Immediately after the new Belltown Messenger came out, I buried myself into a freelance project that won’t see the bright light o’ day for another month. So here are some of the things that have happened this past week or so:

RONNIE BARKER, RIP: In the early ’80s, during one of my many long-term bouts with chronic depression, I became utterly fond of the Two Ronnies sketch comedy show, which KING-TV had picked up (yes, a BBC show airing an American commercial station, albeit at 2:30 a.m. or some such.) The station had just introduced 24-hour telecasting (the first in Seattle to do so), filling up the wee hours with moldie-oldie movies, repeats of the 11 p.m. news, and BBC imports brought over here by Time-Life Television. The Two Ronnies was the best of this motley schedule. It featured cute skits, whimsical monologue stories by Barker’s partner Ronnie Corbett, and fake news bits aqt the beginning and end that relied on time-tested comedy shticks and wordplay rather than anything “topical.” Barker was a genius. And now, as he would say, “It’s goodnight from him.”

AUGUST WILSON, RIP: With the beloved playwright’s demise, Rebecca Wells now ascends to the niche title of the best writer living in Seattle who never writes about Seattle.

STRIP UPDATE: Because a judge stopped ’em from maintaining a permanent “temporary moratorium” on new adult entertainment clubs, the Seattle City Council adopted a draconian set of restrictions on how they can operate. Like the late, unlamented Teen Dance Ordinance of the mid-’90s, this is a not-so-thinly disguised attempt to harass an unwanted entertainment genre into nonexistence. A Reuters dispatch claimed the move was ironic in the face of Seattle’s “liberal,” “tolerant” reputation.

I could’ve told ’em different.

What the nation sees as our supposed blue-state radicalism is really baby-boomer smugness; i.e., just another kind of conservatism. We’re a city whose sociocultural establishment thinks glass bowls are “art” and easy-listening sax solos are “jazz.” We’re a city that loves “diversity,” as long as it’s limited to upscale white women, upscale white gays, and dead black musicians.

We’re a city that only tolerates sex if that scary-sticky-gooey topic can be subsumed under a more acceptable rubric such as individual “empowerment.” So we embrace a certain peep-show parlor where a thick glass curtain keeps the genders neatly apart; but an establishment where women and (gasp!) men could share the same space, even (shudder!) touch one another? Must be stopped!

At least there’s some solace that four City Council members bravely voted against the ban-in-all-but-name, and that affected entrepreneurs are already planning to take the city to court.

For weeks and weeks, depressing developments have dominated the scene. Now, at last, I’ve got something positive to report, at least for my local readers.

Thanks to a federal district judge’s ruling on Monday, new strip clubs in Seattle can finally open again.

I’ve long asserted that a healthy sex-entertainment industry’s a vital part of an urban milieu. It attracts tourist dollars. It employs many creative types, giving them money to support their painting, costume design, rock bands, novel writing, etc. It entrances and pacifies its patrons, instead of turning them into drunken boors. And, at least sometimes, it inspires its clients to go home and satisfy their wives and girlfriends.

For too long, the Seattle cultural establishment’s idea of the perfect strip club has been a peep show parlor, where the genders are permanently separated by a glass curtain. Nothing else could more vividly depict the so-called “Seattle freeze,” a regional sociological phenomenon in which isolation and even loneliness are mistaken for positive human traits.

No, we need better. We need a place where women and men are in the same room, perhaps even talking to one another.

And not just another clone of the Deja Vu formula either, but a club where the costumes and performances are inspired by the neo-burlesque revolution instead of by the bleach-and-silicone porn-star stereotype. A place where the women who show and the men who look are both made to feel good about their sexualities. A place that could even attract a coed clientele.

I’ve known people who’ve wanted to start such a club over the years, but who’ve been stymied by the city’s 17-year “temporary moratorium” on adult entertainment licenses. I hope they can now get up and running, and soon.

Heck, while we’re at it let’s also have strip clubs for women (again), and for gay men (for the first time).

A Dirty Shame, which I finally viewed on DVD this past Saturday morning, is perhaps John Waters’s masterwork and the greatest socio-political sex comedy of our time.

You can read a plot summary elsewhere, but I’ll just give the short version here: Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman) is a “neuter” (i.e., sexually repressed) Baltimore housewife who lives in a bland house on a bland street and runs a bland convenience store with her husband and her mother (Chris Isaak and Suzanne Shepherd respectively). Her chief annoyance: The growing numbers of “perverts” on her street, including her grown daughter Caprice (Selma Blair with impossible fake breasts).

But a bop on the head during a traffic accident, combined with the “sexual healing” prowess of garage mechanic Ray Ray (Johnny Knoxville of MTV’s Jackass), turns her into another of the “sex addicts” of all persuasions and kinks, who vow to take over the street, the city, and eventually the world. Mother and hubby start a reactionary protest group out to enforce “normal” behavior, and the battle is set for the hearts and crotches of Baltimore.

The sex is all farcical and nudity-free, as befits a GOP-controlled America in which even mentioning glandular drives (other than fear and greed) is an ultimate act of subterfuge.

A whole essay or four could be written about its queer-eyed-for-the-straight-guy utopia of sexual anarchy, and how the forces of “neuter” control naturally see it as a threat (to work, to productivity, to a whole social/aesthetic order of suburban obedience), and the “happy ending” in which Ullman discovers the new kink of head-butting to orgasm.

In our schizoid real world, of course, “pleasure,” even sexual pleasure, is sometimes decried as a sinful departure from the staight-n’-narrow ways. But it’s also exploited in advertising, in the magazines, and on “hip” TV channels as the promised result of buying and owning consumer products; which, for most of us, requires working for The Corporation or its affiliated entities.

Waters’s fucking-in-the-streets utopia, in which everybody’s constantly horny and everything safe and consensual is acceptable, would negate that motivation. People would still work, to some extent. They’d still build and/or acquire homes, perhaps with fully equipped dungeons in the basements. They’d still strive to look good, by their changed standards of looking good (i.e., the adult daughter’s impossible breast implants). And because of the lust/luxury continuum (the words have the same Latin root), other sensual-pleasure based consumerism would still occur (swimming pools, hot tubs, limos with big back seats, foods with aphrodesiac or at least mood-setting properties, role-play costumes, corsets, whips, restraints, and, of course, contraceptives, condoms, and STD treatments).

Also note that Waters avoids potential plot complications that might negate his premise. Minor children are not seen, and are barely mentioned, in the film. The repressed mother mentions syphilis once, but AIDS apparently doesn’t exist in the film’s fictional universe. But the whole notion of the film’s sexual utopia is completely informed by gay culture, whose solidarity and assertiveness have been forged by a quarter century of fighting AIDS.

Ultimately, Waters’s erotic ideal posits straight women and men behaving, well, more like gay men, specifically post-Pride Movement gay men. A Dirty Shame‘s proudly self-proclaimed “sex addicts” define their entire beings by their libidos and their fetishes, and forthrightly demand to tell the whole world about ’em. It’s a world where gays and lesbians are just subsets of desire.

John Waters has given us a glimpse of an all-encompassing, fully-functioning Queer Nation.

…in ad-industry lingo, as “a promise which cannot be legally substantiated.”

…classifies the sexual performance of her fellow musicians by the instruments they play onstage.

Upper-management men with pain fetishes become submissives. Middle-management men with pain fetishes become joggers.

Mary Kay Letourneau Faulaau has now made the ultimate avowal to the world that her relationship was, and is, one of consensual Troo Luv, not one of exploitation. If the subsequent years prove otherwise, she won’t have been the first woman to marry out of misguided motivation.

Yep, once more the costumed and street-dressed throngs descended upon the Cinerama, engaged in a waiting and bonding ritual prior to the local premiere of a franchise fantasy sequel. This time, the film in question was the third-but-really-sixth Star Wars megamonster.

The low-budget, creaky-optical-effects charm of the original SW is, of course, long gone in this big digital-FX spectacle. The “New Hope” message of the first three films is also subsumed by the galactic-geopolitical epic plotline of the prequels.

I’ve previously written that the previous prequel, Attack of the Clones, was all about how a republic can devolve into an empire; it was an obvious parallel to the US political situation, even though Clones had been written before the 2000 election fraud and had been principally filmed before 9/11. Sith, some critics say, makes the analogy even more overt.

All that apparently didn’t matter (or, in SW geekspeak, “mattered not”) to the crowd that had gathered three-quarters around the block by 6 p.m. Wednesday, for the 12 a.m. Thursday premiere (and the 3:45 a.m. second show!). Some had camped out for days. (The self-proclaimed “Star Wars Guy,” who’d tried to camp out in front of the theater months before the premiere, had ran afoul of city authorities, and instead camped out in front of the IMAX theater at the Pacific Science Center.)

Anyhoo, the SW line was full of dudes, dudettes, and li’l tykes. All seemed boistrous and cheerful despite the miserable weather (torrential downpour, high winds, lightning). Some of them had brought card tables and card games. Some had portable DVD players spinning out the previous SW films. Some purchased light saber toys (with authentic SW sound effects) from roving vendors. Some teamed up to place Domino’s Pizza orders from cell phones, or to acquire snacks and beverages from Ralph’s deli-mart, kitty corner from the theater.

They were united in the spirit of fandom. They braved the elements, and the snickering local news media, to be part of something bigger than any mere movie. They were there to be among one another, to have fun, to dress up, to dare to look silly in public, to embrace their inner Jedi-osity.

That kind of spirit is potentially more powerful than any fictional “Force.” In a world gone all too serious, we need that spirit more than ever.

…but “If You’re Not Picky About Color” is now a trademark (see bottom of linked page). I suppose that would prevent the phrase from being stolen as the title of an interracial porno.

I’VE GOT A REPORT in the current North Seattle Sun about the Seattle cable access channel’s latest attempts to rein in the porn-compilation series Mike Hunt TV.

It’s been a wacky couple of weeks around here. It’s going to be a couple more wacky weeks. So let’s all just relax and enjoy some patented, guaranteed-to-work Harry Stonecipher pickup lines:

• “Would you like to tour my cockpit?”
• “I’ve laid thousands. No, wait, that’s not it. I’ve laid off thousands.”
• “In the unlikely event of a water landing, your bust can be used as a flotation device.”
• “I’ve just lost a huge Air Force tanker contract. I really need some consolation.”
• “I want to screw you the way I screwed the Machinists’ Union.”
• “You can have all the peanuts and little liquor bottles you want.”
• “I’m certified to navigate without instruments.”
• “Sorry, but I can’t let you into my apartment without a full body search.”
• “I can cross the Pacific without refueling, if you know what I mean.”
• “You’re better stacked than the landing pattern at O’Hare.”
• “Headsets are $5. Head’s free.”
• “Wait ’til you see the size of my hangar!”

…to use a quaint phrase quipped in the Seattle Times, even made the pages of Rupert Murdoch’s UK tabloid The Sun, despite the lack of any readily available photographs of her appearing in that paper’s preferred manner.

Erotic Harry Potter fan fiction.

Harry Stonecipher, who’s helped Boeing become an also-ran in its own industry, has resigned in disgrace after the 70-year-old CEO got caught in a sex scandal. Maybe now we can get somebody who’ll set the company right, somebody who won’t confuse the stock price with the bottom line. If this new person drops the luxury of that Chicago head office and moves it back to Seattle, all the better.

…love embarrassing sex writing.