DOWN THE PIKE: I first visited the Pike Place Market in 1975. More than three years after city residents voted to "Save the Market," the big renovation/restoration was still underway. Much of the South Arcade was boarded up, with "artistic" grafitti and murals painted on the plywood barriers. One board bore the simple message: DON'T FIX IT UP TOO MUCH-SAVE THE MARKET.

The Market voters had "saved" was a homey, funky, rundown warren of stands and shops, a place of proletarian dreams and honest hard work. The fixed-up Market maintained this look, even as the surrounding First Avenue sleaze district shrank.

As the years passed, it became a mecca for civic self-congratulation. More merchants geared themselves to tourists, using such gimmicks as the infamous fish throwers. Luxury car dealerships shot magazine ads along Pike Place ("No Ordinary Supermarket, No Ordinary Car").

New York financiers, supposedly "silent" investors in the Market's real estate, suddenly claimed ownership. The city fought 'em and won. The city argued the financiers intended to "fix it up too much," destroying the Market's soul for the sake of upscale retail revenues.

Now, it seems the city bureaucrats running the Market might just be "fixing it up too much" on their own. Some of the powers-that-be want to promote the place as the ultimate high-end retail destination for the condo crowd. I say the Market's role as "the soul of Seattle" is more vital than competing against Whole Foods.

Sure, sell fancy stuff. But still sell the basics. Make the place a refuge for products downtown people need but high-end retail doesn't offer. And Keep It Funky, God.

SO CLEAN IT SEEMS DIRTY: I watched the Disney Channel production High School Musical 2, the most hyped entertainment event on cable TV since the CNN/YouTube Presidential debate. The frothy, bombastic, hyper-squeaky-clean TV movie bears only a passing resemblance to the corny but human-scale Disney sitcom movies of my youth.

This is a Bollywood movie that happened to have been made in Hollywood (actually in Utah). All your Mumbai-musical elements are there-the gleeful overacting, the sudden breaking into song-and-dance at unpredictable intervals, the almost-but-not-quite-kissing moves in the flirtation dances, the overwrought farce, the family/tribal bonding elements, and especially the X-treme "wholesomeness" turned up to fetish/kink levels.

JUST PLAIN DIRTY: A male Cinerama employee was accused in August of hiding a video camcorder in the theater's women's room.

Reports of this same crime have occurred earlier this year in other cities. At those times, bloggers/pundits (all female) asked how any guy could get off on the sight of a woman on a toilet.

I asked the same question out loud in 1999, when Penthouse, in the last years of founder Bob Guccione's direction, featured pictorials of women urinating. Such scenes never turned me on. But I tried to figure why anyone else would be.

Sometime circa 2003, I read something by former porn-biz blogger Luke Ford about a porn producer who'd reported some stolen videotape masters or something like that. After the pilf was recovered, a police detective made arrangements to personally deliver it back to the producer. During the handover, the cop said he'd always wanted to meet the porn producer. The cop said he particularly loved XXX videos for the occasional moment when a leading lady, in the peak of passion, would drop all feminine pretense and reveal pure, un-acted emotion.

That moment, I guess, is what toilet fetishists seek.

But there's no need to degrade yourself into committing criminal acts in order to play out this fetish (or any other).

In the Internet age, porno images of every kink can be attained quickly and cheaply. Many are created by professionals, with adequate lighting, featuring models who are not only aware and willing but even paid. GREAT MOMENTS IN HYPERBOLE (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 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 and 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 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.)

BETTER THAN JUST 'OK': Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat wrote in August that we can outfox the Oklahomans who bought, and now overtly want to take away, the Sonics. Westneat thinks we can freeze 'em out with "Seattle polite" and "Seattle process."

It's true that the Okie cowboy-capitalists who bought the team are firebrands, and the best way to fight fire is with water. But frozen water, perhaps not.

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 for overpriced 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, then sells at a profit to some other zillionaire.

Clay Bennett and Co. know they're unlikely to turn an operating profit on the team, wherever it is. They want pro basketball in their town to boost its nightlife and tourism industries. They'd only keep the teams here if we paid them so much 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. We gotta do what we did to Argyros and Behring-push back with legal threats and procedural stalls, until a new local ownership group can be formed.

ZINE AGAIN: Austin cartoonist Ethan Persoff is posting complete issues of The Realist, Paul Krassner's pioneering (founded 1958) magazine of committed satire and radical thought, online at www.ep.tc/realist/.

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 original context.

One 1961 issue contains the following unsigned one-liner: "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?"

WE MUST SAY GOODBYE 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 lovefests with the likes of Angie Dickinson, Telly Savalas, and Helen Gurley Brown. 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).

His private life was as kitschy as his show. After one failed marriage, he appeared in public with Eva Gabor and 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:

- 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. - He cofounded 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." Not Devo's "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.

DID ATandT 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.

But the company insists the sound-silencing was a mistake by an overzealous "content monitor" working for a subcontractor.

It couldn't have happened at a better time for critics of the company now known as AT and T. (Today's AT and T is really Southwestern Bell Corp., one of the "Baby Bell" spinoffs of the original AT and T, which acquired the name and other remnants of its former parent.)

The company's critics have chided it for cooperating with the Bushies' warrentless wiretap schemes, and for advocating so-called "throttled" broadband services (in which it would get to speed up or slow down consumers' connections to specific Web sites).

It's not as if AT and T were censoring a site it wasn't directly sponsoring. It's not as if you can't get the deleted words elsewhere. (Pearl Jam has put up the unbleeped sequence on its own site.)

And it's not as if you can't find anti-Bush messages online.

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