Belltown Messenger - Clark Humphrey's MISC

THIS NON-FOOLIN' APRIL MISC is being written on 3/25, during what's essentially the first springtime afternoon of the year. Ah, the smell of freshly mulched grass, the sight of Pike Place tourist hordes, the sound of road-repair jackhammers, the taste of premature California strawberries, the touch of temperate air on the skin. It's the sort of day that lets one forget the entire S.A.D. season.

WHAT I'VE BEEN UP TO LATELY: Still working with a team starting an exciting new online venture, which I hope to officially announce soon. One delaying factor: The difficulty of coming up with a good web-site name that hasn't been taken.

LOSS-O-INNOCENCE MOMENT OF THE MONTH: Heard poorly-excerpted beats from The Jam's 1980 power-pop anthem "Start" in an awful Cadillac commercial last month. It was merely weeks after viewing the DVD set The Tomorrow Show: Punk and New Wave, which contained a rousing performance of the song on Tom Snyder's late-late-night talkfest. The set also includes a 1977 interview segment with Jam frontman Paul Weller and Joan Jett, both looking achingly young and vulnerable. Of all the fates that could have befallen that fresh-faced, 19-year-old Weller, I can think of few worse than to have become a shill for SUVs.

WE'RE #7!: According to some Web site that claims to be authoritative, Seattle ranks 7 on a list of "Top US Erotica Important Cities." (That is, "erotica" as a business, not necessarily as a creative activity.) NY/LA/SF are up there, of course, as are Vegas, Miami, and Chicago (the latter in honor of what's left of Playboy's home office, much of whose operations have been shipped off to LA and NY). Our reason for getting on the list: "Adult Websites." (Maybe they didn't hear that IEG/ClubLove, the big local online-XXX operator, went pffft years ago.)

Other fun alleged-facts on the page: One out of three "visitors to adult websites" are women. Ninety percent of 8-16 year-olds have seen porn online (which means they know the banal mechanics of sex, but not the still-perplexing mysteries of love). Twelve percent of all U.S. Web sites are devoted to porn. The U.S. accounts for only 14 percent of "Worldwide Pornography Revenues," fourth in the world; China (!) and South Korea (!!) lead that category, with fetish-fanatical Japan third. Despite this, "US porn revenue exceeds the combined revenues of ABC, CBS, and NBC." (The latter stat I'm particularly not so sure of; most video and online porn companies are privately held, and reliable financial data about them are notoriously elusive and exaggerated.)

BETTY HUTTON, RIP: I'll remember the Hollywood singing star from Preston Surges's last great movie, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and also from such bold-as-brass pop singles as "Orange Colored Sky" and (the Bjork-covered) "It's Oh So Quiet." Hutton was one of the all-time great entertainers.

THOSE INSOLENT KIDS DEPT.: The P-I reported, in a front-page headline last month, that "Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades."

This trend is a good thing for the teens, and for the makers and sellers of books. But it spells disaster for the grumpy-grownup set.

Ever since I was a teenager (the term "teen" having been temporarily out of style then), pompous adults have relished every chance to stereotype their youngers as a gaggle of illiterate nothings.

I used to imagine this having been especially true in the '80s, when haughty "'60s Generation" people were crowding the grumpy-grownup demographic, but no. This habit has been going on long since, and it was going on long before (cf. Steve Allen's old snipes against that silly rock n' roll music, or the scene toward the end of Yankee Doodle Dandy where an aging George M. Cohan (James Cagney) cringes at some energetic teens singing "Jeepers Creepers").

More recently, Seattle Weekly's new management figured the way to capture a young-adult audience (which the paper's previous managements had either ignored or overtly spurned) was to fire the news department, decimate serious political coverage, and add dumb imitation-Onion faked features.

But this time the grumps can't get away with their putdowns, at least not without a bigger reality-distortion field.

We're facing what, a couple years ago, I half-facetiously named the "Long Attention Span Generation."

We're talking about teens who spent their preteen years devouring Harry Potter novels, each one 150 pages longer than the one before. Teens who've fled the instant-gratification video arcades to immerse themselves in the nonlinear, massively-multiplayer worlds of The Sims and Second Life. Teens who actually understand vast technical parts of the computers, cell phones, and online networks they use.

So, yeah, long-form narrative is quite a familiar concept for 'em. So is the activity of reading itself. (The non-porn parts of the ol' WWW are all about words; so is text messaging.)

What this might mean in the future: Yes, I can imagine whole chat rooms devoted to Proust and Pynchon. I can foresee neo-Shakespeare fashions in London's boppingest nightclubs (complete with codpieces, of course).

But, sorry to say, I suspect there will always be stoner boys whose idea of great writing begins and ends with Hunter Thompson.

YOUR HELP NEEDED: We're now working on a photo history of Belltown. We could use all your images and stories. Send whatever you've got to vanish@miscmedia.com.

(Get a copy of Clark's Vanishing Seattle today at a store near you or at miscmedia.com.)