• Garance Franke-Ruta at the Atlantic wishes U.S. feminist demonstrators had more dignified, less confrontational visual icons under which they could march. Symbols like “Columbia,” the historic female representation of the nation/continent/hemisphere. Of course, there’s this little matter about how this icon is now best known as a movie-studio logo—now owned by Sony….
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 63): No. But Chris Hansen is taking names for a “priority ticket” waiting list.
• Do you wanna believe Knute Berger, who mourns the pending loss of certain local architectural landmarks to developers and their megabucks lawyers? Or David Moser at Citytank, who believes higher-density urban neighborhoods are the only way to keep lower-income folk from being shoved out to costly, car-dependent suburbs?
• Richard McIver, 1942-2013: The 12-year Seattle City Council vet, who was the lone “token black” on the district-less council, was a regular champion for civil-rights issues and for neighborhoods the city often took for granted. And he made a great foil for Grant Cogswell.
• Military officials don’t like a proposal in the state legislature to let “payday loan” companies trot out even more predatory lending products (which are often, but not solely, aimed at troops and their families).
• Yep, police still don’t want police reforms. But they insist it’s a “labor issue.”
• The Center School can again teach its “Citizenship and Social Justice” class. But the school district has imposed vague, unspecified restrictions on how it can be taught.
• Meanwhile, Ta-Nehishi Coates wants to remind you that even “good people” can turn out to be racists.
• Fret not, Tiffany Willis claims: America is irreversably “becoming more liberal.”
• Cord Jefferson at Gawker believes when journalism is only open to people who don’t need a paycheck, only people who already have money will be journalists; and, possibly, only stories of interest to people who already have money will be reported.

These Streets, the musical revue/play at ACT (running through March 10) about four women in the ’90s Seattle rock scene and two (mostly) supportive boyfriends, was constructed as a series of non-linear “moments.”

Scenes bounced between the past and present; the “past” storyline covers five years in the characters’ lives. Many of these short scenes and mini-monologues depicted single ideas or emotions.

In the show’s spirit, this piece is also a sequence of moments.

•

I mentioned in my 1995 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. Women were singers, instrumentalists, managers, promoters, venue owners, zine publishers, photographers, DJs, and record-label owners.

In keeping with the scene’s ethos, most of these women weren’t vying for fame and fortune. (The exception, Courtney Love, already had a record deal before she came here.)

But then a scene that, to many of its members, was an alternative to the major-label machine, became re-defined as fodder FOR the major-label machine.

The global music industry, at what turned out to be its peak of money and power, trawled Seattle fishing for superstars. The Gits were negotiating with a label when singer Mia Zapata was killed. Seven Year Bitch released one album on Atlantic, then broke up. But most of the scene’s women were ignored.

Over the years, “grunge nostalgia” books and documentaries (most made by out-of-towners) continued to ignore artists from the scene who hadn’t become big stars, including the women.

One of Harley and Rudinoff’s goals with the play was to remember this forgotten history.

These Streets, along with its concurrent poster-art and oral-history exhibit at the Project Room gallery on Capitol Hill, received massive coverage in local and national media.

The show includes parts of 18 vintage songs, originally recorded by 14 different female-fronted Seattle acts. Having four different characters singing the songs allowed the show’s makers to feature diverse musical material, from ballads (“power” and other) to straight-out punk blasts.

If any of those bands at the time had received a fraction of the publicity These Streets received, who knows what could have happened?

•

In keeping with the do-it-yourself spirit, These Streets was staged and produced by Gretta Harley and Sarah Rudinoff, who’d also written it (with Elizabeth Kenny).

Kenny and Rudinoff played the older versions of two of the characters. Harley sang and played guitar in the show’s tight backup band. Harley had been in the ’90s rock scene with the bands Maxi Badd, Danger Gens, and Eyefulls. She and Rudinoff currently perform as the duo We Are Golden.

ACT Theatre provided the auditorium space and various production services, under its “Central Heating Lab” program. (Carlo Scandiuzzi, ACT’s executive director, had promoted punk and new-wave gigs at the Showbox in the early 1980s.)

Harley, Rudinoff, and Kenny spent two years developing the script and score, based in part on interviews with some 40 Seattle-scene veterans. Twenty-three of these women were featured in historical graphics installed in the ACT lobby.

•

The show’s present-day storyline involves five of the six characters (yes, that’s a plot spoiler) reminiscing about their days of non-stardom, while surveying their later lives of houses, kids, divorces, and stints in rehab.

And they still have the urge to make music and art, to be on stage, to be loud and passionate in front of a crowd.

The world of their youth, the pre-dot-com Seattle of 1989-94,  has largely vanished. The city isn’t the same and neither are they.

According to Harley, the present-day scenes refer to a time when “you’re in this stage of life and you look back and take ownership of it. But then you’re also looking forward for first time in a very particular way. I hope the show helps to illuminate that ownership of this time in our lives, and also look back and say, ‘Hey kid, you had a lot of guts to get up and do that.'”

Harley says the making of These Streets was “a great experience. People who lived it seem to really love it; they feel that it’s very authentic. A couple of people said it inspired them to pick up music again.”

While no further performances have been scheduled past its three-week run, “we’re taking it one step at a time at this point.”

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

via messynesychic.com

• “Quite possibly the most important street photographer of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone.”
• Jay Jacobs, 1912-2013: Yes, there really was a Jay Jacobs behind the local teen clothing chain of the same name, which operated from 1941 to 1999. At its peak, his company had more than 300 outlets around the country, mostly in malls. But, like Lamonts and the Squire Shops and Bernie’s/Bottom’s, Jacobs’ chain couldn’t make it in the age of the Big Box store (which, in turn, is being succeeded by the age of e-tail).
• Another local institution, Mae’s Phinney Ridge Cafe, is for sale, and will close if a buyer isn’t found soon.
• A UW English prof decries grad-student applicants who can’t name-drop a single modern female author.
• Joan Walsh (correctly, I believe) blames the attempted “sick humor” at the Oscars not on host Seth McFarlane but on the Academy bosses, who apparently wanted to latch onto that Farrelley Bros./American Pie “edgy” thang.
• The William Shatner bit at that show’s top was a textbook example of “framing” a piece of sick/sexist humor (the “We Saw Your Boobs” song) via fake distanced “irony,” to make it seem like just a “parody” of sick/sexist humor.
• The “In Memoriam” Oscars segment has its own selection committee, and “is a focus of campaigning.” That’s one reason why a few famous actors get left out every year and a few obscure behind-the-scenes figures always get put in.
• Elisabeth Parker at Addicting Info wants progressives to stop using right-wing catch phrases.
• For fans of old time radio (and of latter-day revivals of same), here’s a site that appears to have .mp3s of every CBS Radio Mystery Theater episode (all 1,339 of ’em)!

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.