from pulpcovers.com

• Teenage boys don’t read “young adult” fiction. Publishing industry people and school administrators want to change that, by supplying printed-word versions of video-game-esque adventures and sports-heroism sagas. It’s apparently not working. The answer, if you’re not a school administrator, is simple—pulp!
• OKCupid.com claims Portland and Seattle top the nation in personal ads from people “seeking casual sex.” It doesn’t say whether any of the advertisers actually attain their goal.
• From where you wouldn’t expect street theater, some 200 people dressed in Great Depression character costumes held a “soup line” vigil outside Rep. Dave Reichert’s Mercer Island office.
• Local directing wonderkind Lynn Shelton says she won’t be able to make any more movies in Washington until the state brings back filmmakers’ tax incentives.
• As new gambling opportunities have sprouted around the country, horse racing’s taken a nosedive. Fewer races are being staged, and fewer horses are being bred to run in them. One bright spot in the biz: Emerald Downs.
• Are Seafair and Daffodil Festival queens really insufficiently qualified to run for Miss America? And is this another example of our state falling behind in preparing its youth?
• As the Mitt Romney Presidential campaign ramps up, it’s time for a look back to the roots of anti-Mormon fervor. According to authors David Bigler and Will Bagley, it dates back to the initial spread of the LDS “tribe” across the inland west, back in the frontier days.
• Lame excuse dept: Hershey’s made money by having foreign students come to the U.S. for what the students thought would be an educational adventure but turned out to be sub-minimum-wage factory work. Hershey’s now tries to get away with it by saying it was really a subcontractor that did it.
• The latest fad in online fraud? “Review mills” churning out fake accolades for restaurants, books, or anything else you want accoladed.
• Financial analysts examined Google’s acquisition of Motorola’s cell phone division. Their conclusion: Google “bought a patent portfolio and got a mobile phone business thrown in for free.”
• And few seem to have noticed, but this month is the 30th anniversary of the IBM PC. And of the operating software running it, a little something called MS-DOS from a little company on the Eastside.

original mac screen fonts, from folklore.org

There’s a battle going on in the e-book field, one of the few media businesses that’s truly booming these days.

At stake: what these non-thing purchases will cost you.

In one corner: Amazon. The Seattle e-commerce king and Kindle e-book machine seller wants to set its own e-book prices (with most mass-market titles at $9.99), no matter what publishers want.

(Amazon also wants to eliminate the “hardcover window,” the early months of publication in which only the high-priced deluxe version of a book can be bought. Specifically, Amazon wants to sell e-books of a title the same week as that title’s dead-tree version first comes out.)

In the other corner: Five of America’s six biggest publishers (HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster), plus Apple (in a third corner?). The publishers have publicly proposed a different pricing structure, which they call “the agency model.” Under this scheme, publishers would set e-book retail prices. The e-book selling sites (Apple, Amazon, B&N, Kobo, etc.) would keep a 30 percent margin from this price.

Early last year, Macmillan threatened to withhold its titles from Amazon’s Kindle e-book platform until Amazon capitulated to the “agency model,” which it did; but only after Amazon threatened to withhold selling Macmillan’s physical books from the main Amazon site.

Now, a Seattle law firm has filed a class action suit in a California U.S. District Court. The suit alleges the five publishing giants and Apple have conspired to drive up e-book prices. The law firm names two individual consumers, in California and Mississippi, as the case’s official plaintiffs.

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With all this going on, William Skidelsky at the Guardian asks what’s the “true price” of a book as a written and edited document, rather than as a physical object.

Skidelsky quotes ex-Billboard editor Robert Levine, who’s written a forthcoming tract entitled Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back. Levine, as you’d guess, takes the side of the intellectual-property industry, including the book publishers.

Levine (as quoted by Skidelsky) states that it only costs $3.50 to “print and distribute” a hardcover book.

Thus, the argument goes, e-books should be just that much cheaper than physical books, no more.

However, it’s not that simple.

First of all, the whole pricing structure of physical books is about the design, manufacture, shipping, warehousing, and retailing of the object; including big margins to the retailers and wholesalers (who still sometimes have trouble keeping afloat). When all that’s reduced to the storage of some megabytes on a server, that whole pricing model goes away.

And much of the publisher’s share of a book’s price includes an allowance for the industry’s tremendous physical waste. If a copy shipped to a bookstore doesn’t sell, it gets sent back. All those copies are either re-shipped at clearance prices (more likely for coffee-table picture books) or destroyed. With e-books, none of that happens.

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You will note that, aside from Levine, we haven’t mentioned authors.

What would an e-book pricing structure look like if it were based on the people who actually make what’s being bought?

Take the current royalties for a book’s authors and illustrators.

Then at least double them.

Not only do the creators deserve it, but such a step would acknowledge that, since e-books are cheaper to get out, there will be more titles out there scrambling for readers’ bucks, and hence each individual title might not sell as much.

Then add in a budget item for the work-for-hire participants in a book’s making—the editors and designers and cover artists and licensors of agency photographs. Again, they’d be higher than for traditional paper books, to make up for lower expected total sales.

There’s still a role in the e-book realm for what we call “publishers.” They put up the money. They arrange promotion and advertising. They put authors, artists, and editors together. In many cases, they organize the transmutation of a vague idea into a saleable product.

Once these parties all have their pieces of the pie set into a fixed wholesale price, e-book sellers could charge as much or as little as they think they can get away with.

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That’s one potential e-book pricing model. There are others.

One is that of Take Control Books, for which I’ve worked in the past. They sell their e-books directly on their own site. Half the retail take, minus a cut for the company’s e-commerce provider, goes directly to the authors. (Take Control sells its e-books as .pdf files, which can be transferred with greater or lesser ease to all e-book reading devices.)

Another is self publishing, that past and present refuge of the artiste with no perceived commercial potential. Only in the e-book age, some authors are actually succeeding this way.

Earlier this year, bestselling thriller writer Barry Eisler said he was walking out of his “handshake deal” with St. Martin’s Press. For the time being, all books written by Eisler will be published by Eisler.

Of course, Eisler has an established “brand” for his works; much like Radiohead had when they released a download-only album. And Eisler has experience in the Silicon Valley startup world.

A more realistic role model would be that of Amanda Hocking. She’s young. She’s photogenic. She writes in a popular commercial-fiction genre. She’s sold a million e-books without a corporate backer (she’s got one now, though).

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The business side of book publishing, as I’ve carped here for years, has been a moribund, tradition-obsessed infrastructure of waste and lost opportunity.

E-books represent the biggest chance in decades (since the rise of the big-book bookstore chains) to fix this.

Let’s not blow it.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Michael Jacobs for suggesting added angles to this story.)

from thelmagazine.com

There’s bad news today for the book snobs out there.

(You know, the droning turned-up-nose guys who love to whine that Nobody Reads Anymore, except of course for themselves and their own pure little subculture.)

Turns out, according to a study co-sponsored by two industry groups, book sales are actually up over the past three years!

Yes, even during this current economic blah-blah-blah!

Ebook sales have particularly exploded.

But regular dead-tree volumes are also up; except for mass market paperbacks (perhaps the most vulnerable category to the ebook revolution).

Adult fiction sales rose 8.8 percent from early ’08 to late ’10. Also doing well, according to the NYT story about the study: “Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction….” (Good news for people who love bad news, to quote a Modest Mouse CD.)

Oh, as for that other commercial communications medium? You know, the medium that the book snobs call their sworn enemy?

The AP headline says it all: “Pay TV industry loses record number of subscribers.”

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Has the above inspired you to get with the program, hop on the bandwagon, follow the fad, and start buying some more books for your very own?

I have a great little starter number, just for you.

• Some guy who’s writing his own Seattle music-scene book has just listed me among the most “underrated Seattle music people.” Considering that the only public musical performing I’ve done is karaoke, I guess that’s an accomplishment.
• Today’s sermon against the deep bore tunnel comes from the Tacoma News Tribune, which chides the state Dept. of Transportation for refusing to make its tunnel-related records public.
• What they didn’t want to release, an internal memo about the tunnel project’s financial prospects, has been leaked online by tunnel opponents.
• R.I.P. Mark Hatfield, an actual sane Republican (back when there was such a thing) and one of the first national lawmakers to public acknowledge the Vietnam war was a huge mistake. The hereby-linked Oregonian obit claims Hatfield had been on the short list for the GOP VP nomination in ’68; but Richard Nixon chose the more “southern strategy” friendly (i.e., demagogue-like) Spiro Agnew.
• Obama insists that the Standard & Poor’s nonsense notwithstanding, America is still “a triple-A country.” So why don’t we try harder to break into the majors? (At least it’s better than the bush leagues, where we were when the seeds of this mess were planted.)
• Virginia Heffernan asks, and believes she has an answer, why grade-school students can write very lucid blog posts and lousy class papers. She calls for a move away from industrial-age rote learning and a return to “socratic learning.”
• Michael Wolff says he knows how to get the Rupert Murdoch empire out of the U.S.—sic ’em with the RICO Act.
• There’s panic on the streets of London, and spreading to other U.K. cities. It was originally inspired by protests against police brutality. Guardian commentator Nina Power offers another reason—increasing inequality in that land (still not as bad as it is here). The same paper also quotes academicians who see large parts of a whole young generation who believe they have no future. Is this the story of Johnny Rotten?

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

• Gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee made a bold move when he suggested that the state’s Investments Board could put more pension fund money into Washington businesses. Now, Inslee’s backed off that a little.
• Remember suburban sprawl? Now, at least in apartment construction, almost all the region’s new development is in Seattle.
• Meanwhile in the suburbs, local small businesses are among the enterprises learning what they can do with abandoned big-box retail spaces.
• The now-shuttered Columbia City Cinema is a mess. The building, and the finances behind it.
• Nationally, Mark Sumner insists there is no federal fiscal crisis, only a trumped-up right wing power play.
• The group United for a Fair Economy has a chart of 11 different “Things the Wealthiest Americans Can Buy for the U.S. (that most families can’t afford for themselves!).” For instance, the nation’s richest 400 households could pay off the whole country’s credit card debts.
• The Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal continues to obsess pundits everywhere. At The Observer (the Sunday-only sister paper to The Guardian, the left-leaning U.K. daily that broke much of the scandal’s details), Henry Porter claims that, at least in Brit domestic politics, “the door has shut on Murdoch.”
• And an unsigned piece in The Times of India sums up the standard operating procedure at Murdoch’s UK tabloids, even without their ickiest invasions of privacy, as “exploiting the pornography of sorrow.” A lot of U.S. media could be similarly accused.
• We close for today with Roger Ebert righteously snarking against rewritten “easy reading” versions of The Great Gatsby (possibly created for adult ESL classes):

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process.

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?

• I’ve ranted here in the past about certain dot-coms whose whole reason for being is verbal content, but which refuse to pay their writers. Turns out that even “content mill” dot-coms that do pay their writers work them to death. Lots of unpaid overtime, high quotas, short schedules, no pretense of quality, everything search-engine-optimized to smithereens. And the results didn’t even work fiscally, as recounted by “an AOL content slave.”
• Non-news of the day: Ebooks don’t need printers but they still need editors.
• The Brave New Films dudes have a handy dandy guide to the Koch Bros.’ moves behind the scenes of the right wing opinion machine; while Mr Jon Stewart lists a few dozen Fox News lies.
• As you know, I don’t like it whenever a woman brands “men,” as a singular collective entity, as “potential rapists.” I also don’t like it when a man does much the same thing—as a convoluted explanation of/justification for sexual assault. This man, whom I sorry to say shares my birth date, is the real Dilbert.
• Daily Kos has uncovered a Congressmember who loves Green Lantern and is willing to admit it.

…and Sherman Alexie defends writers’ right to depict these hells, both realistically and metaphorically.

As part of my ongoing obsession with cross-genre pollination (and yes, this does lead eventually into my quest for monetizable work), I’m looking for examples of stories that contain investigations or puzzle solving, OTHER THAN formula whodunits and spy capers.

Examples of what I’m looking for:

• “Jane Eyre” and “Rebecca”: Who was that mystery ex-lover?
• “Forbidden Planet”: What happened to the Krell?
• “A Letter to Three Wives”: Whose marriage is kaput?

UPDATE: Some of your responses (thank you):

“Crying of Lot 49”: structured as a mystery, not solved at the end.
“Death and the Compass” (Borges): hard to explain, just read it, it’s short.

You’ve one more evening tonight, and one more afternoon tomorrow, to catch The Novel: Live! at Richard Hugo House. Don’t worry about tuning in late; you can read all the previously written texts at the hereby linked website.

The event involves 36 writers (one of whom has a cartoonist collaborator) creating a single piece of fictive goodness. The final edited work will be put out as an ebook next year.

If this sounds absurd, well it is. But it’s not unprecedented. In the 1980s I was involved with “The Novel Of Seattle By Seattle,” an entire book-length yarn created in four days at Bumbershoot, complete with an accompanying art installation.

Last night, I attended the highly anticipated premiere of I Am Secretly an Important Man, the long in-the-making biopic about Seattle poet/author/musician/actor/performance artist Steven J. “Jesse” Bernstein.

Documentarian Peter Sillen had been collecting footage and reminiscences of Bernstein since the year after Bernstein’s 1991 suicide. Only now, after directing four other films and performing camera work on several others, has Sillen finally assembled this footage into an 85-minute feature.

He’s done a spectacular job.

The finished work captures, as well as any mere 85-minute feature can, the immense creative range, depth, and contradictions within Bernstein, which I won’t attempt to describe in this one blog entry.

(Of course, it helps that Bernstein recorded so much of his life and work in audio tape, video tape, and film, much of it taken by artists and collaborators from across the Northwest creative community.)

Suffice it to say you should see An Important Man during its engagement later this autumn at the Northwest Film Forum.

The 2010 Seattle Storm have not only become Seattle’s winningest pro team right now.

They didn’t just sweep all three of their playoff rounds and all their home games this year.

For me, they brought back my love of basketball itself.

Two years and change after the men’s pro team was stolen from us, I realized I could like this game again. The passing. The defense. The steals. The miracle shots from seemingly out of nowhere.

The Storm story is a tale of triumph from the wreckage of a civic travesty.

It’s been a couple of months since I read it, but I continue to be impressed or haunted (I’m not sure) by Seattle author David Sheilds’ Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.

Parts of it are like an essay anthology, even if they were written expressly to be in the book. I’m particularly thinking of the part where he tells other authors what their books are really about.

Other parts fit more closely into the “manifesto” concept.

And it’s all written in a short and breezy fashion, like Marshall McLuhan’s better known works.

Now if you know my work here, you know I believe there’s absolutely nothing inferior about aphoristic writing, despite four or more decades’ worth of hi-brow ranting against it. Long, cumbersome prose is not inherently insightful. Short, pithy, precision writing is not necessarily dumbed down writing.

In this case, Shields has thoroughly whittled and sanded down his arguments to a fine point.

His main premise: North American white suburban life has become so plasticized, so sanitized, that humans have developed an insatiable craving for “reality.” Even if it’s virtual reality, or faked reality, or fictional narratives disguised as reality.

Hence, we get “reality” TV series. We get the protagonists of these series treated as “celebrities,” splashed over the covers of gossip magazines.

We get first-person novels falsely and deliberately promoted as the real-life memoirs of young drug addicts and street orphans.

We get radio and cable “news” pundits who don’t relay information so much as they spin narratives, creating overarching explanations of how the world works—even if, in some cases, they fudge the facts or just plain lie to make their worldviews fit together.

We get fantasy entertainments (movies, video games) executed in highly hyper-realistic fashions, complete with ultra-detailed 3D computer graphics.

So far, Shields’ argument makes perfect sense.

Now for the “yeah, but” part:

In the past two or three years, most non-billionaire Americans and Canadians have been forced to face a lot of reality; a lot of unpleasant reality at that. Some of us have had all too much reality.

“Reality” entertainment can be seen as just another style of escapism. An escapism that promises total immersion. An escapism that promises, however falsely, to offer an alternate reality, one that’s more dramatic or more comprehensible than the audience’s “real” reality could ever be.

This doesn’t mean Shields’ main premise is wrong.

Millions of people could, indeed, be desperate for more “real” lives.

But they won’t find it in the highly edited and curated “reality” entertainments.

They’ll only get a scratch that makes the itch worse.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Thoughts on recent performance events, big and small, on the Hill:

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1) The Capitol Hill Block Party.

From all accounts it was a smashing success. Some 10,000 people attended each of the event’s three days. Except for one no-show due to illness, all the big advertised bands satisfied their respective throngs. Seattle finally has a second summer attraction with top big-name musical acts. (I personally don’t consider an outdoor ampitheater in the middle of eastern Washington to be “in Seattle.”)

But as the Block Party becomes a bigger, bolder, louder venture, it can’t help but lose some of its early funky charm, and a piece of its original raison d’etre.

Once a festival starts to seriously woo major-label acts, it has to start charging real money at the gates. It’s not just to pay the bands’ management, but also for the security, the sound system, the fences around the beer gardens, and assorted other ratcheted-up expenses.

That, by necessity, makes the whole thing a more exclusive, less inclusive endeavor.

The street fair booths that used to be free get put behind the admission gates. The merchants, political causes, and community groups operating these booths only end up reaching those who both can and want to pay $23 and up to get in.

I’m not suggesting the Block Party shut down or scale back to its earlier, small-time self.

I’m suggesting an additional event, perhaps on another summer weekend. It would be what the Block Party used to be—free to all, but intended for the people of the Hill. An all-encompassing, cross-cultural celebration of the neighborhood’s many different “tribes” and subcultures. An event starring not just rock and pop and hiphop, but a full range of performance types. An event all about cross-pollenization, exchanges of influence, and cultural learning.

It wouldn’t be a “Block Party Lite,” but something else, something wonderful in its own way.

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2) Naked Girls Reading: “How To” Night.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about a strip club in Los Angeles called “Crazy Girls.” I told him I would rather pay to see sane girls.

Now I have. And it’s beautiful.

“Naked Girls Reading” is a franchise operation, originally based in Chicago. But it’s a perfect concept for Seattle. It’s tastefully “naughty” but not in any way salacious. It’s not too heavy. It’s entertaining. It’s edifying. It could even be billed as providing “empowerment” to its cast.

The four readers last Sunday night, plus the dressed female MC (costumed as a naughty librarian), all came from the neo-burlesque subculture. But this concept is nearly the exact opposite of striptease dancing. There’s no stripping, no teasing, and no dancing. The readers enter from behind a stage curtain, already clad in just shoes and the occasional scarf. They sit at a couch. They take turns reading aloud. When each reader has performed three brief selections, the evening is done.

Each performance has a theme. Last Sunday, it was “How To.” The readers mostly chose types of texts that are seldom if ever read aloud in public. Given Seattle’s techie reputation, it’s only appropriate that we rechristen instructional text as an art form.

Selections ranged from explosive-making (from the ’70s cult classic The Anarchist Cookbook), to plate joining in woodwork, to home-brewing kombucha tea, to deboning a chicken (from The Joy of Cooking), to the famous Tom Robbins essay “How to Make Love Stay.” The women performed these selections with great humor, great voices, and great sitting posture.

Despite what you may hear from the Chicken Littles of the book and periodical industries, The Word isn’t going away any time soon, any more than The Body. Both obsessions retain their eternal power to attract, no matter what.

“Naked Girls Reading” performances are held the first Sunday of each month in the Odd Fellows Building, 10th and East Pine. Details and ticket info are at nakedgirlsreading.com/seattle. The promoters also promise a “Naked Boys Reading” evening at a yet-unset date. (The participles won’t be all that’s dangling.)