It’s been months since I reviewed any performance art here. But thanks to the urging of Katie Johnson, I witnessed The Harlequin Hipsters‘ dance/music/theatre piece Passion, Or Death. It occurred last weekend at the Hale’s Brewpub’s back room.

It’s presented by six dancer/performers (evenly split M/F), with a little music (mostly synth with a live violin and guitar) and a few snippets of monologue and dialogue. The premise, set up in these vocal interludes: A mystery illness is overtaking the whole planet. No apparent epidemiological cause. A male newscaster and a female doctor discuss the pandemic with us. The doctor sees sadness and depression as the cause, and dancing and loving as the cure. The newscaster delivers a monologue about becoming a careerist to get the material things he wants out of life, then collapses and dies. We’re then given the moral of our story: Don’t lose yourself making money to get a house and family and fine store-bought foods. Live with Passion, like these dancers.

The color is fading from faces. What are we to do to keep alive? Merely surviving is not enough. We wish to thrive; to not only realize our dreams and passions, but become them.

In truth, it is our only hope.

At the end an enthusiastic alternative marching band (the Titanium Sporkestra) enters the room and invites the audience out into the back parking lot for a short dance party.

It was all very well executed, performed with both with and precision.

And as one who has been neither “thriving” (emotionally) nor “surviving” (fiscally) for much of the past several years, I could readily receive the show’s message.

But can I believe it?

Lots of folks don’t have the option to drop out and be bohemians. They’ve got spouses and kids. They’ve got retirement to worry about. They need health insurance. They can’t run off and join the circus (let alone start their own).

Where do the rest of us find, and healthily exploit, our respective Passions?

(Note: As was the case during my earlier flirtation with morning headlines circa 2007, these won’t necessarily appear every day.)

• Scientific American looks at scare stories claiming a pandemic of Fukushima-related infant deaths in the northwest US (i.e., here). Their conclusion: unneeded fear mongering “supported” by highly selective statistics.
• Still want something to fear? How about the “Big One” earthquake? Some folks at some conference in Portland say there’s a 10 to 15 percent chance of it showing up in the Northwest sometime in the next 50 years.
• Want an ultimate example of gay-related “You’re Doing It Wrong”? How about hating the commercialization of the gay pride movement, and using that as a lame excuse to trash storefronts (including many small businesses as well as chains) on Capitol Hill?
• Emerald Downs had a “horses gone wild” episode. Four humans were hurt, one really bad. One of the two horses involved was “put down.”
• Our ol’ pal Michael Upchurch had a SeaTimes review of a bio book about Zoe Dusanne, one of the unsung heroes of the Seattle art-gallery world. She was an African American woman entrepreneur who helped promote those 1950s “Northwest School” painters, and brought works by the NY/Europe big boys here alongside them.
• Sometime Seattleite Timothy Egan wrote a white-boomer-centric ode in the NY Times to the recently deceased Bruce Springsteen sideman Clarence Clemons. (During Springsteen’s peak years, Clemons was the only living black musician on many “album rock” radio stations’ playlists). At the Collapse Board site run by ex-Seattleite Everett True, writer Scott Creney gently yet thoroughly demolishes Egan’s anglocentric ode:

He says well-meaning things about whites stealing rock and roll from blacks — no mention of hip-hop though. Or what Clarence might have thought about playing to arenas and stadiums filled with next-to-zero black people. (Springsteen’s audience is pretty much exclusively white.) Or, for that matter, how Timothy felt standing in a room full of white people congratulating himself on America’s ability to successfully and peacefully integrate itself, due solely to the fact that there was a black guy in the band playing saxophone.

• Yay to New York for approving gay marriage. We almost forgive you for that dumb NYT paean on Fri., lauding the Portland Timbers soccer team for being almost as successful as the Sounders.
• In other sports news, the UW is soliciting naming rights to the soon-to-be-remodeled Husky Stadium’s “field,” starting in 2013 and continuing “in perpetuity.”
• Big corporations don’t want to be forced to reveal how their CEOs’ salaries compare to their average payrolls. Ah, poor zillionaires….
• Rolling Stone had a harrowing piece a while back about a teenage girl who set herself up as an Internet fashion plate and video blogger, only to attract adult lechers and worse.
• There’s a new art gallery in town, Prographica, specializing in “fine works on paper.” In one of those happy coincidences, its staff includes a UW MFA grad named Kimberly Clark.

• Buzzfeed compares/contrasts“Actual News Headlines Vs. Fox News Headlines.” Hilarity ensues.
• Gene Weingarten rejects the idea that all of us have to “brand” ourselves.
• On a similar note, Zacqary Adam Green insists that musicians, artists, writers, teachers, etc. should not view themselves as mere “content creators”:

If you are a maker of things, a disseminator of knowledge, or anyone who contributes to the collective intellectual output of human beings, do not accept the notion that your work is less significant than a house, a chair, a piece of electronic equipment, or a rock. Do not allow yourself to be labeled as a mere “content creator.” Have more dignity than that.

The Columbo star played a stunning variety of roles, from heroes to villains, from romantic leads to comic sidekicks, and even The Twilight Zone’s version of Fidel Castro. Don’t fret about him being gone from us. He’ll come back as a landed angel, for the coffee and cigarettes.

Is it hypocritical for me to insult a politician or pundit as a “corporate whore,” when I have respect and admiration for actual whores?

The Oregonian’s got a fascinating look back to the wacky days of the Rajneeshee commune, where enlightenment and free love quickly devolved into terror and murder plots. Ah, it’s always amazing what isolation, a sense of in-group superiority, and a total lack of empathy toward outsiders can accomplish.

I cannot allow June 2011 to fade into history without noting a personal anniversary.

Twenty five years ago this month, yr. humble scribe sat in a brick walled room at the old 66 Bell art studios. I typed up a roundup of little notes and comments on an NEC electronic typewriter for publication in a tiny monthly tabloid called ArtsFocus.

With that, the MISCadventure of my life had begun.

There was no World Wide Web at the time. There were dial-up, text-only bulletin board systems, a few of which I was on. All the sociopathic behaviors you see online today, I saw then.

Seattle then was not, as some now claim, a backwards fishing village out in the wilderness. There was a lot of business going about, a lot of culture, and a lot of livin’. The nouveau riche takeover was just getting underway, so there were still a lot of affordable housing situations and cheap DIY spaces like 66 Bell.

Sub Pop, and the acts it championed, were just barely underway.

I was then, as now, struggling to fit into a world I’d never made. Struggling to find renumerative work. Struggling to make sense of things.

I’d already developed a taste for mass media history. One of my favorite aspects of my UW communications major had been poring through the old newspapers, magazines, mass market books, catalogs, and other ephemera. Later, I’d found a store on 13th Ave. on Capitol Hill that specialized in old magazines, paperbacks, and posters. Its signage included one window placcard announcing “MISC. ITEMS.”

One of my favorite newspaper tropes was the “three dot” column. One person, multiple topics, with any one item ranging from a sentence fragment to the full 750-word space. Emmett Watson and future city councilmember Jean Godden had been doing that here, but it was a dying art form.

Everybody else in the media at the time seemed to be advocating “depth.” I was fascinated by breadth, by the interplay and hidden connections among all sorts of different things.

Thus, MISC, the column. Then the one-sheet newsletter, the Stranger feature, the spots in Tablet and the Belltown Messenger, and, since 1995, this very web presence.

Some people claim MISCmedia was “the first blog.” I certainly wasn’t that term, or anything like it, at the time. I just called it an “online column.”

Now, the blog format, in all its ever-evolving permutations and mutations, has become one of the world’s primary methods of communicating. Its offspring, the “tweet,” is reteaching the value of brevity.

And I’m again in search of a steady income.

• Somebody’s buying PopCap Games, the Seattle maker of utterly cute video games, for a cool billion. But who? If, as rumor has it, the buyer is gaming giant Electronic Arts, what will happen to the PopCap office and staff?
• Somebody at Huffington Post has compiled a list of 10 brands expected to die by 2012. American Apparel. Nokia. A&W restaurants (at least in the US). Even Sears. (No, not Sears!)
• Fareed Zakaria at Time looks back wistfully to a past when conservatives at least pretended to be pragmatic, even “reality based.”

This hour (as I’m writing this), Qwest Field (home of the Seahawks and Sounders FC) has officially been rechristened CenturyLink Field, after the telecom giant that took over the mourned-by-nobody Qwest.

It’s as good an official date as any to mark the end of the last of the Baby Bells, the seven regional landline phone companies created with the fed-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. (The other six re-merged into Verizon and “the New AT&T.”)

Pacific Northwest Bell was one of three old AT&T units spun off as “US West.” It was a phone company, run by phone company people, as the communications world began to change all around it. All was fine and dull for a decade and a half.

Then came Phillip Anschutz. I’ve mentioned the California mogul before here, principally in connection with his link to local anti-evolution advocates and to his ownership of the Examiner.com content-mill sites (which rely on “news” stories from unpaid writers).

Anschutz had bought the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1996, just so he could lay fiber-optic phone and data lines across its rights of way. When he sold off SP to the Union Pacific, he attained permission to lay lines along UP’s rights of way as well. Since this was the digital age, these lines could transmit voice, video, and data; though Qwest’s original principal business was long-distance phone service.

To further his business-to-business communications plans, Anschutz bought US West in 2000. Not long after came the complaints by local phone customers. Qwest was “slamming” home users, switching their long distance service to its own subsidiary without permission. Qwest telemarketed like crazy, calling customers at all hours to repeatedly offer its (weak, costly) cell phone add-on plans. Qwest underfunded its regulated landline business, to the point that it couldn’t install phone lines in new subdivisions on time. Unlike AT&T and Verizon, Qwest didn’t get into the cable TV business.

(On the plus side, Qwest refused to go along when the Bush-era National Security Agency asked phone companies to hand over records of everybody’s phone calls, for wiretapping purposes.)

Now, Qwest’s data, landline-voice, and business telecommunications services are owned by the company formerly known as Central Telephone, then Century Telephone (or “CenturyTel”). As an acquirer of other companies’ landline territories, CenturyLink already covered more square miles in Washington and Oregon than Qwest had serviced.

Oh, and some of us still remember another “Qwest”—the old record label run by ex-Seattleite Quincy Jones. Jones has announced he’s using the name again, now that nobody else is.

In case you haven’t noticed, there are some lovely cover-art images on this page’s lower left. They depict books, CDs, and DVDs with at least a vague connection to Seattle and proximity, all of which are for sale.

The selection changes at random every time you load or reload any page on this site. So if you don’t see something you like, you probably will the next time.

I just added more than 100 additional titles to the database, so there’s plenty of variety.

Of course, if you really want to help support these verbal endeavors, you should buy one of our own lovely MISCmedia products.

At least two more of those will be up for your perusal and purchase within the next few months. Stay tuned.

This department hasn’t been updated in a while. During those past months, the SeaTimes has pretty much stabilized at a probably unprofitable level.

Circulation dropped another 5 percent in the past year.

The paper’s Wednesday and Friday editorial sections have gone back to single pages.

Actual “this happened yesterday” news items are decreasing, especially early in the week, in favor of prewritten features (easier to plan and to budget for).

Display advertising in the daily paper continues to be nearly nonexistent, with the four page Fry’s section on Fridays as the only consistent exception. If not for that, the paid obits, and the car and real-estate ads on Friday and Saturday, the daily SeaTimes would essentially exist (as a business venture) only as a wraparound for the Bartell’s and supermarket inserts.

The Sunday paper still has 30 to 40 pages of ads, not counting the inserts. And now the Sunday TV section (12 full-page equivalents with almost no ads) is gone. It’s been replaced by something called TV Weekly, a separate listings magazine for which subscribers have to pay extra.

And the paper’s planning to vacate its handsome 1930 art deco HQ on Fairview Ave. by the end of the year. Remaining employees will move into the nearby 1000 Denny (née Seattle Furniture Mart) building, which the company has sold and partly leased back. The historic-landmark SeaTimes building dates back to when almost all newspapers had their newsrooms and printing presses on the same site. (The SeaTimes is now printed at an increasingly under-capacity facility out in Mill Creek.) The old building will be mothballed pending a development scheme; such a plan would need city Landmarks Board approval.

In past installments of this department, I’d speculated that the Blethen family’s final endgame might be to turn the paper into an even smaller nonprofit operation, designed to live on the kind support of corporate benefactors. Now, as David Goldstein speculates on the basis of a recent editorial, the Blethens could be contemplating just such a scenario, and may be pushing for Federal help to make it so.

• 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.

(in no particular order):

• Yes, I will want to have sex with you. Pretty much immediately. ESPECIALLY if I’m too timid to come out and say so. Be aware of this.
• I’d rather you didn’t complain to me about the guys you sleep with, whilst refusing to sleep with me.
• I have a large repertoire of firmly held, and occasionally contradictory, beliefs. You can try to change some of them if you want to.
• I watch TV. I eat meat. I don’t smoke pot. You won’t be able to change any of these.
• I have a lot of persnickety minor food allergies and strange food dislikes. I won’t expect you to know all of them right away. For now, just know that if you order the two of us an almond-encrusted dessert, you’ll get to eat all of it.
• I enjoy images of the female figure. This does not mean I hate women; it means I like women.
• I may have a “baby face,” but I’m over 50, under 5′ 10″, and beer bellied. Looking for a tall dark prince? Keep looking.
• I’m among the long term unemployed. I don’t think it’s romantic or noble. I want to change it. I want a real job. The specific real job I want changes. Sometimes what I want is an office cubicle with my name on it. I want to process data, perform boring routines, and get a deserved compensation.
• Some women have said they would be too intense for me to deal with. In the past, I have had capital-R Relationships with a D.I.D. patient, a bipolar alcoholic, and two women who expected me to casually agree that all males were intrinsically evil. I believe I can handle “intense.”
• People call me “A Writer.” I’ve always rejected that title, and the “romantic” stereotypes associated with it. I have no interest in living in a cabin on an island. I have no interest in becoming famous only after I’m dead. I have no interest in becoming dead.
• I don’t want to be your dependent, your co-dependent, your enabler, your user, your abuser, your enemy, your submissive, your dog, your platonic friend, your gay friend, or your girlfriend. I want to be your boyfriend.
• My sexual fetish is Love.

After word slowly leaked out that the situation at Fukushima is, or at least was, direr than officials originally acknowledged, the fringier-fringy “news” sites are spreading unsubstantiated scare stories about the Fort Calhoun nuclear plant in Nebraska, a site recently surrounded by floodwaters. Here’s a more plausible report of what’s going on there, from an unofficial but knowledgeable source.