american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

I just watched (much of) the beginning-to-end Monkees marathon on Antenna TV (one of those digital broadcast sub-channels).

All 58 series episodes plus the feature-film epilogue Head were aired over 31 consecutive hours, in memory of the recently deceased co-star Davy Jones.

Things I discovered (or rather rediscovered) during this:

The series was both wholesome and subversive. It incoroprated both Three Stooges slapstick (shot on the same studio lot and occasionally using leftover Stooge props) and Bunuel surrealism. It’s no coincidence that the show’s makers went on to make some of the most groundbreaking feature films of the late ’60s-early ’70s.

If only the derogatory “prefab four” meme (the idea that, as primarily a comedy team playing scripted roles, they weren’t a “real” rock band) had not gotten around to denigrate both the show and the group, the show would have been seen at the time as what it was—a leap several steps beyond the standard Screen Gems sitcom, a bright and life-affirming piece of informed nonsense.

The four actor-singers had distinct comic personalities. No one of them was allowed to overshine the others. They played off of one another very well, especially when they weren’t in reactive mode against the guest characters.

They also had distinct singing voices, and they were all skilled musicians, even though the show’s shooting schedule (much more elaborate than that of your basic living-room sitcom) didn’t allow them to play on most of the backing tracks.

The Monkees series is a work of perfection. And thanks to the growing rancor between the stars, the producers, and the network, the show ended at its peak. It didn’t fall into a slow decline, like so many other series.

The group’s lightweight pop sound was already becoming rear guard by the time the show premiered. By the spring of 1968, when the show ended, that music was even more passe among the emerging rock snobs, and would soon fall under the damning label of “bubblegum.”

And the four co-stars were anxious to make more of their own music, which would inevitably lead them in different directions.

But the Monkees, and their producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, would not leave without a proper goodbye.

•

Some reviewers have called Head a destruction of the Monkees’ image. Actually, it expanded the series’ absurdist premise to its natural extreme.

In the series, the Monkees always saved the day because they were even crazier than the villains, and because they knew that as the heroes they could bend the show’s fictional “reality” to their will.

But in Head, they’re trapped in a world that’s more complicated, even more surreal. No matter how many times our heroes break the proverbial “fourth wall” to escape a scene, they’re herded back into another. The Monkees could no longer save the day, or even themselves; much as the youthful idealism of the Camelot early ’60s was descending into foreign and domestic turmoil.

•

I was nine when The Monkees series began its original network run.

It made perfect (non)sense to me then.

And it still does.

The show’s music epitomized commercial pop at its best.

And it still does.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

wallyhood.org

My adventure in Bellingham this past Sunday was cold but lovely. Will post a complete post about it a little later on.

And I’ve got another presentation coming up this Saturday, right here in Seattle! It’s at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in pontificous Pioneer Square. (That’s right across from Zeitgeist Coffee.) This one concerns my ’06 book Vanishing Seattle, and perhaps all the things that have vanished around here since then. Be there or be frostbitten.

Now, to catch up with a little randomness:

• Writer Jonathan Shipley would like to hear from anyone who lived or worked at or was involved in the Home of the Good Shepherd (1906-70), the former Catholic “wayward girls” institution, whose building is now a community and arts center.
• One of my current projects is an essay about the “future of news.” It will start with the proclamation that web ads, by themselves, will almost never pay enough to support original, professional journalism. No matter how hard you pander to the advertisers.
• The admirable local-politics site Publicola has faced this fact, and has begun appealing for donations.
• Facebook: Soon to have more ads in your “news feed” from companies you don’t even “Like®”.
• Under current legislation, city authorities would have more authority to kick people out of Westlake Park (including protesters?).
• Ron Sims says it better than I can: We’ve cut too much from higher-ed in this state already.
• Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna won’t endorse a GOP presidential candidate. This is smart strategy for the current state attorney general. If he wants to win even a single moderate crossover vote, he’ll need to stay as far away as he cam from the “I’m a bigger bigot than you!”/”No, I am!” Republican presidential field.
• The Seattle Times, now mostly ensconced in its new smaller digs, has put up a retro Times Square-esque news ticker sign, where people stuck in traffic halfway up Denny Way can learn all that’s going on.
• The construction bust (at least in greater downtown): Wasn’t it wonderful? Now there’s gonna be 40 stories of apartments next to the Paramount.
• I’ve been a skeptic of Bill Gates’s education-reform schemes (i.e., bust the teachers’ unions, and spend on fancy tech even if it means firing teachers). But today he makes a good point, that you can’t get employees to work better if you treat them as objects of incessant ridicule.
• The Koch brothers: Not only big anti-Obama Super PAC donors/organizers, but also leading oil price speculators. I’m not alleging any dot-connecting, but you might.
• Jonathan Chiat at New York magazine has a theory for why the far right wing (and its corporate puppet masters) are tripling down on the hate- and fear-mongering this year. It’s because the far right’s traditional chief audience (non-college-educated whites, particularly white males) is aging and dwindling, both in number and as a part of the total electorate. This may be the last Presidential election in which this audience can be effectively exploited.
• Did Ralph Nader really endorse Ron Paul, or is the hereby-linked rant a gross exaggeration?
• Ex-Seattle monologuist Mike Daisey talked a bit about sweatshop labor in his Apple-themed piece last year. Now he’s bashing the defenders of the Chinese factory system.
• It’s the fourth anniversary of the last Leap Day. That was when the soap opera Guiding Light (then the longest-running dramatic production in the world) introduced a new reality-show-like production technique. (Even the studio scenes were shot with hand-held minicams.) The new look failed to save that show, or the three other soaps (which held to their standard styles) that got canceled after GL was.

My pals at HistoryLink.org have put together a weighty historical coffee table tome called The Future Remembered.

It’s all about the Century 21 Exposition, the Seattle world’s fair that began 50 years ago this April.

It’s 300 pages of insightful prose and luscious pictures concerning what is still probably the single most important event that ever happened here in Software City.

It’s proof of what a physical book can still be—an object of desire. (And a handy blunt instrument, should you need one.)

It gives you most of the individual subplots of the fair’s story, from the miraculously perfect design of the Space Needle to the erotic puppet show (by the future producers of Land of the Lost!).

These sub-stories are woven around a main narrative line, about a cabal of squarer-than-square civic boosters who pulled off a staggering feat of a spectacle, something that melded both high art and mass entertainment into one vision of a sleek modern tomorrow (that mostly still hasn’t shown up).

And it even turned a small profit, and left a 74-acre arts-and-recreation campus in the middle of town.

You should all look it up, check it out, even get one for your very own.

•

Indeed, there’s only only one small mini-gripe I’ve got with the document.

There’s a two page spread saluting “Women At Century 21.”

It honors Gracie Hansen (the brassy small-town hostess who ran one of the fair’s burlesque revues), Laurene Gandy (wife of fair exec Joe Gandy and a tireless worker for both the fair and the subsequent Seattle Center), and the other male execs’ wives (billed collectively as “Our Fair Ladies”).

But one prominent woman is not mentioned in the spread. Or in the entire book.

Dr. Dixy Lee Ray (1914-1994) was a marine biologist, a UW prof, and a science-ed host on KCTS.

Ray worked as a “science advisor” to the United States Science Pavilion at the fair. In this role, she was the pavilion’s chief spokesperson to the local media.

She then became the first head of the pavilion’s post-fair entity, the Pacific Science Center.

From there she became the highest ranking woman in Richard Nixon’s Executive Branch (running the Atomic Energy Commission).

From there she successfully ran for governor in 1976 as a “flag of convenience” Democrat.

Then she proceeded on an anti-environmentalist agenda, alienated just about the entire state Democratic Party, and lost her re-election bid in the 1980 primary.

Ray left behind a lot of political opponents.

And, admittedly, her later role with the Science Center held more authority than her role with the Science Pavilion.

But she should not be written out of the fair’s history.

kono packi, the capital times (madison wi)

Independents, swing voters, “moderates,” “compasisonate conservatives”—the Republican Party, at the federal and state levels, officially doesn’t give a damn about any of these people.

Or more likely, the Republican Party has given up trying to bring them back into the fold.

The only audiences today’s Republicans have anymore are the people cocooned in the “conservative bubble.”

That is, the people who ONLY listen to and read conservative-ONLY media (Faux News, conservatalk radio, the Drudge Report, Regnery Books, etc.).

People who listen to nothing but the one-sided party-line right wing spin on everything.

Partly because these guys look, talk, and use the buzzwords of a particular “Real Americans” subculture.

These pundits and politicians, and the megabuck lobbyists who wholly own them, have real agendas that often run counter to the self-interests of their audiences, and especially counter to these audiences’ proclaimed moral/social values. (Joking about wishing you could murder all your opponents, then claiming to be “pro-life”? Really?)

I’m working on an essay for the general election season, tentatively titled Talking To Your Conservative Relatives.

One of its lines of reasoning will go as follows:

Don’t believe the hype.

To be more specific, don’t believe the demographic and psychographic marketing.

(Yes, I’ll explain what those things are. Essentially, they’re the schticks advertisers use when they talk about the “cigarette for women” or the “diet drink for men.”)

To be more specific, be EVEN MORE SKEPTICAL of politicians, pundits, etc. who claim they speak on behalf of your own values (including the values of family, hard work, faith, freedom, etc.).

The more these guys insist they’re “one of you,” the more you have to sniff out for the putrid scent of a confidence game going on.

• Not really a Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch update, but related: The Times website has posted the entire 152-page commemorative special section originally published at the Seattle World’s Fair’s opening weekend, 50 years ago this April. (And remember, newspaper pages were a lot wider back then.) All those puff-piece articles. All those now ‘retro’ photos and art. And all those ads! From supermarket chains down to commercial construction firms that didn’t need mass-market ads. Everyone wanted to advertise in newspapers then.
• No, Amazon is not some giant ogre out to stomp on all things truly bookish, say a few truly bookish folks.
• Rap n’ Opera, together at last. At least in this story.
• Last week’s #1 TV show in the Seattle area: the Grammys. #2: Downton Abbey. Really.
• Are we two years away from no longer being able to see films distributed on, you know, film?

tinyprints.com

• We may hear today (Thu 2/16) from the ex-Seattle financier who wants to build a new basketball/hockey arena and move an existing NBA team to it. No word from that other guy who allegedly wants to move an NHL team here.
• Dystopian novelist Gary Shteyngart went to Seattle for a travel mag. The resulting piece is super sad, in parts. But he also describes Seattle and Portland as…

…the last places in America where books are still a dominant part of the culture, consumed, discussed, pondered, and critiqued with gusto.

• Amazon reportedly still wants more Seattle office space.
• Liquor privatization starts phasing in on March 1, when restaurants and bars can buy booze direct from producers and out-of-state distributors.
• That $340 million state budget “windfall”? A lot of it’s due to past slashings of social service programs.
• The state Legislature still doesn’t have a plan to halt horrendous budget cuts. But it is working to bring back incentives for out-of-state film productions.
• It’s the end of the smelting line for the Fremont Fine Arts Foundry. The longtime site of statue-making, and home base of the first efforts to save the ferry Kalakala is going to become a restaurant, a bar, and a restaurant-bar supply house.
• Forget about radio, the printing press, penicillin, the wheel, or even gum with flavor crystals. The Internet is “the greatest thing that mankind has ever created.” Or so says the don of crazy cat captions.
• Is Microsoft helping fund a creepy right-wing campaign to force “climate change is just a theory” curricula in K-12 schools?
• In reality, as opposed to right-wing-media fantasyland, there is no war on religion in this country. And wrestling is fake too.
• Sean Hannity held a panel discussion about the birth control pseudo-controversy. The panel included men of several races and religions, and not even one woman. (Has even one woman spoken for the anti-birth-control side in any public forum, other than Sarah Palin?)
• Nancy Grace has become, if it can be imagined, even sleazier.
• Lest We Forget Dept.: It’s the 70th anniversary of the forced detention of Americans of Japanese descent.
• One anniversary not commemorated by many, except by Noam Chomsky: The 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. (Or rather, of U.S. involvement in same.)

fdin.org.uk

• Did you know Heinz had a soup factory in Kent? Emphasis on the “had.”
• Just when you thought you’d seen everything, something unexpected comes. Today’s edition: A poet who’s actually got people listening to him. Meet the Tacoma guy behind the viral video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
• A Facebook ad said an Issaquah heavy-metal guitarist with the stage name Steve Thunderbolt was looking for bandmates, but insisted on “no blacks”. Not ’cause he was a racist or anything; it was just “a drug issue and a safety issue.”
• It’s not just Ron Paul. The national Republican Party as a whole seems to just luuuuuv them some white supremacists.
• The UW president, the state’s highest paid employee, claims finding answers to education funding in Wash. state is “above my pay grade.”
• Soul divas aren’t supposed to die this young.
• Let’s hear it for last week’s #1 selling musical star on Amazon’s CD and download charts: Leonard Cohen! (Really.)
• Let’s close, just for the heckuvit, with Mike Wallace in a shortening commercial.

• Graphic designer Ben Crick is in the process of creating a manifesto for designers in the 21st century, to be communicated in the form of handsome posters. Crick’s name for the project: “I Am Designer.” He doesn’t have the URL for that yet, but he’s got the posters. The third poster happens to incorporate the logos of ATV and ITC, Sir Lew Grade’s TV production companies (The Saint, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds, The Muppet Show). The first poster, though, is the one whose message I identify with:

Don’t work for free under the guise of ‘good exposure’. It is bad exposure. If you don’t value your own work, neither will anyone else.

• It’s 10th Anniversary day today (Wednesday 2/8) at Top Pot Doughnuts. You know what that means: Free Old Fashioneds!
• As I’d previously predicted, the New York design firm contracted to design a new Seattle Waterfront has come up with a set of pretentious, windswept plazas and promenades, intended more to scream world-class-osity than to provide recreation and convenience for, you know, the people who actually live here. As I’ve said before, I don’t want a waterfront in good taste. I want a waterfront that tastes good.
• A Republican in the Oregon State Senate proposed a bill that would criminalize online invitations (even Tweets®) to events where crimes were later committed. As Goldy points out, it would essentially outlaw online organizing, under the guise of cracking down on “aggravated solitication.” The bill’s DOA in the Dem-controlled Ore. Senate, but it’s still damn close to what authorities in Egypt or Syria would like to stop.

entertainment weekly via getty images

Our ol’ pal, Posies singer-songwriter Ken Stringfellow, is quoted at the East Portland Blog as saying the Madonna/M.I.A. halftime show at Super Bowl LSMFT was all OK but doesn’t really signify “empowering women.”

That sort of “feminist victory,” Stringfellow claims, will only occur when “50 percent of the media companies are owned by women.”

“Ownership,” of course, is a slippery thing with NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies.

Such companies could easily be more than 50 percent “owned” by women. Overall, a sizable majority of all corporate stock shares officially are.

But this “ownership” is often filtered through pension systems, trusts, mutual funds, broker-managed accounts, and other schemes that don’t infer practical control.

Of the major media companies operating in the U.S. today, only a few have any significant degree of individual or family ownership. Among them:

• Viacom (Paramount, et al.) and CBS, now separately managed but both controlled by movie-theater mogul Sumner Redstone and family;
• Warner Music Group, now controlled by Russian-born chemical titan Len Blavatnik;
• Hearst Corp. (Cosmopolitan, A&E, et al.), wholly owned by that family’s fourth- and fifth-generation members;
• Advance Publications (The New Yorker, The Oregonian, Puget Sound Business Journal, et al.), owned by the S.I. Newhouse family;
• and, of course, News Corp. (Fox, et al.), controlled by the Rupert Murdoch clan.

Redstone’s and Murdoch’s daughters have taken major roles within their respective aging dads’ companies, and may take greater roles in the future.

But they’ve shown every sign of supporting regular showbiz-content gender roles, including the roles Stringfellow derides as “T&A” and “soft porn.”

I, and I suspect many of you, wouldn’t count that as a “feminist victory.”

treasurenet.com

• Remember, folks: “Rural estates” are not farmland. (And in my mind, vineyards only technically count.)
• Rumblings about a new SoDo basketball/hockey area heat up with revelations of high-level discussions between would-be developers/team owners and city bigwigs. The object: a development deal that wouldn’t need the city funds it legally can’t get. Also, the NBA’s Sacramento Kings could be moved, as early as next season.
• A tangible, physical Amazon store in Seattle? Believe it when you see it.
• A Seattle (and specifically Capitol Hill) institution, Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz, is being sold. The new owners plan to consolidate operations at the dealership’s newish Airport Way site, abandoning the East Pike Street HQ it’s held all these past 52 years. The Smart family will continue to own that property, one of the last remnants of the old Pike/Pine Auto Row.
• The Capitol Hill Times, a neighborhood paper for which I worked, off and on, in mostly part-time capacities between 1984 and 2011, has been sold to a foreclosure-services entrepreneur. His apparent business model for the paper is as a forum for legal notices, including his own.
• A tiny piece of the old Washington Mutual is left standing. It’s a mortgage reinsurance unit, and it could become profitable as early as, say, 2019.
• A few months back, we mentioned how the kind of artisanal video that used to be made for cable access is now made for YouTube. The latest example is a new online comedy series. It’s called Local Brew. The titular “brew” is Rainier Beer—which has not been a local product for more than a decade.
• Can today’s China be rightfully described as a fascist state? And if so, what kind of light does that shine on the “progressive” western corporations (from Redmond, WA as well as Cupertino, CA) who have all their stuff made there?
• I don’t always agree with Chris Hedges, but he’s spot on when he calls out violent “anarchists” as a “cancer” within the Occupy movement.
• Super Bowl SPQR: An actual exciting game, which went down to the final play. The commercials: the same old misanthropic “hip” violence. The halftime show: more “global superstar” over-the-top-osity, this time with Centurions. At least Madonna didn’t do the fake-English-accent thing this time.
• The folks at KCPQ would really like a Seattle Super Bowl. That is to say, a Super Bowl held in Seattle, not one in which the Seahawks would play (which seems even more remote these days). What would hosting the big game mean locally? Think of it as a big convention. Sixty thousand people (mostly people who can afford $16,000 tickets) descending here for perhaps a week. Oh, and some for-the-locals “fan fest” in the parking lot a couple days before.

sherilynn fenn in 'two moon junction'

The former bit actor (born Zalman Lefkovitz in 1941) made his first big career splash in 1988 when he wrote and produced the softcore classic 9 1/2 Weeks.

That film’s success led to a career as America’s premiere erotic filmmaker of the time, with the minor classics Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction (Sherilynn Fenn’s springboard to fame), and Delta of Venus (arguably a better Anais Nin adaptation than the higher-budgeted Henry and June).

Even before Henry and June‘s disappointing box office led Hollywood’s theatrical distributors away from sex flicks, King had branched out into late night cable shows, starting with the still-famous Red Shoe Diaries (David Duchovny’s springboard to fame).

In a sub-genre known for some of corporate media’s shoddiest production values, King’s shows and TV-movies stand out. They display lush (if clichéd) lighting/photography and poetic dialogue/narration. The sex scenes are choreographed to convey warmth more than “heat,” accompanied by King’s trademark fusion-jazz sax soundtracks. King helped fund these projects by distributing them on video, emphasizing distribution at Blockbuster and other outlets that didn’t carry hardcore porn.

A devoted family man in spite of his subject matter, his wife and two daughters were key members of his production team.

From time to time he branched out beyond the skin-flick genre, including documentaries about dancers and surfers. But those were sidelines to the sex stuff. Battling cancer in recent years, he kept producing and sometimes directing more TV-movies and series. A pay-per-view website for these was announced last year but never launched.

And yes, he died at the age of 69.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!