After months in the making, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has finally issued forth its paid-subscription based (albeit free for the first two weeks) online “newspaper,” christened The Daily. It’s only available via an iPad app, though I suspect versions for other platforms will roll out in time.

First complaint: I am a veteran of, and remain loyal to, the Daily of the University of Washington. To me, no other enterprise will ever deserve the name “The Daily.”

Second complaint: After all this planning by one of the world’s biggest media companies, the thing’s a flimsy mess.

It feels like an awkward mix of USA Today and the New York Daily News (archrival to Murdoch’s own New York Post). It’s full of stunning color wire-service photos, but its news stories are short and superficial; many are rehashes of stuff an online news geek would have already read.

Mitigating factors: It’s not as rabidly stupid as Murdoch’s Fixed Noise Channel, nor as puerile (or as fun) as his NY Post. The opinion section has a few intriguing, and eminently readable, guest essays. There’s no overt political agenda.

But overall, it’s an over-processed, over-formatted, over-packaged hunk of commercial middle-of-the-road blandness, being sent out into an online America that seems to not like that sort of thing.

While I wasn’t looking, Amazon’s put its Kindle ebook machine in brick n’ mortar stores. Including Fred Meyer, whose own in-store book selection has seldom stretched beyond the mega-bestsellers and Harlequin romances.

• Ida Kay Greathouse, who ran or co-ran the Frye Art Museum for more than four decades, died at the impressive age of 105. With her husband Walser (executor of meat packer Charles Frye’s estate), then on her own after Walser’s death in 1966, Greathouse kept the Frye free, and kept its laser focus on “realist” art. She paved the way for later curators’ expansion of the museum’s mission into more contemporary genres.
• The 619 Western art studio building lives! Probably. State transportation planners, who still want to dig the Alaskan Way Viaduct’s replacement tunnel beneath 619’s less than totally solid foundations, said they’ll now try to work out a plan to shore up the building without upscaling it out of the artists’ price range. We shall see.
• The Red Dress concert special, a Seattle Channel/KCTS presentation that aired this past week, can still be viewed online at Seattlechannel.org. The show highlights a rock/punk/blues/funk fusion outfit that’s still as vital as it was three decades ago. Who’d like to scour for donations, so’s we can have more showcase concerts like this on local public TV?
• The Neptune Theater in the U District closes this weekend as a cinema, to reopen later on as a live performance space. I remember the Neptune’s heyday in the ’80s as a “repertory cinema,” showing a different new or classic bill every night. There was a suggestion book at the concession counter. I used to write in silly double bill ideas like M and Z. If the book were still there, I’d now be suggesting a twin bill of 127 Hours and A Farewell to Arms.

I can imagine the next stage in this saga.

Get ready for “The Legally Prohibited From Being Defiantly Truthful on Television Tour.”

The Belltown Messenger, the scrappy li’l neighborhood monthly for which I wrote and edited for some six years, has just put out its last, online only, edition.

Publisher Alex R. Mayer, who’s now running a pro-pot rag called Mary Jane, had kept the Messenger going on the interwebs after the last, newsletter-sized, print Messenger came out last August. (I was not a part of the latter, unprinted, incarnation.)

The Messenger’s spiritual roots go back to the late 1980s and Belltown’s Brain Fever Dispatch, published by Elaine Bonow out of her dance studio.

At the time, there were a few scattered condo towers going up, but the ol’ Regrade was still largely a half square mile of print shops, small apartments, car lots, and artists’ studios. It was the latter milieu, that of the painters and musicians and clothing designers in their rustic lo-rent spaces, the original Dispatch covered.

The Messenger’s era of Belltown also contained art and music and fashion, plus a lot of creative “foodie” restaurants.

And it had a lot of other things.

It had the region’s hottest “HI-NRG” bar scene, which was covered more completely in Exotic Underground and later in D List.

It had the high-rise rich (and the merely affluent, spending as if they were rich). The regional slick magazines catered to these consumers’ spending needs much more closely.

And it continued to have more than its share of the various “street” subcultures, chronicled and advocated for in Real Change.

What Belltown didn’t have were some of the things “neighborhood” papers spend a lot of time covering, such as public schools, parks, kids, and community centers.

In the end, the “place” covered in the Messenger wasn’t so much a geographic region as a state of mind.

Any attempt to bring back something like it, which I’m considering, would have to keep that in mind.

…but somewhere on the first page of Flickr’s “Seattle Invitationals 2011 Pool” you can find a shot of me in my best oversize thrift store stage suit.

Just before the end of the previous year, I wrote here that Seattle has become the home of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre.

Seattle had already been one of the two U.S. hubs of the video game industry, which had been America’s fastest growing media genre the previous decade.

This is a vital, though potentially only temporary, shift.

To explain it, let’s start by going back to the allegedly good old days of the U.S. lit biz.

Books were more of a cottage industry during the first half of the previous century. That’s because they were far less popular than they are now.

Yes, less popular.

The masses read slick magazines and pulp magazines (and, later on, mass market paperbacks). “Real” books, the hardcovers and the coffee table editions, were sold in boutiques or boutique-like settings within department stores, to a target audience of educated but careerless women. They were commissioned and curated by small offices of tweed-suited gentlemen in New York and Boston.

The smallness of the market ensured that the established publishers and distributors could maintain profitable market shares, so long as they kept issuing saleable works.

The few new authors who could break into the rarified world of “trade books” (usually from the fiction sections of the “better” magazines) knew they’d be promoted and nurtured by their publishers, as big fish in a very small pond.

This is the milieu that “people of the book” nostalgize about. I dunno ’bout you, but I’d have hated it. Too stifling, too restrictive, too frou-frou.

Then the industry got big.

The GI Bill fueled three decades of growth in college lit programs.

Trade paperbacks, and original (non-reprint) mass paperbacks, helped bring the book racket into supermarkets and discount stores.

Chains opened full-line bookstores in shopping malls, succeeded by bigger chains opening big-box bookstores in every town and suburb.

Global conglomerates bought, sold, and combined publishers, bringing in cadres of corporate bean-counters in the process.

Authors became in-demand guests on TV and radio talk shows; their facility with these appearances (or lack thereof) often greatly affected their career prospects. Even in

Then came Amazon.

Instead of the extremely inefficient bookstore world, whose crippling (for publishers) return policies became ever-more abused by ever-bigger big box chains, there was one massive retailer who bought to order, and who tracked every sale with a staggering array of useful statistics.

Within a decade (a mere trice in this traditionally snail-paced industry), Amazon became the big publishers’ best frenemy.

As the big chains had eased out many smaller booksellers, Amazon took market share from the chains. When the great recession struck all retail sectors, the book chains suffered more than most.

Then came Kindle.

After more than a decade of attempts, electronic books finally took off thanks to Amazon’s marketing clout.

With no physical product for publishers to have manufactured, Amazon has wound up with even more leverage in the delicate dance of supplier and seller.

Amazon doesn’t even have to sell all its own hardware, with Kindle-format ebooks playing on PCs, tablets, and smartphones as well as Amazon’s own branded devices.

I’m not the only observer to see Amazon having a clear upper hand in the industry, if not its fulcrum of clout.

It had subsumed some of the biggest media companies on earth (while imposing its will on more than a few smaller publishers along the way).

And now, Amazon’s put its valuable sales-metrics data on a handy online dashboard widget thang. It includes data about industry-wide sales of a publisher’s titles, not just those made through Amazon.

With this information at hand, and without the need to invest in print runs or suffer the bookstore chains’ consignment policies, the financial barrier to book publishing (on a serious commercial level) continues to plummet.

It’s easy to imagine more authors becoming self-publishers, hiring their own copy editors, publicists, etc. instead of working for corporate publishers who have those operations in-house. (Already, in the comics world, ebook sales favor indie titles more than comic-book-store sales do.)

Who needs a royalty-sucking edifice in Manhattan, when an author can deal with Amazon direct?

The Jet City, once thought of in lit circles as little more than a strong book buying market and a gateway to Montana, has become Book City U.S.A.

For now, at least.

Thing is, the brave new book world is a faster place. A much faster place.

Enter Google Ebooks.

And Google Ebooks’ strategic ties with local indie booksellers.

That’s something Amazon just isn’t set up to offer (though the fiscally troubled Barnes & Noble is)—a physical, real-world presence, with friendly neighborhood book-lovin’ experts guiding buyers’ individual reading pleasures.

Then there are the authors and publishers who claim not to need Amazon or Google. They just sell direct, from their own websites. These include the new OR Books and my own sometime ebook publisher Take Control Books.

It’s going to get messy and complicated. When and if the dust clears, I expect Amazon will remain a strong player in both “e” and non-“e” books.

But it won’t be the only one.

Seattleites, enjoy your collective symbolic stance as capital of the world of words while it lasts.

The 67-year-old Seattle artist was, even by the standards of the local alt-art scene, a an iconoclast and a lone wolf.  While best known for his conceptual works with discarded nuclear materials and his related residency at the Hanford cleanup megasite, Acord was also a sculptor and dimensional designer of the top rank.

That’s not to dismiss his nuclear related projects as mere publicity stunts. He developed his art as a practical philosophical reaction to The Bomb (that instrument of instant, mass death and potential planetary extinction) and radioactivity (that byproduct instrument of slow, deformative death and potential planetary extinction).

A few days late but always more than welcome, it’s the yummy return of the annual MISCmedia In/Out List.

As always, this listing denotes what will become hot or not-so-hot during the next year, not necessarily what’s hot or not-so-hot now. If you believe everything big now will just keep getting bigger, I can get you a Hummer dealership really cheap.

I’ve been recruited into singing at this year’s Seattle (Elvis) Invitationals. The annual impersonation (or “tribute artist”) competition takes place this Saturday evening, Jan. 8, at Club Motor, 1950 1st Ave. S.

It will be my first singing in a public, non-karaoke setting in at least a decade.

Unlike many of the Invitationals’ entrants, I’m no professional tribute artist. I don’t expect to win this thing. I’m just in it for the show-biz-ness of it all.

Be there if you dare.

Seattle sports fans are used to the national media giving their teams no respect. This NY Times blog entry about the Seahawks, by the paper’s crack political-statistics nerd and poll watcher Nate Silver, is easily the harshest dis of them all.

There’s talk about seeking historic preservation status for the doomed Bank of America drive-thru branch at Broadway and East Thomas.

SRM Development wants to establish the right to tear the bank branch and three adjacent buildings down. That’s so the four buildings (and a back parking lot, where the Capitol Hill Farmers Market has been held in recent years) could eventually make way for another of those retail-residential mixed use projects that were so popular a few years ago.

Right now there’s still a surplus of storefront and condo spaces, on the Hill and in the greater Seattle area. But SRM is betting that, as the economy eventually improves, this backlog will eventually fill up, leaving a market for new projects again.

In December, SRM learned that the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods has formally begun to investigate whether the B of A building was worth landmark status. This status, if granted, would not automatically prevent the building’s demolition, but it would make the developer jump some more bureaucratic hurdles.

The building in question was built by Seattle-First National Bank, for more than 50 years the state’s dominant bank.

“Seafirst” (as it was later known) and its predecessors gave Seattle many true landmark buildings. In downtown alone, the Seafirst heritage includes three of its headquarters buildings—the Dexter Horton Building, the 1969 Seafirst Tower on Fourth Avenue (now known as “Safeco Plaza”), and its last headquarters, the Columbia Center (the tallest building west of the Mississippi).

Several original Seafirst branch offices are also landmarks, or could be. In that roster, I’d include the relatively huge (for neighborhood branch banks) brick edifices in SoDo (still used by B of A) and on Denny Way (now a Walgreens).

But the Broadway branch building’s a more quesitonable candidate for landmark status. It was built in 1967, to a standard suburban-style prototype Seafirst was using at the time.

It presents a slate facade and a small rock garden to the street, and a blank wall to its barren side plaza. It’s never been a particularly pretty or pedestrian-friendly spot. Its drive-thru window is a quintessential example of the ’60s “car culture” City officials now want to discourage.

Two of the other three buildings SRM wants to replace as part of the development scheme have far more character. They’re the old First Security Bank building (later a Crown Books, most recently housing a salon and a pho restaurant) and the old Cafe Septieme/Andy’s Cafe building. The former sports an institutional white facade, symbolizing an image of comfortable solidity banks used to care about promoting. The latter is a quaintly aged neighborhood diner structure.

If the City’s willing to let those buildings fall, for the sake of higher residential density near the future light rail station, there’s no real reason to keep the B of A building standing.

(The bank itself plans to move back onto the block when the retail/residential complex is built, and to temporarily occupy other space on the Hill during the construction.)

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Ballard’s legendary Totem House fish n’ chips stand suddenly closed on New Year’s Eve, after 62 years in business.

The operation had been in decline for many years.

But the building, with its native longhouse-inspired design and iconography, needs to stay.

Any ideas what to put in there?

I know a LOT of people who are spending this day and upcoming night wishing a good riddance to this epic fail of a year we’ve had.

The economy in much of the world (for non-zillionaires) just continued to sluggishly sputter and cough. Thousands more lost jobs, homes, 401Ks, etc.

The implosion of the national Republican Party organization cleared the way (though not in this state) for a wave of pseudo-populist demagogue candidates who only appeared in right-wing media, because those were the only places where their nonsensical worldviews made pseudo-sense. Enough of these candidates made enough of a stir to take control of the US House of Reps., which they have already turned back over to their mega-corporate masters.

And we had the BP spill, continuing mideast/Afghan turmoils, violent drug-turf wars in several countries, floods in Pakistan, a bad quake in Haiti, the deaths of a lot of good people, and a hundred channels of stupid “reality” shows.

Locally, a number of ballot measures were introduced to at least stem the state’s horrid tax unfairness, while staving off the worst public-service budget cuts. They all failed.

And the South Park bridge was removed without a clear replacement schedule, the Deeply Boring Tunnel project continued apace, the Seattle Times got ever crankier (though it stopped getting thinner), and our major men’s sports teams were mediocre as ever. Seattle Center bosses chose to replace a populist for-profit concession (the Fun Forest) with an upscale-kitsch for-profit concession (Chihuly).

Alleviating factors: (Most) American troops are out of Iraq. Something approximating health care reform, and something approximating the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, both passed. Conan O’Brien resurfaced; Jon and Stephen worked to restore sanity and/or fear. The Storm won another title. The football Huskies had a triumphant last hurrah; the Seahawks might get the same. Cool thingamajigs like the iPad and Kinect showed up. Seattle has emerged as the fulcrum of the ebook industry, America’s fastest growing media genre. The Boeing 787’s continued hangups have proven some technologies just can’t be outsourced.

My personal resolution in 1/1/11 and days beyond: To find myself a post-freelance, post-journalism career.

You’ve heard of paid signature gatherers. Now, George Monbiot ponders whether corporate and right-wing forces are hiring paid Internet comment trolls.

I do know this site’s comment threads have been attacked in recent weeks by spam bots. In my efforts to “moderate” those pitch people off of the site, I might have inadvertently excised an actual comment by one of you dear readers. My apologies.