Some in the City government think they’ve found an easy budget cutting target.

It’s the cable access channel.

Even though its funding comes from cable subscription taxes and is supposed to be dedicated toward improving citizen access to communications technology.

Don’t let ’em do it.

At Crosscut, ex-UW prof Dick Morrill laments the disappearance of the pre-Vietnam, class-struggle-conscious radical left in America and specifically in Seattle.

Morrill offers a sophisticated whatthehellhappened analysis. So do many of the page’s commenters.

Like some of the commenters, I see two reasons why it all occurred:

1. The Cold War-era blacklists, purges of labor union leadership, and general scare tactics against anybody or anything more liberal than John Foster Dulles.
2. The subsequent New Left’s preppy disdain for working-class squares, which repeated itself in later decades of identity politics, semiotics, and neo-bohemian “alt” culture.

Is there a way out of this recursive trap?

I believe I’ve already seen part of it.

I’ve seen it at the immigrants’-rights protests.

I’ve seen it among the grassroots and netroots groups striving to turn Obamamania from a singular event into a permanent force for progress.

And I hope to see it at the Stewart/Colbert rallies later this month.

When one gets to become my age, one is occasionally wont to reminisce.

I have lived through such amazing times. So much history. So many advances. So many struggles. Such cool gadgets.

Herewith, a few of these memories.

I REMEMBER:

• Dial phones.
• 300 Baud modems.
• Thick daily local newspapers.
• Early color TVs with unnaturally orange hues.
• Plymouths, punch cards, and pubic hair.
• Mood rings and copper bracelets.
• Qiana.
• Girdles.
• CompuGraphic typesetting machines, and the HTML-like codes needed to enter text into them.
• National Educational Television (NET).
• Rock n’ roll on AM radio, played by live local DJs.
• When girls in high school were first encouraged to be anything they wanted, but boys were still expected to all be jocks.
• When you had to go a thousand miles to lose your money in a legal casino.
• Rhinelander, Heidelberg, and Lucky Lager.
• Lumbermen’s taverns.
• Road houses.
• When grooming and behaving as a gentleman was not considered ironic or strange.
• Reel-to-reel tapes.
• Life, Look, and The Saturday Evening Post in every doctor’s waiting room.
• When discrimination was so everyday as to be invisible, if you weren’t the one being discriminated against.
• When most writers in Seattle could be classified in two categories: those who would rather be in New York, and those who would rather be in Missoula.

(Cross-posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Sally Clark had seen the Capitol Hill Block Party.

She’d seen the exuberant crowds bringing life, and business, to Pike/Pine.

She saw that it was good.

She decided she’d like more of it.

All year round.

In July, even before this year’s Block Party occurred, the City Councilmember floated the idea of closing one or more blocks in the Pike/Pine Corridor from vehicular traffic, one or more nights a week.

Her inspiration came partly from the Block Party and partly from the example of Austin. The Texan nightlife hotspot, once billed in the ’90s as the “Next Seattle,” shuts down Sixth Street (its main nightclub drag) on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights from 11 p.m. to closing time. The result: A bustling, vibrant street scene along this part-time pedestrian mall.

Councilmember Clark’s first choice for a year-round block party site here was East Pike Street, from Broadway perhaps as far east as 12th Avenue.

The concept hasn’t progressed very far since it was initially offered. Councilmember Clark says it would need the approval of, and tax assessments from, area businesses.

Still, at this fledgling stage, the every-weekend block party has already attracted detractors.

Writing at PubliCola.net in mid-September, urban planning maven Dan Bertolet (who has described himself as a devout “car hater”) nevertheless disapproved of the street closure concept.

Bertolet believes a late night street party every weekend just couldn’t attract enough regular patrons to be worth the traffic disruptions.

He’d rather have a more modest set of pedestrian amenities on East Pike, such as wider sidewalks and a wider range of permitted foods for street vendors to sell.

I disagree.

I’ve seen the weekend night scene along First Avenue in Belltown (which will get its own quasi-Block Party space next year, when Bell Street gets refitted with wider, landscaped sidewalks).

The late-night scene on First can occasionally get wild and rowdy, particularly in the hour just before and after closing time. But it can also be a blast, an entertainment destination in its own right.

Something like that on The Hill, with its own unique milieu, would be its own kind of blast. Particularly if it’s enhanced by the freedom of milling about without fear of traffic.

Of course, Seattle has something Austin (and New Orleans and Miami) don’t have.

A rainy season, commonly known as winter.

Would The Hill’s party-minded young adults, hipsters, gays, etc. want to wander about on a closed-off street during a drizzling Northwest monsoon season?

For a potential answer to that, don’t look south. Look north.

A long stretch of Vancouver’s Granville Street has been car-free (except for transit buses) for three decades now.

And it works.

Day and night, week in and week out, Granville is alive with diners, drinkers, clubgoers, and assorted revelers of all types.

Pike can become more like that.

We could at least try it out.

Close East Pike to cars one Saturday night a month for six months.

Festoon the place with awnings and tents in case of rain.

Bring in artists, a music stage, street performers, fire eaters, and vaudeville/burlesque acts.

Park some mobile vending trucks. But leave out the beer garden. The object is to bring more business to Pike/Pine’s bars, not to compete with them.

If these trials work out, if they attract enough regular revelers, turn them into regular events.

I can see the slogan now:

“Yes, We’re Closed!”

Last night, I attended the highly anticipated premiere of I Am Secretly an Important Man, the long in-the-making biopic about Seattle poet/author/musician/actor/performance artist Steven J. “Jesse” Bernstein.

Documentarian Peter Sillen had been collecting footage and reminiscences of Bernstein since the year after Bernstein’s 1991 suicide. Only now, after directing four other films and performing camera work on several others, has Sillen finally assembled this footage into an 85-minute feature.

He’s done a spectacular job.

The finished work captures, as well as any mere 85-minute feature can, the immense creative range, depth, and contradictions within Bernstein, which I won’t attempt to describe in this one blog entry.

(Of course, it helps that Bernstein recorded so much of his life and work in audio tape, video tape, and film, much of it taken by artists and collaborators from across the Northwest creative community.)

Suffice it to say you should see An Important Man during its engagement later this autumn at the Northwest Film Forum.

Confused about all the initiatives on this year’s Wash. state ballot?

You’re not alone.

Fortunately, there’s a handy dandy “Living Voters Guide” now online, to help you match the number to the proposal.

I’m relisting the measures here, with my own endorsements (which are based around the concept that we do need public services, and we need ways to pay for them in-this-economic-blah-blah-blah):

• Referendum 52: The Legislature should have simply passed this instead of referring it to voters. Schools need energy efficiency retrofitting. Bottled water might was well have the same taxation as pop. YEP.
• Initiative 1053: Tim Eyman’s latest sounds-good-on-talk-radio, is-disastrous-in-real-life measure. No, we’re not stupid. No, we don’t want Calif.-style legislative gridlock. Yes, the state needs to plug budget holes, even with spit and hairpins and bailing wire if need be, and without regard to arbitrary “caps.” NOPE.
• Initiative 1082: The Building Industry Association of Washington’s attempt to gut worker’s compensation by turning it over to the private insurance industry (not exactly my favorite group O’ guys these days). NOPE.
• Initiative 1098: The new state income tax, only on the rich. Endorsed by Bill Gates Sr. (who used to call himself Bill Gates Jr., but that’s beside the point). By itself, it won’t cure Washington’s status as the most regressive tax system (or at least close to the most regressive) in the nation. But it’s a start. YEP.
• Initiative 1100: Two very different schemes to privatize liquor sales made the ballot. This is the one that has TV spots with bar owners Linda Dershang and Tom Douglas endorsing it. It’s also the Costco-funded initiative. It’s the one that would get the state out of both the wholesale and the retail liquor biz, and would allow outfits like Costco to buy beer and wine as well as spirits direct from their makers, instead of through wholesale intermediaries. It would lower liquor prices but at a too-high cost to state coffers. NOPE.
• Initiative 1105: The less radical liquor privatization scheme. This is the one promoted by alcohol wholesalers, whose existence is threatened by the rival I-1100. If you really insist on putting hard booze into the supermarkets, pick this one instead. Otherwise, NOPE.
• Initiative 1107: The Coca-Cola initiative, to end the temporary sales tax on pop and junk food. The tax itself is a cumbersome mess of inclusions and exclusions, but this would just gut the whole thing. NOPE.

I thought this department was perhaps due for retirement. After all, the SeaTimes hasn’t run a 24- or 26-page minipaper in several weeks. Even Monday and Tuesday editions regularly run to 32-36 pages, with 8-12 pages of paid advertising.

However, as Goldy at HorsesAss points out, these looks can be deceiving.

The paper’s offering drastically discounted ad rates for in-state political advertisers.

And some of the SeaTimes‘ other ads, particularly in Mon.-Thurs. issues, seem to be for mail-order merchandisers of the type you’d normally see in late night TV infomercials. I don’t know what rates these firms are being charged, but I suspect they might also be less than they used to be.

The Cooking Channel (not to be confused with the Food Network!) is showing reruns of The Galloping Gourmet from the ealry 1970s.

This is the earliest cooking show I remember ever watching complete episodes of.

That’s because Graham Kerr was a comedian in the guise of a foodie. He had his schticks, his physical comedy bits, his gags, his mugging funny faces. And because his act was grounded in the presentation of a real recipe of the day, he always had a narrative “through line” to get back to.

The Cooking Channel’s web site calls The Galloping Gourmet “a U.K. import.” Kerr was a Brit, but the show was made in Toronto.

As many of you know, Kerr’s lived in northwest Washington for the past few decades. He’s become an outspoken evangelist for healthy eating and sustainable, local farming.

The buttery, creamy, high-fat-content entrees he used to make on TV are no longer in his repertoire.

But it’s still fun to watch him making them, via the magic of videotape.

This week has seen two members of the still fledgling Seattle filmmaking community step out of the scrappy milieu of ultra-low-budget indie cinema and into the most formula-driven segment of Hollywood, “episodic” television.

Last Thursday, John Jeffcoat’s warm, subtle dramedy feature Outsourced premiered as a broader, more blatant NBC sitcom.

And on Sunday, Humpday mumblecore auteur Lynn Shelton made her Directors Guild of America debut helming a particularly emotional episode of AMC’s Mad Men.

Reviews for Outsourced the series are mixed at best. Shelton’s Mad Men episode got its full share of the praise that that critics’-darling series has gotten.

Jeffcoat and George Wing, his co-screenwriter on the Outsourced movie, are credited with the screenplay for the Outsourced series pilot episode. But Hollywood producer Robert Borden shepherded the series adaptation.

The simpler, cruder gags and ethnic humor in the show, compared to the original film, could be the work of Borden. But they should more appropriately attributed to the network’s vehicle assembly system, the layers of bureaucracy that turn so many promising shows into mush before they even get a chance.

Reportedly, Jeffcoat and Wing have been retained as consultants on the series. Let’s hope they can help mix in a greater portion of the film’s higher culture-clash content.

Shelton faced the opposite situation.

She was given a script, complete with multiple last-minute rewrites. She was given standing sets, a regular cast and crew, and an established audio-visual vocabulary. She had input on the episode’s new settings and guest actors. She had eight shooting days and a similarly tight editing schedule.

The result was not, by any means, a Lynn Shelton film. It was a regular Mad Men, albeit an especially potent one.

Directing episodic TV is more akin to conducting than to composing. It’s working within a complex set of disciplines and strictures. It is an art in its own right.

At my sometime stomping grounds of  Seattle PostGlobe, Eric Ruthford writes about a potential PR campaign to curb demand for child prostitutes.

He writes of such campaigns in other cities, campaigns based on shaming the “John,” or on stern lectures about criminal penalties.

He also quotes Debra Boyer, a local anthropologist who’s studied child prostitution:

“We need to somehow educate people so that they can see what harm they’re doing,” she said. “How do we create empathy in people who have objectified women?”

You’re not going to persuade these men by using words like “objectifying.”

And you’re sure not going to persuade these men by objectifying or stereotyping them.

Instead appeal to pride, to dignity even.

Say “Your sex drive can bring life. It can bring joy. It can even bring love. Or it can contribute to a living horror.”

Say “You really want to give your money to a pimp, so you can contribute to a child’s hell?”

Say “You’re better than that.”

Say “Make love, not hurt.”

Contrary to what the nostalgia industry and PBS pledge-drive specials will claim, the era commonly known as “The Sixties” involved a lot more than just a bunch of upscale white kids getting stoned and laid and calling it a “revolution.”

A lot of people performed a lot of hard work, against real opposition, to help make this a better place for a lot of different folks.

One of the premier examples of this was Roberto Maestas, who died today.

To call Maestas a professional political organizer is to oversimplify the many activities and crusades in which he participated over the years.

But his living legacy is, and will be, El Centro de la Raza. Founded during the early ’70s “Boeing Bust” recession at an abandoned elementary school building, it’s a community and advocacy group devoted to the practical improvement of people’s lives.

“A smart heroin addict is still a heroin addict.”

A Facebook correspondent said that to me, after I rebutted his anti-television screed.

But that’s not what I’m writing about today.

I’m writing to confess something.

Yes, I am an addict.

Specifically, I am addicted to what members of certain online message boards call “stim.”

That’s short for “stimuli.”

In my case, for a broad array of mental/emotional stimuli.

Among many other things, I am addicted to:

• The beat and the chords and the melody of a great pop song.
• The urgency of news headlines, as delivered in any medium.
• The telegraph-inspired urgency of old network radio “news on the hour” themes.
• The scrolling headlines and stock tickers on cable news channels.
• The wild juxtapositions of time/space/narrative in an old newspaper.
• The similar juxtapositions in a well-curated blog.
• The sound of a phonograph needle hitting the scratchy outer groove of a vinyl record.
• The frenetic beauty of a Merrie Melodies cartoon.
• The typography and design of old magazines and newspapers.
• The look and build of an old building, even one that was considered ordinary in its time.
• The all-out attempts at persuasion seen in old advertisements, pamphlets, political badges, and printed pop ephemera of all types.
• The glow of a neon sign; the stasis of its daylight background base.
• The noise, beats, sights, and smells of many industrial processes (including those that were sampled in the Dancer in the Dark soundtrack).
• The poignancy of urban decay, of streets and structures whose once-noble aspirations have faded with time.
• The “instant insight” of a well turned phrase.
• The “gotcha” moment of a particularly awful pun.
• The sight of a female figure, revealed in artistic, alluring, and/or fun ways.
• All of the sounds, touches, tastes, and scents associated with heterosexual pleasure.
• A sugar rush.
• A caffeine rush.
• The sated feeling after a big meal.
• The exotic thrill of a foreign film, particularly a foreign mass-entertainment film. The song-and-dance spectacles of Bollywood, in which generalized sensuality triumphs over sexual prudery. The audacious blare of an Italian “giallo” soundtrack. The milieu of early British Hitchcock films, just foreign enough to unsettle.

Strangely enough, several genres and industries designed wholly around “stim” don’t particularly enthrall me. Casino gambling; modern video games; big budget special effects movies—I just don’t respond to ’em.

The 2010 Seattle Storm have not only become Seattle’s winningest pro team right now.

They didn’t just sweep all three of their playoff rounds and all their home games this year.

For me, they brought back my love of basketball itself.

Two years and change after the men’s pro team was stolen from us, I realized I could like this game again. The passing. The defense. The steals. The miracle shots from seemingly out of nowhere.

The Storm story is a tale of triumph from the wreckage of a civic travesty.

I don’t remember attempting to watch a complete episode of As the World Turns before 1969, when KIRO-TV first placed a noon newscast ahead of it. (Ah, Sandy Hill….)

ATWT was a difficult viewing experience for a preteen boy. But I challenged myself to get through it.

First came the gothic organ theme, and that very simple title sequence using a very church-y typeface. (Years later I learned the font was named “Lydian.”) Then a whole minute of commercials.

Only then did the drama commence. It was slow and quiet. It mostly seemed to consist of the Hughes, Lowell, and Stewart family members discussing the everyday minutiae of their lives.

That was all there was to story during the most famous episode of all, the one that Walter Cronkite interrupted for the news that President Kennedy had been shot.

But in retrospect, upon seeing pieces of these old episodes on YouTube, there was a hypnotic formula at work.

ATWT creator Irna Phillips (1903-1973), who’d essentially invented the genre, knew her audiences wanted virtual neighbors, whose lives (just slightly more exciting than the viewers’ own) could be shared in predictable doses at the same time every day, Monday throgh Friday.

Phillips didn’t shout at her viewers with high-strung melodrama. She seduced them with carefully written, if hastily rehearsed, dialogue.

Traditionally soaps were the one TV genre where The Writer was the auteur. ATWT’s auteur was Phillips. It was her masterwork.

It was also one of the first TV soaps to run a half hour per episode. Previously they’d all been 15 minutes, as they’d been on radio.

Phillips took this extra airtime and used it to slow down the storytelling pace, sometimes to near glacial proportions. That only made it more compelling.

ATWT quickly became known as the class act of daytime. Within two years it had conquered the ratings. It stayed on top for two decades.

But it was a show created for the three-network TV economy. The multichannel landscape was a harder place to support a single hour with a reported $50 million annual production budget, producing over 250 episodes a year with no reruns and no DVD box sets. Budgets, casts, and sets got smaller. But those were only stopgap measures.

The last episode has now aired in the west. A story older than me has ended.

Could anything like it be started again?

Yes.

Character-based, quiet, domestic drama is just about the easiest scripted video to produce. It could even be done online, given the right economies of scale.

But this particular story has ended.

As part of the big megaproject to replace the Alaskan Way Viaduct, the City wants to redevelop the pedestrian areas of Seattle’s central waterfront. Four competing proposals for this will be publicly unveiled this week.

My onetime housemate Steve “Fnarf” Thornton hasn’t seen all these proposals yet, but he suspects he’ll hate them all.

In an essay at the Seattle Transit Blog, he persuasively explains what downtown doesn’t need—more windswept plazas and cavernous boulevards.

And he delineates what downtown does need—more places like the Pike Place Market, places alive with the cacophony of commerce and the bustling mix of human activities.

In the case of the waterfront, this means more piers, more stuff going on on the piers, more vendors and food carts, and (in a big duh) more boats. The waterfront’s original purpose, Thornton knows, will never be reclaimed in an age of containerized cargo. But other water-based uses wait to be put in there.

I agree with most everything in Thornton’s premise.

To paraphrase an old slogan for a sea-originated product, we don’t need a waterfront with good taste.

We need a waterfront that tastes good.