“Stillwell” reminds us that Karl Rove may be gone (for now), but plenty of other right-wing thugs are still around to do his work for him.

(Priscilla Presley quoted in USA Today): “Elvis means something to people because he wasn’t a contrived person, he was organic and true to himself.”

Sorry, ex-mother-in-law of Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. You’re mistaken.

As Brit musicologists Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor write in their fascinating new book Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music, Elvis was as contrived as they come.

He carefully constructed a persona that was one part nice Mississippi mama’s boy, one part James Dean sneer, and one part R&B outlaw. And it worked. These seemingly incompatible traits melded together in the 1954-58 Elvis persona, creating a musical legend and a world icon.

The trick to the early Elvis wasn’t that he was “natural.” It was that he made his particular artificiality seem natural.

Presley’s later reinventions, as a goody-two-shoes matinee idol and as an overstated Vegas self-parody, were no more or less “real” than his first persona. And they were just as successful with audiences of the time–as they are to this day, in the form of impersonators and merch/DVD sales.

So, on the 30th-anniversary week of Presley’s passing, let’s remember the real “real” Elvis, the consummate entertainer who found a way to rock the world.

(Faking It, by the way, is a wonderful book. Its chief premise: Forget “authenticity” or “keepin’ it real.” All pop music is a contrivance, and that goes for country, folk, blues, punk, hiphop, and square dancing too. Sure, the Monkees were a manufactured image–but so was John Lee Hooker.)

David Postman informs us that Seattle Times reports vocally cheered when Karl Rove’s resignation was announced on a newsroom TV.

Postman, defending traditional media “objectivity,” said they shouldn’t have done that.

Dan Savage replied that the departure of Bush’s favorite manipulative operative was something “worth cheering for.” Savage claims, “Maybe the reporters cheered because they, of all people, are in the best position to recognize Rove’s departure as a positive development for the nation—and for the ideal that all journalists everywhere honor the most: the truth.”

I’ve no problem with professional reports having minds, nor with them speaking their minds, even if it’s just amongst themselves.

As for the “Mayberry Machiavelli” himself, Rove was the dirty trickster who always got away with it, and now he’s away with getting away from DC. It’s not as if he had anything left to do for Bush, having played such a big hand in every ruination, disgrace, and failure of Worst-Preznit-Ever. Rove’s first love has always been the next election cycle, for which he’ll surely work as a string-puller for the GOP or one candidate. Expect the anti-Hillary mud to start slinging, and soon.

Danny Westneat thinks we can outfox the Oklahomans who bought, and now overtly want to take away, the Sonics. Westneat thinks we can freeze ’em out with a megadose of “Seattle polite” and “Seattle process.”

I’m not so sure.

It’s true that the Okie cowboy-capitalists who bought the team are firebrands, and that the best way to fight fire is with water.

But frozen water, perhaps not.

As you know, I was never a sports-hating hippie. I believe in bigtime sports as community institutions.

I want to keep the Sonics and Storm (no, not just the Storm).

Yet, the NBA’s business model is broken. Fewer TV viewers (the inevitable result of new home-leisure technologies) mean less money to pay overpriced diva superstars. Limited arena capacities (even in bigger arenas than ours) means ticket revenues have inherent caps, no matter how high teams raise prices. Team ownership has become a speculative hobby–a zillionaire buys a team, loses money on it, then sells it at a profit to some other zillionaire.

That’s who Clay Bennett and Co. are. They know they’re unlikely to turn an operating profit on the team, wherever it is. They want pro basketball in their town as means of boosting their town’s nightlife and tourism industries, in a place traditionally lacking in both. They’d only keep the teams here if we paid them such ridiculous amounts of corporate welfare that they just couldn’t say no.

Like ex-Mariners owner George Argyros and ex-Seahawks owner Ken Behring, Bennett and his cohorts are parasitical figures who need to be expunged from the local and national sports scenes.

How?

If we all boycott the teams, Bennett will just claim we don’t deserve ’em.

If our socio-economic upper crust shuns the owners, they won’t mind; they never intended to make any friends here.

Nope. We gotta do to Bennett’s crowd what we did to Argyros and Behring–push back with legal threats and procedural stalls, until a new local ownership group can be formed.

David Thornburg warns that “The real challenge to the US is not our loss of high-skilled repetitive jobs to India, but the fact that we are losing our creative edge to other countries more than happy to invent the future without us.”

Austin cartoonist Ethan Persoff is posting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner’s pioneering (founded 1958) magazine of committed satire and radical thought.

Krassner was one of the progenitors of hippie-era ribald masculine humor (despite having been born way back in 1932). Much of the Realist material has been anthologized in book form, but to really “get” it you need to see it in its Persoff-provided original context (32-page newsprint magazines with few pictures and no ads).

One just-posted 1961 issue contains the following unsigned one-liner within its back-page filler column: “Ever wonder if some of the pious souls who talk about exporting democracy really just want to get it the hell out of this country?”

…to two of the greatest entertainers and entertainment packages ever.

Merv Griffin was a genius strategic dealmaker who also happened to be a genial talk-show host and made-it-seem-easy raconteur.

I’ve already told my favorite Merv Griffin Show story, about the long Richard Pryor monologue that slowly built up to one big punchline that was completely bleeped. For every moment like that, there were hundreds of smarmy lovefest chats with the likes of Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, Helen Gurley Brown, Eva Gabor, Jackie Mason, and Jonathan Winters. As dull as these segments often got, there was at least the promise of some opening repartee with his trumpet player Jack Sheldon (who was also Schoolhouse Rock’s favorite male vocalist).

But Griffin’s real talent was on the business end of the business. A brief outline:

• After stints as a big-band singer and radio personality, the Goodson-Todman game show empire signed him up to host Play Your Hunch, a blatant ripoff of G-T’s own To Tell the Truth.
• After four years of that, NBC signed Griffin in 1962 to host an afternoon talk show. It premiered on the same day (and from the same studio) as Johnny Carson’s first Tonight Show. Some observers believe the network was grooming Griffin as a potential relief pitcher, should Carson’s show flop.
• Carson, obviously, didn’t flop. NBC dropped Griffin’s show. But as part of the contract, Griffin got to place two daytime games on the network. The second of these, premiering in 1964, was Jeopardy!.
• By 1975, NBC’s daytime boss was one Lin Bolen. She believed in modern innovations, such as expanding soap opera episodes from 30 to 60 minutes. She hated legacy game shows with old-man hosts, such as Jeopardy!‘s original host Art Fleming. Bolen moved J! to worse and worse time slots, and finally axed it. But as part of Griffin’s contract, he got to place another daytime game on the network. That was Wheel of Fortune.
• Meanwhile, Griffin had revived his own show in syndication, then moved to CBS late night, then back to syndication, demanding and getting more cash each time.
• By the 1980s he’d successfully placed Wheel in syndication and revived J! as a sister show.
• He sold the whole thang to Columbia Picutres for $250 million and a share of future profits. He built that stake into a “luxury” leisure empire of hotels, casinos, resorts, and race horses.
• But he remained involved in TV production. He produced a kids’ game show, Click, shooting the second of its two seasons in Seattle. (He lived on a yacht moored at south Lake Union during the tapings.) And in his last days he was selling a new show, Let’s Play Crosswords.

His private life was as delightfully kitschy as his talk show. After one failed marriage, he appeared in public with the likes of Gabor and even the widowed Nancy Reagan; while rumors spread of his affections toward poolboys and valets. If true, that meant he had a real self he felt he had to hide from the world, even after he was financially set for life.

ACROSS THE POND, meanwhile, we must say goodbye to Tony Wilson, best known here as the subject of the film 24 Hour Party People. But Wilson’s achievements were too big for one movie (let alone one blog entry):

• He began by hosting a local music TV show in Manchester, welcoming acts the London-based network shows wouldn’t touch.
• He went from there into narrating serious network documentaries, and from there into anchoring Manchester’s only commercial TV newscast.
• On the side, he continued to support new music by cofounding Factory Records, home to Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and many more.
• He opened The Hacienda nightclub, where top acts played (and “house” electronic music was partly developed) for 15 years.
• More recently, he became a political activist. His chief cause: “Devolution.” No, not de-evolution, but a crusade to bring more political power to England’s regions, away from London’s central bureaucracies.

Wilson was an honorable man in three often dishonorable professions (music, TV, politics).

And everything he did was informed by his lifelong devotion to his hometown.

He’s someone we could all admire and emulate.

…(or rather, a streaming-content company working with AT&T’s sponsorship) deliberately censor Eddie Vedder leading an anti-Bush chant during a live Lollapalooza webcast?

And in a related question, are there really still Lollapalooza concerts?

Yes to both questions.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake done by an overzealous “content monitor” employee at the content contractor.

It couldn’t have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT&T. (You’ll recall, won’t you, that today’s AT&T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the “Baby Bell” spinoffs of the original AT&T, which recently acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company’s online critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies’ warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called “throttled” broadband services (in which Internet service providers such as itself could speed up or slow down consumers’ connections to specific Web sites), and for cooperating too closely with MPAA/RIAA file-sharing crackdowns.

It’s not as if AT&T were censoring a site it wasn’t directly sponsoring.

It’s not as if you couldn’t get the deleted words from other sources. (Pearl Jam has put up the whole unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it’s not as if you can’t find anti-Bush messages online from many other sources.

Still, it ain’t good PR for a company trying to prove its trustworthiness (whilst basking in its share of the iPhone hype).

…Seafair parade, here’s an official Seafair Pirates eye patch. It’s sponsored by AT&T Wireless, made of space-age rubberized plastic, and made in China.

That’s at least one potential explanation why his occasional public remarks are sounding less like the sayings of a Zen master and more like those of Yogi Berra.

Got another little essay in the Capitol Hill Times, this one about how and why apartment and condo residents could be more sociable.

Got the August Belltown Messenger out, with three long pieces by yrs. truly.

And I’ve turned in another photo-history book to Arcadia Publishing. Seattle’s Belltown will be out in November, tentatively, and it’ll be just as fabulous as Vanishing Seattle. More on this later.

By now you’ve read/heard/seen all the mealy-mouthed analysis of the Minneapolis freeway bridge disaster, including the obligatory references to western Washington’s own infamous span failures of 1940, 1979, and 1990.

You may have even heard informal gossip or talk-radio blather comparing the Minnesota disaster to the tragedy-waiting-to-happen moniker some Seattle citizens have placed onto the unloved Alaskan Way Viaduct. The facts that these two different structures have very different structural premises, foundations, etc. will ultimately not matter to those who Demand We Do Something Now.

And who knows: Perhaps some added haste might work in favor of the surface/transit option, rather than the more cumbersome replacement alternatives of a tunnel or a new viaduct.

Ex-Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio just got sentenced to six years’ imprisonment over sleazy corporate accounting tricks. Now if we could only get our old, public-service-minded Pacific Northwest Bell back….

…this report, the Weekly World News is shutting down. Unlike most of my readers, I won’t miss it.

WWN, that most beloved of all periodicals by the would-be hipsters and the easily amused everywhere, began in 1980 as a spinoff of the National Enquirer. The Enquirer was morphing from its previous weird-news format into the highly successful celeb-gossip sheet it is now. The WWN was created to service fans of the material the Enquirer would no longer emphasize.

The rag found its market niche among all the kids who bought it to sneer at all the other people who supposedly bought it. By 1985, it was being written and edited by hip young adults for hip young adults, but still pretending to be targeted at the mouth-breathers out in flyover country.

It traded on its outrageousness. But that’s difficult to maintain. Every year the WWN became more over-the-top, more ridiculous. Its fake news evolved into a house of mirrors–they knew it was fake, you knew it was fake, they knew you knew, but they pretended they didn’t know you knew, and you pretended they didn’t know you knew.

It’s amazing they kept it up this long.

The beginning of WWN’s end may have come when it hired my ol’ acquaintance, cartoonist Peter Bagge, to create a weekly comic strip based on “Bat Boy,” a character whose airbrush-created face made the paper’s cover at least once a year. The pretense had ended with Bagge’s arrival. The editors had included true urban-hipster material.

American Media, current owners of the Enquirer and WWN, apparently turned down at least one offer to buy the publication, for reasons unknown.

These past two weeks I’ve been hard at work on the next photo-history book, Seattle’s Belltown. (If anyone has any images of the Trade Winds, the Belltown Cafe, the original Tugs, the Weathered Wall, or the original Vogue, contact me immediately!)