LOCAL NOTE: Bumbershoot: The Seattle Arts Festival ended its Sunday fare with ex-local film collector Dennis Nyback showing off some old reels of vaudeville stars. Highly appropriate, since Bumbershoot itself is like a vaudeville show exploded onto a bigger time/space canvas (four days and 17 stages). It's a big all-you-can-eat buffet of darn near every performing- and visual-art genre, designed to pack in a huge, mongrel audience. Increasingly, those audiences are responding to the more challenging, unfamiliar entrees. Cibo Matto played to a packed KeyArena throng; and many of the "adventurous music" acts completely filled their own smaller stages. Enough to give you renewed faith in humanity. (Speaking of faith and the future....)

TWO 'K'S, MUCHO KALE: For a recent freelance gig with Everything Holidays, I was assigned to research a short piece about Year-2000 survivalist camps.

I'd expected to find a lot of the separatist compounds out in the hills, like I'd seen when I first explored the topic last year. Folks who'd previously used rumors of the "new world order," UN black helicopters, race war, nuclear war, the Red Scare, flouridated water, religious Armageddon, and countless other excuses to call true believers to set up a self-contained utopia of true believers, equipped with canned goods and guns.

People who now were applying the same supposed solution to a new supposed problem--the belief, nay the hope, that at the stroke of midnight on 1/1/00, all of the western world's industrial, communications, and transportation infrastructure will immediately and irrepairably go Ka-blooey.

A global computer crash that would leave the cities (especially the parts where those minorities live) in ruins, the phones out of whack, the airlines grounded, the banks busted, the electrical grid down forever, and even late-model cars with computer-chip-controlled systems undriveable.

I found a few ranters of that type. But I also found several hundred more folks who claimed to believe in one-person, or one-family, survival schemes--and were, and are, ready and eager to equip such an effort, for a modest fee.

And such a cornucopia of personal-survival tools have they!

Foodstuffs dried, canned, vaccuum-sealed, dehydrated, concentrated, irradiated, flash-pasteurized, and/or ready-to-eat.

Farm tools, implements, and "Y2K seeds," so you can grow your own food without depending on the patent-protected, non-perennial products of the big seed companies (which, of course, will go away with the rest of corporate society).

Generators, co-generators, solar panels, battery rechargers.

First-aid kits and more elaborate medical supplies, so you can fill your kids' cavities after all the dentists get killed in the urban riots.

Radios and shortwave transceivers that run on batteries, gasoline, or wind-up springs.

And, of course, plenty of the gold and silver coins and ingots that're bound to become the New Currency once the global monetary system evaporates.

In a way, all this leaves me hopeful.

You see, it all means many Americans aren't really buying the Y2K Scare as the End of the World As We Know It. Instead, they're taking it like we take so many things--as an opportunity to do our part to keep capitalism going.

The hundreds of Y2K Scare outfitters out there are preaching disaster, but they're practicing the all-American religion of entrepreneurialism.

And so am I. When January rolls around, and our infrastructure (as predicted by most experts who aren't selling survival gear) doesn't crumble, I hope to have a line of cookbooks on the market, teaching folks how to make tasty near-gourmet meals out of their three-years' supplies of freeze-dried apricots, beef jerky, and army-surplus crackers.

TOMORROW: Yet another retro-futuristic bar, plus the possible end of a private art-garden.

PITCH IN: This time, I'm looking for cultural artifacts today's young adults never knew (i.e., dial phones, non-inline skates, and three-network TV). Make your nominations at our MISC. Talk discussion boards.

ELSEWHERE: Ghosts of end-of-the-world prophecies past... And what if everything had a Y2K bug, not just computers?... "In the chaos following the collapse of Western civilization, your first objectives will be to procure food, clean water, shelter, and fresh breath..."

(For an explanation of the above, look here.)

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