AFTER ALL the self-parodic inanities on TV attempting to appeal to “guy culture,” finally came something that put it all into historical perspective.

A brief voice-over passage in Showtime’s Sex in the 20th Century noted that, as a Nation of Immigrants, the U.S. has long had a sub-population of sexually-frustrated single men. In the late decades of the last century and the early decades of this one, our big cities and factory towns teemed with tens of thousands of Euro and Asian settlers who came over without moms, wives, girlfriends, or kids. (Chinese-American immigration was officially male-only for many of those years.) Westward expansion created frontier and ex-frontier communities comprised mostly of unattached males.

It was for the patronage of these men that America developed the rowdy saloon culture and the raunchy/satirical burlesque shows (both of which were fought by women’s suffragists and other “progressives”). Not to mention underground porn, “stag films,” and a once-booming brothel biz. (The documentary noted that prostitution provided the only coital opportunity for these immigrant and pioneer men.)

Anti-censorship and sex-freedom advocates today like to blame the differences between U.S. and Euro sexual attitudes on a damaging legacy of Victorian prudes. What the activists neglect is how and why those prudes came into power in the ’20s and early ’30s.

As women gained more political clout (and neared gender-parity in these ethnic and working-class communities), their sociopolitical agenda almost always included the eradication of the “guy culture” of the day.

To the “progressives” and the suffragists as well as to social conservatives, the world of single men, especially the hedonistic elements of that world, represented everything icky and worse–pre-penecillin STDs, the self-destruction of alcoholism and other drug abuse, laziness, cynical attitudes toward patriotism and the work ethic, a flight from family commitments, disrespect toward women, profanity, irreligiousness, and the pigsty living conditions still commonly associated with the undomesticated male.

So the saloons were shut down (Prohibition speakeasies had a much more coed patronage). Red-light districts were quashed one city at a time. Burlesque houses were busted. By 1934, Hollywood movies were strictly censored.

(One could also mention the implicit racism in the progressives’ “clean” and bland civic aesthetic, but that’s a topic for another day.)

To this day, the single male is treated as a social-sexual pariah in many “progressive” and even “alternative” circles, and not just by radical feminists either. Some “sex-positive” authors and journals that advocate women’s sexual liberation have a heck of a hard time accepting non-gay men’s right to sexual expression (except in the forms of masochism or servility). “Swing” clubs routinely ban femaleless males from attending; the more wholesome nudist movement used to do the same (some nudist camps still do).

And the current wave of “guy” magazines and TV shows wallow in icky-man stereotypes as universal givens.

And both corporate porn and reverse-sexist writers allow no exceptions to the premise of male=brainless sleazebag.

But beneath all these one-dimensional overgeneralizations lies a basic truth. Men need women. For sex and a hell of a lot more.

And women may no longer need men for brute-strength labor or protection, but a society unbalanced on the yin side is just as dysfunction as a society unbalanced on the yang siade.

Gender parity will happen not just when men are forced to fully respect women, but when women allow themselves to fully respect men. Then more women and men might feel more comfortable with their own yang energies, and we could all feel freer to enjoy wining, dining, coiting, and other hedonistic pleasures.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be rhomboidal.

TOMORROW: Web journals, the evil (or is it good?) twins of Weblogs.

ELSEWHERE: UK essayist Theodore Dalrymple’s got an alternate explanation for our troubles accepting the hedonistic life: “Southern Europeans seem to enjoy themselves more than northerners”–including the Brits and much of the folks in their North American ex-colonies–“who regard even pleasure as a duty… in the south one drinks to enhance life, in the north to drown one’s sorrows”… Once there was a nation whose leaders openly denounced liquor, tobacco, and even meat, and which funded pioneering cancer research. Too bad about some of its other policies…

LAST FRIDAY, we discussed the continuing blight of suburban sprawl and what might possibly be done in upcoming years to make those Nowheresvilles more eco- and people-friendly.

What drives the sprawl, of course, is a growing population that needs to live, work, and go to school somewhere. But what if there won’t be as many additional folk in coming decades as folk today expect there to be?

An Atlantic Monthly article claims not only won’t there be a Soylent Green-style overpopulation catastrophe, but the world’s supply of living humans might actually decline in the long run.

Author Max Singer expects world-pop numbers to grow at ever slower and slower rates; so “within fifty years or so world population will peak at about eight billion”–still a way-scary two billion more than we have now–“before starting a fairly rapid decline.” Indeed, “unless people’s values change greatly, several centuries from now there could be fewer people living in the entire world than live in the United States today.”

Singer claims the real reason for this reversal wouldn’t be AIDS in Africa or economic collapse in Russia or girl-abortions in China or eco-disasters or wars or declining sperm counts, but the spread of modern attitudes about work and family. If this transpires, our grandchildren (however many we have) might not have to eat one another, but they’ll have other issues to face. The North American economic system’s pretty much always been premised on growth–more people, and more wealth for some of these people to spend on consumer goods. What would a more-deaths-than-births world mean to one’s career or personal ambitions?

It should be mentioned, though the Atlantic doesn’t fully mention it, that Singer’s a leader in the near-right Hudson Institute, a prolific producer of reports and policy papers asking citizens and governments to ignore those loudmouth environmentalists about pollution, tainted food, nuclear waste, and assorted other issues in which the insitute believes big business should be given the benefit of all doubts. Singer’s Atlantic article just might be considered to be possibly part of a larger scheme of attempting to rebuff enviro-doom-warners at any opportunity.

But the U.N. figures Singer cites seem plausible. And he’s not calling for the developed countries to breed away, but simply reporting what he claims is an almost-inevitable trend (albeit one that won’t prove true or false for a long time).

Who knows? Maybe that radical-green “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement” just might find its dreams nearly fulfilled–after everybody in the group today will have died.

(For another viewpoint, check out Zero Population Growth’s Y6B site.)

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya. The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike in downtown Seattle. Be there or be equilateral.

TOMORROW: Less need-to-breed might increase the number of single men, America’s socio-sexual outcasts since way back.

UPDATE: We’ve already told you of the totally separate, and apparently feuding, sites Seattlemusic.com and Seattlemusic.org. I’ve since learned of a third name-game player–Seattlemusic.net!

ELSEWHERE: The same Atlantic issue mentioned above has a somewhat amusing “Periodic Table of Rejected Elements,” including Imodium, Xena, Hydrox, and Fahrfergnuven… Everybody loves wacky inventions, especially when the inventors are (apparently) totally sincere in their intentions…

IN LAST FRIDAY’S Misc. World Midsummer Reading List, I mentioned James H. Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere and its sequel Home From Nowhere.

The two books claim to offer a thorough diagnosis of what’s wrong with the American suburban-sprawl nightmare and what might be done about it. Unfortunately, Kunstler himself sprawls all over the landscape of thought. He reveals himself as a self-described “angry old hippie” who doesn’t just have beefs against cookie-cutter subdivisions, soulless strip malls, and scenery-scarring freeways. He appears to hate the entire 20th century industrial society.

Kunstler rants and rants against mass-produced building materials, standardized home design, Craftsman-era magazines that published ready-to-build house blueprints, single-crop agriculture, etc. etc. etc.

And, of course, like all conformist nonconformists of the angry-old-hippie school, he reserves his deepest animosity for television, the angry-old-hippie’s all-purpose scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with everything.

I guess we should be grateful that Kunstler, unlike a certain other angry old hippie who hated industrial society, offers some positive solutions. Most of them come from the “New Urbanism” movement, a scattered bunch of architects, developers, planners and thinkers who wish to undo 55 years of North American civic planning.

For now, the New Urbanists’ schemes have led to a few planned communities, mostly in the Sunbelt. But if carried a little further, their schemes might eventually lead to “suburban renewal,” humanizing the existing sprawl (taking advantage of the possible depletion of oil reserves and the even more possible decline of existing malls and big-box chains as Net retailing gains more of a foothold).

Dig, if you will, the picture: Decaying old discount stores and supermarkets rebuilt as, or replaced by, public marketplaces and walkable meeting places. Hectares of surface parking lots replaced by curbside storefronts. Older and more decayed subdivisions refitted to be (or razed and done anew as) real neighborhoods with narrower streets, real sidewalks, smaller houses built closer together, and the population density that could make public transit more feasible.

One thing the New Urbanists sometimes don’t like to mention (though Kunstler does) is how today’s sprawlscape is the child, or at least the bastard grandchild, of yesterday’s humanitarian schemers, who thought they could destroy the twin scourges of urban chaos and rural poverty by imposing a rational, efficient, modern, convenient, and clean-looking built environment. Harvard Design Magazine writer Michael Benedik discusses this in a piece on “Architecture’s Value(s) in the Marketplace”: “The condition of the modern world is due at least partially to what the ‘best’ and most prominent architects have done, have allowed, and have come earnestly to believe over the past fifty years.”

Kunstler insists government regulation will have to be part of the answer. But he also admits government regulation has been part of the problem. Streetcars were private enterprises that merely used city rights-of-way. Freeways were and are built and maintained by governments, via gas and vehicle taxes encouraged by “the highway lobby.” Subdivisions and strip malls are the product of building codes devised to allow almost no other types of residential construction.

The Libertarian Party might use these facts to claim developers not only could but certainly would build more imaginative, affordable, dense, and eco-friendly tracts if only freed from those pesky ol’ governments telling ’em what to do. I don’t completely buy that line of reasoning (the private sector’s done plenty-O-damage to the landscape over the decades, with and without gov’t encouragement), but it does have something going for it.

As the influx of cyber-wealth into Seattle has shown, people want to live in real cities and towns. It’s just that Sprawlsvilles are the only new residential areas being built.

But before we buy up the old beige-rambler houses and replace them with something with more “character,” let’s remember what the subdivisions have wrought, the human-scale lives lived in inhuman-scale surroundings. As a current photo exhibit in NYC shows, humans have and will continue to express their individuality amid even the least-likely settings.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be octagonal.

MONDAY: A think-tank boss wants us to stop worrying about overpopulation.

ELSEWHERE: “Want to know what to expect before you see a movie? Want to read a mockery of some movie you hated? Have a few minutes to kill?” Then see parody movie scripts at The Editing Room (“We Clean Up After Hollywood”). An example, opening up Eyes Wide Shut:

INT. TOM AND NICOLE’S APARTMENT

NICOLE is wearing a sign that says “I’m in the movie, too.”

MEANWHILE, BACK AT THE SPOOKY SATANIC MANSION

TOM:This is really weird. I must leave before I have sex and allow the audience to see me naked.

HIGH PRIEST: But, I thought the movie centered on you being naked.

AUDIENCE: So did we.

TOM: Ha ha ha.

REAL ART, the saying from some ’80s poster goes, doesn’t match your couch.

Despite centuries of western-world art scenes run according to the whims and tastes of upscale patrons and collectors, the principle still holds among many culture lovers–real expression and creativity are at fundamental odds against upscale art-buyers’ priorities of comfort, status, and good taste. The priorities expressed in the title of the NY Times Sunday feature section, “Arts and Leisure.”

While right-wing politicians’ diatribes against public arts funding have apparently lost much of their former steam, their damage has been done, and such funding is still way down in the U.S. from its ’70s peak (and from the funding levels in many other industrialized countries today).

So painters, sculptors, composers, and other makers of less-than-mass-market works have become even more dependent upon pleasing private money. And often, that means showing rich folks what they want to see. Today, that might not necessarily mean commissioned portraits showing off the patrons’ good sides, but instead pieces that more symbolically express an upscale worldview, one in which even people born into rich families like to imagine themselves as self-made success stories who piously deserve all they’ve gotten.

A somewhat different worldview from that of the ’50s silent generation, but one based upon similar notions of best-and-the-brightest authority figuring.

Man With the Golden Arm novelist Nelson Algren was disgusted by the silent-generation conformity and McCarthy-era harassment of free thinkers, and wrote about his disgust in a long essay, Nonconformity (first published in 1996, 15 years after his death). Here’s some of what he wrote, at a time when subdivisions and Patti Page records were being foisted upon the nation:

• “The American middle class’s faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essense, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources….
• “A certain ruthlessness and a sense of alienation from society is as essential to creative writing as it is to armed robbery. The strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is out solely to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event may afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even…. If you feel you belong to things as they are, you won’t hold up anybody in the alley no matter how hungry you may get. And you won’t write anything that anyone will read a second time either….
• “…By packaging Success with Virtue, we make of failure a moral defeat. And rather than risk such failure, the less daring now take it to be the part of wisdom to sit out in the booths and the bars. They do not wish to commit themselves, they are reluctant, in this sick air, to let themselves be engaged. Not realizing that the only true defeat is to be capable of playing a part in the world, and playing no part at all.
• “Do American faces so often look so lost because they are most tragically trapped between a very real dread of coming alive to something more than merely existing, and an equal dread of going down to the grave without having done more than merely be comfortable?”

Back in the present day, some readers may recall a symposium previewed here a few weeks back, about trying to solve Seattle’s affordable-artist-housing crisis. The event turned out to be dominated by developers, whose suggested “creative solutions” tended to all involve trusting developers to create (when given the right amount of public “support” and fewer pesky regulations) practical live-work spaces for those artists who could afford the “market rate”–i.e., those who sell enough prosaic glass bowls to the cyber-rich.

Sounds like Algren’s posited dilemma ain’t that far past us.

So what to do?

Algren suggests real artists should strive not to live among the comfortable, or even among only other artists, but with “the people of Dickens and Dostoyevsky,” those who are “too lost and too overburdened to spare the price of the shaving lotion that automatically initiates one into the fast international set… whose grief grieves on universal bones.”

That might be relatively easy for a writer (at least in the days before writers imagined themselves to need fast Internet connections), but what of a visual artist who needs a decent-sized workspace and not-always-cheap materials?

Perhaps it means to go where the hard life is still lived. By the 2010s, if not sooner, that place might not be the fast-gentrifying cities but the already-decaying inner rings of suburbia.

More about that on Friday.

MARK YOUR CALENDAR!: More live events for The Big Book of MISC. are comin’ at ya, at least if you live round here (Seattle). The next is Thursday, Aug. 19, 6 p.m., at Borders Books, 4th near Pike downtown. Be there or be trapezoidal.

TOMORROW: The Wallpaper* magazine interior look is spreading. Is there a cure?

ELSEWHERE: Local author-activist Paul Loeb disses cynical detachment as a useless “ethic of contempt;” while Boston Review contributor Juliet Schor examines “The Politics of Consumption,” calling for an ideology that would “take into account the labor, environmental, and other conditions under which products are made, and argue for high standards”… A newspaper story about Ecstasy and GHB contains some half-decent info but ruins it all with a typical, stupid ’60s-nostalgia lead…

PASSAGE OF THE DAY: Categories of pithy quotations at Send-A-Quote.com’s online “virtual greeting card” service: “Love, anger, hate, regret, inspiring, remorse, joy, money, stupid, job, hobby, apology, leadership, ambition, courage.” Now go write a sentence using all the above.

A COUPLE WEEKS OR SO AGO, we mentioned a Village Voice essay suggesting that not only was “grunge” dead, so was the whole Blank Generation zeitgeist, destined to be remembered only as a brief interregnum of punkesque angst and cynicism prior to the present neo-gilded age of corporate teenybopper pop and happy techno.

I’d already been reading discussions of (for lack of a slicker catch phrase) the “new sincerity” on the Wallace-l email list, devoted ostensibly to discussions of the author David Foster Wallace. He’d written an essay (collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) calling for young writers to forego what he saw as a recursive trap of self-referential, “hip” irony, and to instead “dare” to be sincere, even at the risk of cloyingness.

In the essay, Wallace asks for a new movement of literary “anti-rebels,” who’d rebel against the perpetual “revolutions” of corporate-media culture. These would be writers “who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue.”

The recent discussions on Wallace-l have concerned whether the “reverence and conviction” shtick has already taken over in certain areas of the culture with shorter trend-lead-times than literature. One contributor to the list recently claimed irony was still prominently air-quoting its way through the social consciousness, and cited the enduring TV popularity of Seinfeld, Beavis and Butt-head, Mystery Science Theater 3000, and Jerry Springer as his support.

This drew a response from list member Marie Mundaca:

“You’re talking about the shows we would watch (meaning, we as people who read wallace as opposed to Barbara Cartland). most shows are not Seinfeld or South Park. Most shows are Friends, Jesse, Moesha, Felicity, and Providence. Three of the shows you mentioned ARE NO LONGER IN PRODUCTION (Seinfeld, Beavis and MST3K), and one has been showing six-year-old reruns in many markets (Springer).

“I think you’re thinking about a time a few years ago when the media disovered that ‘Gen X’ had money to spend. now the media markets to baby boomers and their teenage offspring. you’ll note that Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears and Ricky Martin are infinitely more popular than, say, Orgy or Radiohead or Pearl Jam or whoever else people my age are supposed to be listening to.

“Sincerity is way in these days dude, and I for one don’t like it.”

Later on in the cyber-conversation, Mundaca added these additional thoughts:

“With many of the people I come in contact with, Backstreet Boys, 98 Degrees, Britney Spears,Shania Twain, Touched by an Angel–these are sincere, even tho they are clearly dishonest. None of those people even write their own songs, and Touched by an Angel is just some marketer’s response to ‘family values.’

“Whereas South Park is a really sincere movie, I thought. Kyle and what’s his name, Stan, they want do so something really good–save the lives of two comedians, at the risk of their own lives! While the parents, who probably watch Touched by an Angel, are ready to kill.

“I’ve read several of the books wallace extols the virtues of, being real sincere and all, and basically they’re nothing but well-written pablum. I know he’d say that [Richard Powers’s] The Gold Bug Variations was a more sincere book than [Ronald] Sukenick’s Blown Away; I’d have to disagree with him vehemently.

“If we were to have D.F.W. here and could ask him, ‘Hey Dave, who’s more sincere, Paul McCartney or Kurt Cobain?,’ you know who he’d pick. And he’d be wrong.

“Sarcasm and irony can get a point across just as well as ‘sincerity.’ It’s just a more subtle form of communication.”

When I emailed Mundaca for her permission to post these remarks here, I compared her remark about the decline of hip-ironic TV to the Voice piece about the eclipse of youth angst. Her response:

“The real irony, for me, is that when the media picked up on us (i.e., when Nirvana hit), most of my friends were angry that we were being treated like a demographic, insisting that we were all much too complex to be described by numbers and a catchy name. And now they’re all mad that we only had a few years of being pandered and marketed to.”

Our lesson here? Apparently, you’re damned if you do, and touched by an angel if you don’t.

ELSEWHERE: Smug.com has more evidence that the alterna-rock-listenin’ folks (or at least their old-school-punk predecessors) are now on the flip side of a generation gap. In ‘Viva La Drone,’ Joe Procopio writes of young-adult know-it-alls in offices, stuck behind 35-ish know-nothing “arrogant bastards” who will ruin their youngers’ careers and souls until “the revolution” comes. He doesn’t specify what that revolution might be.

TOMORROW: If the Net really does kill newspapers as we know them, it could be the best thing papers have ever had.

ON TUESDAY, we discussed members of Seattle’s artistic community who feel left behind by the region’s cyber-boom.

Actually, a lot of folks my age or a little younger (what early punk rocker Richard Hell called the “Blank Generation”) feel out of the mainstream swing-O-things and always have. And now, just as we’re heading toward the supposed prime of our lives, many of us still feel that way.

Our elders, those ever-self-absorbed baby boomers, still essentially run everything in North American society. And now our youngers have become the darlings of demographic target-marketers everywhere.

Read about it in Eric Weisbard’s Village Voice essay, complete with a way-cool Pete Bagge cover illo.

“We’d always been Born Too Late,” Weisbard writes. “Suddenly we were Born Too Early as well. It was official: our crew–roughly 25-to-39-year-olds, though culture never breaks neatly–were the needy middle child of the latter 20th century. Caught between domineering elder sibs and spoiled youngsters.”

Our moment-O-triumph, Weisbard claims, was but a mere moment in popcult history, those few years of Cobain and Phair that occurred somewhere between the fall of New Kids on the Block and the rise of N’Sync. Our defining sociopolitical moment was lost somewhere between the ’87 stock crash and the six weeks of Gulf War protests.

Weisbard predicts us Baby Busters will be remembered, if at all, as a replay of the ’50s Silent Generation–those kids too young to have served in WWII, who were treated as also-rans in college by their older GI-Bill-student peers, who lived and worked in the war generation’s shadows as subservient toadies (according to the stereotype depicted in movies like The Apartment), and who ended up getting dissed as soulless Establishment lackeys by those boomer hippies.

If there’s a good side to this, it’s that after 20 years, I finally get to be on the old-fogey side of a generation gap!

To an ever-larger extent, Those Kids Today aren’t aping my generation’s punk, goth, old-school-hiphop, and industrial-fetish schticks. They’re unimpressed by alterna-rock angst, by the frustrated moans of an in-between generation that had expected it and all future generations after it to face permanently diminished expectations.

Instead, they’re either doing the techno-electronica thang (all positive, all upbeat, all celebratory) or the corporate-pop thang (all dreamy, all creamy, all steamy).

But, as usual, I do find things to admire about the younger generation. My generation, and the kids just after my generation, have been to, too large an extent, sexual cowards. Oh, we’ll dress up in PVC and indulge in porn and/or dildos, but real interpersonal involvement scares too many of us.

If you believe the Washington Post, however, today’s early-teens have a much more vigorous (yet still “safe”) attitude toward mutual pleasurement.

I’d just say to be careful about the ol’ pregnancy/STD thang and the emotional-relationship-turmoil thang, but otherwise go for it. You’re only young once.

TOMORROW: They’re called “weblogs,” and they’re the latest cyber-fad.

A LOT OF ARTY TYPES love to hate Seattle and always have.

Oh, you could live here cheaply enough. And the neighbors were plenty easy to get along with, just so long as you didn’t expect ’em to welcome you with gregariously open arms.

But, the old line went, there was no money here and no decent arts infrastructure–the networks of (depending on your genre) museums, galleries, gallery customers, recording studios, record labels, nightclubs, film producers/distributors, publishers, agents, publicists, etc.

(An exception was the theater community, where patient troupes and producers gradually assembled their needed resources from approximately 1963 through approximately 1978. But to this day, local actors complain, management at the Rep and ACT still cast too many lead roles in New York.)

Today, things are a bit different. The region’s awash in cyber-wealth. Lotsa arts-infrastructure people have moved or at least passed through the place. A lot of culture-management enterprises have indigenously risen here, especially in popular and commercial music.

And with the new communications technology (much of it developed here) and the DIY-culture boom, that oldtime culture bureaucracy’s starting to seem less necessary to a lot of folks.

But all that’s not enough for some boho-folks.

As we noted back in April, the boom’s left a lot of local old-timers behind, some of whom are culture-biz old-timers. The tech biz has produced a lot of low-paying day jobs and perma-temp gigs, but the big-money positions all seem to require either hyper-aggressive sales skills or five years’ experience on software technologies that just came out last year.

As COCA’s current “Land/Use/Action” series of exhibitions and events depicts, real-estate hyperinflation and gentrification mean it’s harder every year to live here–especially if you’re a visual artist who needs adequate studio space, a musician who needs a place to play, or a creator in any discipline who needs to invest time in your work before it’s ready to go out into the world.

(Many of these cyber-employers demand 60 or more hours a week from their staffs, plus a sense of devotion-to-the-empire so fanatical as to pretty much exclude any self-styled free thinkers as potential hires.)

This leaves Seattle as an exciting place to document, with physical and social changes and confrontations to be seen just about everywhere, but still not an optimal live/work site for the would-be documentor.

Contemporary-art galleries still struggle as always. The big-bucks out-of-towners who plopped a couple of fancy gallery spaces down here, hoping to siphon some of that cyber-spending-money, have closed up shop and split.

Literary publishing here still means the gay-and-theory-oriented Bay Press, the feminist-oriented Seal Press, and the tourist-oriented Sasquatch Books.

Bands and musicians can still make stuff here, but managers and promoters find a career ceiling they can’t breach without heading to N.Y./L.A.

Art-film exhibition’s big here, but art-film making is still just getting off the ground (and commercial/industrial filmmaking here has nearly collapsed).

So the new Hobson’s choice, for many, seems to be to either take up a Real Career (if possible) and leave one’s real life’s work to semi-commercial or hobby status; sell out another way and make glass bowls or other stuff the moneyed people here will buy; move to the old-line Big Media cities; or move further out into lo-rent land.

(These topics and others will be discussed in “Where’d the Artists Go?: Art and Development in Belltown,” a COCA-sponsored forum tonight, July 13, at the reopened, remodeled (but looking-exactly-like-it-used-to) Speakeasy Cafe, 2nd and Bell.)

TOMORROW: The new local art neighborhood?

ELSEWHERE: Perservering hippie-musician Jef Jaisun has his own list of reasons to dislike Seattle. Alas, most of them involve weather, and seem intended to discourage inmigration (the old Emmett Watson “Lesser Seattle” schtick). And there’s a whole “Weblog” site to “Why (BLANK) Sucks.”

PRE-FOURTH-O-JULY SPECIAL: Found a used paperback at a sidewalk sale, Is America Used Up? (Judith Mara Gutman, Bantam Books, 1973).

Using the photo-illustrated essay format of Marshall McLuhan’s paperback screeds, Gutman (whose works are all out of print, though she continues to travel and lecture about the history of photography) compared the old spirit of American can-do expansionism (as expressed in old photos of industry, homesteading, and family life) with the national angst she saw in the book’s present-day era of recession, double-digit inflation, oil shortages, Watergate, and the last days of the Vietnam debacle.

“We move more hesitantly,” Gutman wrote, “try to run risk out of our lives, and become more weary about reaching far-off ends. We’ve lost the surety and conviction that we formerly gained from living on an edge that we could never predictably know was going to provide a firm footing. We’ve lost the belief in what we could create, not in what we did create, but the belief in our ability to establish a new order of life should we want to.”

Today, of course, we’re supposed to again be living in boom times. Some commentators have proclaimed end-O-century American corporate capitalism as the final for-all-time social configuration for the whole world. Everybody’s supposed to be hot-for-success, defined in strictly material terms. Few folk, it seems, want to talk about the underclass, about urban ghettos or abandoned factory towns, about victims.

(Seattle Times columnist Nicole Brodeur partly attributed the partly closing of the volunteer agency Seattle Rape Relief to a social zeitgeist that doesn’t want to be bothered with such troublesome facts of human existence as domestic violence and its survivors.)

At least back in the supposed bad-old-days of the ’70s, some folks were a little more willing to consider that all might not be completely hunky-dory in our land.

Gutman saw an America that suffered from nothing less than a lack of spirit.

In our day, America might be suffering from a misdirected spirit.

I’m not the only commentator to question why America’s “reviving” cities can support fancy-ass stadia and convention centers and subsidized luxury-shopping palaces, but not (fill in your favorite cause here).

The simple answer is that business gets most anything it wants from government these days. What doesn’t help business, or the managerial caste, gets ignored. If the NRA and Christian Coalition are losing some of their past political clout, it’s just because business-centric politicians feel they no longer need to suck up to those groups’ voting blocs. If you believe the op-ed pundits, next year’s Presidential race will be a snoozer between two southern scions of boardroom deal-making, Albert Gore fils and George Bush fils.

What we need now is a third or fourth way–something beyond boomer-leftist victimhood, middle-of-the-road corporatism, and religious-right authoritarianism. Something that goes beyond protesting and analyzing, that empowers more folks (including folks outside the professional classes) to take charge of their own destiny. That’s what Gutman believed had once made America great, but which became lost even as “diverse” expressions and art forms emerged:

“Though our dominant culture carries more diverse forms of expression than it ever before managed, we don’t think of it as supporting our desire for expression. It’s as if it can’t. No matter how much we hoped the objects and desires that have widened our cultural patterns would swell our expression, they haven’t.”

MONDAY: The end of Mark Sidran’s reign of terror? One can only hope…

A FEW MONTHS BACK, I wrote a few thoughts about the unexpected U.S. success of Nintento’s Pokemon franchise (involving video games, role-playing card games, a TV cartoon, and assorted ancillary merchandise; all set in an alternate-universe world where the non-human animal population consists of some 150 varieties of cute and super-powered “pocket monsters”).

Today, some additional thoughts.

Its complexity turns on kids and befuddles grownups. This is true of the games, and even more true of the TV show (which was conceived to somehow tie in entertaining cartoon plots with the characters and story elements originally devised for the far-different narrative rules of gaming). The first episode starts out with the assumption that viewers already know the basic premise of these creatures and the young humans who befriend and use them. Pieces of the metastory are doled out in each episode, along with at least one new Pokemon critter and hints about which of them can outbattle which other ones and how.

(In the English-language version of the show, the complexities and oddities are even wackier. The show’s three young human heroes, for instance, are forever talking about their tastes for such all-American teen foods as pizza and donuts, but are only shown eating rice and sushi.)

It’s got something for everyone. Younger fans can get into the cuter critters and the video game (whose plot involves capturing a personal menagerie of wild Pokemon). (By the way, “Pokemon” and all the species names are both singular and plural; just one of the complexities kids can get but grownups can’t.) Teens can get into the more strategic aspects of the card game (which centers around mock quasi-cockfights between opposing players’ trained super-critters). Older teens and young adults can get caught up even further in the games’ minutiae (sort of like Dungeons and Dragons but with a more attractive cast of characters), or proceed from the TV series to explore the whole maddenning multiverse of Japanese Anime.

The games reward strategy, not brute strength. A cute little creature like Pikachu or Psyduck, if equipped with the right powers and skill-levels, can outfight a huge brute like Onix or Charmeleon. On the TV show, the human villains of Team Rocket always scheme to steal “rare and valuable Pokemon,” and always fail because bullying never wins in the Poke-world. The schoolkids who try to bully other kids out of particularly useful Pokemon game cards, causing some schools to ban the cards on school property, are therefore only learning how to lose.

It teaches values. Most all kiddie TV these days makes a semblance of “educational” content, even if it’s just the hero coming on in the end telling the kids to drink their milk. Pokemon’s life lessons, however, are deeply incorporated into every plotline. The Pokemon battles themselves are imbued with a Sumo-like sense of tradition and honor. Many of the stories involve the humans learning about properly caring for one another, their environment, and their Pokemon. And the show’s chief plot element, preteen Ash Ketchum’s personal quest to “become the world’s greatest Pokemon master,” might parallel Japan’s current national soul-search to discover a sense of individual initiative after generations of training its youngsters for lives of self-sacrifice.

(Of course, the values the show teaches might not be the values some real-world humans would want to have taught. Animal-rights folks, f’rinstance, might object to a key element of the games and the show, of young humans learning to capture and train wild animals for show, for sport, and especially for fighting.)

(As you might expect, Poke-parodies are already being thought up. Here’s a particularly good one.)

Tomorrow: Speaking of Nintendo properties, management at the Nintendo-owned Mariners is acting like Team Rocket in attempting to extort ever more tax $$.

YESTERDAY, I SEARCHED for signs that today’s young singles were ready to move beyond the anti-intimacy, consumeristic hedonism too prevalant in an allegedly “sex positive culture” of porn, vibrators, S/M, et al. Today, some postscripts.

Postscript #1: On Friday, I chatted with the Dutch magazine writer who’d interviewed me back in ’97 about “life after grunge.” This time, she was writing about how hard it was to start a relationship in Seattle, especially for men, and why this might be so. She wondered if Seattle women were “too politically correct,” too obsessed with propriety and power to risk the uncertainty of emotional closeness, to open themselves up emotionally to others, or even to acknowledge men as having souls.

(Update: The writer in question emailed the following addition to this discussion Tuesday evening: “I never said that women are ‘too politically correct’. I asked (mind you, a question instead of an assertion) if Seattle was so politically correct that now men have taken on (or are forced to take on) the women’s role and women behaved like men used to do. See, I have absolutely no problem with women doing that, so I would never have used the words you used on your web site.”)

I didn’t see the situation as bleakly as she did; but I had to agree on certain points.

This has long been a bourgeois town; a repressed-Scandinavian-via-Minnesota town; a place of lawyers and engineers and college administrators who defined themselves by their supposedly superior “taste” and social bearing, compared to the farmers and loggers supposedly out there in most of the rest of the west. It’s also been a town of strong women, who built social institutions and fought for such “civilizing” movements as Prohibition.

Mix that heritage up with today’s capitalist rugged-individualism and “feminist” ideologies that sometimes merely exchange one set of overgeneralized gender-stereotypes for another, and you end up with a city of men who need women and women who claim they don’t need men.

A city where casual sex (at least in some subcultural circles) is often available, but where anything more substantive is blocked by women afraid to let their guard down and men afraid to even ask for anything, lest they be immediately denounced as “a typical male.”

The old sexism stereotyped women as either virgins or sluts; the new sexism, at least as practiced around here, stereotypes men as either wimps or creeps.

But there are ways beyond this new double standard; speaking of which…

Postscript #2: On Saturday, I saw the Fremont Solstice Parade, with its apparently-now-annual rite of nude, mostly male, bicyclists before and between the oh-so-funky floats and bands. This year there were some real nudies, some fakes in anatomically-correct body stockings (of the wearers’ own or opposite gender), and some “almosts” clad in loincloths or streamer tape.

This spectacle of male exhibitionism (before a co-ed, all-ages audience) was unthreatening yet still more robust and joyous than the foreboding wholesomeness of organized nudism. It demystified the male organ, that most taboo-to-reveal of either gender’s body parts. A man can indeed take healthy pride in himself without being a creep about it. Male sexuality, these true rebel bikers showed, is nothing to be either afraid or ashamed of.

That’s not the ultimate answer, but it’s a start.

Postscript #3: Matthew DeBord, writing in the online zine Feed, suggests the answer to the dilemma of sensitive straight boys feeling too ashamed of their manhood is to listen to role-models for positive self expression–then names the lesbian band Sleater-Kinney as an example.

The problem, of course, is that a self-defeatist straight boy can be all too willing to allow lesbians to express self-confidence but to still wallow in misappropriated gender-guilt himself. I say, better to have male role models who are males themselves, to better break through the new double standards.

Tomorrow: Some male singer-songwriters who depict relationship-angst as something risky but beautiful and necessary.