Gus Van Sant’s movie My Own Private Idaho envisioned Portland street gangs with colorful names, strict internal codes of conduct, and allusions to classic literature. Apparently the town’s real teen thugs are much like Van Sant’s fictional ones. Where he referenced Shakespeare, the author of the above-linked newspaper story tells of “a subculture that resembles Fagan’s gang in the classic tale of Oliver Twist.” Just don’t romanticize ’em: These teens and young adults exist in a milieu as sad as Dickens’s, and as prone to (figurative or literal) backstabbing as Shakespeare’s.

…not included on the station’s website, claims Seattle’s second (and Portland’s first) in the number of unmarried living-together couples. The news item claims one in four Seatown pairs haven’t bothered to get the legal certificate of wedlock, compared with one in ten nationally. The station didn’t say whether the region’s lousy economy (which causes folks to delay or forego all sorts of commitments) might have something to do with it.

…the real start of autumn in the GreatNW. Before long, there’ll be as little as eight and a half hours of daylight—and even when there is daylight, there won’t be much of it.

I luuvv what other folks think of as Seasonal Affective Disorder season. The air is crisp. The light is diffuse. An overriding blanket of gray hovers over everything like a half-comforting, half-smothering blanket. It’s the closest you can come in the Lower 48 to Alaska’s wintertime “midday moon.”

It’s time to break out the sweaters, scarves, boots, and long coats.

Time to spend long nights and short mornings cuddling for warmth, or to spend short afternoons and long evenings in cozy gathering places in search of a co-cuddler.

Time for cocoa, mochas, hot buttered rums, and red wine.

Time for thick oatmeal, toasted foccacia sandwiches, stew, chili, lasagne, teriyaki bowls, and roasted veggies.

Time for bright interior colors and dimmer switches turned up to 11.

Time for video-viewing marathons, group dinners, and house parties.

Time for basketball, ice skating, bowling, skiing, and pool. Time for home beer-brewing, bookshelf-building, book-writing, and political organizing.

Time to reconnect with what makes each of us truly human.

I DON’T THINK majhonng, miniskirts, and trampolines belong on a site devoted to “Bad Fads,” but at least CB radios and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles made the list.

…have it better if if they live where there aren’t rich people– i.e., whether socioeconomic inequality itself is a harbinger of disease and destitution.

FREDERICK ZACKEL WRITES about the history of Judeo-Christian prejudice against cities and city-dwellers in the essay “Life on Earth Deserves to be Lived in Vegas.”

SCROLL DOWN the document at this link and read the fascinating story of a retired mechanical-pencil-company executive. Really.

British scientist Steve Jones (no relation to the ex-Sex Pistols guitarist) claims in his new book Y: The Descent of Men that human males don’t have much of a future. Not only have average sperm counts declined in recent decades, but the Y chromosome itself is slowly but irrevocably devolving into uselessness. The result, as Jones tells Britain’s weekly Observer: “‘The chromosome unique to men is a microscopic metaphor for those who bear it,’ Jones concludes. ‘For it is the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot… From sperm count to social status, and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline.’… ‘the Y chromosome will eventually disappear and be taken over by another sex-determining mechanism.’

This is the first preview of the autumn print MISC, which will have a kids & families theme:

THERE ARE TWO kinds of families in the U.S. today.

There are real families.

And there is “The Family.”

Real families come in infinite assorted colors, shapes, sizes, and styles. A few of these variants even superficially resemble, at least in appearance, the look of “The Family.”

“The Family” is available in only one factory-set configuration. Married middleclass parents (dad works, mom doesn’t); one to four obedient children; house, car, picket fence, pets. “The Family” can be ordered in a small choice of colors—but no mix-n’-matching is allowed.

Real families have arguments and conflicts. Pieces of them sometimes split off, and some of those pieces sometimes combine to form other real families.

“The Family” is a command/response unit of military precision. Kids happily obey mom, mom happily obeys dad, dad happily obeys his boss, and everybody happily obeys their political and religious authorities.

In real families, people have sexualities (active, budding, frustrated, confused, etc) and ambitions (ditto).

In “The Family,” mom and dad have mated for life (though they don’t mate very often). Male offspring’s sexualities are always hetero, and are always successfully suppressed. Female offspring have no sexualities.

Real families really exist.

“The Family” doesn’t exist. It never did exist. It was a fantasy developed over the years (particularly the post-WWII years) by advertisers, housing developers, and social engineers. Persons living in real families were pressured into wanting to live up to the ideal of “The Family,” and were often ostracized (by their surrounding communities or by other family members) when they didn’t or couldn’t.

Even in the 1950s, there were pregnant unwed teens (more, proportionately, than there are now). There were hoodlum boys. There was racial turmoil. There were abortions (clandestine and often harmful to the women’s health). There were drugs. And, yes, there were homosexuals.

In spite of its nonexistence, “The Family” holds a mighty influence on the American imagination.

Anarchists call for its vilification and derision.

Politicians call for its defense; even while they pursue economic policies that hurt real families.

Art-worlders and white mall gangstas like to imagine they’re offending it.

Radio demagogues invoke its preservation to justify the harassment of gays and lesbians, the censoring of music, the banning of strip clubs, the imposition of school dress codes, and the war on drugs. “The Family” long ago replaced racial “purity” as bigots’ favorite excuse (though the “war on terror” might have now jumped into the #1 slot).

Civic planners still use it as the basis for suburban zoning and building codes, in which single-family homes (ever bigger, ever further apart) exist in isolation, strung together by sidewalkless roads, which in turn lead to strip malls anchored by “Family”-oriented chain stores.

Second- and third-tier TV channels mount one-hour drama shows extolling its wholesome American virtues (whilst being filmed on the cheap in non-union states or in Canada). Yet even these shows find the need, for the sake of compelling storytelling, to regularly acknowledge the difference between their characters’ messy real lives and their far simpler ideal lives.

THE ADVOCATES, marketers, and critics of “The Family” all presume its existence, at least tacitly, at least as an ideal.

But what if more of us recognized its nonexistence?

What if we each looked at our own past and/or present families and admitted they weren’t, aren’t, and could never be anything like the sterile abstraction that is “The Family?”

We could stop expending so much time, energy, and money either building up or tearing down something that was never more corporeal than a magazine lifestyle concept. We could build communities real families could more likely thrive in. We could demand wages real families could live on, and schools where the offspring of real families were welcomed and encouraged to excel.

We could remember that even families that try (often too hard) to become “The Family” are actually real families, with real idiosyncracies and diversities. We in the urban arts scene could stop ridiculing those families and start encouraging them to express their own weirdnesses.

Go ahead and call this a dream. Call it unrealistic. It’s still more realistic, and more likely, than “The Family” ever was.

…the two most bizarre spectacle on yesterday’s all-day, almost-every-channel memorial marathon. The No. 1 most bizarre sight was eminently predictable: The merchandising of gaudy flag-ribbon trinkets, bald-eagle collector plates and such on the shopping channels. The No. 2 most bizarre spectacle was much more unexpected: ESPN senior announcer Chris Berman reciting from the Gettysburg Address between inninngs of a Yankees-Red Sox baseball game.

AUTHOR-CRITIC NEAL GABLER has a different way to describe what some other critics call ironical PoMo entertainments. He calls ’em “simulated entertainment.”

I KNOW UPDATES HAVE BEEN SPARSE this past week. But the print MISC is out now, so we’ll be adding more stuff soon (including pix taken in the past few weeks, and some recent print MISC texts).

UPDATE: You recall that recent flap over a proposed civilian-snitch empire to be launched under “anti-terrorist” excuses? Some Senators want to scrap it.

GOOD NEWS: The long-delayed midsummer print MISC is finally almost done, and oughta be out by the end of the month. This might be the last one to be printed on cheapie newsprint.

AND THERE’S GONNA BE a public coming-out event for the ish. MISCosity Breakdown will occur on the convenient Friday evening, Aug. 16, at the early timeslot of 7-9 pm, at the always-lovely Rendezvous at Second north of Bell. As many print MISC contributors as can make it will appear. And we hope you do too.

A LOT OF WEBSITES have been playing up this Australian newspaper article that claims the U.S. government is “planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies.” An actual careful reading of the story reveals a lot of speculation on the writer’s part about the Feds’ proposed “Terrorism Information and Prevention System.” Few actual details on the program have been revealed. But that doesn’t stop the speculation. And it shouldn’t stop you from being wary of such schemes.

…at their advertised uses, but those “diet belts” on TV infomercials turn out to be great vibrators.

AUTHOR KEVIN PHILLIPS has a simple theory for all the corporate scandals: When the rich get too rich, you end up with “a taste for speculation and highly developed sense of “gimme” that winds up jeopardizing both the American economy and the vitality of the American democracy.”

…an unexpected tribute to the True North from the once-promising novelist Douglas Coupland. (His comments about the “Canadian character” toward the end are, unremarkably, a lot like what I’ve been saying about the Seattle character.)