Saturday, June 19, 2004

CAITLIN ROSS CLAIMS the real dividing point in U.S. politics is "between those who know they are right and those who are a bit doubtful."

posted by clark 12:46 AM

Friday, June 18, 2004

SPACE IS THE PLACE: The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, Paul Allen's latest vanity monument, opened Friday morning with a simple ceremony. Instead of the all-star weekend of free rock concerts that marked the opening of SFM's parent organization, the Experience Music Project, SFM merely had some short speeches by the usual suspects (Allen, Mayor Nickels, author Neal Stephenson, etc.).

Nickels, bless him, turned out to be a geek at heart. He thanked the costumed "extraterrestrials" in the audience, and closed his remarks with "Live long and prosper."

Several of the suspects then jointly pressed a button which set off metallic confetti showers, some steam spurting out of the robo-bug gizmo on the building, and "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (a.k.a. the 2001 theme) blared forth.

Among the costumed fans in attendance was our ol' pal and Punk Lust zine editor Willum Pugmyr (above).

Management didn't let me take pictures inside the museum. But I can tell you it's a fanboy's dream. For the (relatively costly) price of admission, you get to see dozens of real movie props (Captain Kirk's chair, the Lost in Space robot), costumes, illustration-art pieces, fanzine pages, book covers, toys, and more. There are also many clever computer-based displays, including the "Hall of Fame" section (honoring some three dozen influential authors), and two impressive globular video-projection units.

And as a writer, I was pleased to see all the attention given to the written origins of sci-fi.

The space is smallish. But since the EMP's vast Sky Church auditorium's adjacent, it can be used for any SFM special events, which I hope will include author panels, film festivals, and other fan-convention favorites.

The place is fun, and the strolling experience through the small space is appropriately akin to traversing a cramped spaceship. I'm just disappointed at the $10 admission fee. Perhaps Mr. Allen needs to be reminded that some of us have less spending money than he does.

posted by clark 8:27 PM

Thursday, June 17, 2004

UN-BREAKING THE NEWS: David Neiwert, a local author who specializes in investigating hate crimes and other examples of rabid nonsense, has issued a "Media Revolt Manifesto."

Like many of us, Neiwert's mad as hell at the GOP cheerleading and pundit-blather that passes for "news" in today's US mainstream media. Thankfully, he wants us to get beyond just complaining and protesting about it.

He sees rescuing US journalism as a multi-faceted, multi-fronted task. At the center of this new media paradigm will be the so-called "new media":

"Blogs... can and should play the role abdicated by the mainstream media both in monitoring their own behavior and ethics, and in providing enough diversity that a wealth of viewpoints are given fair treatment, as in any healthy democratic society, and the public properly served.

Blogs will not and cannot do the job alone, of course. The whole purpose of the revolt is to foster an environment in which mainstream journalists, from the lowly ink-stained wretch to the well-coiffed network anchor, are both allowed and positively encouraged to provide truthful and meaningful journalism that provides vital information to the public and does it responsibly and thoroughly. So that will mean recognizing and positively celebrating when superior journalism does its job well; such reporters and truth-tellers should be lauded, promoted, and in the end well remunerated for their work. It will mean channeling the marketplace to reward organizations that do their job well, too.

Finally, the Media Revolt will tap the energy of the citizenry through traditional means as well: Letter-writing campaigns, voting with our pocketbooks, organizing politics and funds on the ground -- without which, in fact, anything that occurs on the Web may prove meaningless. The idea is to turn from simply critiquing the media to taking concrete action."

Of course, some of Neiwert's goals are easier to accomplish than others.

He'd like to see more websites that don't just rehash or comment upon stories from the traditional media. He'd even like to see "the creation of viable newswire services beyond the current Asssociated Press monopoly." But he acknowledges the difficulty of funding original reporting, particularly on the web (Salon's bleeding red ink, and Slate survives as a Bill Gates vanity project).

So he also calls for a mass groundswell of support for breaking up the media conglomerates, bringing back the Fairness Doctrine, and otherwise reshaping the media we've already got from "a press corps addicted to trivia and inanity" into something that actually serves the needs of an active democracy.

"I think the tools for serious change are finally within our reach," Neiwert says. Can it happen? Only if we all, those of you who read news and those of us who write it, do our part to help make it happen.

posted by clark 2:21 AM

'COMPOUND' INTEREST: The aforementioned David Neiwert claims we haven't heard much from the "patriot" militia gangs lately because they've been absorbed into the Republican establishment.

posted by clark 1:07 AM

Wednesday, June 16, 2004

ONE-STOP SCHLEPPING: Now we know what Kroger will do with its adjacent QFC supermarket and Fred Meyer variety store on Broaday. It'll move the QFC into the Broadway Market building, displacing the Fred Meyer operation and also some of the indie merchants there. The current QFC will close when the new one opens, and presumably would be available for retail redevelopment.

The losers, aside from the small businesses to be displaced, include everyone in central Seattle who buys any Freddy's merchandise. It's the only place in Capitol Hill/First Hill that sells paint, hardware, board games, VCRs, underwear, patio furniture and countless other products. No other chain that even bothers with these lines is situated anywhere near Broadway. (Walgreen's and Bartell's don't come close to matching Freddy's selection in most nondrug categories.)

If anyone wants to start a Save Freddy's campaign, they can sign me up. If anyone wants to start a new store to replace it, they can hire me to promote it. (Come back, City People's Mercantile! All is forgiven!)

posted by clark 4:41 PM

THE RIGHT-WING SLEAZE just keeps getting shriller and dumber. Now, a prowar outfit is trying to pressure movie theaters into not showing Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11.

A quick Net check shows this group is led by one Howard Kaloogian. He recently ran for a US Senate seat in California, on an anti-immigration, anti-environmental, anti-abortion, anti-gay, pro-weapons platform. He also played some part in the gubernatorial recall campaign that put Schwarzenegger in the state house down there; other recall advocates allege he siphoned contributions from the recall drive to put into his own campaign.

Another principal in the drive is a Calif. campaign operative and former Reagan advisor named Sal Russo. Kaloogian and Russo previously co-ran the successful campaign to stop CBS from airing its Reagans miniseries.

As Frederick Sweet writes, the anti-Moore drive is no grassroots support-our-troops campaign but a smear tactic from high GOP sources. "The Bush Republicans are trying very hard to stop Americans from seeing Michael Moore’s movie. They are also trying to hide the fact that their campaign is attempting to smear Moore and pressure theater owners into not running his movie. Hopefully, the Republicans’ censorship and intimidation will fail and millions of Americans will soon learn how George Bush had a business relationship with the Bin Laden family. They will learn this just before the next presidential election."

posted by clark 4:20 PM

AND A HAPPY ONE HUNDREDTH to "Bloomsday," the centennial worldwide celebration of the day on which James Joyce's Ulysses takes place. The hereby-linked Village Voice article even includes a photograph of Joyce that's not the one you always see.

posted by clark 11:04 AM

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

I KNOW I PROMISED no more dead-Gipper links, but Slumberland had one I couldn't resist: A mock campaign site for "Bush/Zombie Reagan 2004!" "Difficult times call for great leaders -- men of vision, strength and courage. Men like George W. Bush and the shambling, reanimated corpse of Ronald Reagan."

posted by clark 10:59 PM

JOY IN HOOPVILLE: The Lucking Fakers were thoroughly trounced. The mighty Detroit Pistons, a real basketball team (as opposed to an overpaid, overhyped bunch of divas) handily won the basketball championship Tuesday night.

The victory was a mighty blow for all that is right and good in America, and a slap against the NBA's powers-that-be and its "broadcast partners" (ABC, ESPN, TNT). In the post-Jordan era, the league and the networks have conspired to treat the Lucking Fakers as The Team That Deserves Everything, The Team You MUST Love. All 29 other squads received as much combined respect as the Harlem Globetrotters' sham opponents.

Back during the regular season, TNT could barely bother even covering game one of its weekly doubleheaders; instead, the channel spent two and a half hours plugging the Lucking Fakers' forthcoming appearance in game two.

In the playoffs, the national print media joined the broadcasters in predicting a Lucking Fakers walkoff. Sure, the Pistons had more teamwork, more energy, and more balance, but they didn't have more endorsement deals!

So the Pistons' victory, not just by an edge but by a trounce, proves that there's still room for sports in American sports.

posted by clark 10:15 PM

A BIG MISCmedia HOWDY and congrats to fellow Stranger refugee Charles D'Ambrosio, who appears in the current New Yorker with a short memoir about hopping freight trains. It's a fun, beautiful essay. Read it now.

posted by clark 4:59 PM

Monday, June 14, 2004

BROADWAY, BOUND?: Conflicting news reports hint at what might happen to the Broadway Market minimall, which has suffered during the recent retail slump like many other merchant sites. A P-I story claims Kroger, which owns both the relatively-small Fred Meyer drug/variety store anchoring Broadway Market and the QFC grocery across the street, may stick a Fred Meyer food department into the Broadway Market building. A Stranger news brief last week suggested Kroger would pull its existing QFC operation into the building.

Either way, some of the current mall spaces would be shuffled around or displaced altogether. I happen to think that's not necessarily catastrophic for small business on Capitol Hill. There are other vacant Broadway storefronts (including the former Orpheus Records, Godfather's Pizza, and Chang's Mongolian Grill sites) available for subdividing on behalf of indie merchants. There'd be even more such space if the Broadway/Republican QFC (one of the last former A&P buildings in Seattle still used for grocery selling) is vacated. Some smart developer could fashion one or more of those lots into a funky mercantile destination that'd be perfect for some of the smaller current Broadway Market retailers. Let's just hope such future developers do a better job of landing and nurturing tenants than was done at Pike Street's short-lived Capitol Hill Independent Mall.

posted by clark 10:16 PM

REAGAN WITHOUT TEARS, SIXTH AND FINAL PART:

• Leonard Pitts asserts that the news media "have embarrassed themselves this week. They have rewritten history and slapped on a happy face."

• William Greider, expectedly, calls Reagan "a fabulist" who "launched the great era of false triumphalism that continues to this day among American leadership."

• In These Times quotes historian Wakter Karp describing Reagan as "Like Death not knowing itself": "Yet what brutal truncation, what cutting back of the plant, produces that splendid bosom! What lopping away of knowledge, of curiosity, of truthfulness, to produce that public aura of candor and confidence. What lopping away of realism, foresight, even the very capacity to govern. Reagan is ignorant, deliberately, willfully ignorant, scarcely knows who works for him, rarely asks a penetrating question."

• Randolph T. Holhut remembers the Reagan era as "an exercise in horror and frustration, but it turned out to just a warm-up to a presidency that is even worse."

• Gary Dretzka insists that the also recently-deceased Ray Charles "probably did as much for lifting the veil of tyranny on imprisoned nations as Reagan...."

• And theater critic Frank Rich likens Bush to Reagan's "Stunt Double"—"But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from getting his own way."

In the end, the corporate media's Reagan hagiography, in which the smiling countenance was lauded and the cruel policies ignored, could be interpreted as little more than the corporate media's (and even the "alternative" media's) business as usual, in regard to dead famous people. The media tend to act as if someone's media image was someone's whole being. They don't care what you did, just "who" you superficially were. Hence, Ken Kesey was principally described in most obits as a "sixties icon," not as a novelist.

I began this thread a week ago by mentioning that I'd been reading a lot in self-help books about the importance of maintaining a positive attitude. I'll end the thread by mentioning another concept in some of these books—the duality between "doing" (masculine/yang/western) and "being" (feminine/yin/eastern).

Some of the books' authors claim modern society has overemphasized the "doing" aspect of human lives, and ignored the "being" aspect.

I'd say certain parts of modern society overemphasize a shallow slice of the "being" aspect, and always have. The current White House occupant didn't get there due to anything he did (other than schmooze big campaign contributors), but because of what he "was"—his daddy's boy. Over the centuries, too many incompetent people have attained too much power due to such trivial criteria.

In Reagan's case, he worked and clawed his way up from Illinois radio and into the easy life. This self-made status made him a good figurehead spokesman for the silver-spoon set, a more effective one than either of the George Bushes. He attained the power to do good things for many people, but instead helped create the sleaze machine that's still trashing this country and this planet.

We are all "doings" as well as "beings." And both count.

posted by clark 3:58 PM

DESPITE THE WHININGS of certain cranky old hippies, images as well as words have always been a part of human communication. You can meet hundreds of these images, from astrology, mythology, hobo culture, meteorology, the military, and more at Symbols.com.

posted by clark 9:40 AM

Sunday, June 13, 2004

THE BARE FACTS: The "World Naked Bike Ride," held Saturday in Seattle and various other burgs planet-wide, was supposed to be a political statement against foreign oil or car-culture or censorship or some combo of the above. Its local incarnation was more of a fun run.

Dozens of men, and six or seven women, pedaled their bare buns through Fremont, Westlake, Seattle Center, and downtown. At several stops along the way, cheering spectators and avid photographers expressed their vocal appreciation for those who dared to bare. (Though, unlike the body-paint bikers at the Fremont Solstice Parade, this was intended as a participatory, not a spectator, event.)

There were no arrests, and only the most formal of official disapprovals. That's good.

Now if we can only get a legal public nude beach in this town....

posted by clark 4:11 PM

CATHODE CORNER: I really, really want light entertainment programming to be a permanent part of the local Seattle TV scene, which it hasn't been for more than two years.

So I wanted KIRO's Star Search Seattle to be a smash.

Alas, it's a dud.

The original Star Search format, as you may recall from the old Ed McMahon series, would be a natural for a talent-rich town such as ours. It mixed singers, dancers, comedians, "spokesmodels," and other performance categories, in simple one-on-one competitions before celebrity judges. The recent CBS network revival featured four categories.

Instead, Star Search Seattle depicted only one performance genre—karaoke singing.

In six one-hour episodes, a total of 36 amateur and semipro vocalists belted their way through various '70s-soul moldies and office-radio-station ballads, to the accompaniment of canned backing tracks. In one nod to the original, the singers were judged two at a time. The pairings weren't the fairest—decent song-stylists often faced off against one another, and pathetic wannabes often competed against other pathetic wannabes.

To their credit, the judges (Mr. President Chris Ballew, record producer Glenn Lorbiecki, and local DJs Lisa Foster and Mitch Elliott) never insulted the contestants, but gave kind and constructive criticism. (I still don't know why Ballew and Lorbiecki each had one vote in the judging, while Foster and Elliott had to split a vote.)

Anyhoo, you've one more chance to see the show, such as it is. The big season finale will be telecast live at 8 p.m. this Friday (6/18/04), originating from the Clearwater Casino (the series' main sponsor, as noted, '50s-game-show style, by logos decorating the studio set of the preliminary episodes).

And the station's promising a second season sometime. I hope next time they'll dump the American Idol aping and embrace the something-for-everyone format of the original Star Search.

Indeed, I could envision new genre categories for a Seattle talent competition. Slam poetry, of course, but also DJ-ing (in turntable and laptop divisions), conceptual/performance art, and even musical performances that include the playing of actual instruments.

posted by clark 3:29 PM

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