• City Council president Richard Conlin claims “Seattle’s Legislative Strategy Worked.” This essentially means urban planning and human services agencies were decimated a lot less than they could have been.
• Meanwhile in Minnesota, Rep. legislators and the Dem. governor just couldn’t get it done. Or rather, the legislators demanded big giveaways for the rich and big cutbacks for everybody else, and the governor refused to cave.
• Speaking of enforced austerity, the Int. Monetary Fund leader whose career has involved imposing such shock treatments onto whole countries? His sexual assault defense team is doing a swell job at discrediting the victim.
• Margaret Kimberly reminds us that proudly backing (upscale white) gay civil rights is not the same thing as building a fairer society for the non-upscale and the non-white.

Back in the alleged good old days of American journalism, chain-owned newspapers would often be ordered by corporate HQ to run the same chainwide stories. (The Hearst papers were particularly notorious for this.)

Now, the Arizona-born company calling itself Village Voice Media has just done this at its papers, including Seattle Weekly.

They’re running the same expose piece, entitled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.” It’s an attack on Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” PR campaign, which claims “100,000 to 300,000” underage girls are trapped in street prostitution in the U.S. every year.

In contrast, the article claims the real number, while unknowable, is probably much, much smaller. The big number, says the story, comes from a highly flawed academic research piece about kids “at risk” for becoming hookers, a figure that pretty much includes the entire teen populations of U.S./Mexico border towns.

A sidebar item acknowledges a VVM corporate interest in combating anti-sex-work scare campaigns. The fear mongers pressured Craigslist to stop running (unpaid) online sex-work ads, and are now setting their rhetorical gunsights on providers of (paid) sex-work ads, including VVM and its Backpage.com site.

To summarize, the article’s “good news” is: A lot fewer girls (and boys) are underage hookers than you might think. If you hire an escort, you and she/he are breaking some laws, but most likely statutory rape isn’t one of them.

The bad news remains: There still are some minors trapped in underage hooking, even if they’re a lot rarer than Kutcher and co. claim. In Seattle we had our own highly publicized pimping scandal last year, involving a few young-adult males and perhaps a dozen underage females.

(I happen to believe escorting and other sex work should be legal, and regulated. When it is, it will be much easier for law enforcement and social workers to find underage participants, divert them into other lives (perhaps in supervised group homes), and to prosecute any madames or pimps employing them.)

•

UPDATE #1: As if right on cue, Mayor McGinn and police Lt. Eric Sano held a press briefing on Friday denouncing VVM’s Backpage.com and supporting Kutcher’s PR drive against it. Sano claimed “there have been four documented cases of child prostitution openly advertised on Backpage.com.” Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely, while not directly involved with Backpage’s operations, insists the site’s staff does all it can to reject and/or remove ads offering erotic services by under-18s.

UPDATE #2: Elsewhere in that company, the Village Voice itself has cut 60 percent of its staff in recent years. The New York weekly’s remaining employees threatened to go on strike this past week over wage and benefit cuts. Now comes word the strike may have been averted.

UPDATE #3: John Spangenthal-Lee at SeattleCrime.com said on July 5 that the VVM article was wrong about Seattle Police records concerning juvenile prostitution arrests. Spangenthal-Lee claims there were about twice as many such arrests in 2007-2009 than the article counted. Seattle Weekly managing editor Caleb Hannan, whose staff supplied research for the chainwide VVM article, told Publicola they got their numbers from the SPD.

UPDATE #4: The Sex Workers Outreach Project, an organization supporting legal and civil rights for sex workers, issued a statement “responding” to the VVM story. The statement approves of the article’s reality-checking regarding the extent of the situation. But SWOP goes on to state the real issue here isn’t Kutcher vs. VVM and Backpage.com:

…There are three overlapping issues here: the trafficking of youth into the sex industry, the service needs of youth with experience trading sex for survival and the rights of consenting adult sex workers.

UPDATE #5: Ryan Hodgson pointed me in the direction of a Seattle Weekly item from last October. It seems that before the Kutcher Krusade or the chainwide VVM counterattack, SW editors publicized the FBI’s claim that Seattle was “Ranked Worst City in U.S. for Child Prostitution.”

• Microsoft boss Steve Ballmer said he’d like to be involved in an effort to bring men’s pro basketball back to Seattle. But, he claims, there’s a “real estate problem.” This problem can only be solved with a new arena, which would cost $300-500 million. KeyArena, Ballmer asserts, is too small; though it’s actually well in the range of NBA arena capacities. What it lacks are more luxury boxes and an NHL-friendly hockey configuration. Ballmer also apparently didn’t mention that as long as the City of Seattle owns KeyArena, it won’t subsidize a new building that would compete for concerts and other bookings. Even if the city had the money, which it doesn’t. (Question: Could KeyArena be expanded again without knocking down the nearby Northwest Court complex?)
• For decades, University of Washington administrators have chafed at the presence of all those pesky college students walking around, diverting time and attention away from the world-class-research-institution stuff the administrators would much rather focus on. Now, the current UW bigwigs have come across a solution, in the form of a whoppin’ 20 percent in-state tuition hike. Students plan to protest.
• The federal government has indeed sold the former Rick’s strip club building. And yes, the new owner will probably open another strip club there.
• Howard S. Wright, the construction giant that built the Space Needle and Columbia Center, was sold off to a Texas company.
• Could it really rain more at airports?

• You’ve got your Fremont parade. You’ve got your gay parade. You’ve got your Seafair parade. Now get ready for a one time only “largest-ever parade” on Tuesday morning (right downtown, right at morning rush hour!). It’s part of a huge Lions Club convention.
• If the county’s proposed $20 car surtax doesn’t pass, get ready for draconian Metro bus cuts.
• Everybody loves those Lake Union houseboats, except them pesky bureaucrats, who could just regulate them away.
• While we wait to see if some new owner will reopen Rick’s strip club, another skin-spectacle joint on Lake City Way is about to open. Its name: Pandora’s. You’ll get no “box” jokes (or Avatar references) from this website, at least not today.

Seattle loses a major community institution this week, quietly.

SCAN TV (Seattle Community Access Network), the nonprofit that’s operated the city’s public access cable channel for more than a decade, closes up shop. SCAN declined to bid on another contract to run the channel, after penny pinching city bureaucrats slashed the funding for its operation.

The Seattle Community College District’s SCCtv agreed to take over the channel at the vastly reduced funding level. The new iteration of the access channel, renamed Seattle Community Media, starts Friday. For the first few weeks, as SCM gets its technical infrastructure together, programming will be limited to rerun episodes of shows supplied by existing SCAN citizen producers.

With the change comes the closing of the access studio on N. 98th Street east of Aurora. Starting in 1983 (when Group W Cable opened it as a condition of its city cable contract), the Northwest Access and Production Center’s modest 30-by-40-foot main studio hosted an astounding array of artisanal TV. Citizens signed up for time slots, took training classes on the gear, and created all-volunteer productions, some quite elaborate.

That room was known as the “big studio.” There was also the “small studio,” a walk-in closet with one camera and a control console; producers strove to stretch that room’s capabilities, even producing musical variety shows (albeit starring very small combos).

SCM will reinstall the SCAN equipment on the North Seattle Community College campus, just a few blocks east of the old site. This means producers will still be able to make multi-camera, studio-based TV shows, as well as single camcorder, field-based video footage.

But nothing on the new SCM channel will be cablecast live.

That means (1) no call-in segments, and (2) no in-studio surprises. In-studio mistakes, yes, but no surprises.

•

At the access channel’s peak of popularity in the mid 1990s, a Seattle Times feature story described its panoply of programming.

There was music of every conceivable genre, including some of the earliest footage of Soundgarden and other future “Seattle scene” stars (and should-have-been stars).

There were ethnic cultural programs ranging from Chinese to Somali.

There were single-issue discussion and monologue shows advocating everything from gun rights to alternative medicine.

There were preachers of every theological stripe, including UFO religions and atheism.

There was the Rev. Bruce Howard, a music teacher who created (and successively re-created) his own spiritual discipline, evolving from fire and brimstone to (relatively) happy folk singing. (No, I don’t know whatever happened to him.)

There was Philip Craft’s Political Playhouse, in which the sometimes naked host offered up interviews and comedy skits expressing his flavor of radicalism (politicians = bad, marijuana = good). Craft later moved to L.A. and helped make a low budget film based on his experiences, Anarchy TV.

Another lefty political show, Deface the Nation, had a vegan cooking spinoff series called All You Can Stomach.

There was the drag queen cooking show Queen’s Kitchen and its sequel Love, Laverne (a live sitcom).

There were other home brewed comedy ventures such as Bend My Ear Seattle (with hosts Chardmo and Johnny 99 and house band Hot Dog Water), The Make Josh Famous Half-Hour of Garbage, and Gavin’s Hawse (with Gavin Guss, later of the neo-pop band Tube Top and now a solo singer-songwriter).

There was Richard Lee’s Kurt Cobain Was Murdered, in which the steadily crazier looking and sounding Lee reiterated, week after week for years, his specious conspiracy theories. Lee eventually ran for mayor in 2001, showing up at a debate with a beard and in a dress.

There was deadpan comic MC Spud Goodman, one of the two access stars who graduated to “real” TV, hosting bizarre skits and local bands for four years on channels 22 and 13.

There was the other later-made-it-big guy, serious public affairs interviewer C.R. Douglas, who took his insightful chats with local political leaders to the city-owned Seattle Channel (retiring earlier this year).

And there was the call-in show Bong Hit Championships (did what it said on the tin).

•

In 1999, the access channel had already begun to fade from public awareness. That’s when the city engineered the creation of SCAN, and put the new nonprofit group charge of the channel.

One reason was to remove Comcast AT&T (which, through mergers, wound up with most of Seattle’s cable subscriptions, which would soon after be sold to Comcast) from the responsibility to enforce limits on the channel’s “free speech” policies.

Producers were forbidden from airing commercials or soliciting money on the air. Otherwise, pretty much any content was permitted. Officially, programming wasn’t supposed to violate federal “obscenity” guidelines.

But with a no-prescreening policy in effect, some producers dared to sneak stuff past. Michael Aviaz’s Mike Hunt TV and T.J. Williamson’s Fulfilling Your Fantasies included uncensored excerpts from hardcore porn videos. Aviaz’s show ran off and on for nine years, getting kicked off for good in 2006. Williamson stopped submitting X-rated shows, but continued to program non-controversial travelogue videos under the name Adventure TV.

•

One of the ’90s access stars, monologuist-painter Shannon (Goddess Kring) Kringen, is still on the channel today (though no longer prancing naked on camera).

So are a trio of long-running musical shows, Music Inner City, D’Maurice & Armageddon, and Blues To Dos.

This week’s final SCAN schedule includes much the same range of fare the access channel had in its heyday, albeit without some of the edgier fare.

There’s even a madcap comedy-variety show, The VonHummer Hour.

It’s imported from Portland.

•

The ultimate question should not be, “How could the city defund SCAN?”

It should rather be, “Why was so little done to defend it?”

One reason: In a 200-channel cable TV landscape, this one little unadvertised analog channel lost what local prominence it had.

Another reason: With YouTube and podcasts and video blog posts, a scheduled cable channel is a relatively inconvenient way to distribute and view indie video. And the ol’ WWW in general is a handier way to disseminate niche-audience messages and entertainments (albeit a harder place to find them).

Still, there’s something very invigorating, even democratizing, about people making their own TV and making it available to the whole community to view in real time.

With the right support, SCM could bring that spirit back.

•

UPDATE: Seattle Community Media has now taken over the channel. The schedule of programs is the same as the final SCAN schedule. The only difference so far is the promos between programs. One of them is a sped-up video of a short drive from the old SCAN building to the NSCC campus, where a small staff stands in wait to proclaim “Welcome to Seattle Community Media.”

• Yay to New York for approving gay marriage. We almost forgive you for that dumb NYT paean on Fri., lauding the Portland Timbers soccer team for being almost as successful as the Sounders.
• In other sports news, the UW is soliciting naming rights to the soon-to-be-remodeled Husky Stadium’s “field,” starting in 2013 and continuing “in perpetuity.”
• Big corporations don’t want to be forced to reveal how their CEOs’ salaries compare to their average payrolls. Ah, poor zillionaires….
• Rolling Stone had a harrowing piece a while back about a teenage girl who set herself up as an Internet fashion plate and video blogger, only to attract adult lechers and worse.
• There’s a new art gallery in town, Prographica, specializing in “fine works on paper.” In one of those happy coincidences, its staff includes a UW MFA grad named Kimberly Clark.

Is it hypocritical for me to insult a politician or pundit as a “corporate whore,” when I have respect and admiration for actual whores?

(in no particular order):

• Yes, I will want to have sex with you. Pretty much immediately. ESPECIALLY if I’m too timid to come out and say so. Be aware of this.
• I’d rather you didn’t complain to me about the guys you sleep with, whilst refusing to sleep with me.
• I have a large repertoire of firmly held, and occasionally contradictory, beliefs. You can try to change some of them if you want to.
• I watch TV. I eat meat. I don’t smoke pot. You won’t be able to change any of these.
• I have a lot of persnickety minor food allergies and strange food dislikes. I won’t expect you to know all of them right away. For now, just know that if you order the two of us an almond-encrusted dessert, you’ll get to eat all of it.
• I enjoy images of the female figure. This does not mean I hate women; it means I like women.
• I may have a “baby face,” but I’m over 50, under 5′ 10″, and beer bellied. Looking for a tall dark prince? Keep looking.
• I’m among the long term unemployed. I don’t think it’s romantic or noble. I want to change it. I want a real job. The specific real job I want changes. Sometimes what I want is an office cubicle with my name on it. I want to process data, perform boring routines, and get a deserved compensation.
• Some women have said they would be too intense for me to deal with. In the past, I have had capital-R Relationships with a D.I.D. patient, a bipolar alcoholic, and two women who expected me to casually agree that all males were intrinsically evil. I believe I can handle “intense.”
• People call me “A Writer.” I’ve always rejected that title, and the “romantic” stereotypes associated with it. I have no interest in living in a cabin on an island. I have no interest in becoming famous only after I’m dead. I have no interest in becoming dead.
• I don’t want to be your dependent, your co-dependent, your enabler, your user, your abuser, your enemy, your submissive, your dog, your platonic friend, your gay friend, or your girlfriend. I want to be your boyfriend.
• My sexual fetish is Love.

While Hooters may be gone from Seattle now, there are now several other “breastaurant” chains now serving up sports-bar food via low-cut waitress costumes around the country.

And one of them even uses the name “Twin Peaks,” with no permission from David Lynch (thanks to the vagaries of trademark law).

(Thanx and hat tip to Ronald Holden.)

Most of the Hooters restaurants in Washington, including the Seattle location at south Lake Union, are now closed. The parent company insists it’s not due to any lessened popularity in the chain’s concept. It’s just the matter of a regional franchisee that got into a lawsuit with an unspecified “third party.”

This sort of thing has happened before. Here in the late 1990s, a multistore Burger King franchisee suddenly folded.

Of course this could be an opportunity for some new, all local cleavage-themed restaurant. Perhaps with a neo-burlesque concept. After all, there’s nothing either novel or trademarkable about low-cut waitress costumes. The idea goes back at least as far as the serving wenches in English country inns. (And sometimes the food at Hooters tasted almost as old.)

At 2 a.m. this morning, I finished a book project that won’t earn me a cent for at least six months. I can now resume finding other excuses not to blog.

After I post a few entries I’d been putting off.

First, you might have heard of the big online buzz over what is supposed to be the only nude photo ever posed by Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s a photoshopped fake.

The original “body shot,” to which Taylor’s face was pasted on, is a “tasteful” Hollywood glamour nude, done in 1940 by photographer Peter Gowland and included in a photography guidebook he and his wife issued many years later.

The figure pictured in it doesn’t even remotely match the see-thru shots Taylor had made for Playboy on the set of Cleopatra. Those were published in 1963, less than five years after she was supposed to have posed for the nude. (The Playboy image does not appear to be online in any freely accessible place; here’s a tiny thumbnail of a similar shot.)

Our ol’ pal David Meinert suggests at Publicola that Seattle could get at least a little out of its deep fiscal hole by opening itself up to casinos, slot machines, and booze in strip clubs.

(UPDATE: And our other ol’ pal Goldy thinks it’s a lousy idea.)

At AlterNet, Clarisse Thorn asks the musical question, “Why do we demonize men who are honest about their sexual needs?”

Her answer: Because many women see men, particularly straight men, particularly unfamiliar men, as potential threats. It’s one thing to disdain a woman as a “slut.” It’s vastly more dehumanizing to dismiss a man as a “creep.”

ARI UP OF THE SLITS: Some of the first-generation punk rock women copied, mocked, or expanded on the then-traditional bad-boy rocker tropes. Ari Up, with her bandmates, did something different. They created a sound that was neither “fuck me” nor “fuck you.” It was totally rocking, totally strong, and totally feminine. And it’s seldom been matched.

BOB GUCCIONE: His masterwork, the first two decades of Penthouse magazine, was not merely a “more explicit” imitation of Playboy, as some commentators have described it. It had its own aesthetic, its own fully formed identity.

And so did its originator. If Playboy founder Hugh Hefner was more like William Randolph Hearst (a hermit philosopher secluded on his private estate), Guccione was more like Charles Foster Kane (living with gusto, building and losing a fortune). A Rolling Stone profile, published just before Guccione reluctantly gave up control of what was left of the Penthouse empire, depicts the open-shirted, gold-chain-bearing mogul as a man who poured millions into “life extension” research, even while he smoked the five packs of cigarettes a day that took much of his mouth in 1999 and his life last week.

TOM BOSLEY: Now we may never know what happened to Richie’s older brother.

When one gets to become my age, one is occasionally wont to reminisce.

I have lived through such amazing times. So much history. So many advances. So many struggles. Such cool gadgets.

Herewith, a few of these memories.

I REMEMBER:

• Dial phones.
• 300 Baud modems.
• Thick daily local newspapers.
• Early color TVs with unnaturally orange hues.
• Plymouths, punch cards, and pubic hair.
• Mood rings and copper bracelets.
• Qiana.
• Girdles.
• CompuGraphic typesetting machines, and the HTML-like codes needed to enter text into them.
• National Educational Television (NET).
• Rock n’ roll on AM radio, played by live local DJs.
• When girls in high school were first encouraged to be anything they wanted, but boys were still expected to all be jocks.
• When you had to go a thousand miles to lose your money in a legal casino.
• Rhinelander, Heidelberg, and Lucky Lager.
• Lumbermen’s taverns.
• Road houses.
• When grooming and behaving as a gentleman was not considered ironic or strange.
• Reel-to-reel tapes.
• Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post in every doctor’s waiting room.
• When discrimination was so everyday as to be invisible, if you weren’t the one being discriminated against.
• When most writers in Seattle could be classified in two categories: those who would rather be in New York, and those who would rather be in Missoula.