haley young, via seattlemag.com

You really ought to see These Streets, the new play at ACT about five women in the ’90s local rock scene.

Its writers (Gretta Harley, Sarah Rudinoff, Elizabeth Kenny; pictured above) were there. They know of what they speak.

I mentioned in my book Loser how the national media’s false “grunge” stereotype included “no women in sight, not even as video models.”

But in the real Seattle scene, women were involved in leading roles from the start, on stage (Kim Warnick, Sue Ann Harkey, Barbara Ireland) and off (managers, venue owners, photographers, zine publishers, etc.).

Now, the truth may at last become better known.

webclipart.about.com

As the many unattached among us face with dread the day devoted, by Hallmark and other marketers, toward luvvey-duvvey cutesy-poo, comes a new study on “the old man-woman thing.”

Authors Bobbi J. Carothers and Harry T. Reis claim, among other things, that:

• Instead of a clear demarcation of “female” and “male” behaviors and thoughts, there’s more of a continuum among individuals.
• Gender itself is less a factor in psychological differences among people than race, nationality, subculture, etc.

Imagine the possible implications!

• Those men and women who classify the entire opposite sex as the Evil Other-with-a-capital-O are just wrong!
• Attempts to “pink-ify” consumer products, in order to market them as “For Women,” are really just as stupid as they already seem.
• Dating and “speed seduction” courses intended to reveal the mysteries of the opposite-sex brain are big wastes of money. (Which some of you already know.)
• There’s even less of an excuse for movie studios not to create more “active” roles for female characters, or for the rest of corporate America to pay women less.
• And instead of fighting and manipulating and jostling for power as “man” and “woman,” we’re really fighting and manipulating and jostling for power as “people.”

ap via nwcn.com

• Just like at the Ballard Locks, Oregon’s Willamette Falls is plagued by salmon-hungry sea lions. Local officials’ answer? “A boat crew armed with seal bombs and shotguns loaded with firecrackers.”
• A Seattle Times headline labels “art” as a waste of state taxpayer money, right up there with legislators’ dry-cleaning bills. This is not the sort of objective reporting of which the Times claims to be a last bastion.
• You want real spending waste, in a project about, well, waste? Then look no further than Seattle Public Utilities’ new south end transfer station, still not ready months after its ribbon cutting.
• Another stupid shooting in another local nightspot. How utterly gross. (Here’s news of the benefit for the bar bouncer’s recovery.)
• I seem to have found out about this story in progress, but the UW’s Women’s Action Commission has created its own theater piece in the tradition of The Vagina Monologues. Only this all-new work is called The ___ Monologues. The title is apparently an attempt to make the work “more trans-friendly.”
• The Yankees don’t like A-Rod anymore.
• Marijuana industry trade associations are now a thing.
• The Wall St. Journal says Microsoft wouldn’t have to take a majority stake in Dell in order to have  a pivotal degree of influence in the beleagured PC maker.
• The newest version of MS Office comes in a “cloud based” subscription version, which seems to essentially require you to have a never-interrupted Net connection (and, of course, to keep paying).
• Boeing’s global-outsourcing craze is now, more or less officially, a “disaster.”
• We must say goodbye to Regretsy, the site that pokes gentle fun at kooky craft products. Its operator April Winchell (yes, Dick Dastardly’s daughter) said the site’s concept had run its course (“now we’re just Bedazzling a dead horse”).
• Last week, Twitter launched a new streaming-video site called Vine. The premise is people posting six-second, repeating GIF videos. Yes, it’s already been used for porn, and for people taping themselves taking bong hits.
• Barnes & Noble plans to close perhaps 20 percent of its stores over the next decade. So much for the guys who were supposed to be taking over the industry and driving all the indie quirkiness out of the book biz.
• Someone’s written a long, detailed critique of the cinematography in Les Miserables—in the character of the Incredible Hulk.
• “Rei” at Daily Kos wants you to reconsider the Fox News story from last week about Iceland’s official baby-names list.
• Speaking of which, while my masses-bashing “radical” leftist friends like to imagine Fox News as “the most popular TV channel,” its ratings among adults under 55 are the lowest they’ve been in more than a decade.
• Jeb Boniakowski at The Awl would like a mega-McDonald’s in NYC’s Times Square, that would serve everything the chain serves everywhere else but not in this country.
• Public radio’s idea of “humor,” at once bland and cloying, reaches a new nadir in a Chicago station’s make-believe plea for its listeners to breed more public-radio-listening babies.
• Headline: “Ex-NFL player charged with beating boyfriend.” Comment: Yes, this is still what it takes to acknowledge the existence of gay athletes.
• Jim Nabors had been rumored to be gay ever since his days of sitcom stardom. Now he’s finally publicly proclaimed it, by getting married in Seattle.
• The NY Times has discovered something that’s been going on around here for some time—the “permanent temp” economy.
• One of the last of its kind in the region, the Valley 6 Drive-In Theater in Auburn, will not reopen after its most recent seasonal shutdown. Even sadder, its longtime manager Kieth Kiehl passed on shortly after the decision to close was made. Both will be missed.

beth dorenkamp via grindhouse theater tacoma

igor keller at hideousbelltown.blogspot.com

• The Sixth Avenue Motor Inn and the King Cat (née King) Theater are coming down, in preparation for the three Amazon high rises (each of which will be as tall as the ex-Seafirst tower).
• I’d rather be on a non smoking flight, thank you. (But in all seriousness, would the pre-McDonnell-Douglas Boeing have let planes go into service with untested battery technologies?)
• The Queen Anne branch of Easy Street Records is still closing on Friday. But in happier news, Queen Anne Books is reopening under new management.
• Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely quits just as new, perhaps more competent, owners take over.
• An Everett woman “is accused of smothering her boyfriend by lying on his face.” With her chest.
• One reason to get an iPhone instead of something else: Facebook’s free-voice-calls app.
• Nagisa Oshima, R.I.P.: Japan’s government should honor the filmmaker’s memory by finally allowing his masterwork, In the Realm of the Senses, to be screened uncut in his country.
• Abigail Van Buren, R.I.P.: Pauline Phillips, one of the advice-column twins (Eppie Lederer, a.ka. “Ann Landers,” was her sister), carved out a niche in daily newspapers back when such institutions still had many such niches to be filled. Her common-sense, yet witty, responses to readers’ personal issues kept readers enthralled, and subscribed, for more than three decades. Speaking of deceased twins…
• Conrad Bain, R.I.P.: My favorite of his performances was when Maude ran a “twins” episode, a common sitcom shtick. In the big closing reveal, both characters walked out, in front of the studio audience in an obviously unfaked shot. Turned out Bain really had a twin, Bonar Bain, who still lives. (Bonar later appeared as himself, albeit renamed “Fred Bain,” on SCTV.)
• No, Washington Post: People’s Twitter pictures are not free for the (unpaid) republishing.
• Markos Moulitsas claims today’s Democrats, popularity-wise, “may now be on the right side of every single relevant issue.”
• Punch, the late beloved UK humor mag, knew the addictive power of mobile electronic-media devices before they even existed:

via kip w on flickr

• First the B&O Espresso shutters. Now, another outfit you’d think would thrive with legal gay marriages instead goes away. It’s Brocklind’s Formal Wear and Costume Supply. It’s closing up shop after 106 years (the last 20 or so years residing on E. Pike).
• In related news, gay mag The Advocate claims Tacoma is “America’s Gayest City.” I can actually imagine this being true. Lots of military and truck drivers, and a “tuff’ civic culture that extends to women as well as men.
• The faculty at Garfield High has chosen, collectively, not to administer the “Measure of Academic Progress” (MAP), the Seattle School District’s standardized tests in reading and math, to ninth-grade students this month. The teachers’ statement claims the test “wastes time, money, and precious school resources… It produces specious results, and wreaks havoc on limited school resources during the weeks and weeks the test is administered.”
• Nate Silver, who wowed ’em by accurately predicting November’s election results, now says the Seahawks will meet the Patriots in the Super Bowl (but lose).
• State Sen. Rodney Tom, the pseudo-Democrat who wants to turn control of the Legislature to Republicans, got a stinging rebuke by his own party in his own district.
• Pundit Tom Esdall believes an “Obama coalition” of women, minorities, working-class folk, and “99 percenters” stands a chance of really challenging “corporate America’s” control of the federal political process.
• Young-adult evangelicals these days love Jesus but don’t love gay-and-woman-bashing.
• There’s a new industry that actually pays people to write online! Unfortunately, they’re being paid to be right-wing “comment trolls” on opinion blogs.
• Print book sales may be down, but no further down than last year. (And they’re still holding their own better than CDs and DVDs.)
• I usually like to watch the Australian Open, even though I’m not a hardcore tennis fan, just to be reassured that, somewhere in the world, it’s warm now. But this year, it’s too warm there. By a lot.

via jim linderman on tumblr

• Dear Bellevue Police: People have sex. Sometimes the people who have sex are co-workers. Deal with it.
• You missed the suddenly announced closing night at Cafe Venus and the Mars Bar. It’s been around at least 16 years (the space, in a lovely old Eastlake Ave. apartment building, was the Storeroom Tavern previously). It hosted countless bands. It was cooler than all get out. Its status has been in doubt, like the statuses of so many cool spaces, for several years now.
• C.B. Hall at Crosscut reminds us that real “bus rapid transit” isn’t like Metro’s “RapidRide.” The real thing has its own lanes, for one thing.
• The Seattle Times couldn’t possibly be buying Seattle Weekly. That makes about as much sense as HP buying Compaq (oh wait, that actually happened).
• Shelby Scates, 1932-2013: It’s not just that we’re losing some of the great local journalists of our time, but that there’s no means to develop worthy successors.
• A 2007 anti-Iraq-war protest at the Port of Tacoma led to six arrests. Now the case is finally going to court.
• As the Legislative session nears, Brendan Williams at Publicola pleads for state Democrats to stop talking like diluted Republicans.
• We’re Number Five! (In terms of lousy traffic.)
• How did Vancouver’s economy do during the soon-to-end Hockey Lockout II? Not that badly.
• Newsweek refugee Andrew Sullivan’s new site won’t have ads. P-I refugee Monika Guzman agrees with the strategy. Guzman claims online ads earn too little money these days, and many sites that try too hard to attract ad revenue turn into useless “click whores.” But the problem then becomes attracting enough readers who like you enough to support your site by other means (pledge drives, merch/book sales, etc.).
• Hamilton Nolan at Gawker insists that real journalism means writing about someone(s) other than your own narcissistic self.
• “Intercity bus and rail ridership up, as car and air travel remain flat.”
• Folks luuuvvv those big online college courses. As long as they don’t have to pay for ’em.
• Frank Schaeffer isn’t the first pundit to note the geographical coincidence between today’s “red states” and yesteryear’s “slave states.” Nor will be be the last.
• In Iceland, like in France at one time, kids can only be named from names on an approved list. One 15-year-old girl is trying to fight that.
• The college football post-season was mostly a dud. But here’s one “highlight.” It’s the weird one-point safety Kansas State committed after blocking an Oregon point-after-touchdown.

via nutshell movies

For the 27th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most venerable and only accurate list of its kind in the known English-speaking world.

As always, this is a prediction of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming year, not necessarily what’s hot and not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some Hostess Brands stock to sell you.

…back in 1973.

(It’s a sequel to The 2,000 Year Old Man, one of the great comedy LPs of all time.)

'he-man and she-ra: a christmas special,' part of the festivities at siff film center on xmas eve

And a dreadful sorry for not posting in the last 12 days.

What I’ve been up to: Not much. Just wallowing in the ol’ clinical depression again over my first mom-less Xmas, trying to figure out how the heck I’m gonna pay January’s rent.

(For those of you who came in late, I’m not independently wealthy despite the old rumors; a few little local photo books don’t earn anything near a decent living; and my eternal search for a little ol’ paying day job has gone nowhere slowly.)

But I have vowed to stay at it. And there will be new MISCmedia products in the new year.

And, as always, it’s the time of year for MISCmedia’s annual In/Out List, the only accurate guide to what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming 12 months. Send in your suggestions now.

On with the accumulated random links:

• To be a fan of a Seattle team is often like being a Who (Horton Hears a Who! version), constantly needing to scream “We Are Here! We Are Here!” to the NYC/Bristol CT sports media. Finally, they’ve heard about the Seahawks, who just might be “the NFL’s best team” right now.
• Get ready for big labor strife at the Northwest’s grain export terminals.
• Gray’s Anatomy costar Patrick Dempsey says he wants to buy the remaining Tully’s Coffee stores, and says he may make Seattle his “home away from home.” What, someone associated with Gray’s Anatomy actually plans to be in Seattle? How will that affect the Gray’s drinking game, where you take a swig whenever someone says something hopelessly inaccurate about this town?
• Today’s example of trying to make the homeless “invisible” is brought to you by the City of Olympia.
• Are Safeway stores deliberately overcharging? And is Staples.com charging different people different prices for the same stuff based on where they live?
• One pundit’s predictions for the e-book biz in ’13: Free e-book reader machines.
• Al Sharpton looks back at 2012 as “the year the rich couldn’t buy.”
• The Paris Review reviews porn novels. Yes, really. Specifically, contributor Avi Steinberg discusses five recent porn novels with librarian characters, and wishes (among other things) that they had more sex scenes that actually took place in libraries.
• It’s been a week of losses for fans of fun TV and movies, with the departures of Jack Klugman and Charles Durning. Now we must also add Gerry Anderson, creator-producer (with then-wife Sylvia) of Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds, Captain Scarlet, UFO, and Space 1999. His “Supermarionation” shows were nothing less than “F.A.B.”

nanowrimo.org

I participated in National Novel Writing Month again this year. Came out of it with most of the first draft of something I’m tentatively calling Horizontal Hold: A Novel About Love & Television. More details as I come closer to making it presentable.

• There’s one of them online petition thangs out to try to persuade the CBS Radio Stations Group to keep KPTK-AM and its “Progressive Talk” format on the air.
• Bruce Pavitt’s put out an Apple “iBook” about the Nirvana/Mudhoney/TAD tour of Europe in 1989. And he’s talking about how he sold Sub Pop as a brand signifying coolness to two continents.
• The Seattle branch of Gilda’s Club is keeping its name. This is news because other outlets of the drop-in cancer support organization aren’t keeping the name. One reason: some young adults these days don’t remember who Gilda Radner was. That’s almost as sad as cancer itself.
• Daily Kos contributor “MinistryOfTruth” has some advice for Republicans trying to rebuild their party: “Don’t have a base of idiots.”
• Steve Fraser at TruthOut, meanwhile, wishes to remind you that the so-called “fiscal cliff” is, like so much else, a political invention.
• The business-press buzzword of the month: “Insourcing.” GE’s restarting work in some previously abandoned appliance factory buildings; and Apple’s assembling some iMacs in the U.S. with plans to expand. Just don’t expect this to be the one answer to the unemployment crisis. Factory work these days is so automated, and CAD/CAM design work can make it so efficient, that there’s not that much labor in the cost of a lot of stuff, no matter where it’s made.
• Finally, let’s all reflect (and refract) in the glory that was gay marriage license midnight madness at the Console Color TV Building (King County Admin) downtown, Wednesday night/Thursday morning. Actual gay weddings start Sunday.

kirotv.com

priscilla long, via the american scholar

• Priscilla Long takes you on a geological tour of North America without leaving downtown Seattle, simply by exploring the marble and other stone claddings on our office buildings.
• John Koster, a Republican candidate for the U.S. House in Washington’s revamped First District, says he’d oppose abortions even in cases of “the rape thing.”
• An out-of-state right-wing “SuperPAC” is sinking millions into sleazy attack ads on behalf of Reagan Dunn’s campaign for state attorney general. The Politico site seems to approve.
• When I first heard about this issue, I said I understood. I told the guy I preferred Thelonius Monk myself. Then he told me he was really criticizing a “coal train.”
• When is a nude woman in public not cool? When she punches and strikes a chair at a (clothed) elderly woman in the same apartment building.
• Thankfully, Puyallup’s organized diaper theft ring has been caught.
• As the World’s Fair anniversary winds to a close, Jon Talton wonders whether Seattle can hold its own economically in a 2062 world that could be dominated by global “alpha cities.”
• A self-proclaimed conservative Christian from Tacoma pretended to be gay for a year. Insights on humanity and understanding ensued.
• Did all those hours upon hours of “parka boy” standups by cable TV news reporters help anyone understand Hurricane Sandy’s impact? Probably not.
• David Letterman and Jimmy Fallon’s Monday night shows, performed without studio audiences, may be the greatest non-election, non-hurricane TV events of the year.
• Yes, the polling companies are still under-sampling people who only have cell phones, not landlines. The probable result: a supposedly “close race” that may really be more Obama-leaning than it appears.
• Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson reminds you that Mitt Romney really is as awful and amoral as they say he is; while HuffPost’s Michelangelo Signorile’s dug up some video of Romney spewing the most hateful anti-gay bigotry. And Christina D’Angelo claims the GOP’s devolution into a home for virulent racists is like “lynching Lincoln.”
• New Yorker book critic Arthur Krystal attempts to claim the superiority of “literary fiction” above so-called “genre fiction.” As if highbrow weren’t really just another genre.
• Chris Wade at Slate wants you to learn to appreciate the Speed Racer movie.
• Disney, having already digested ABC, ESPN, Pixar, Marvel, and the Muppets, is now taking over LucasFilm and the Star Wars properties. Immediately, a new Star Wars feature film is being planned. What I want to see is a mashup concept involving all these “universes.” Bonus points if you write this as a story for a Lifetime TV movie (half-owned by Disney).

aaron tung, via digitalbookworld.com

There are many differences between the book world and the music world.

For one thing, music-world people have long held a healthy disrespect for the weasels, hucksters, and corporate wolves running their industry.

Book-world people, in contrast, are often willfully supplicant toward their industry, its masters, and its most crippling business-as-usual tactics.

Until, perhaps, now.

Germany’s Bertelsmann and Britain’s Pearson Group announced they’re merging their respective English-language book publishing units, Random House and Penguin. Those firms, two of the Big Six in the U.S. book biz, have each absorbed other imprints over the years—Viking, Putnam, Bantam, Doubleday, Knopf, Pantheon, and many others.

Bertelsmann will control the merged entity, once the Feds approve (perhaps one year from now).

The official excuse, this time, is that big publishers need to become even bigger so they can “stand up to Amazon.”

But we know the real reason. Monopolistic greed and dreams of global conquest, as always.

Now, the publishing biz is too consolidated for its own good already. It has been since at least the mid-1990s.

But “people of the book” (authors, reviewers, editors, etc.) said or did little to challenge the takeovers.

They’d often complain about book selling falling into fewer hands, especially in the heyday of the Borders/Barnes & Noble duopoly. But these folks didn’t complain as much about publishers becoming ever fewer and ever bigger.

Book fans cold have used some of the music fans’ cynicism about the companies who claim to have their interests at heart.

And now, they might finally be developing some of that wise-assery.

Publishers don’t, and never really have, acted in the best interests of either authors or readers. They, like other businesses, are in it for themselves.

And in this case, their actions may lead (as an LA Times business writer puts it) to “higher prices and less diversity of book titles.”

Yet that piece, and other commentaries summarized by UK trade blog TheBookseller, repeat the seldom questioned presumption of a “diminished interest in books.”

Even though total print and e-book sales are rising, even soaring in some categories.

And even though print book sales have held their own in this economy, better than a lot of other media sectors.

Instead of ever mega-er mega publishers saving the book biz, perhaps the biz is renewing itself in spite of them.

• Of all the “Google doodles” over the years, this may be the search giant’s most beautiful. It’s an animated tribute to Winsor McCay’s classic comic Little Nemo in Slumberland.
• We must say goodbye, after eight fun-filled years, to the group blog PCL LinkDump (née Pop Culture Links). Its curators brought in fab music clips, kitschy old ads and book covers, nostalgic photos, film clips, comic book panels, and other doses of delight culled from around the world.
• The UW Daily explores the still new-n’-obscure genre of “Alt Lit,” fueled by young authors, small-press publishers, and online distro.
• Would you like some lead in that cheap imported Halloween costume? No? How about some dorky racial-stereotype imagery, then?
• British Columbia’s provincial government ran ads for its employment service. The ads depicted their young-adult target audience as layabouts, girls on the prowl for rich husbands, and, worst of all, as “hipsters.”
• The utterly misnamed American “Family” Association is soft on school bullies, just as you’d expect.
• Wal-Mart workers’ putting pressure on management just might be starting to work.
• Economic historian Chrystina Freeland sees parallels between today’s One Percenters and the rich n’ powerful of ancient Venice. They, too, pursued an insular agenda of more for themselves and the rest be damned. It was a long-term disaster.
• Meanwhile, the Koch Bros. (whom, by the way, you never hear about on Fox or right-wing radio, just as you never hear there about how the conservative movement really works) seem to believe themselves to be above the petty laws of puny humans.
• Perhaps it’s not quite in time to save the timber biz from the construction and newspaper industry crashes, but a guy in Israel has invented a cardboard bicycle.
• Some of the last images shot on Kodachrome film are still emerging into public view. Among them, Lise Sarfati’s images of would-be and former would-be actresses in L.A., now taking whatever work is to be had.

via dailymail.co.uk

chris lehman, npr via kplu

• In my onetime stompin’ grounds of Corvallis OR, an Asian American businessman sponsored a downtown mural depicting tranquil nature scenes in Taiwan contrasted with police brutalizing protesters in Tibet. China’s government would like the mural gone.
• On the 20th anniversary of the film Singles, Spin imagines the film with a modern-day soundtrack (available as a Spotify playlist). No current Seattle acts are on it (though ex-local Mark Lanegan is).
• Most of the hereby-linked article is behind a paywall, but the gist is this: ESPN blogger Craig Custance believes Seattle’s got a great shot at a National Hockey League team, but as an expansion rather than a moved franchise. Custance agrees with similar remarks earlier this year by CBC hockey commentator Elliotte Friedman. (Nobody might have NHL hockey for perhaps a whole year, if the league continues to lock out its players.)
• My ol’ pal James Winchell has a neat piece in the Jewish mag Tablet (no relation to the defunct local hipster rag of the same name), philosophizing on the Hebrew roots and symbolism in the works of Franz Kafka.
• How artificial intelligence is turning out: expect more stuff like Siri, but no human-esque robots any time soon.
• As big chain retailers abandon more and more sites around the country, some of those sites are being taken over by big chain restaurants.
• Danny Westneat asks if Romney’s so down on those who don’t pay taxes, when’s he gonna go after the likes of Boeing? (Or, for that matter, Microsoft?)
• Poll-analyst extraordinaire Nate Silver sees Obama doing better in polls that include real-live pollsters (instead of robocalls) and that include cell-phone-only households.
• Today’s scathinger-than-scathing Romney rants come to you courtesy of Nicholas Kristof and Lawrence O’Donnell…
• …while Jon Stewart tears yet another righteous hole in the blatantly hypocritical Faux News partisans.
• As for me, for now, I’ll just say Romney’s appearance on Univision should have been accompanied by one of that channel’s biggest personalities. I speak, of course, of “El Chacal de la Trompeta,” the masked trumpeter from the Gong Show-like talent segment of Sabado Gigante.

watch el chacal de la trompeta, via youtube

In a publication entitled City Living, you might expect words by and for people who love this city.

But there are also Seattle haters out there.

I know. I’ve seen them.

All the time I’ve been in Seattle (don’t ask), I’ve known two predominant kinds of Seattle haters:

1) White baby-boomers who rant that the city is too big, too loud, too tense, and too full of suspected “gang bangers” (i.e., nonwhite males younger than 40). These folk dream of having a McMansion-sized “cabin” on the Bainbridge shoreline, but would settle for a Skagit County farmhouse.

2) Men and women of prominent ego (of many races, though still usually white) who decree that this hick town doesn’t deserve their obvious greatness.

These denouncers almost always also rant that Seattle fails to sufficiently imitate New York, Los Angeles, and (especially) San Francisco, in criteria ranging from architecture to food.

These folk generally refuse the idea that people in cities other than NY/LA/SF can choose to run a city any differently. All which is not NY/LA/SF, by these folks’ definition, is automatically inferior.

Sometimes, these folk will expect me to casually agree with their putdowns. They’ll ask me what part of the East Coast I’m from. Then, before I can answer, they’ll tell me I obviously agree that this is just a cowtown full of hicks and don’t I want to get my butt back to the civilized world?

I tend to respond that the only thing “eastern” I’m from is the eastern shore of Puget Sound; that Seattle is a fascinating place brimming with ideas and personalities; and that we can do things our own way.

If these folk are still listening, they usually tell me that I’m obviously just kidding. (Which I’m not.)

This is the combination of hubris and willful ignorance depicted in Where’d You Go, Bernadette?, the highly publicized new novel by local transplant (and former Hollywood sitcom writer) Maria Semple.

The title character is a tried and true Seattle hater. She’s also a former elite Los Angeles architect, with a Microsoftie hubby and an above-average teenage daughter (and an outsourced “virtual assistant” in India). She lives a life of wealth and privilege; the daughter goes to an elite private school. The family’s even planning a vacation getaway to Antarctica.

But even with everything money can by, Bernadette’s not happy. And, like many unhappy people, she blames her unhappiness on the world around her.

When Bernadette disappears, as the novel’s title implies, the daughter tries to figure out what happened by reading the mom’s old diaries, letters, and emails.

It’s in these documents that Bernadette says what she might have been too polite to say in public. Particularly among Seattle’s well documented cult of niceness.

Among her complaints: Too many Craftsman bulgalows. Too many Canadians. Too many slow drivers. Too many wild blackberry bushes. Too many neurotic moms. Too many self-congratulatory “progressives.” And way too much politeness.

Or for the short version, this is a city unfit for the presence of someone as obviously superior as Bernadette.

But, to Semple, this attitude is merely a symptom of a larger disorder. It’s a stage in the character becoming estranged from the world in general, then dropping out of sight from even her family.

But in a missive revealed at the novel’s end, she announces a change of heart. Bernadette really loves Seattle after all. She loves the gray-wash winter skies, which “felt like God had lowered a silk parachute over us.”

Semple herself, according to interviews, had also been a Seattle hater. But, like Bernadette, she’s since changed her mind.

Semple says she wouldn’t write Bernadette’s vitriolic Seattle putdowns these days. Semple now loves the place.

Or at least that’s what she says in public.

You know, to be polite.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)