SOMEONE NAMED ONLY ‘MICHAEL’ has a lot of profound things to say about the differences between “movie people” and book people.” I read books, and even write them, but I’ve never considered myself comfortable among the proponents of what I’ve called “the writerly lifestyle.” This essay tells me why, at long last.

Who’d’ve thunk it? Noam Chomsky, academic-left theoretician and author of obscure incendiary anti-Bush tracts, has become a famous enough name, at least in this town, to become an ad slogan for a regional chain of seven bookstores.

You know you’re a word-usage freak when this sign makes you stop and think not about its message, but about whether it should say “1 in 7 is” or “1 in 7 are.”

Above and below, anonymous sidewalk chalk art found downtown.

WHO DOESN’T LOVE bad sex scenes in literature? Almost nobody, that’s who.

THIS PAST FIRST THURSDAY, the Forgotten Works space found a way to become a little less forgotten. It held a big, wide-open holiday art sale, with as many works (all limited to 8″ x 10″) as would fit on the walls.

The previous first Thursday, the Nico Gallery space (where my own City Light, City Dark premiered) held a live dance/performance/whatever event entitled Flipeography. Seven dancers, spaced around the room, held static poses until passersby touched them to cue a “flip” to a new pose.

Castle, the multi-state sex-shop operation we once described here as “buying chains from a chain store,” opened a new outlet on Broadway, in a former Wherehouse music store. (Just think: They could’ve kept the old sign and just changed the third letter.)

Most of Castle’s branches are self-contained big-box (pun unintentional) buildings with plain storefronts. Its first Seattle store, on Fairview between the Seattle Times and Hooters, is so minimally marked you essentially have to already know it’s there. But the Broadway store’s got a big open display window, inherited from its prior tenant. Everyone who passes by can see what’s in the windows (so far, fetish wear and Xmas decorations). Everyone who passes by can see when you enter and leave. (But they don’t have to know what you bought.)

Still, for intimate goods I’d still recommend a more intimate store, such as Toys in Babeland.

Meanwhile, Abercrombie & Fitch announced this week it won’t make any more of its wacky catalogs, infamous for their use of naked models to sell clothes.

Say what you will about the chain, but its catalog was the original Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. It taught a generation of iron-jawed frat boys to think of themselves as objectified sex toys; as exemplified by the photo-op models seen here at the downtown Seattle store on the day after Thanksgiving.

ON NOV. 30, Doug Nufer emceed the final installment in the Titlewave used-book store’s monthly live reading series, after nine years. We’ll miss ’em.

ONE OF THE FEW intelligent conservative publications out there, The World & I (founded by pals of Unification Church honcho Sun Myung Moon), has a long, intriguing essay about “The Feminization of American Culture.” The writer, Leonard Sax, implies a connection between the rise of feminine values and a rise in “environmental estrogen,” due to chemical leakoffs from all the plastic products lying around our homes and landfills.

I’d already heard about the latter phenomenon in a Hugo House lecture a couple years ago by Olympia postcard designer Stella Marrs. Marrs didn’t think the pervasiveness of estrogen-like chemicals was a good thing, for women or anybody. Recent medical disputes about the long-term effects of (deliberate) estrogen therapy regimens, such as a possible increased breast-cancer risk, might back her up on this.

Which brings me to the good friend of mine who’s studied a lot about the Greek Amazons, warriors of legend who would undergo masectomies to gain better bow-and-arrow skills. Are the women of the industrialized world, Sax’s article asks, gaining more dominance at the expense of their own health?

Some people are apparently irate about a Pioneer Square restaurant offering something called “Naked Sushi,” an evening in which little sushi tidbits are served from the Saran-wrapped torso of a reposing woman (wearing just enough, besides the Saran, to appease the Liquor Board).

This is essentially a commercialization of an old Yoko Ono performance-art piece; or, if you will, a fusion-cuisine adaptation of an old entertainment shtick done in Hellfire Club-era London drinking parlors (as fantasized about in Geoff Nicholson’s novel The Food Chain.)

It’s not a statement of hatred against women or against sushi. If the restaurant in question presents it in the proper way, it could be a statement of sensuality, of adoration, and of honor for the circle of life.

Or, if the restaurant in quesiton presents it in the improper way, it could just be a silly little lark.

GO BACK IN TIME and relive the top news events of 1950 with poet Edward Sanders. (Yes I know, we’ve finally added a poetry link. But please don’t send in your own poems hoping to get published on this site.)

…the Frankfurt Book Fair last week (whose schedule is one reason the Northwest Bookfest doesn’t have as many global bigname authors these days). Anyhoo, she gave a long but intriguing speech about the recent Euro/American rift, with the following closing benediction: “In a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

The NYU professor and longtime showbiz-basher passed away last Sunday, but (perhaps appropriately, given his contempt for all things media-esque) the papers didn’t mention it until Thursday.

The following is not intended as a “flame” message, but I always felt frustrated at Neil Postman’s writings. He said he wanted people to avoid deceptively simple ideas, but his books were full of those.

In the past, I’d publicly belittled Postman as a grumpy ol’ baby-boomer elistist of a character type I used to know in college, whose examples were always stringy-bearded, always disdainful of anything in culture or entertainment that didn’t remind them of The Late Sixties, and always contemptuous of anyone who dared commit the mortal sin of being younger than them.

This past February, some of you might recall, I was asked to join a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library entitled, “Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death?” (from the title of Postman’s best-known book). I found myself essentially arguing against the premise, vs. a stringy-bearded baby-boomer film critic who essentially argued that anyone whose lifestyle or demographics were different from his was automatically a dumb mainstream dupe.

I argued, and would still argue, that popular culture is not intrinsically evil (and neither are heterosexuality, meat, or non-co-op grocery stores). I would also argue that the world situation is not nearly as one-dimensionally simplistic as Postman claimed it to be (even while he denounced the masses’ excess simplicity). The books of his that I’d read were full of a priori arguments, gross overgeneralizations, ageisms, sexisms, and us-vs.-them dichotomies (although, like all my stringy-bearded professors, Postman often said “us” when he really meant to say “them”; when he wrote “we,” you could tell he meant “all those ignorami out there in dorky mainstream America who don’t know what we know and wouldn’t understand it if they heard it”).

Some of you reading this might imagine that I must be a right-winger who disliked Postman as a left-winger. NO, NO, NO. I believe Postman wasn’t too radical, he was too conservative. He was too comfortable in his hermetically-sealed ideology. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he never acknowledged that life, politics, et al. are complex, and that our schoolchildren need to learn to deal with these complexities; that there are more than two sides to most issues, and that there are a lot more than just two kinds of people in this country.

If I can now say something positive on Postman’s behalf, it’s that, at times, he did proclaim the need for critical thinking, even if he insufficiently practiced his own prescription.

from Absolute Write: “Please contact the authors if you’d like to reprint articles on this site.  All copyrights are retained by original authors.  And plagiarizers will be rounded up, handcuffed, and stuck into a very small and humid room wherein they must watch Mariah Carey’s GLITTER over and over again.”

I’M CONTINUING TO FEEL relatively energetic after my recent physical unfortunateness, so I’m hoping that was just a one-off thang.

So, it was back to Bumbershoot on Saturday.

The performance-art group Mass Ensemble strung its giant “Earth Harp” from the Space Needle, where LA dancer/singer/yoga teacher Andrea Brook attracted attention from all with her acrobatic musicianship.

Then it was off to Flatstock 3, an annual showcase of rock-poster art and the artists who make it, held in a different city each year. Since each poster was designed to shout for your attention on a wall or a light pole, the sight of hundreds of them at once leads to a not-unpleasant-at-all kind of sensory overload, much like that of the best rock n’ roll itself.

Above, local poster-maker Shawn Wolfe (the artist formerly known as Beatkit).

Below, ex-local poster-maker Jermaine Rogers wears an inside joke about our ol’ pal Art Chantry, the most famous current poster boy to refuse to attend Flatstock. (Chantry has always insisted he hates computer graphics.)

Once night falls, the slam poets come out.

I’M STILL FEELING ERRATIC ACHES and dizzy spells at varying times of the day following my recent panic-type episode. (I’m still waiting for at least one reader to email their sympathies.)

But I did get to spend most of Friday at Bumbershoot.

Firstly, I spotted this loving pair on the way to what band’s set? (C’mon, it’s an E-Z guess.) (OK, the answer’s at the bottom of this post.)

Prior to that, however, I got to see plenty-O-rockin’-action at the Exhibition Hall, starting with the wonderful Visqueen.

Later, during The Divorce’s set in the same space, I finally got my very own Charles Peterson moment.

Beer gardens are everywhere on the B-shoot grounds, in keeping with the festival’s ongoing capitulation to the national mania for revenue enhancement. The Ex Hall’s beer garden is festooned with lovely Lava Lites and similar products.

Jessica Lurie performed a typical mind-blastin’ set with her ensemble at the Northwest Court stage.

The Bumbrella Stage’s banners include plugs for two sponsors I’d never expected to see on the same piece of screen-printed fabric.

One big change this year: The Small Press Book Fair was turned into the Ink Spot. Its aesthetic premise was also changed, from circa 1973 (Port Townsend-esque nature poetry) to circa 1983 (punk zines). Above, local zine vet Gregory Hischack (Farm Pulp).

(Answer: Modest Mouse, of course.)

NEAL POLLACK sez it’s way past time Americans started fighting for their right to party:

“These are tense times. People want to loosen the steam valve a little bit. They want to participate in culture outside of the jurisdiction of federal ‘morality’ educators. We don’t want the government telling us how to spend our free time, sussing out and prosecuting casual drug users and harassing nightclub owners. And for heaven’s sake, give the kids some condoms.

“Sex and drugs and live music make life great. These are the kinds of things that were outlawed in Taliban-run Afghanistan. If they can’t be legal and easy in America, then I don’t want to live here anymore. I want to live in a place where drugs and sex are tolerated, where the government provides a sane level of social services, where religion isn’t always threatening to take over the state.”

I heartily concur.

Down with the Republican sex police AND the Democrat music censors!

Proponents of pot legalization should give up their pious guises, admit they’re really out to legalize recreational toking, and take pride in that.

We should allow and even endorse such wholesome frolics as the Fremont Parade nudists. Even set aside a clothing-optional public beach or two.

The Seattle City Council shouldn’t just approve bigger parking lots for strip clubs, it should dump its decade-long moratorium against licensing any new strip clubs.

Let’s fess up and admit our teens (and adults) are gonna be gettin’ it on w/one another, and prepare ’em for the potential physical (and psychological) consequences.

And consentin’ adults of whatever gender oughta be able to get it on w/other consentin’ adults of whatever gender, even for material gifts, as long as they don’t keep the neighbors awake at night.

Hedonistically-related activities that do impunge on the well-being of others, such as stinky meth labs that could explode and take out the whole block any day now, could still be prosecuted under those reasons.

Heck, I’d even lower the drinking age a year or two, under certain circumstances and with certain driving-related caveats.

There. Now I’ve gone and ruined any chance of ever getting elected to the U.S. Senate.

Unless a bunch of us go out and do what Pollack asks–form a “Party Party” built around the right to live our own lives our own way.

As I’ve written in the past, Seattle’s civic history has always involved the dichotomy between sober civic-building and boistrous partying-for-fun-and-profit. (Frenchie theorist Jean Baudrillard would call it “production” vs. “seduction.”) The past decade of the hi-tech boom saw great public and private investment in the “production” half of the equation, but all that remains standing from much of that are monuments to the bureaucrat-acceptable parts of the “seduction” industries–sports and recreation sites, big comfy homes, museums, and performing-arts palaces. The newest of these, McCaw Hall (the revamped Opera House), has its open house this Sunday. (Yes, it’s a theater named for a family whose fortune was made in that bane of theater operators everywhere, cell phones.)

Las Vegas is realizing the economic value of fun. It’s time our regional (and national) leaders did likewise, or got replaced with other leaders who do.

(PS: I know the cyber-Libertarians would insist to me that they fully support the right to party. Alas, some of these dudes also support the right to pollute, the right to discriminate, the right to pay shit wages, and the right to bust unions.)

(PPS: Ex-Nirvana manager Danny Goldberg discusses some of this in his new book, Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit. Goldberg makes the supposedly provocative, but actually common-sensical, point that the Demos can’t successfully court what used to be known as “the youth vote” if they’re sucking up to censors and wallowing in baby-boomer bias.)

…with some of “those” words from the comics.

I almost never write about my private life here. But in the weeks since my recent, involuntary, five-day Internet fast, I’ve returned to certain habits and behaviors into which I’d gradually fallen over the months of my current unemployment.

I’ve been letting my mind, my most precious possession, remain stuck in first gear all day.

I’ve spent hours upon hours sitting before this machine, reading and looking at other people’s creativity, day after day, week after week. Not writing much; finishing even less. Getting a quota of job applications out, but not doing nearly enough of the ol’ in-person schmooze-networking.

I’ve got about a dozen and a half book ideas; few even close to completion. I’ve had all the time in the world, but instead have been watching scores of DVDs and reading self-help books about positive mental attitudes that don’t seem to ever really work.

I don’t know what to do about this condition.

But part of it must surely involve changing the circumstances of my daily existence.

I’ve got to spend less time online. Maybe even drop my home connection from DSL to dialup.

And I’m never going to become a “Kill Your Television” puritanical hippie (moderation in everything—including moderation). But I do need to spend lesss time with other people’s stories (even well-made art film stories) and more time devising my own.

For you the loyal MISCmedia reader, all this may mean fewer updates. Or it may mean more and longer updates, but concerning topics closer to the so-called “real” world than to the media-mediated worlds that have been this column’s main topic lo these past 16 years. Or it may mean more fiction pieces or long, serialized research projects.

Of course, if I just somehow attained a lucrative day job that kept me out of the house and out of my own head several hours a day, that also might help my condition.