driver, Mark McLaughlin, was shot in the arm. Mudhoney singer Mark Arm’s real surname: McLaughlin.

Back in the late ’80s, Metro Transit’s ads tried to discourage citizens from thinking of bus riders as underclass losers and winos, with images of well-scrubbed, pale-skinned models and the slogan, “Metro. Who rides it? People just like you.” Then in the ’90s, as headlines blared of “road rage” and roads became clogged with “out-of-my-way-asshole” SUVs, bus riders got plastered with the PR image of “civil society” do-gooders who did their part to reduce traffic congestion and encourage social mingling, people whose efforts deserved to be furthered by the regional light-rail referendum. Will this tragedy re-ignite the old stereotype of bus people, or be perceived as the wheeled equivalent of a drive-by?

NOW FOR YOUR GIFT: I also promised last week I’d start adding exciting new features to your beloved Misc. World site. With the assistance of the speakeasy.org programming staff, I’m proud to pre-announce the forthcoming, one-‘n’-only Misc.Talk discussion board. In a sense it’s a return to my roots, having first discovered online communication via bulletin board systems back in 1983. Your first question: What’s the ickiest, most inappropriate, or most embarrassing Xmas gift you ever got (or gave)? Have fun, and talk nice.

THE SHOCK OF THE NUDE: As mentioned previously in The Stranger, Erika Langley’s Lusty Lady coffee-table-book photos won’t have their own Seattle Art Museum show (across from the peep-show emporium where Langley took her pix) after all. She’d been invited by one SAM official, then disinvited by highers-up (who’ve offered her a slot in a group exhibition next year instead). The official line: The show would’ve been in a hallway, where kids on group tours might be exposed to the sight of beautiful women’s physiques. (Langley’d already agreed to leave sexually-suggestive shots out of the show.) Yet Langley and her supporters noted (in this paper and elsewhere) that other nudes (M/F) have been on open display at SAM. I saw plenty of under-agers enjoy the drawn nudes at SAM’s Cone Collection exhibit last year, including several young art students copying the drawings into sketchbooks. But art’s gatekeepers have always preferred their nude images to be safely removed from the here-and-now. I believe as late as Monet’s time, painters were expected to set nekkid people only in historic (ancient Greece), foreign (Mideast harems), or mythical (Biblical sinners) settings. But a modern-day gal willfully showin’ off her bod sans shame? Alors! Speaking of sex-fear…

I WAS READING the 1965 intro to The Olympia Reader, wherein editor-publisher Maurice Girodias complained about French censorship in the de Gaulle era, when the radio told me about a Federal Way city council hearing wherein speakers claimed a planned Castle Superstores sex-toy shop would directly lead to wild-eyed rapists rushing the streets after any woman or child in sight (as if anybody in Federal Way walked anywhere!). As I previously wrote, Castle’s just a big-box consolidation of the indie and small-chain stores where nice straights (and nice closeted gays) buy silk undies, condoms, vibes, videos, and other tools for enabling their decent, wholesome sex lives. A criminal will think like a criminal with or without such stimuli. Indeed, a clean, well-lit, mainstream sex shop might help convince someone with borderline-criminal thoughts that sex isn’t necessarily the stuff of oppressive compulsions but is as natural (and potentially as dull) as any aspect of existence. Speaking of sex-role stigmas…

LESS OF A MAN’S WORLD?: The Seattle Times recently reprinted a Washington Post article (originally one of a five-part Post series on gender relations) claiming increased social stigmas against males, especially boys. It claimed boys were more likely to be ostracized for asocial behavior or “learning disabilities,” and more likely to later become perpetrators (and victims) of violence (to themselves or others). Post reporter Megan Rosenfeld wrote, “Boys are the universal scapegoats, the clumsy clods with smelly feet… feeling the tightening noose of limited expectations, societal scorn and inadequate role models” amid a lack of positive sex-role imagery (girls can now become most anything, but boys are still expected to be dumb jocks). Other reports, meanwhile, talk of lowered sperm counts and fewer boy babies in the major western nations, even of chemical-therapy estrogen finding its way (via sewage-sludge fertilizer) into the food supply. Whatever happened to the ’80s radfem cliché of “testosterone poisoning”? Speaking of a gradually more femdom world…

SPLITTING: Bikini Kill’s members have called it quits their way, after seven years of making music their way–avoiding major labelss, package tours, MTV, even movie soundtracks. It’s not that the band’s career was going nowhere. They achieved just about all they could achieve within their self-prescribed boundaries. And now they’re moving on to new creative endeavors, without major-label debts, contractual-obligation albums, or acrimonious “farewell tours.” While I disagreed with the anti-sexist sexism in some of their words, I always admired the strength of their convictions. When they called for “Revolution Girl-Style Now,” they meant more than simply wishing to stick some female bodies onto the same ol’ seats of power, or some military overthrow with subsequent reign of terror. It was about rethinking the whole premises of social engagement, including the way “rebel” music’s produced and distributed.

WELCOME BACK TO MISC., the column that asks the question global economists have as yet refused to address: How will the Korean fiscal crisis affect the continued production of Simpsons and King of the Hill episodes?

WHEN’S ORGANIC NOT?: The health-food business (and don’t be fooled; it really is a business) doesn’t want the Feds deciding what is or isn’t an acceptable nutritional supplement or health remedy. But it does want the Feds to define what is or isn’t an “organic” food. Some within the biz want stricter rules on the “organic” name than the government’s latest proposed guidelines recommend, particularly regarding the use of pesticides on crops. If you wanna learn more, the folks at Central Co-Op will be glad to bend your ear.

WHEELIN’ N’ DEALIN’: Call me retro, call me picky, but I know I’m not the only one to believe there hasn’t been anything really good in U.S. automotive design since the fall of American Motors. From the awkward K-Car, to the once-innovative but now-tiresome Taurus teardrop, to today’s bland minivans and macho-gross sport utilities, mediocrity rules showrooms across the land. The new VW Beetle represents a small forward step, though it doesn’t look enough like the old Beetle and costs too much. Things are a little brighter overseas, especially in Japan. Nissan’s got a number of way-rad cars it sells only in Asia (including a slug-shaped miniwagon called the “S-Cargo”), while continuing to saddle its U.S. division with the same poor-selling Altimas.

Now I have a new object of desire. The Smart car, made by the unlikely joint venture of Mercedes and Swatch, was supposed to hit Euro streets this month (production-startup problems have now held back the launch ’til fall). Think of it as a scooter with a roof. It seats two people snugly inside its eight-foot-long plastic body (surrounding a steel safety cage). It looks like the perfect super-fuel-efficient tool for urban errands, leisurely country drives, or any other transport use that doesn’t involve mucho cargo or wintertime pass-climbing. Naturally, there are no plans to bring the Smart to North America. They don’t think enough people here would want a human-scale vehicle to be worth developing a U.S.-street-legal version and setting up dealers to sell and service it. Sadly, they may be right.

NETTING: Nearly two years ago, I told you to look forward to a new, high-speed Internet connection called ADSL (asymmetrical digital subscriber line). Now at last, US West promises ADSL hookups in Seattle no later than June. It’ll cost $200 to start up such a connection, plus another $300 or so for the special all-digital modem US West will sell you. From there, you’ll pay $60 a month ($40 if you use a separate Internet service provider). For that, you get 256kbps, five times the speed of the best current analog-modem connections. (Even faster rates, up to 7 mbps, will be offered at higher prices.) You might not receive complex web pages all that faster–much of today’s “World Wide Wait” is due to heavy demand on the Internet’s transmission infrastructure, not to the home connection. But it’ll be a boon to Net-based multiplayer games, and it could make streaming video practical at last (opening another potential explosion of many-to-many communication, as mentioned here last week). And you’ll be able to talk on the phone and use the Net at the same time, without an extra line.

A couple caveats: The high speeds only come to, not from, you; it’ll still cost more to become your own Net server. And it’s all promised by a company whose on-time performance record has left more than a little to be desired.

SIGN OF THE WEEK (ad card on the front of a Seattle Times vending machine): “Out of the Box News.” That’s dangerously close to KIRO-TV’s 1993 slogan, “News Outside the Box.” The station’s only starting to recover from that debacle.