Remember the big plan to revive All My Children and One Life to Live as online-only soap operas? Ain’t gonna happen. The economics just weren’t there.

On Saturday, Occupy Seattle folks disrupted a pro-Occupy Wall Street panel discussion at Town Hall, using the “people’s mic” tactic to prevent just about anything from happening.

On Tuesday, Occupiers blocked the intersection of Fifth and Pine. The expected police response was nasty.

Question: Is this about making a spectacle, about disruption for disruption’s sake? Or is it about something beyond our own selves?

Additional question: Is the job of a police department to maintain order at the cost of violently intensifying the disorder?

washingtonstatewire.com

So the voters of the state finally up and did it.

They took liquor retailing away from themselves (the people of the state) and gave it to the likes of Costco and Safeway.

I for one will miss the state liquor stores, which will be closed or auctioned off to private operators some time next year.

In a modern marketing world where everything was loud and flashy and out to sell-sell-sell, this was one major retail chain out not to promote its wares, but to control their sale.

The stores were mostly no-frills operations, with modest signage and minimalist interior decor.

The employed unionized clerks, whose job was to facilitate sales, not to increase them.

In most years, they generated at least enough revenue to pay for the state’s alcohol treatment and anti-drunk-driving programs.

But their main function was service, not sales.

(Booze For People, Not For Profit.)

They showed by example that consumer goods can be distributed without excess hype, and without the secular religion of excess consumption.

'off the mark' by mark parisi

• R.I.P. Bil Keane, 1912-2011. The Family Circus cartoonist plied the same realm of family homilies and deceptively simple line work for a half century. If Keane’s characters never generated the licensing income of Garfield or Dennis the Menace, they did provide a consistent note of light amusement. By staying within their own fantasy realm, with only the slightest whiff of contemporary pop-culture references. Even more notable was Keane’s good-natured willingness to let other cartoonists spoof the Circus’s delicately insular universe.
• Local singer-songwriter Heather Duby was in a horrid accident in New Jersey. She lost part of one finger, and almost lost both her hands. She’ll need a lot of rehab. There is, as you might expect, a benefit concert 11/26 at the Crocodile.
• Just what the hell is Microsoft doing as a prime sponsor of the Koch brothers’ (funders of all things wingnutted and anti-planet and anti-democracy) big Tea Party conference?
• Brendan Coffey at Forbes lists our own Russell Investments as one of the four companies that essentially control the financial world, for good or ill.
• Reuters notes Seattle’s explosion as a high tech hub. Now let’s work on getting more jobs here for non-programmers.
• The long-lost deleted scenes from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet have been found in a Seattle warehouse, and will be a bonus feature on the film’s DVD reissue.
• Punk rock history is becoming an academic specialty. Maybe I should apply for that teaching certificate.
• Amanda Hess at Good magazine depicts the late Andy Rooney as a reactionary crank who hated minorities, uppity women, and pretty much anything newer than the electric typewriter. She also describes Rooney as a man “who saw the world from his seat in a darkened library of hardcover books.” The combo of book collecting and reactionary crankiness, alas, exists far more frequently in this world than “book people” will admit.
• Paul Krugman proclaims solar energy as now being widely cost effective in many applications.
• Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” PR campaign wasn’t enough to save one horrendously bullied gay teen from suicide. In response, CBC comedy-show host Rick Mercer issued a call for more immediate action:

It’s no longer good enough for us to tell kids who are different that it’s going to get better. We have to make it better now, that’s every single one of us. Every teacher, every student, every adult has to step up to the plate.

jiyoung-s.blogspot.com/

• The Bruce Lee family is talking about establishing a museum in Seattle honoring the late martial arts star, who lived here for much of his youth. A shame this wasn’t in the works while half the town was trying to put something at the old Fun Forest site that wouldn’t be a friggin’ glass art gallery.
• What happens when a big Wall St. bank CEO (specifically, the CEO of the big bank that devoured our own once-beloved Wash. Mutual) comes to town to give a speech during the height of the Occupy ____ protests? Citizen blockades and pepper spray, that’s what.
• Forget about caffeinated meat. That was yesterday’s novelty product. Today’s big news in pick-me-ups is caffeinated inhalers!
• The Tacoma City Council passed what was essentially an anti-Walmart zoning law. But, faced with potential unaffordable lawsuits, the council’s backed down and allowed Walmart’s application to proceed through the bureaucracy.
• Darcy Burner, one of our favorite folks, is running for Congress again. This time it will be in the redrawn version of Jay Inslee’s old district.
• R.I.P. Thomas Patrick Haley, who bought two neighborhood-newspaper groups and combined them into Pacific Publishing Co. Haley took a ragtag batch of properties (including a job printing operation) and put them on a firm footing (well, as firm a footing as could be attained in that subset of publishing). The Belltown Messenger had a co-publishing agreement with Pacific for the five years I was involved with it. I appear once a month in Pacific’s Capitol Hill Times.

Broadway and Pine. The south lawn of Seattle Central Community College. 1:30 p.m. Saturday.

Throughout the area, cute cartoon monsters are displayed on painted plywood stand-up pieces. It’s an installation called “Monsters on Broadway.”

Also throughout the area, young-adult volunteers are pulling batches of hay from bales and spreading it over every part of the lawn. The smell reminds me of the hobby farm on which I grew up. This, it turns out, is not part of “Monsters on Broadway.”

Instead, as a kind lady on the hay-spreading team tells me, they’re covering the grass to protect it from turning into mud. Occupy Seattle would set up its tents on the lawn later in the day. The whole area was going to be heavily walked and stood and even slept on, perhaps for some time.

Fast forward to 6 p.m. Halloween Saturday night is slowly getting underway. The Hill’s regular weekend-night parade of colorful characters is at least a little more colorful. Men and women walk around as zombies, vampires, celebrities living and dead (and undead), and cartoon characters. In and near the more upscale bars, some of the women are dressed just slightly “sexier” than normal for a Saturday.

Back at SCCC, Occupy Seattle events have begun. There’s a speaker’s platform, with a microphone and a small set of amplifiers. There’s a covered feeding station. A few dozen people are there, some in costume. These include a disco dude in a metallic toga (with a wool scarf covering his lower face, WTO style), a Maid Marian with a sign reading “Where Is My Robin Hood?,” several generic fantasy and steampunk getups, and at least one guy in a Guy Fawkes mask, a la the graphic novel and film “V for Vendetta.” (The graphic novel’s author Alan Moore denouced the film, and earns nothing from the masks.)

It’s at least an hour before the main scheduled events get underway. The speaker’s platform bears a succession of orators discussing topics outside the “Occupy” movement’s already broad subject matter. I leave as a woman at the mic promotes 9/11 conspiracy theories, with the audience repeating her statments call-and-response style. (This shtick comes from the original Occupy Wall Street protests, which aren’t allowed to use amplifiers.)

From there I go to a Pike/Pine bar. A woman there tells me she’s “so over” the “Occupy” protests. She claims they’ve degenerated into protesting for protesting’s sake. This remark upsets the man seated next to her, who’s stopping for a drink on his way to join the camping-out protesters. He says something to the effect that he hopes the woman’s happy being part of the problem instead of the solution. (Hint: If you’re going to build a popular, all-welcoming movement, it’s unwise to go around insulting people.)

Back at SCCC, tent raising time officially begins around 8:30. A few campers had already put up their shelters ahead of time. Several hundred people have gathered for the main “street party” (not actually in the street) with pumpkin carving and more costume characters.

Hours later, well into the bar scene’s peak hours, about 150 people would settle in for the night. More than three dozen tents were raised.

•

They’d had to move somewhere. Even the most capital-P progressive mayor wasn’t likely to let the protests remain 24/7 indefinitely at Westlake. Especially not with the annual Christmas carousel less than a month away from installation.

SCCC is about as Occupier-friendly a public space as can be had in the heart of Seattle.  The teachers’ union is an outspoken “Occupy” supporter. The college president released a statement giving at least tacit, tentative permission for the camp.

This space is not really the place for a thorough analysis of the “Occupy” movement and its agenda. Suffice it to say they’re responding to long-term trends in U.S. society, and doing so with long-term tactics. By announcing no end date to their protests, and no single, simple demand to be met, they’re stating that building their society will also be a long-term endeavor.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

SeaTimes average paid circulation has shrunk again, to 242,814.

This is according to the latest Audit Bureau of Circulation report, covering the six months ending Sept. 30. This decline is comparable to that of other big-city dailies.

(One exception to this trend: The NY Times, which actually has more Sunday print readers nowadays. That’s because it’s offering “weekender” print subscribers full access to the NYT’s online content, at less than half the price of a web-only subscription.)

•

The SeaTimes still plans to vacate its 81-year-old landmark HQ on Fairview Ave. The company now plans to hold on to the site, while offering a “ground lease” deal to developers. If one reads between the lines of the paper’s spokesperson Jill Mackie in the linked story, one can conclude the company hopes to help subsidize the paper’s losses via real-estate profits.

•

Before those profits, if any, kick in, there are areas where the already-thin paper could keep shrinking.

The biggest of these is the space given to wire-service stories, particularly on Sunday.

Some local-reporting beats could be turned into blog-like columns, to which assigned reporters would fill a predictable quota of  column-inches every week, whether there’s a big story in that subject area or not.

The SeaTimes could also give up on home delivery for the nearly ad-free Mon.-Wed. papers. (The potential snag to this idea: its recent deal to take over the Everett Herald’s delivery operations.)

sotnight.blogspot.com

I know some of these are a few days old. My present life is just that hectic, yes.

• The CBS Radio Stations Group, in its infinite wisdom, is transferring ex-child actor Danny Bonaduce’s morning talk gig from Philadelphia to Seattle’s KZOK-FM. In the recent past, celebrity offspring Ron Reagan Jr. and Scott (son of Bob) Crane fared well as Seattle radio personalities. Can Shirley Jones’s pretend-spawn do likewise?
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Perhaps in a pathetic attempt to get back at Mayor McGinn, over the latter’s allegiance to the crusade against SW sister company Backpage.com, the paper filed a public disclosure request seeking any instances of McGinn’s office using swear words in emails.
• Farm worker shortages aren’t just for Alabama anymore.
• Even Ken Schram agrees: The state can’t get out of its fiscal mess by cuts alone.
• Living costs (led by rent) have risen faster in Seattle than in the state as a whole.
• Separated at Birth: Microsoft’s new “video of the future” and AT&T’s 1993 “You Will” commercials?
• Much of what “they” say about the Internet today, was said at its infancy 15 years ago.
• Could hydroponic farming, that old pot-inspired technology, actually become a viable way to grow veggies in cities and suburbs?
• A blogger at the site Zen Peacemakers says the economic reform movement shouldn’t be about “the 99 percent,” but about uniting everybody toward a common, better future.
• Right wing outrages of recent days include a Halloween-themed Virginia Republican email depicting a zombie Obama shot in the head.
• And in corporate outrages of recent days, Citigroup settled (without admitting guilt) a case in which the big bank allegedly, knowingly, sold worthless mortgage-burger securities, while simultaneously “selling them short” (essentially betting they would fail). And the big banks still insist that all they have is an “image problem.”
• Kemper Freeman outrages of recent days include the Bellevue Square mogul and anti-transit obstructionist spearheading a trumped up “crusade” against a pro-transit Bellevue politician.
• And in deference to what has become America’s favorite adult holiday, here are the Occupy Seattle pumpkins at Westlake.

king-tv

Before Thomas Frank became a renowned author of geekily-researched anti-conservative sermon books, he co-ran a tart, biting, yet beautifully designed journal of essays called The Baffler.

It was based in Chicago for most of its existence. Its original focus was the intersecting worlds of corporate culture (including corporate “counterculture”), entertainment, and marketing. (It’s where Steve Albini’s 1994 screed against the music industry’s treatment of bands, “Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,” first appeared.) As Frank’s concerns steered toward the political, so did The Baffler‘s.

Its one consistent aspect was its irregular schedule. Though it was sometimes advertised as a “quarterly,” only 18 issues appeared from 1988 to 2009.

This will now change.

The title was bought in May by essayist/historian John Summers. Last week, Summers announced he’s attained backing from the MIT Press. MIT and Summers promise to put out three Bafflers a year for the next five years.

This is good news, because we need its uncompromising voice more than ever.

(Told you I wouldn’t necessarily be providing these headlines every day.)

• Wednesday was drum n’ bass dance nite at Occupy Seattle!
• Gavin Polone is a film/TV producer in L.A. who believes film and TV should mostly be made in L.A., not spread out across North America. Still, he makes a lucid point when he alleges state and provincial tax breaks for film producers (like the ones Wash. state just got rid of) benefit only the producers, not the states and provinces.
• The real woman behind the book and TV movie Sibyl didn’t really have multiple personalities. But (and this is buried in the linked story) she really did have serious psychological/emotional issues, and believed she could only get the attention and help she desperately needed by exaggerating her condition.
• Ex-Seattleite Emma Harris pleads for her fellow environmentalists to care about more places besides “pristine wilderness”—which she says doesn’t even exist.
• Could the recently concluded CityArts Fest grow into the big regional music festival various entities have tried to launch from time to time but without really catching on?
• Now it can be told: Steve Jobs called Fox News a “destructive force in our society” to Rupert Murdoch’s face, while he was negotiating to get Murdoch-owned entertainment content for iTunes.
• Does the boss of BankAmeriCrap really believe all he has is an “image problem“? If so, he’s even more out of touch with reality than the average big-bank CEO. If not, he’s just another cynical spinmeister.
• Even Forbes scorns the Oakland, CA police’s violent over-reaction to peaceful Occupy protesters.
• Danny Westneat notices something we’ve known all along—Tim Eyman hates transit. So do right-wingers in general. They want people stuck in traffic, as captive audiences for the talk-radio goons.

gadgetsin.com

As power in the book biz moves increasingly from Manhattan to here, the Manhattan news media treat it as a crisis, or at least as a matter of controversy.

Hence, the Sunday NY Times op-ed package posing the musical question, “Will Amazon Kill Off Book Publishers?”

What rot.

Worse, it’s predictable rot.

I’ve ranted on and on here, since years before the e-book became a marketable commodity, about the traditional book industry’s stodginess, parochialism, and criminal inefficiency.

I’ve also ranted about the particular cultural conservatism (bordering on the reactionary) that’s long held sway within the big-L Literary subculture. (That scene is not the same thing as the book industry, even though it thinks it ought to be).

Current example: Dennis Johnson (a respected publisher of, and advocate for, big-L Literary product), claiming in the NYT debate-in-print that

…publishing isn’t, right now, and hasn’t been, for 500 years, about developing [sales] algorithms. It’s been about art-making and culture-making and speaking truth to power.

The corner of publishing Johnson occupies might be about art n’ culture making.

But the whole of publishing is, and always has been, about the bottom line.

And in societies such as this one where there’s no royal family or state church to prop up (and censor) publishing, that bottom line means sales.

And, I will argue, that’s mostly been a good thing.

Not in spite of the ephemeral commercial dross that’s been the bulk of most commercial publishers’ product, but because of it.

The romances. The mysteries. The space operas. The treacle-y 19th century “ladies’ stories.” The pulp adventures. The lurid ’60s paperbacks. The advice and how-to guides. The travelogues. The comics. The fads. The tracts (spiritual, political, dietary). The bodice-rippers. The porn. The celebrity memoirs. And, yeah, today’s teen vampires and werewolves. They’re all where the passions of their particular times and places are preserved.

But Johnson wants to know how big-L Literary work will fare in the brave new e-world.

I say it will thrive as never before.

For the e-book business model is not, as Johnson fears, a recipe for monopoly.

It’s about less consolidation, not more.

There are three major e-book sales sites, and hundreds of minor ones.

Anybody can sell just about anything in e-book form on their own, or via one of these sites.

And they are.

Cottage industries are springing up to provide editing and design services for e-book self publishers.

And new small presses are forming to more fully curate “quality” ebooks, and to more effectively promote them.

Big-L Literature was, at best, a prestige sideline for the old-line major publishers. Smaller specialty presses, like Johnson’s, had to play by the big presses’ business rules (including devastating return policies with bookstores); rules that made Johnson’s kind of books hellishly difficult to put out at even a break-even level.

That good, and sometimes great, books of highbrow or artistic fiction came out of that business model, and came out regularly, is a testament to the perseverance of impresarios such as Johnson, and to authors’ willingness to work for the equivalent of less than minimum wage.

The e-book business model doesn’t guarantee success.

But it gives specialty works, and their makers, a fighting chance.

• Jezebel and Gawker each snark away at the absurdist extremes of commercial “sexy” Halloween garb.
• The Olympian has some cogent reasons (as opposed to the TV ads’ scare-tactic reasons) why Washington state’s liquor business shouldn’t be turned over to Costco.
• Jerry Large is the first local mainstream reporter to note the connection between Occupy _______ and the Vancouver mag Adbusters.
• Buried within a statement of support for Occupy Seattle, city councilmember Nick Licata floats the idea of a municipal income tax.
• There’s a whole site of writers expressing support for Occupy ______. One of its best entries, as you might expect, is from Lemony Snicket.
• Matt Honan claims to speak on behalf of millions of grownup children of prior recessions when he proclaims, “Generation X is sick of your bullshit.”
• Is Target really better than Walmart? Allegedly, not when it comes to working conditions.
• Microsoft’s opened a retail outlet in U Village, right across a parking lot from the Apple Store.

• Get an early start on your holiday shopping needs with the Seattle Catalog. It’s a a select listing (in print and online) of handmade art and decor items, ranging from the decorative to the whimsical.
• On Saturday, Occupy Seattle was the fifth biggest “occupy” gathering in the country. On Monday, the city authorities cleared the site out again, with more protesters arrested.
• As Eric Scigliano notes, the Westlake site of Occupy Seattle has been a place of contention and dispute for five decades, ever since it was first christened as the world’s fair monorail’s end point.
• If GOP gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna’s supposed to be such a “moderate,” how come he’s got far-right dungeon master Karl Rove speaking on his behalf at a Bellevue fundraiser?
• A Bellevue cemetery now has a special golfers-only section.
• Legalizing pot, now more popular than ever.
• You might have expected this: The right-wing site “We Are the 53 Percent,” purporting to speak on behalf of “real” taxpayers, is a total fraud.
• Wacky headline atop a tragic story: “Teen girl forced to wear armor, fight stepfather with wooden sword.” Within the story, you learn the Yelm medieval re-enactor’s stepdaughter was also beaten and punched, as punishment for going to a party without his or her mom’s permission.

seattle sounders fc, via seattleweekly.com

• ‘Twas a lovely low key event in glorious Greenwood Thursday evening, debuting our latest book Then & Now: Seattle. Thanks to all who attended and to the staff of Couth Buzzard Books.
• The greatest American-born soccer player in perhaps-ever has retired. There’s a monument to him in his hometown, Olympia.
• Besides the expected police over-reactions in various cities, right wing sleaze artists are trying to discredit the Occupy ______ movement by committing acts of vandalism and blaming it on the movement. There’s also a falsely credited photo circulating around right-wing blogs. It depicts a protest march with banners reading “Fuck the Troops” and “No Gods No Masters.” The right-wing blogs claim it to be a recent Occupy Wall Street scene. It’s really from Portland, and it’s from a 2007 antiwar protest.
• Danny Westneat is wrong. The Occupy ______ people don’t want to get “government handouts.” They want the people and companies who don’t need government handouts, but get them anyway, to get at least fewer of them.
• I guess there’s never an off-season for jokes based on “Seattle” stereotypes.
• Seattle Public Schools are way popular. This bodes well for the city’s survival as a place where ordinary, non-affluent folk can continue to reside.
• The guy being blamed around Facebook and Twitter for stiffing a Capitol Hill waitress and calling her fat? He’s not the guy that did it.
• With fewer undocumented immigrants entering the U.S. these days (despite what the lying right-wing media claims), there’s a shortage of farm workers. That shortage has hit the Washington apple orchards.
• One side effect of the proposed Swedish-Providence medical merger: The nuns who run Providence want nothing to do with abortion services, and will veto any continuation of elective abortions at Swedish. Swedish management’s trying to get out of the resulting PR brouhaha by helping to fund a new Planned Parenthood clinic.
• Dear animal activists: “Liberating” critters bred to be homebodies doesn’t always work. Especially if the critters aren’t native to the particular wilds you’re sending them into.

classickidstv.co.uk

• Greenwood. It’s truly a lovely neighborhood. A great place to spend an autumnal evening in the company of fellow Seattle social history fans. Specifically, fans of our latest product, Then & Now: Seattle. It all transpires starting at 7:30 p.m. today (Thursday) at the Couth Buzzard Books and Cafe, 8310 Greenwood Ave. N. Be there.
• The media’s parental scare story of the week: Teens are supposedly soaking gummy candies in alcohol and scarfin’ them down for a quick buzz.
• The state’s moved one step closer to allowing Seattle bars to stay open later.
• Gay marriage, now less unpopular than before.
• Occupy Seattle’s still going strong; but is it being taken over by folks protesting for protesting’s sake?
• Community colleges in Washington can now declare themselves in states of “financial emergency.” Unions representing the college’s (mostly already underpaid) teachers are worried it could lead to further and faster layoffs.
• After the construction slump and the shrinkage of print newspapers, what more could go wrong for the wood products industry? Well, China used to buy Northwest-made finished lumber, but now it just wants raw logs.
• The vast majority of non-governmental arts funding in this country goes to big establishment institutions with decidedly white, upscale audiences. This will come at no surprise to friends of mine who’ve tried to drum up corporate and foundation support for smaller but established performing-arts outfits, only to learn said corporations and foundations only give to the “SOB” (symphony, opera, ballet).