(via Anne Silberman):

“I usually agree with your take on sex and frivolity and the joys of loving our bodies and those of others.  However, I feel I must take issue with your stance on the Naked Sushi trend.  I wasn’t offended until I read the story at the Seattle Times and saw the photo.Perhaps it was because the model’s face wasn’t included in the shot but I couldn’t help but see the dehumanizing quality of using a living, breathing female as a serving platter!  I was horribly offended and even more so when I read that this is a trend that started in Japan and has moved to the US, first in Los Angeles and now in Seattle!  Where will it stop?  This is not celebratory of life at all.  It is exploitative. Perhaps if others find it offensive, the sushi bar will lose customers and the practice will stop. In a paternalistic, capitalistic society, that is the best we can hope for.

Otherwise, still love Miscmedia.

Anne”

Some people are apparently irate about a Pioneer Square restaurant offering something called “Naked Sushi,” an evening in which little sushi tidbits are served from the Saran-wrapped torso of a reposing woman (wearing just enough, besides the Saran, to appease the Liquor Board).

This is essentially a commercialization of an old Yoko Ono performance-art piece; or, if you will, a fusion-cuisine adaptation of an old entertainment shtick done in Hellfire Club-era London drinking parlors (as fantasized about in Geoff Nicholson’s novel The Food Chain.)

It’s not a statement of hatred against women or against sushi. If the restaurant in question presents it in the proper way, it could be a statement of sensuality, of adoration, and of honor for the circle of life.

Or, if the restaurant in quesiton presents it in the improper way, it could just be a silly little lark.

…at least until today. Here, some random action shots from Sunday. Above: “Le Petite Cirque.” Below: A break-dance contestant practicing prior to his turn onstage.

And some civilians getting in on the act on the big lawn.

Following all this, I saw two and a half sets of the One Reel Film Festival. In these days since the rise and fall of movie dot-coms like AtomFilm, modern U.S. live-action shorts, at least the ones booked for this series, mostly fall into a few main categories, including but not limited to:

• Film-school demo reels, showing off the director’s slickness qualities for the purpose of getting hired in Hollywood;
• Earnest polemical statements, forcibly introducing sociopolitical concepts the director doesn’t know you’ve already heard a thousand times (did you know that advertisements are trying to get you to buy things?);
• Sincere if repetitive homages to other filmmakers or existing pop-culture reference points.

The cliches were particularly fast-n’-furious in the “Sex Ed” set, five unsubtle films in which I learned that:

• Straight couples are inane;
• Straight men are lechers;
• Gay men are sanctimoniously political;
• Lesbians are cute and sassy; and
• Prostitutes are abused waifs.

There’ve gotta be better up-n’-comin’ film and videomakers out there, and I hope to find some.

FROM THE RIDICULOUS to the sublime, Sunday was the last night for the grand old Sorry Charlie’s piano bar. The space has been bought by some hipster capitalists who plan to revamp it into something nice and retro-elegant, but it just won’t be the same.

On closing night, the place was jammed with fans ranging in age from the barley legal to the barely walking. We were united in our love for the place, for the participatory good times shared over the years, and especially for the artistry and geniality of our host lo these many years, the great Howard Fulson. He’s been a piano player with good taste, in a dive bar that tasted good.

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

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

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

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

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

CONTINUING OUR RECAPPING of events we’d documented but not uploaded during our early-summer bout of computerlessness, the Fremont Solstice Parade.

This “silent protest” just might’ve been inspired by our own photo series, Signifying Nothing.

Dr. Seuss’s Sneetches, those universal metaphors for self-titled hipsters and the futulity of exclusive scenes.

The now world-renowned body paint bicyclists and other public nudes have, for several years now, upstaged the parade’s more organized attractions. And for good reason. For two hours a year it’s quasi-legally-tolerated to appear naked on a public street, and to be seen by bystanders of all genders and ages.

Solstice Parade nudity isn’t overtly sexual. Nor is it the formally informal “natural” nudity of naturist camps and free beaches. It’s a whole other thang altogether. It’s a statement of freedom and pride, as much as anything at the Gay Pride parade the following week.

The essential message: We’ve all got bodies, and they’re all great. They’re fun to look at, and fun to live in. A simple and obvious message, but one us repressed Americans still need to hear regularly.

Oregon State U. prof Jon Lewis’s book Hollywood V. Hard Core, now out in paperback, claims the Hollywood studios aren’t and weren’t the free-speech crusaders they sometimes claimed to be. Lewis argues, according to the book’s back-cover blurb, that the studio-imposed ratings system and other industry manipulations served to crush the ’60s-’70s craze for sex films and art films, and thus “allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what movies got made and where they were shown.”

When the Independent Film Channel runs its salute next month to “renegade” type filmmakers of the ’70s, you can compare and contrast IFC’s take on the era with that of Lewis. IFC, I suspect, may describe ’70s cinema as a freewheeling revolutionary era, whose rule-breakin’ bad boys took over the biz and are still among today’s big movers-n’-shakers.

I’d give an interpretation closer to Lewis’s. That’s because I essentially came of age at the height of ’70s cinemania. My early college years (including one year at OSU) coincided with the likes of Cousin Cousine, Swept Away, The Story of O, All the President’s Men, Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Dawn of the Dead, Days of Heaven, Manhattan, Being There, Rock n’ Roll High School, Emmanuelle 2, and countless other classics that forever shaped my worldview.

But that was, to quote a film of the era, “before the dark time. Before the Empire.”

Lucas and Spielberg, those clever studio-system players who let themselves be marketed as mavericks, re-taught the studios how to make commercial formula movies. Before long, they and their imitators became the new kings of the jungle. Francis Coppola, Alan Rudolph, Richard Rush, Terrence Malick, and other medium-expanders were shunted to the sidelines of the biz.

The sorry results can be surveyed on any episode of Entertainment Tonight.

In related news, an alliance of Net-radio entrepreneurs is planning to sue the record industry, claiming the major labels have set royalty rates so high only big corporate stations can afford to legally exist….

…And Jeff Chester of TomPaine.com interprets Comcast’s lastest cable-contract wrangling in Calif. as a scheme to kill public access channels. I don’t think Chester’s allegation’s fully supported by the evidence he gives, but the situation’s still one to watch with concern.

…to so skillfully manipulate his wand that a beautiful girl ends up on her back, smiling angelically and floating beyond the bounds of earthly reality. (Found at the Pioneer Square Magic Shop.)

WHEN MCDONALD’S REOPENED its Third and Pine branch earlier this year (it was shut while the upstairs was remodeled into moderate-income housing units), they didn’t bring back the loud country music they’d formerly blasted out onto the sidewalk in a futile attempt to repel street loiterers. Instead, they had Ronald himself give a proxy warning.

(BTW: A fan site called McBurgers offers recipes it claims resemble the chain’s original formulae, and insists McD’s current market-share troubles would be solved if the company went back to the way it used to make things, before the efficiency experts and cost-cutters started messing everything up.)

A SURE SIGN OF SUMMER in the city: An elegant barefooted lady relaxing with her PowerBook.

THE JAPANESE have long been known for sex-fetishes some westerners might consider odd. Some of the odder ones are listed on this page selling import DVDs. (Link not safe for work.)

The list of videos starts out with easy to understand fantasies: Nude swimming, nude volleyball, nude gymnastics; all portrayed by casts of dozens. From there it gets into less common fantasies, such as couples having sex while the woman’s supposed roommate is supposedly asleep in the same room. Then comes a reference to something called “64 Girls Practice Emergency and First Aid.”

But halfway down the page, there’s a disc called Stark Naked Orchestra.

That’s right: Seventeen female musicians and a female conductor, all wearing only identical tasteful black pumps, sitting or standing up straight, apparently actually performing. Just like the cable pay-per-view show Naked News, this video (which I haven’t viewed) apparently depicts smart, competent women who are nude-but-not-lewd, an ultimate fantasy indeed for certain men living in the age of “women’s empowerment.” (U.S. hoaxster Alan Abel promoted an act called the Topless String Quartet circa 1971, but those women apparently didn’t really play their instruments on stage.)

(Those who insist upon thinking crudely might note that the Stark Naked Orchestra women play only horns, reeds, and percussion instruments, and might ponder whether they sometimes appear with strings.)

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

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

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

NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:

“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.

“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”

I heartily concur.

Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!

Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.

We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.

The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.

Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.

And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.

Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.

Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.

There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.

Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.

As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)

Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.

(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)

(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)

LET THIS BE THE FIRST CORNER to express sympathy and support for Mike Price, the former Washington State football coach who scored the prestigious U of Alabama head-coaching gig, then got fired before his first game after he spent one orgiastic weekend in Pensacola FL with strippers and/or hookers.

That’s just the sort of behavior adored by the guyz on The Best Damn Sports Show Period (and by student-athletes themselves), but so heavily loathed by the powers-that-be in Bama. You know, the state that still flies a variant on the Confederate battle flag, and in which dildos are still illegal.

Far from being vilified for his victimless transgressions, Price should be lauded as a freedom fighter against conservative hypocrisy.

…”we need to make love to the Iraqis after we’ve made war.”

ALAS, our official Best Show On TV, CBC’s Zed, shuts down for the season Tuesday night (11:25 pm) after only 110 weeknight editions. (Still more than Carson showed up for in his last full year.) Starting Wednesday, its time slot will be occupied by hockey payoffs. Now we must wait until fall (or until any yet-unannounced summer reruns) for our fix of weird short films, avant-arts documentary segments, ambient-trance music, and ever-so-elegant host Sharon Lewis (if you’re reading this, Ms. Lewis, please consider becoming my green-card bride so I can live in a sane country).

Or you can go to Zed‘s giant website, where hundreds of films and musical performances from the show are archived. One of my personal favorites on the site is Violet, a complex, existential, and vigorous nine-minute dance short performed by the stunningly accomplished (and elegantly nude) Vancouver dancer Ziyian Kwan. Unfortunately, the site only has an info page (not the film itself) for Babyfilm, a darkly hilarious fake educational film encouraging new parents to become totally paranoid about anything that could possibly be unsafe for the baby. Neither would likely ever appear on PBS, let alone in a high-profile time slot.

This is written on Sunday, March 16. The day before the Irish Catholic Church’s sanitized substitute for the ol’ pagan spring equinox fertility rites. A time to honor nature’s cycle of renewal; the hope that comes from new life; and the libidinous, procreative spirit that makes it all possible.

But instead the world sits and waits for all hell to break loose, for wanton death and destruction to rain from the sky onto a small country already suffering under a brutal dictatorial regime, now to be decimated by the agents of another brutal dictatorial regime.

No, all you masculinity-bashers out there in alternative-land, this is not a war about penises or testosterone. It’s almost the complete opposite of that. Both the Iraqi and U.S. war regimes are fueled by an anti-erotic passion, an ultimately nerdy-geeky quest for abstract power. The U.S. neoconservatives are particularly addicted to this internalized, repressed, retro-pre-pubescent, anti-sex, anti-life state of mind.

This state of mind can be seen among censors who would outlaw images of sex but who don’t mind images of violence. It can be seen in a government that promotes abstinence-only “education” in the public schools, but refuses to decently fund basic education in these same schools. It can be seen in a national health care “policy” aimed solely at enriching the drug and insurance CEOs. Indeed, it can be seen throughout a federal Executive Branch whose every large and small decision is predicated upon rewarding big campaign contributors and/or silencing dissent.

A Guerrilla Girls ad in the Village Voice suggested sending estrogen pills to government officials, imagining that would immediately make them start seeing everything correctly. I suspect it would only turn them from sanctimonious, repressed men into sanctimonious, repressed women-in-men’s-bodies.

No, we need more passionately female females on the side of peace. And we need more passionately male males. (And, of course, more passionately queer queers, etc.)

In the eternal Dionysian spirit of life, we need to actively be out in the world with an intense, dedicated love. We need to sow the seeds of peace, to cultivate the fruits of true democracy. We need to do our share of initiating consensual, cooperative interaction here and abroad. We need to plow, thrust, pull, push, kneel, gaze, lick, caress, rub, nibble, sniff, and do whatever else it takes to help bring the planet out of its current frustration and toward greater serenity and satisfaction.

Or, to be Irish about it, to help the world become as ecstatic as the end of Ulysses.

…in rural Eastern Washington can be found today at the unlikely spot of SexNewsDaily.com. Scroll about halfway down the hereby-linked page to find the memories of one “Larry K.” concerning the girls he knew back home, who drank and cavorted like rebel girls everywhere but who disdained abortion or even contraception—because they saw what used to be called the “shotgun wedding” as a path to an at least marginally-better existence.

Mr. K also chides college-grad feminists for not seriously considering the plight of the non-affluent:

“To lower class women the world doesn’t look like patriarchy; it looks like it’s run by a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.… Feminism failed because it failed to seriously consider the fears of the mass of women who don’t have many options.”

I also see the world, or at least the non-Moslem world, as controlled by “a class of women and men who run it to their own advantage.”

White affluent women are the second most privileged class in this country. It’s not surprising for such a woman to see only affluent men above her socioeconomically, and then to perceive the whole of society as “The Patriarchy.”

I’m not denouncing such women. It’s easy to fall into limited perspectives. It’s harder to imagine life from somebody else’s point of view.

But it’s vital.