As the Elliott Bay Book Co. prepares to leave Pioneer Square a business neighborhood without an “anchor tenant,” the Square’s major retail industry, big rowdy bars, is also in decline. The J&M shuttered altogether (it’s rumored to be reopening under new management as less of a bar and more of a cafe). Others are rumored to be in trouble.

I remember the glory days of the Square’s nightlife scene. I remember that milieu’s signature street sound. You’d stand in front of the pergola around midnight on a Saturday. You could hear, from five different bars, five different white blues bands, each cranking out a mediocre rendition of “Mustang Sally,” each band slightly out of tempo with the others. It was a cacophany only avant-garde composer Charles Ives could have dreamt up.

That scene was already waning before the infamous 2001 Mardi Gras melee gave the Square a bad PR rep.

Fast forward almost a decade. Today’s loci for bigtime drinking are Fremont, Pike/Pine, and especially Belltown.

Belltown’s bar scene has its own signature street sound. It’s the arhythmic clippety-clop of dozens of high-heel shoes trotting up and down the sidewalks of First Avenue. Creating this sound are many small groups of bargoers, small seas of black dresses and perfect hairdos.

These women, and their precursors over the past decade and a half, are the reason Belltown won the bar wars.

In my photo-history book Seattle’s Belltown, I described the rise of the upper First Avenue bar scene:

“After the Vogue proved straight people would indeed come to Belltown to drink and dance, larger, more mainstream nightclubs emerged. Among the first, both on First Avenue, were Casa U Betcha (opened 1989) and Downunder (opened 1991). Both places began on a simple premise: Create an exciting yet comfortable place for image-conscious young women, and the fellows would follow in tow (or in search).”

To this target market, the Square was, and would always be, too dark, too grungy, and too iffy. The condo canyons of Belltown, in contrast, were relatively clean (if still barren) with fresh new buildings and sported (at least some) well-lit sidewalks.

The state liquor laws were liberalized later in the 1990s, leading to more and bigger hard-liquor bars. Casa U Betcha and Downunder gave way to slicker fun palaces, all carefully designed and lit, with fancy drinks at fancy prices to be consumed while wearing fancy out-on-the-town clothes and admiring others doing the same.

And, aside from the occasional Sport, nearly all these joints sought to attract, or at least not to offend, the young-adult female market.

You’re free to make your comparisons here to the high-heeled and well-heeled fashionistas of HBO’s old Sex and the City.

I’d prefer a more local comparison, to Sex In Seattle. In case you don’t know, that’s a live stage show that’s presented 17 installments since 2001. Its heroines are social and career strivers, less materialistic and less “arrived” than the Sex and the City women.

And they’re Asian Americans. As are Sex In Seattle’s writers and producers.

As are a healthy proportion of the clientele at Belltown’s megabars these days.

These customers want many of the same things Belltown residents want. They like attractive, clean, safe streets with well-lit sidewalks.

They may make a little more noise outside than some of the residents want to hear.

But we’re all in the same place, geographically and otherwise.

(Cross posted with the Belltown Messenger.)

There’s this guy named Jaron Lanier. He was part of some of the earliest virtual reality research, as he’ll repeatedly tell you.

Now he’s rebranded himself as a cyper-skeptic. While he insists he’s no Luddite, he sure talks as if he thinks everything wrong with modern society could be traced to the Internet, to its imperfect technologies, and to its even more imperfect business models.

He’s compiled some of these screeds into a book, You Are Not a Gadget.

It’s subtitled “A Manifesto,” but it’s less of a single structured argument and more of a package of rewritten magazine essays.

In them, Lanier blames the collapse of just about all old-media businesses on the Web’s inability to command a price for content.

He blames what he calls the sameness of modern pop music on the bad influence of discrete synths and samplers.

He blames lousy software on open-source collectives that just can’t innovate the way individuals and strong-leader groups can.

He blames 2008’s economic collapse on inscrutably arcane “investment products” that could only have been devised with the aid of advanced computer technology.

He blames what he calls a devaluing of the individual in today’s world on Web 2.0 sites’ obsession with collective anonymity, with turning humans into abstracted collections of likes and associations.

I’m not convinced.

Yes, the legacy ephemeral-media businesses (broadcast TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and so on) are in huge trouble. But the whole concept of the mass audience, upon which these businesses had relied, has cracked, probably irreversably. The Web has only some of the blame/credit for this.

Apple, Amazon, and others have proven people will pay for content delivered as electronic bits, under the proper circumstances. I believe the iPad and machines ike it will only help commercial e-media grow.

Meanwhile, the decaying remnants of the big record companies (there are only four of them left, none US-owned and only one (Sony) still tethered to a major corporation) continually try to stuff the musical genie back into the broken mass-market bottle. They promote decreasingly distinctive works, issued under the names of professional gossip-mag celebrities. In the 1980s, folks such as Sub Pop founder Bruce Pavitt predicted corporate music would end up in a recursive death cycle. It’s happened now, and it ain’t pretty, but it was inevitable.

Open source software didn’t grow out of mistaken techno-hippie idealism, as Lanier claims, but out of mainframe-era computing administrators who shared pieces of code as a professional courtesy. From the start, it was all about insider geeks helping find better ways to solve existing problems. So it gives us insider-geek tools like LINUX and better-mousetrap stuff like the Firefox browser. If the truly innovative tech stuff always comes from individuals and top-down groups, as Lanier alleges, it’s because that’s where the make-a-name-for-yourself incentive is.

As for the financial bubble, Lanier’s closer to where I believe the mark is, but still misses it. The fatal link to the reckless speculators wasn’t from Internet technologies, but Internet business models. A decade after the first dot-coms arose, large swaths of business and most of finance had adopted dot-com mindsets. Enron was only the first prominent example. We can make millions, billions, fast! Not by old slowpoke return-on-investment models, but by devising really clever schemes and then selling them as hard as humanly possible—no, even harder. The whole of the global economy was wrested by the same smirky tall white guys who’d given us such surefire success stories as Flooz.com, Kozmo.com, and MyLackey.com.

And then comes what I see as Lanier’s most important allegation, that being online is degrading what it means to be human. No. It’s really the marketing business that wants to either lump us all into an undifferentiated mass or to wall us off from one another on the basis of demographics and buying habits. Social media, at their best, help humans reconnect to one another on other bases—political/social organizing, religious/spiritual questing, shared cultural memories, or just being alive and having something to say.

You already know about the hit blog/book Stuff White People Like. It’s a gentle satire on the ways and mores of the upscale NPR/Starbucks/REI subculture.

One guy named “Macon D” has taken the same premise, cut out the funny business, and created a serious examination of modern ethnic attitudes.

As he explains,

I’m a white guy, trying to find out what that means. Especially the “white” part.

His site: Stuff White People DO.

At The Atlantic, Don Peck ponders what could happen if high unemployment for the non-rich sticks around for years to come .

I’m old enough to have seen that very thing, during the Boeing slump of the early ’70s.

What happened was a lot of emotional depression, a lot of moving away (Seattle proper lost about 10 percent of its population), a lot of depressed home values, and, eventually, a lot of entrepreneurism, as desperate folks got up and tried to rebuild their lives with or without a paternalistic big employer.

In a video of a TED conference lecture, Bennington College prexy Liz Coleman articulately argues a point I’ve been trying to express all these years—that society needs generalists as much as specialists, breadth as much as depth.

Twenty-four years after Expo 86, Vancouver BC is getting ready for another “world class” mega-event. This time, as Sports Illustrated reports, many “people in Vancouver are dreading Games.”

At Paste magazine, Rachel Maddux asks the musical question, “Is Indie Dead?” Her answer: Yes. Deal with it and move on already:

Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture—not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about “indie” is that nobody agrees on what it means.

You don’t have to open Barbara Ehrenreich’s latest sociocultural rant book, Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America to know what it’ll say.

From the title alone, it’s obvious Ehrenreich can’t stand the positivity movement/industry, a very American institution that’s boomed and blossomed of late.

She blames positive thinking (and its assorted tendrils in religion, business, and pop psychology) for infantilizing its followers, for leading a passive-aggressive nation into all those now-popped economic bubbles, and even for the Bush gang’s gung-ho drives into war and ultra-graft.

The book is a minor work of hers, which is odd considering it starts out with a very personal crisis in her own life. (She got breast cancer. She wound up hating the teddy bears and boxes of crayons foisted upon her more than she hated the disease itself.)

And like so many left-wing essay books, it comprises a long sequence of complaints, with only the briefest hint of possible solutions stuck in at the very end. She loathes uncritical, unquestioning “positivity,” but she doesn’t want people to be hooked on depression or stress either.

So what’s left in between? Social and political activism, she suggests.

But I’ve seen plenty of “activists” who get stuck in their own emotional trips (self-aggrandizing protests, feel-good “lifestyle choices,” sneering against the “sheeple,” et al.). They get to feel powerful, or righteous, or smug, or genetically superior to the sap masses. And nothing changes.

World-changing and personal therapy, I believe, are two different thangs.

Still, there is a psychological benefit to working with other people, helping other people, becoming an involved part of our interdependent existence.

That was one of the messages in This Emotional Life, the recent Paul Allen-produced PBS miniseries. Another message was when an interviewee said, “The opposite of depression isn’t happiness. The opposite of depression is vitality.”

That meets obliquely with something I wrote around the time of the Obama inauguration. The “hope” Obama talked about wasn’t pie-in-the-sky positive thinking. It was acknowledging that work needed to be done, and then doing it, doing it with a clear and open mind and with full confidence in one’s abilities.

This has everything to do with Ehrenreich’s usual main topics, progressive politics and the plight of working families.

Civilian moon colonies, snow-shoveling robots: the world of 2010, as once imagined in Bob Guccione’s Omni magazine.

It’s the madcap return of the MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got a great house for sale at its 2007 price.

or,

I Survived the Bush Junta and All I Got Was This Lousy iPod

WE’LL WONDER HOW WE EVER DID WITHOUT:

The whole WWW thang, social networking, smart phones, Netflix, Adobe Flash, Netroots organizing, Jon & Stephen, Keith & Rachel, HBO-style serial drama, digital video, Pixar, the gay-marriage movement.

WE’LL LOOK BACK AND LAUGH AT:

‘Sexting,’ Twitter, Auto Tune, tea parties, Jon & Kate Plus Eight, Glenn Beck, CGI-enhanced superhero movies, Sarah Palin, American Idol, Botox, the first dot-com frenzy, the second dot-com (“Web 2.0”) frenzy, the real-estate frenzy, the stock-market frenzy, the war frenzy.

ALTERNATE-HISTORY FANTASISTS WILL DREAM ABOUT WHAT IF:

Gore won, 9/11 was prevented, the print-media and music industries got their heads out of their asses, the New Orleans levees had been properly built.

ALREADY FORGOTTEN:

Y2K, Napster, $4 gas, Enron, Octomom, Balloon Boy.

ALREADY MISSED:

The P-I, the Sonics, Washington Mutual (pre-“WaMu”), “big book” catalogs, Tower Records, the Bon Marché (and all the other Macyfied stores), New Yorker Films, The Rocket, Sunset and Leilani Lanes, the Ballard Mannings/Denny’s, the International Channel, Olds/Pontiac/Saturn/Plymouth, Chubby & Tubby, the Twin Teepees, McLeod Residence, Northwest Afternoon, inauguration morning, Ted Kennedy, Pluto.

GOOD RIDDANCE TO:

Bush/Cheney, all the corrupt cronies of Bush/Cheney, all the graft-happy funders of Bush/Cheney, all the apologists and hucksters for Bush/Cheney (even the ones currently still on air and in print).

Sixties antiwar organizer Mark Rudd insists in his essay “Beyond Magical Thinking” that…

Successful political movements do not spring fully formed. They require long-term, nuts-and-bolts organizing.

In other words, protesting, no matter how big and splashy, isn’t enough.

Carl Franzen at the Atlantic compiles other sites’ “Odd, Overreaching ‘Decade’ Lists.” Among them is Billboard’s list of “One Hit Wonders of the 2000s.” This one’s a particularly odd list, mainly because the pop charts have become so meaningless. Back when commercial music radio meant something, the Top 100 chart meant what you’d be allowed to listen to on the ol’ AM/FM. But now, the likes of Gnarles Barkley and Macy Gray can carve out decent careers for themselves without returning to the top of singles-sales.

From that addicted-to-verbiage NYTimes, here’s graphic designer Phillip Niemeyer with a handy chart illustrating and categorizing the past 10 years in logos and buzzwords.

As self-help author Eckhart Tolle proclaims the beneficial Power of Now, essayist Pico Iyer grumbles about “the tyranny of the moment .”