A former supermarket tabloid stringer finds solace in berating his youngers for finally getting old.

Sheesh.

Yeah, Cobain’s image has been showing up on tacky nostalgia-kitsch merchandise. But it has been almost since his death.

Elsewhere in the no-shit-Sherlock realm, David Bowie just turned 60. Debbie Harry already passed that milestone. Joe Strummer and Joey Ramone didn’t get the chance to do so. Macauley Culkin’s been married and divorced. And the Earth revolves around the sun approximately once per calendar year.

“Gen X” never vowed to die before it got old. Rather, it (or some of its more vocal members) vowed not to look ridiculous while doing so.

…points out exactly where the American left made its big wrong turn, in learning “to love ‘identity’ and ignore inequality.”

Megatrends author John Naisbitt, quoted at Poynter Online (a great media-news site), repeats the old baby-boomer canard that them kids these days aren’t reading anything. To illustrate this, the Poynter editors used a stock photo of wristbands–all festooned with words.

I’ve said it before, and it’s worth repeating until the boomer bigots finally listen: People younger than you or me are not necessarily a subhuman species. Yes, they can read.

Indeed, words are more pervasive than ever. All these millions of blogs, MySpace sites, and online forums–they’re all about words. (They’re certainly not about the graphic design.) Text messaging, IRC chats, email–all about words. Talk radio, podcasts–all about spoken words.

What media companies have to ask themselves is whether the words they’re generating are worth reading.

…an Anglophone web designer based in Japan, discusses “What Internet workers can learn from the old Greeks.”

…postulates that people just might choose their mates based partly on an unconscious to be of one mind.

…misguided Ren and Stimpy “adult” revival show was a flop, but he’s still a great scholar of cartooning and animation. His personal blog provides an ongoing lesson in these deceptively simple looking art forms. A recent entry on the Chuck Jones short Inki and the Minah Bird lauds Jones for having “the idea to constantly try new things and experiment and always be restless and never satisfied with anything. I might be the last person on earth who remembers the concept of ‘progress’ as a positive thing, a concept that just a few decades ago was the American philosophy that made the country the greatest, most influential and fastest moving nation in history.”

Of course, that same idea of “progress” has caused the film in question to become banned from authorized screenings and TV showings, due to the questionable racial portrayal of the African hunter boy Inki.

Forbes now claims Kurt Cobain is now America’s most lucrative dead celebrity, having passed Elvis Presley with some $50 million in earnings. You may now make your own sick comment about what the poor lad would’ve done with the dough.

TIME MARCHES ON DEPT.: USA Today has discovered that a lot of those kids today are politically active and socially concerned. But writer Sharon Jayson felt obligated, alas, to insert the boilerplate disclaimer inserted into all mainstream media stories about youth activism lo these past three decades: “They may be less radical than baby boom activists in the 1960s and 1970s, whose demonstrations for civil rights, women’s equality and protecting the environment and protests against the Vietnam War became flashpoints for their times….”

When, over the past how-many years, I’ve bitched about San Franciscan attitudes, I was talking about:

• Professional counterculture celebrities who are merely famous for being infamous, who’ve never really written/painted/recorded anything of value but who are adored for their (carefully contrived) outlaw images;
• Loudmouth entertainment/restaurant/fashion hustlers who come up here as cultural colonists, forever whining that this hick town will always suck unless it gets a _____ exactly like the _____s in San Francisco;
• Unimaginative Seattleites who think the only path to true cultural creativity is to copy something already done down there.

I do not, and never have, dissed Frisco (and, yes, I still insist on calling it that) for having gays or liberals within its overpriced midst.

Therefore, I hereby renounce the right wing sleaze machine’s attempt to scare citizens out of voting for Democrats because the Dems would place
a known San Franciscan as Speaker of the House.

…explains “Why I Don’t Believe in First Grade.” Essentially, he believes real learning (as opposed to rote memorization) is a habit that’s gotta be nurtured from birth.

…organizational consultant offers a sure-fire solution to what’s wrong with education in this country (and most others): “Take a Chance… Let Them Dance.” He claims “we are educating people out of their creative capacities” is we don’t allow kids to be artistic and even (gasp!) make mistakes. Of course, he doesn’t mention that a generation of uncreative, obedient drones might just be what certain corporate/governmental leaders want.

“If Seattle’s really the brainiest city in America, why can’t we figure out how to ________?”

I’m the only person I know who refuses the conventional wisdom about the Sonics’ possible move. I believe (1) it’s not inevitable, and (2) we can and should try to prevent it.

Part of this is I’m not a reactionary “radical.” I don’t hate sports. I don’t hate television. I don’t hate working-class people. Yes, I was belittled by the jocks in high school—but I got over it.

Pro basketball is a business. And it’s a good business for a town to have, for assorted tangible and intangible reasons.

It’s good to have affluent suburbanites coming in to patronize our bars, restaurants, and pay-parking lots 41 times a year (plus 17 times for the Storm). It’s good to have blimp shots of the city skyline viewed on ESPN HD. It’s good to have basketball players (even mediocre ones) around to open supermarkets, visit sick kids, and endorse local paint stores. It’s good to have some scrappy underdogs playing under our town’s good name, fighting the good fight against the Lucking Fakers and the other bloated-superstar outfits. It’s good to have white kids rooting for black kids, and with the Storm to have boys rooting for girls.

But the price? It doesn’t have to be bank-breaking.

As I’ve written previously, we can offer the new owners a decent, if not spectacular, arena makeover. Enough to add a food court and an amusement arcade (perhaps replacing current such facilities elsewhere on the Seattle Center grounds), and to make it more viable for hockey. Tie it in with a larger Center sprucing-up, one that would directly benefit all Center-goers and citizens. The public’s part of the arena part can be paid for by keeping the current rental-car and restaurant taxes for a few years longer.

This could have all been settled with the previous owners a year ago. We now know why it wasn’t: The previous owners were preparing to sell out and take their value-appreciation profits. Now it’s the new owners’ turn. We can make ’em a reasonable offer that, if they reject it, will make ’em look like even bigger dorks than the previous owners now look like.

But back to all the overt public cynicism: An awful lot of the folks I’ve talked to, exchanged emails with, and read online said, in varying terms, that they’d like to be rid of the Sonics as a big FU to the supposed mindset of our civic leaders, who (according to this interpretation) will normally suck up to any big, worthless corporate scheme as long as it promises to turn this into “a world class city.” The team’s loss, this line of reasoning goes, is a good-riddance event that’ll show those downtown schemers a thing or two about real priorities.

When I first started hearing this line, I initially reacted that it wasn’t “The Seattle Way” to mope around in self-defeatism. But then I remembered it is.

For every element of pioneer gumption and inventiveness we’ve got, we’ve also got a huge dose of unseemly grumpiness. We love to whine that everything in this hick town totally sucks, always has and always will. Cobain took this attitude as a personal worldview. More recently, Cobain’s former next-door neighbor Howard Schultz whined on and on that the city and us fans just didn’t understand his needs.

Now we’ve got a prospective new owner who’s talkin’ just like Ken Behring and Jeff Smulyan used to, that he really really wants to keep his new team here but we’re just being insufficiently cooperative. He’s playing his assigned role by making these cynical statements; we’re playing our assigned role by giving him cynical rejoinders in response.

But behind this scripted posturing, serious backroom dealmaking can occur, and I hope it will occur. For that is also The Seattle Way.

…three-days-after-Canada-Day day, my apologies for not having written anything for this site in the past week. I could say I’ve been busy, but that would be a mere excuse. I’ve had spare moments away from the search for Vanishing Seattle pix. But I’ve wasted those odd hours and half-hours in such meaningless pursuits as settling old debts, figuring out how to get to the Renton Fry’s Electronics store by Metro bus (the solution: Route #110, a minivan commuter route from the Renton Transit Center), and watching odd YouTube.com contributions (such as “The Worst Looney Tunes Ever,” five pathetic shorts made in 2003 by Simpsons/Family Guy writers).

NOW THEN, TO THE DAY’S TOPIC: Yes, it’s possible to still love your country, even when it repeatedly does stupid, stupid, STUPID things.

Indeed, that’s the only real kind of love there is.

The shut-up-and-obey submission preached by today’s right wing isn’t love. It’s more like the misguided pseudo-love battered spouses sometimes express toward their abusers.

There was a time, within my lifetime if not yours, when conservative fringies were defiantly distrustful of authority figures, particularly if those authority figures represented “big government.” Would that were still the case. Those same fringies were often racist, sexist, and anti-intellectual as hell, but they at least refused to be anyone’s stooge. We could use a little more of that “don’t tread on me” attitude around these days.

…another reason why we perhaps shouldn’t accept “business” as the default model for all societal institutions: “People at big companies don’t realize the extent to which they live in an environment that is one large, ongoing test for the wrong qualities.”

…and the only devil I saw was a certain ex-boss of mine, who showed up for the weekly session of Drinking Liberally. Mr. Savage sported a custom tee with the slogan CAN’T WE HAVE CRAIG KILLED?, in reference to the founder of a certain free-want-ads web site that’s put a wrench into print-media busines models across the country.

It’s been a decade and a half since Mr. Savage and co. were the new kids on the local-media block, with a surefire business plan that took ’em to the top. Now, newer outfits with newer surefire business plans are causing both “mainstream” and “alternative” newsprint publishers to run scared. Ah, the more things, well, you know…