So: I was walking back from the street scene outside the Obama fundraiser for Patty Murray at the Westin. 

Near the Dahlia Lounge, I received a “Hey” from a parked Jaguar.

From within the luxury car, a mature woman with flashy mall-teen fake fingernails smiled and started to chat me up with the typical small talk stuff.

Then she quickly segued the conversation. She asked if she could come back to my place, or at least join her in the car.

I hemmed and hawed my way out of the conversation, without the topic of money ever emerging.

What this might mean: On an 80 degree day in Seattle, even the instigators of “street” commerce prefer to stay out of the sun.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Thoughts on recent performance events, big and small, on the Hill:

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1) The Capitol Hill Block Party.

From all accounts it was a smashing success. Some 10,000 people attended each of the event’s three days. Except for one no-show due to illness, all the big advertised bands satisfied their respective throngs. Seattle finally has a second summer attraction with top big-name musical acts. (I personally don’t consider an outdoor ampitheater in the middle of eastern Washington to be “in Seattle.”)

But as the Block Party becomes a bigger, bolder, louder venture, it can’t help but lose some of its early funky charm, and a piece of its original raison d’etre.

Once a festival starts to seriously woo major-label acts, it has to start charging real money at the gates. It’s not just to pay the bands’ management, but also for the security, the sound system, the fences around the beer gardens, and assorted other ratcheted-up expenses.

That, by necessity, makes the whole thing a more exclusive, less inclusive endeavor.

The street fair booths that used to be free get put behind the admission gates. The merchants, political causes, and community groups operating these booths only end up reaching those who both can and want to pay $23 and up to get in.

I’m not suggesting the Block Party shut down or scale back to its earlier, small-time self.

I’m suggesting an additional event, perhaps on another summer weekend. It would be what the Block Party used to be—free to all, but intended for the people of the Hill. An all-encompassing, cross-cultural celebration of the neighborhood’s many different “tribes” and subcultures. An event starring not just rock and pop and hiphop, but a full range of performance types. An event all about cross-pollenization, exchanges of influence, and cultural learning.

It wouldn’t be a “Block Party Lite,” but something else, something wonderful in its own way.

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2) Naked Girls Reading: “How To” Night.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about a strip club in Los Angeles called “Crazy Girls.” I told him I would rather pay to see sane girls.

Now I have. And it’s beautiful.

“Naked Girls Reading” is a franchise operation, originally based in Chicago. But it’s a perfect concept for Seattle. It’s tastefully “naughty” but not in any way salacious. It’s not too heavy. It’s entertaining. It’s edifying. It could even be billed as providing “empowerment” to its cast.

The four readers last Sunday night, plus the dressed female MC (costumed as a naughty librarian), all came from the neo-burlesque subculture. But this concept is nearly the exact opposite of striptease dancing. There’s no stripping, no teasing, and no dancing. The readers enter from behind a stage curtain, already clad in just shoes and the occasional scarf. They sit at a couch. They take turns reading aloud. When each reader has performed three brief selections, the evening is done.

Each performance has a theme. Last Sunday, it was “How To.” The readers mostly chose types of texts that are seldom if ever read aloud in public. Given Seattle’s techie reputation, it’s only appropriate that we rechristen instructional text as an art form.

Selections ranged from explosive-making (from the ’70s cult classic The Anarchist Cookbook), to plate joining in woodwork, to home-brewing kombucha tea, to deboning a chicken (from The Joy of Cooking), to the famous Tom Robbins essay “How to Make Love Stay.” The women performed these selections with great humor, great voices, and great sitting posture.

Despite what you may hear from the Chicken Littles of the book and periodical industries, The Word isn’t going away any time soon, any more than The Body. Both obsessions retain their eternal power to attract, no matter what.

“Naked Girls Reading” performances are held the first Sunday of each month in the Odd Fellows Building, 10th and East Pine. Details and ticket info are at nakedgirlsreading.com/seattle. The promoters also promise a “Naked Boys Reading” evening at a yet-unset date. (The participles won’t be all that’s dangling.)

If we’re to believe one of these condom-company PR surveys, Seattleites have a lot less sex than the national average. Just an average of 75 encounters a year, compared to a national average of 82. Maybe the feds shouldn’t have shut down Rick’s strip club.

Samantha Roddick, owner of a high-end London sex toy shop, on the UK TV miniseries Sex: How to Do Everything:

There are no straight lines in nature.

As part of a federal plea bargain with associates of strip-club vet Frank Colacurcio Sr., his Talents West company and its three remaining clubs (Rick’s in Lake City, Honey’s Everett, and Foxy’s Tacoma) have closed.

The Everett building will be razed. The other two, plus the previously-closed Sugar’s in Shoreline, become U.S. Government property, to be auctioned off.

Think of this as another opportunity. Let’s get ’em reopened under new management, bringing more class to the shows and more respect toward the performers.

One of the great cult filmmakers has passed on at age 89.

Decades before the Lifetime Movie Network, he had the vision to combine two female-centered genres—soap opera melodramatics and softcore sex.

The visual, narrative, and acting styles of his ’60s New York films (Moonlighting Wives, The Love Merchant, Red Roses of Passion, etc.) borrowed heavily from the era’s daytime TV soaps. Harsh lighting; long speeches; single-camera-angle dialogue scenes with people talking to one another but looking out in the same direction.

The women and men in these films had a lot of sex, but it was obsessive-compulsive sex, which often inflamed his characters’ feelings of guilt and helplessness.

As the grindhouse film circuit turned to Eastmancolor sunniness later in that decade, Sarno came to spend his summers filming in Sweden. These films (Swedish Wildcats, Butterflies, Young Playthings) now had bright skies and green scenery and pouting young blonde stars. But they were still rooted in pathos and dramatic conflict. And they still depicted their heroines and heroes as fully dimensional people, torn between conflicting desires, or between desires and obligations.

When theatrical softcore faded as a commercial genre in the ’70s, Sarno turned to directing hardcore porn under pseudonyms—first for porn theaters, then direct to video. He kept at this until 1990. But hardcore’s stag-film aesthetic of frenetic fake “heat” and forced “happiness” wasn’t really his style.

By then, Seattle’s Something Weird Video had issued several of Sarno’s softcore dramas on VHS. With these releases, and later DVD reissues, Sarno became known as someone a cut or three above the genre’s formulaic hacks.

Retro Seduction Cinema (part of the string of video labels started in New Jersey by William Hellfire and Michael Raso) acquired other old Sarno films, and reissued some that Something Weird had put out before.

Then in 2004 they brought him out of retirement to make one comeback opus, Suburban Secrets. It was shot on handheld video cams, with much of the regular cast and crew from Raso and Hellfire’s lesbian horror-spoof vids. It’s two and a half hours long. While the cast isn’t as adept at dialogue histrionics as it is at body bumping, Sarno’s signature touches shine through. Where Raso’s movies usually hide behind the safe emotional costumery of “meta” parody, Suburban Secrets treats its characters, and the sex they’re having, as if they actually meant something.

For all the press and acclaim and high-profile-osity accorded over the decades to the Lusty Lady, the operation was simply a slightly-cleaned-up rendition of a live peep show, a type of sex business devised at Manhattan’s 42nd Street fleshpots of the ’70s.

Considering how much the porn and stripper industries have changed since then, what’s amazing isn’t that the Lusty’s closing in June, but that it’s lasted this long.

In an age when high school kids freely disseminate nude cell phone pictures of themselves and “amateur adult couple” images flow bountifully on Tumblr blogs, the mere sight of nude women across a glass curtain has lost its novelty.

The full story of the place, when it’s written, will be a story of a changing city and a great job of branding. Its roots are in the Amusement Center, a pinball-and-bowling arcade on the ground floor of the Showbox ballroom, first opened circa 1938. By the 1970s the coin-op arcade had gone, replaced by a new business under the same sign and name with coin-op stag film booths.

In 1981 it was revamped again, as a nominal nonprofit calling itself The Venusian Church and Temple of Aphrodite. It still had a few movie booths, but its main attractions were two live coin-op shows. One had nude couples making out (but never coiting) on stage. The other had naked lady dancers, performing continuously in staggered shifts all day and night. (I had a summer crush that year on one of those first live dancers.)

The Venusian Church concept generated its share of civic controversy at the time, but it faded as a commercial premise. When the peep dance operation moved across and down First Avenue in the mid-’80s (to the former Seven Seas Tavern building), it only kept the “Amusement Center” name. That was soon changed to “the Lusty Lady,” a name the owners were already using for a branch operation in San Francisco.

Along with the new name and location came a highly promoted new image. While the “Venusian Church” brand had sought to confront moralists, the “Lusty Lady” brand was meant to fit right in with the new Seattle’s upscale NPR-ish affectations. It advertised itself as the respectable sex business. It boasted of how its workers were well treated in clean surroundings by kind mother-hen managers. (Contrary to common belief at the time, it wasn’t all-female owned.)

Its main promotional vehicle, of course, has been its marquee sign with its cute dirty-joke slogans lit up in huge type. Roger Forbes’ old XXX movie houses downtown in the ’70s and ’80s had had all-text signage; but the Lusty’s ever-changing punnery was itself an entertainment, all good clean dirty fun.

Business at the Lusty peaked in the late 1990s. It owned its building, so it got a big cash infusion by selling the “air rights” above the space to the Four Seasons Hotel’s developers. But the overall economy, and the peep concept’s own fall from favor, meant its end was nigh.

What now? I’d obviously like to keep the sign up (and continually refitted with new risque verbiage). Behind it, I’d like to see an adult cabaret, with tables and chairs and coffee and snacks and burlesque-inspired strip acts. (And while we’re at it, let’s amend the WA liquor laws, so this new establishment could serve up both cocktails and no-touch nudity.)

Heck, even “AutoTune the News” is more arousing than many of Billboard.com’s “50 Sexiest Songs Of All Time.”

Mayor Mike McGinn takes office today. He’s released the results of his online call for citizens’ ideas for Seattle. In this highly unscientific poll, more people want a legal nude beach than want another NBA team. (The top request: more transit.)

(via Rosa Blasi at HuffingtonPost):

Show me any man who has sick amounts of money and power, and I will show you a man playing musical vaginas.

Today let us all hail Zipporah Foster, launcher of a bold effort to improve working conditions for Portland strippers. She’s suing at least four strip clubs there, demanding they stop treating their dancers as “independent contractors” and charging them a “stage fee” for the privilege of hustling for tips.

Because these are industrywide practices, Foster’s crusade could help exotic dancers throughout the country.

You who have been customers at these places: Wouldn’t you prefer your hard-earned money go to the women who worked hard to earn it from you, rather than get taken by “the house”?

Playboy (another now-imperiled oldline media brand) has posted a gallery of all of its 1970s covers. They display the peak of the magazine’s creativity, followed by a quick fall back into formula.

The magazine had begun in the 1950s with the simple premise of being the first US nudie mag respectable enough to attract mainstream advertising.

By 1970, its first real competitors had shown up. Its editors responded by turning the Playboy cover, theretofore a simple tease shot of a blandly grinning model in an artsy composition, into something more complex, more colorful, more mysterious.

The images still weren’t as complex as real sexual desire, but they began to approach that high-erotica territory. It remained a slick corporate publication promoting a superficial, smirking approach to sex, but it had begun to hint at the emotional and aesthetic layers beyond its skin-deep stance.

(This being the ’70s, the images also swirled with that era’s soft-focus photography and art-deco nostalgia.)

Then precisely in 1978, that effort ended.

Convenience stores had begun placing Playboy and its raunchier rivals behind the counter. To stem massive circulation losses, the magazine’s covers went to big bold headlines surrounding basic staring-at-the-camera poses.

Later on, of course, came all the models with teased-up hair and cartoonish implants and the rest of the unsexy nonsense that followed.

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One of the few things more formulaic and trite than Playboy is anti-Playboy criticism. Latest example: Kate Harding at Salon.com.

Harding quotes one of the mag’s recent models, Joanna Krupa, praising the opportunity it gives to women such as herself and asking why any feminist would criticize such success.

Then Harding reiterates some (not all) of the standard anti-Playboy and anti-porn stances—and other “actual feminist” arguments that aren’t even about the topic at hand.

Yes, as Harding asserts, Playboy is the pay-and-prestige apex of a certain type of modeling work, one that’s not open to women who don’t have the specific “look,” and which can be a tough and short-lived career even to those who break in.

But ALL OF CORPORATE ENTERTAINMENT is like that.

There are a few stars, a lot of would-be stars, and a heck of a lot of strugglers and strivers. They’re all fighting for the opportunity to express some committee’s vision of what will sell to the target market.

To change that, you need to change the whole showbiz industry model, away from the centralized purveyors of formula tripe (in any genre) and toward more street-level works expressing real ideas and passions.

In sex entertainment, that’s being done by the neo-burlesque movement and its many spinoff ventures, by the burgeoning erotic art scene, and by the thousands of amateur erotic writers, photographers, and painters now online.

With all the aborted/infanticided girl babies in China these days (despite heavy-handed government efforts there to stop those practices), where will that nation’s rising population of surplus males find mates? Would you believe, Tanzania? (From the (London) Times.)

Playboy, like a lot of oldline media outfits, is in fiscal trouble. Earlier this year, according to industry rumor, its management offered up the company for potential sale. The asking price was apparently far above the firm’s estimated market value. That’s because the 83-year-old Hugh Hefner wanted to make sure he maintained his ultra-hedonist lifestyle (and he didn’t really want to sell anyway).

Still, at least two potential buyers emerged. They’re private equity firms, companies that exist only to buy and sell other companies (like the one that briefly owned Chrysler).

One of these would-be bunny buyers, according to Marlow Harris, also currently owns the Century 21 and Coldwell Banker real-estate brands.

Make up your own puns about “development,” “view lands,” or “treating women like property” here.

Hooters just opened in South Park, the first national chain restaurant in that defiantly unchained pocket neighborhood.

(Update 10/11/09: I got there today. It’s really in Boulevard Park, a tiny commercial strip separated from the South Park neighborhood by a lonely highway overpass. A McDonald’s already exists along this strip.)

I don’t particularly care for Hooters.

I really don’t care for essays that attack Hooters from the standpoint of simplistic gender-ideology, such as Lindy West’s piece in the Stranger.

On the other hand, I love the comment thread following West’s piece.

The commenters hit upon some important points West had elided past:

• Is Hooters’ food really any good? (Some say yes; others insist on the superiority of locally-owned hot wing emporia such as Wing Dome.)
• Is the “Hooters Girl” image demeaning to all women? (Some say yes; some say no; I say there’s no such thing as “all women.”)
• Is it wrong to use sex to sell stuff? (If so, many commenters note, the Stranger would be at least as guilty.)
• Are West and the Stranger contradicting their “sex positive” stance? (I say no, they’re simply overriding it with a stance that’s even more vital to “alt” culture—the stance of sneering at anything to do with “the wrong kind of white people”.)

West, most of the commenters, and I agree on one point—the Hooters Girl look (apparently inspired by the sorority-slut uniforms in the 1979 sexploitation film H.O.T.S.) is, to all of us, decidedly unsexy.

And the whole Hooters aesthetic/experience conjures association with/nostalgia for fraternity-sorority bonding, but is profoundly anti-intellectual and anti-education. The apparent ideal Hooters customer is an adult who went to college but didn’t learn anything.