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.

filmfanatic.org

• Forget the movie and the two bios, all full of fiction. In reality, Frances Farmer was not lobotomized. Her story’s still mighty tragic, though.
• Architect Matt Roewe suggests a new, novel public transportation solution—a passenger gondola from the waterfront to Capitol Hill, ending atop a 16- to 40-story tower above Broadway.
• Even some longtime Seattle citizens don’t realize the Army has held on to pieces of Fort Lawton, now surrounded by former fort land that’s now Discovery Park. That ends Saturday.
• The last iPhone-incompatible cell service operator, Bellevue-based T-Mobile, won’t be such anymore. They’re not going to sell the iPhone any time soon, but their data plans will at least work on it once the upgrades are done.
• Yep, looks like another stupid all-cuts budget in the Legislature, kicking the can of our regressive revenue system down the road again. However, at least Basic Health (or what’s left of it) is preserved in one of the competing budget proposals.
• The memorial totem pole to slain carver John T. Williams will be unveiled this weekend at Seattle Center.
• The Seattle Times wants to sell its now ex-headquarters buildings for $80 million, twice their appraised value. That would help the company to meet its pension obligations, and perhaps even help subsidize the paper.
• Artists’ rights outrage of the week: “…A Florida judge ruled last month that iconic funk king George Clinton doesn’t own the rights to any music he created from 1976 to 1983.” That pretty much includes anything you remember from the P-Funk heyday.
• Sponsor tie-ins and product placement, those savior/banes of modern bigtime movies, just get more ridiculous every year. Now The Lorax, that story-sermon against runaway consumerism and “stuff”-ism, is being used to sell SUVs.
• Google’s latest potential new hardware product is something out of a modern dystopian novel. It’s “augmented reality” eyeglasses that display informative texts, social media updates, and, yes, ads.

joe mabel, via wikimedia commons

• How comprehensive can a list of the “10 Greatest Homes in Seattle History” be if it leaves out the Montlake spite house?
• Something I never thought I’d see: young adults joining Elks lodges. Back in the middle of the last century, Elks clubs were huge. The one in Everett, where my father attended, had that town’s best bar, gym, and private pool, and its only live music lounge. But the national Elks were among the last American social institutions to confront their own racist/sexist policies, and hence got branded as reactionary fuddie duddies. The new Elks are promoting themselves with that so-courant “social” mantra, and cheap drinks.
• Linda Thomas would like to remind you that Microsoft XBoxes and Amazon Kindles are also made at the same notorious Chinese factories used by Apple.
• Thomas also performs the ever popular local-angle-on-big-story shtick, with “Local duo penned popular Whitney Houston hits.”
• Not so fast, arena-hopers: Efforts are indeed being made to keep the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes right where they are. At worst, this would give the arena developers more time to acquire the rest of the land they’d need and to design the thing.
• Meanwhile, Goldy dumps righteous scorn on the hippie sports-haters.
• Mayor McGinn’s “State of the City” address mentioned the usual things (Amazon, arena, jobs, education, crime, etc.). But he also mentioned race discrimination in housing (still going on) and attempts to pull up African American school graduation rates. Unlike some ’60s-generation white people around here, McGinn actually knows there have been actual black people here other than Hendrix.
• Knute Berger sees developers and Seattle’s civic establishment as preparing for a post-recession boom.
• The state budget deal: done with mirrors.
• Who’s not making money from the Facebook IPO? The $1-an-hour foreign laborers who censor your pictures on the site.
• Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis thinks journalistic institutions should become more like Facebook. Whatever that means. Let me explain briefly why this is hokum: Professional journalism (no matter what contrived “social” or “search” elements are tacked onto it) is someone relaying/interpreting information, telling factual stories for collective audiences. It’s nothing even vaguely similar to the huge censored chat room that is Facebook.
• Amanda Marcotte says the Girl Scouts, current topic of a trumped-up right wing smear campaign, really were progressive at the start, just by having girls do the same “scouting” things boys were doing.
• D.L. MacKenzie boils down the whole Libertarian thang into a simple mantra, in which Business is supposed to be Always Good and Government is supposed to be Always Bad. (As you might expect from this summary, MacKenzie interprets this mantra as a gross oversimplification, at odds with the complications of the real world.)
• Where not to go to get away from drugs: small towns.
• My fave recent American author David Foster Wallace would have been 50 this week. He never even got to live to see The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar (a shtick in his most famous work Infinite Jest).

vintage postcard via allposters.com (prints just $14.99)

• After the success of its Redbox DVD machines, Bellevue-based Coinstar’s Next Big Thing could be—(ready for it?)—coffee vending machines. But, supposedly, really good coffee vending machines.
• Queen Anne Books is for sale. Prospective buyers: Don’t think of this as your chance to stage a valiant crusade to save Book Culture. Think of it as a bona fide actual for-real business opportunity. One that, depending on your skills and dumb luck, stands a good chance of panning out.
• How fiscally desperate is the state? One legislator suggests selling off the state’s art collection.
• Community Transit in Snohomish County slashed service a couple years back, and is slashing it again this week. Like other transit agencies around here, it’s over-dependent on local sales tax revenue.
• Then there’s the story of an unemployed local tech writer, who’s now making at least some money picking lice out of schoolkids’ hair.
• Seattle’s would-be NBA owner, an admitted hedge fund manager, is also described as having been a small time bully at Blanchet High. (Seattle’s would-be NHL owner, as described here previously, is in a business almost as lowly regarded as hedge funds—tobacco.)
• City-owned KeyArena will do just fine even with a newer, bigger Sodo arena, or so the City insists.
• The scary mega-earthquake dystopian fantasy known around here as “The Big One:” Could still happen. Could be even more fearsome than previously feared.
• And we must say goodbye, after eight-plus years, to Inner Space, the private indoor skateboard park in Wallingford. But fret not: it might reopen under new management later this year.

• 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?

donald levin's holdings range from cancer sticks to hockey sticks.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has confirmed the rumors (mentioned here a few weeks back) that Donald R. Levin, owner of a minor league hockey team in Chicago, is interested in owning a new or moved National Hockey League team in Seattle.

Levin’s interest in the Seattle sports world has been known for a while. Last July, KIRO-TV reported Levin was looking into potential Bellevue sites for a new NHL arena. But the Globe and Mail story says Levin’s willing to be roomies with Chris Hansen, who wants to build an NBA arena in Sodo.

Besides the American Hockey League’s Chicago Wolves, Levin is the principal owner of the privately held D.R.L. Enterprises.

It’s a mini conglomerate built around Republic Tobacco. Levin built that from a single smoke shop in the Chicago suburbs. From there he moved into wholesaling, and eventually into manufacturing.

Republic’s properties include JOB rolling papers* (bought from the original French owners), Drum and Top “roll-your-own” tobacco (bought from R.J. Reynolds), and assorted other brands in assorted countries.

Levin has funneled some of his cancer-puff profits into businesses with brighter futures; principally industrial leasing (including aircraft, though I don’t know if that includes Boeing aircraft) and licensed sports gear and merchandise.

And, according to the Chicago Wolves’ website, Levin has “made nearly 20 motion pictures distributed in the U.S. and overseas.”

The Wolves’ site doesn’t identify them, but the Internet Movie Database lists 12 films produced or executive-produced by Levin from 1983 to 1995. They include:

• the Stephen King bomb Maximum Overdrive,
• the Jamie Lee Curtis soaper Love Letters (in partnership with Roger Corman),
• the camp-classic thriller Angel, and
• the late director Zalman King’s softcore classic Two Moon Junction (which launched the career of our idol Sherilyn Fenn).

In other words, he sounds just like our kind of guy.

* (PS: Yes, I am aware that rolling papers are sometimes filled with a substance other than tobacco. If you can find a relevance from that fact to this story, go ahead.)

A scene from the 2008 Japanese film Love Exposure (dir. Sion Sono).

walla walla union-bulletin, via bygone walla walla

• As we prepare to mark a half century since the Century 21 Exposition, another local institution also marks the big five-O. Let’s raise a Coca-Cola Freestyle and some Mexi-Fries to the fiftieth birthday of Taco Time. (The Washington Taco Time, that is; not the same-named but separate Oregon chain.)
• Cold cases may make for popular TV dramas, but the folks who actually pursue them are facing layoffs.
• The Legislative session’s more than halfway done. Still nothing even on the horizon that would address our state’s crippling, unjust revenue system.
• Stanley Siegel at Psychology Today says your tastes in porn can reveal your personality—even the person you wish you were. If true, then it means I long to live in a never-really-was vision of 1970s Europe, surrounded by dirndl-clad Alpine lasses, slinky Indonesian photographers, and clean-cut German coeds. (And cool cars and cooler music.)
• Memo to the pop music world: Dude, you’re not gettin’ Adele.
• Friday’s BP refinery fire could have been covered as an environmental disaster barely averted, or a sign that this company still can’t be trusted. Instead, the Seattle Times‘ lead proclaimed the event’s most important aspect was that it “might boost gas prices.”
• Paul Krugman explains, at length, what the Wall St. crooks did. As for righting their wrongs, he says “It’s not that simple.” (Link contains NSFW banner ads.)
• Sarah Jaffe proclaims that America is becoming “less, not more, conservative.”
• Layla Farah at Huffington Post lists 11 living both-black-and-gay icons. They are two writers, one professor, one news anchor, three film directors, one comedian, two magazine editors, and one former athlete. No singers, musicians, actors, elected officials, businesspeople, scientists, or current athletes. And, in a major act of omission, no DJ Riz.

• King Street Station isn’t just getting “restored.” It’s getting architecturally-appropriate new stuff added to it.
• The basketball/hockey arena proposal announced Thursday is exactly as I, and many others, had predicted. All the money will come from private sources, and from city/county bonds to be paid back by arena revenues. Now comes the long wait, on three fronts. The city and county councils have to sign on. The project has to be designed. And it won’t get built until an NBA or NHL team (preferably both) actually come here.
• On a related note, Aaron Levine at KCPQ says it’s still OK to hate NBA boss David Stern.
• A lonely expanse of lawn on Beacon Hill is slated to become a neighbor-run park dedicated to edible plants. Welcome to the “food forest.”
• Lisa Rochon at the Toronto Globe and Mail makes “The Business Case for Beautiful Libraries.” Yes, she mentions Seattle’s.
• KIRO-TV.com headline: “Marysville teachers protest for statewide budget cuts.” Uh, they’re actually protesting against the cuts. This must be the same sort of sentence construction as the oft-heard talk about folks staging “a fundraiser for muscular dystrophy.”
• Now we know why Michael Nesmith wasn’t on last year’s Monkees reunion tour, and hadn’t performed many solo gigs lately either. He’d been slowly going blind. But he’s cured now. (It was undiagnosed cataracts.)
• Today’s Republicans aren’t even trying to get the votes of non-dittoheads anymore.
• In the 1990s it was e. coli in Odwalla apple juice. Now it’s arsenic in “organic brown rice syrup,” whatever that is.
• Mars Inc. will impose maximum calorie counts on its candy bars. Think of it as a way to reduce product sizes, keep the prices the same, and call it a “health” move.

candy wrapper archive via aol/lemondrop.com

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.)

Last June, I wrote a piece entitled “Notes to a Potential Girlfriend.”

That piece was all about me.

This time, I’m fantasizing/riffing about who I would like that potential girlfriend to be.

She would be, more or less, as follows:

• Any adult age; though if you’re much younger, be aware that I don’t stay up ’til 2 as often as I used to.
• Any ethnicity, skin color, or hair color.
• Won’t try to convert me into becoming a Christian, a vegan, a stoner, or a Libertarian.
• Will let me keep my “room of one’s own;” will let me keep it messy.
• Will let me hold, more or less, to my odd (but never deliberately so) tastes in food, music, apparel, and entertainment. Will let me continue to own and use a television.
• Believes in gender equality, in BOTH directions.
• Allows my needed daily work-at-home time.
• More into soul-melding, intimate lovemaking than porn-style fucking.
• Progressive populist, not alt-culture elitist. (i.e., not a square-basher.)
• Not a female me, which couldn’t exist anyway. A complement rather than a clone.
• Notices things I don’t notice. Knows things I don’t know (which covers, I admit, a LOT of ground).
• Has an open and voracious mind.
• Cares about people and the future and stuff.
• Sees the heart and humanity in other people, no matter what their niche or lifestyle.
• Has eyes that light up the night, and lips to melt into.
• Equally at home in social and private situations.
• A “city mouse.” (I’m not moving to Bainbridge.)
• Preferably not currently married. Preferably.
• NS/LD.
• Preferably without preteen kids (but that’s not a requirement).
• Preferably without implants (but that’s not a requirement).
• Isn’t looking for a guy with money (goes w/o saying).
• Isn’t looking for an “enabler.”
• Doesn’t need to conform to others’ standards of “nonconformity” (ideology-wise or fashion-wise).
• Tells me what she wants; doesn’t just expect me to already know.
• Relatively free of psychotic episodes.
• Centered, self confident, and comfortable in her self.
• Believes love is more important than self righteousness.
• Believes in herself, in others, and in me.

aol radio blog

• Overhyped meme of the day: Following last night’s Grammys, teens and young adults by the dozen are supposedly Tweeting® “Who Is Paul McCartney?” As if the entire world hadn’t been force-fed the Sixties Generation® and its incessant proclamations of itself as the apex of humanity from which all before and since is a mere subspecies. As if Sixties Generation® superstars, even those famous for singing about dogs and butter pies, haven’t been repurposed everywhere from Simpsons cameos to Guitar Hero® games. Have at least a few dozen young Americans actually found a way to mentally shut out the tactics of Nostalgia, Inc.? Could they actually be more interested in creating their own culture, their own world?
• Adultery. Sex scandals. Obsessions with sales-hustling, upscale material goods, and “branding.” Shady business practices. Welcome to the all-American materialistic world of yoga.
• Just in time for v-day, gays will be able to get married, in just a few months. As long as the out-of-state bigot megabucks campaign, just starting, doesn’t reverse it.
• The Belltown Community Center is finally set to open in June, at the former Zum upscale gym at Fifth and Bell. The building of Bell Street’s “park boulevard” makeover (specially wide sidewalks and special street lighting) starts later this year; piggybacking, as it had always been planned to, on street work City Light was going to do on Bell anyway.
• Is Rick Santorum really an extremely bigoted ass, or simply cynically pretenting to be an extremely bigoted ass?
• Going everywhere by car: it’s just sooo less popular these days.
• The drive for NBA and NHL teams in Seattle now has a “fan lobby.” It’s called Arena Solution. Its board and advisory committee includes everybody from ex-Seahawks coach Tom Mara and Sonics legend Shawn Kemp to Capitol Hill bar owner Marcus Lalario and “Seattle’s Biggest Sports Fan” Lorin Sandretzky. This group seems willing to have a new arena in either Sodo or Bellevue, as long as we get the teams to play in it.
• Working moms are often perceived as giving less than 1000-percent undivided fealty to their employers. They are role models to us all.

john mattos, via tor.com

• How to teach those kids an appreciation for classic art: via sci-fi inspired knockoffs.
• Sadly, one of the greatest collectors of art and info about VHS-era home video has passed away. His name was Fred Adelman. He published a zine, first in print then online, called Critical Condition, starting in 1982. His principal topic was horror/sci-fi cinema. But while the films themselves survived (though several of them have remained in, or returned to, obscurity), the medium through which Adelman initially reviewed them went away altogether. His site remains a major historical source about movies released on tape.
• I meet a lot of people who call themselves “Burners.” But I always had, and continue to have, only one favorite Burner. And here’s how you can help her.

filmschoolrejects.com

Alexander Wolcott at Vanity Fair ponders the not quite as rare as it used to be phenomenon of male nudity in U.S. movies, and sees farce and weakness and busted bravado. He goes on to describe these scenes as…

…caution flags, symbolic indicators of a national power drop that encompasses politics, economics, education—the works. Now that we’re no longer king of the world, American self-confidence is undergoing its own shrinkage; no one believes in the Top Gun jockstrap bravado anymore, and the joshing attitude and shrugging posture our movies have adopted reflect a country and a culture that have lost their spunk and don’t feel like keeping up the pretense of swagger anymore.

As my half-namesake Kenneth Clark might say, more lucidly than I, there are many ways to see a naked man.

The typical Hollywood way is best exemplified in the (phallus-free) Porky’s films: Female nudity is drama; male nudity is comedy. Every sex (or almost-sex) scene turns from enticing to ridiculous the instant the guys drop trou.

And thus you get the premise of Seth Rogan’s entire career.

Anna North at Jezebel.com doesn’t like that male parts only appear on screen to be laughed at:

This stereotype is a bummer for men, many of whom enjoy the chance to be admired. But it’s also sad for heterosexual women, reinforcing the notion that they don’t really desire men, that they’re only interested in guys’ fame or money or desire to get married, and not in, say, their butts.

As for the nation-in-decline part of Wolcott’s premise, there are historical examples to the contrary.

Imperial Greece had plenty of statues and paintings of nude men (or rather, of men with boy-size privates).

Victorian England had a mini-renaissance of nude studies (albeit carefully coded in mythological narrative, at least at first).

And stern-faced nude dudes were prominent in Nazi kitsch art.

Of course, nude paintings, statues, and even posed still photos tend to depict what Kenneth Clark called “the Ideal Form.”

Which isn’t something the makers of the Hangover movies care much about.