Our ol’ pal David Meinert suggests at Publicola that Seattle could get at least a little out of its deep fiscal hole by opening itself up to casinos, slot machines, and booze in strip clubs.

(UPDATE: And our other ol’ pal Goldy thinks it’s a lousy idea.)

Two years ago this week, Seattle arts promoter-patron Su Job died from a fast-debilitating illness.

Now, the art-space building she managed and nurtured for more than 15 years is threatened.

619 Western is a gallery and/or workspace for more than 100 artists, as it has been since 1979. It is one of the principal stops along the First Thursday art crawl.

It is a gorgeous century-old rustic warehouse structure, its six stories divvied into labyrinths of large and small spaces.

And it’s got Seattle’s third coolest public elevator (after those of the Smith Tower and the Space Needle).

All this is threatened by the deep-bore tunnel project, to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

The state doesn’t want to tear down 619. But it wants to dig beneath it.

619 is an old building, built on top of fill dirt. As any Pioneer Square Underground Tour patron knows, the ground in the area was filled in during the early 20th century.

The state is wary that 619, in its current condition, might not survive being dug beneath.

So: If the tunnel dig proceeds, 619 will have to be evacuated in early 2012. After that, it would either be torn down or expensively rehabbed; probably out of the artists’ price range.

Some of the artists have started an effort to find new digs.

But I say: Let’s save the place.

So does Cheryl dos Remedios at Great City, the civic progress group Mayor McGinn used to belong to. She wants the Seattle arts community to organize for 619 and other tunnel-threatened structures. (She’s writing on her own behalf; Great City has not taken an official stance on the tunnel.)

As longtime readers know, I haven’t taken an official stance on the tunnel myself. I’ve wanted to save the viaduct; but I’ve been willing to listen to the argument that saving it’s not cost effective.

Now, I’m firmly on the anti-tunnel side.

Cornell University researchers are trying to make one of the gadgets in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age to life—the futuristic food processor that could turn a streaming input of basic goop into nearly any delicious foodstuff imaginable.

They’ve got a prototype machine that works like an ink jet printer. As a BBC report summarizes,

Just pop the raw food “inks” in the top, load the recipe—or ‘FabApp’—and the machine would do the rest.

As one who has long hailed the promise of food tech, and who has refused the false dichotomy of “processed” vs. “healthy,” I’m intrigued by the possibilities.

Right now, the device only works with ingredients that can be stored in liquid form. But since hot dogs and gyro meat are made with a liquid intermediate stage, meat products (or veggie-friendly fake meat products) can be used in the system. (On-the-bone meats and un-juicified veggies can’t.)

I can foresee great possibilities for creative home cookery (and nutrient-controlled institutional cookery).

Of course, I can also foresee a lot of bad ideas. (Ham cake, anyone?)

In typical DC Beltway pundit pomposity, the New Republic’s Noam Scheiber claims “Wikileaks Will Kill Big Business and Big Government.”

Scheiber’s claim: In an age when organizational secrets are porous commodities, big orgs shouldn’t have a lot of people around who know them. That, in turn, will require smaller, more cohesive orgs. Perhaps no bigger than 500 workers (the size of Obama’s campaign organization, which held great internal discipline).

“The Wikileaks revolution isn’t only about airing secrets and transacting information.” Scheiber asserts. “It’s about dismantling large organizations—from corporations to government bureaucracies. It may well lead to their extinction.”

We’ve discussed this dream of de-consolidation in the past, with local author David C. Korten’s 1999 book The Post Corporate World. Where Korten saw utopian promise in small businesses and housing co-ops, Scheiber sees business (and government) as usual (or close to it) surviving by becoming smaller, nimbler and tighter.

At once, Scheiber’s and Korten’s visions contradict and support one another.

Scheiber sees big institutions going small to retain strict top-down control.

Korten sees grassroots people-power ventures offering an alternative to strict top-down control.

In reality, both could happen. And in some ways, they already are.

The Republican wins this past midterm election largely occurred in spite of the national Republican Party. They were the works of more decentralized big-money whores of all genders and many ethnicities, who’d directly solicited big campaign cash from corporations and billionaires.

And with so much of America’s personal wealth concentrated on the top one or two percent of the population, a lobbyist-lovin’ politician only has to successfully nab a few mega-donors to run a “friend of the little guy” campaign.

And as we’ve learned in the ecological and economic and workplace-abuse fields in recent years, an institution doesn’t have to be big to do bad things.

Still, decentralization is an interesting starting point for a conversation about the world and its future. Lots of folks these days despise the world of global business and its capacity for harm, but I’ve not met many people with well-thought-out alternatives to today’s capitalist system.

Katie Baker had a great essay topic: “How to Talk to a Woman Without Being Rude, Creepy or Scary.”

Unfortunately, her essay never gets around to actually saying how.

Instead, she talks about wolf whistles and catcalls as evidence of men hating women.

She doesn’t quite get that, to some extent, these men might be liking women, or at least thinking they are.

Which raises an even better premise: “How to tell a woman you like her, without her thinking you hate her.”

Any suggestions? (Proactive, positive suggestions, that is. Don’t tell what NOT to do, tell what TO do.)

If you’re to believe political cartoonist and radical essayist Ted Rall, everything’s just going to keep getting worse, and the only answer is to actively speed up the process.

He’s got a book out, The Anti-American Manifesto.

In it, he claims that “it’s time for our revolution.”

He doesn’t mean a “creative revolution,” or a “revolution in business.”

And he sure doesn’t mean a “tea party revolution” that just reinforces the big-money powers’ grip on control.

Rall wants to see an actual uprising, that would lead to the actual overthrow of our country’s political/corporate system.

He acknowledges that such a revolt would be violent. Many innocent people would be hurt or killed; many types of infrastructure would be destroyed; and what would rise from those ashes could very well be a dictatorship and/or reign of terror.

Rall doesn’t seem to mind all of that.

He claims that even if we end up with a Robspierre or a Napoleon or even a Pol Pot, the long-term result would still be an eventual overall improvement for the continent’s, and the world’s, people.

I wouldn’t be quite so sure about that.

But at least Rall, unlike some I know who’ve bandied about the “R word,” realizes it would be a serious action with serious consequences.

The legendary musician-artist, who passed away last week, began his 1965-82 recording career by fusing two seemingly incompatible baby-boomer fads, beatnik “jazz poetry” and hippie “dirty blues.”

Somehow he made it work, through his own, firmly enforced, artistic vision.

What might have sounded like wild improvisations emphatically weren’t. Like his high-school buddy and sometime colleague Frank Zappa, Van Vliet was a control freak. He would riff out the melody lines for a whole album in a single day, then spend a year coming up with the elaborate arrangements, which he would painstakingly teach note-by-note to his sidemen.

He never sold many records, but was cited as an influence by countless later acts that sounded nothing like him, or like one another.

I got to meet him backstage after a 1981 Showbox concert. It was his 40th birthday. He wasn’t tremendously lucid. I promised his manager I wouldn’t print the interview.

A year later, he released his last album. He had another career, painting, where he felt he was treated better.

Coindicence, or…? dept.: Van Vliet died on the same day as Larry King’s last show. Both were associated, at different times, with legendary Hollywood agent-lawyer Herb Cohen.

Could Microsoft really be the tech sector’s new ‘Underdog’?

A UW prof published a study blasting military recruiting at inner city high schools as “abusing” parental trust. Naturally, Bill O’Reilly’s all up in exaggerated arms about her. And, naturally, he’s got his facts as well as his “patriotism” all wrong.

It’s time to send in your nominations for MISCmedia.com’s annual In/Out List, the longest-running and only accurate list of its type anywhere.

People, places, things, celebrities, fashions, catch phrases, paint colors, politicians—all these and more are yours to choose.

Which will become hotter, which will become more not-so-hot?

Tell us now.

MTV.com has, today, finally posted all of $5 Cover Seattle.

Local filmmaker Lynn Shelton completed the “webisode” music/drama series over a year ago. But the MTV bureaucrats sat on it ’til now.

If only Shelton had had someone in her life who could have warned her about working with this company.

Oh, wait….

Mayor McGinn found places at Seattle Center to put both a for-profit Chihuly glass-art gallery and a new home for KEXP.

The latter, which will include a live-performance studio with viewing windows, will be built out with no city funds. Expect even-longer pledge drives on the station starting next year.

The space will be in the Northwest Court buildings. That’s where the Vera Project is now and SIFF Cinema will be soon.

Of course, this means all of the Northwest Court’s rental spaces will be taken over by permanent tenants. Hence, they are no longer available for Bumbershoot’s visual and literary arts exhibits. This will result in these programs either getting diminished, or relocated to other Center spots. Let’s hope it’s the latter.

As it is darned near every year, the proposed ’11 WA state budget contains a plan to completely eliminate the Basic Health program for the working poor.

This must not stand. Even if it takes bipartisan supermajorities in the Legislature.

We need a society where we give a damn about one another–and not just when it’s convenient or when it’s “good for business.”

Hey, would be would-be book banners: Go take a Soma pill and chill out.

I was in the UW Daily newsroom that Monday night when the first bulletins came in on the already-archaic AP teletype machine, reporting first that John Lennon had been shot, then that he had died.

Within minutes, every radio station that even half-claimed to play rock music, and many that didn’t (in commercial radio, remember, this was the nadir of the soft rock era), went to all Lennon/Beatles and stayed that way for the next day or longer. I remember going up two flights of stairs in the Communications Building to the studios of KCMU (KEXP’s precursor), to hand deliver copies of the wire reports to the DJ on duty.

This was one month after the election of Ronald Reagan, the moment many of us campus libs feared would bring the beginning of the end of progress and democracy in America. (Turns out the only thing my more cynical/fearful lefties had wrong about that was how slow the nation’s fall from middle-class economic security would be.)

Then, with the assassination of the man who’d done as much as anyone to “invent” rock n’ roll as people my age had known it, it seemed to some of us like the end of the world.

But life, as Lennon himself had sung, went on.

As it will after all of us have left its stage.