A few of the thousands of marchers in downtown and Belltown on May 1, supporting immigration reform in the U.S. and opposing Arizona’s new “papers, please” state law.

(Notice: This edition talks a lot about erotic commerce and/or art. Discretionary reading is advised.)

THE LAST PEEP SHOW: For all the press and acclaim accorded to the Lusty Lady, the operation was simply a live peep show, a type of sex business devised at Manhattan’s 42nd Street fleshpots of the ’70s.
Considering how much the porn and stripper industries have changed since then, what’s amazing isn’t that the Lusty’s closing in June, but that it’s lasted this long.

Its roots are in the Amusement Center, a pinball-and-bowling arcade on the ground floor of the Showbox ballroom, first opened circa 1938. By the 1970s the coin-op arcade had gone, replaced by a new business under the same sign and name with coin-op stag film booths.

In 1981 it was revamped again, as a nominal nonprofit calling itself The Venusian Church and Temple of Aphrodite. Rumor at the time was that it had proclaimed itself to be a church in order to claim “freedom of religion” rights to conduct its business. That business still had a few movie booths, but its main attractions were naked lady dancers, performing continuously in staggered shifts all day and night. (I had a summer crush that year on one of those first live dancers.)

The Venusian Church concept generated its share of controversy, but it faded as a commercial premise. When the peep operation moved down First Avenue in the mid-’80s, it only kept the “Amusement Center” name. That was soon changed to “the Lusty Lady,” a name the owners were already using for a branch operation in San Francisco.

Along with the name came a new image. The “Lusty Lady” brand was meant to fit right in with the new Seattle’s upscale NPR-ish affectations. It advertised itself as the respectable sex business. It boasted of how its workers were well treated in clean surroundings by kind mother-hen managers. (Contrary to common belief, it wasn’t all-female owned.)

Its main promotional vehicle was its marquee sign with its cute dirty-joke slogans lit up in huge type. Roger Forbes’ old XXX movie houses in the ’70s had all-text signage, of a carny-hustle variety; but the Lusty’s ever-changing punnery was itself an entertainment, good clean dirty fun.

Business at the Lusty peaked in the late 1990s. Its landlord got a cash infusion by selling the building’s “air rights” to the Four Seasons Hotel’s developers. But the overall economy, and the peep concept’s fall from favor, meant the business’s end was nigh.

I’d like to keep the sign up (and continually refitted with new risqué verbiage). Behind it, I’d like an adult cabaret, with tables and chairs and coffee and snacks and burlesque-inspired strip acts. Speaking of which ...

THE LAST LAP DANCE: As part of a federal plea bargain with associates of strip-club vet Frank Colacurcio Sr., his company and its three remaining clubs (in Lake City, Everett, and Tacoma) will close. The Everett building will be razed. The other two, plus an already-closed club in Shoreline, become U.S. Government property, to be auctioned off. Think of this as another opportunity. Let’s get ‘em reopened under new management, bringing more class to the shows and more respect toward the performers.

JOE SARNO, R.I.P.: One of the great cult filmmakers has passed on at age 89.Decades before the Lifetime Movie Network, he had the vision to combine two female-centered genres—soap opera melodramatics and softcore sex.

The visual, narrative, and acting styles of his ’60s New York films (Moonlighting Wives, The Love Merchant, Red Roses of Passion, etc.) borrowed heavily from the era’s daytime TV soaps. Harsh lighting; long speeches; people talking to one another but looking out in the same direction.

The women and men in these films had a lot of sex, but it was obsessive-compulsive sex, which often inflamed his characters’ feelings of guilt and helplessness.

As the grindhouse film circuit turned to Eastmancolor sunniness, Sarno came to spend his summers filming in Sweden. These films (Swedish Wildcats, Butterflies, Young Playthings) had bright skies and  pouting blondes. But they still depicted dimensional people, torn between conflicting desires and obligations.

When theatrical softcore faded in the ’70s, Sarno turned to hardcore porn under pseudonyms. But hardcore’s frenetic fake “heat” and forced “happiness” wasn’t really his style.

Seattle’s Something Weird Video issued several Sarno softcores on VHS, and later DVD. Sarno became known as a cut or three above the genre’s formulaic hacks. Retro Seduction Cinema (one of Michael Raso’s New Jersey video labels) acquired other Sarno films.

In 2004 Raso brought Sarno out of retirement to make one comeback opus, Suburban Secrets. It was shot on handheld video cams, with much of the regular cast and crew from Raso’s lesbian horror spoofs. While the cast isn’t as adept at dialogue as at body bumping, Sarno’s signature touches shine through.

Where Raso’s movies usually hide behind the safe emotional costumery of “meta” parody, Suburban Secrets treats its characters, and the sex they’re having, as if they actually meant something.

A CLEAN PLACE, REASONABLY PRICED: Twenty years and one month ago, Twin Peaks debuted. It is impossible to fully state the series’ effect on me as a TV fan, a story teller/listener, and  an explorer of Northwestiana.

As for the show’s lasting effect on TV itself, that’s easier to describe.

At the dawn of the cable era, the oldline networks didn’t know whether long-form scripted programming had a future. Twin Peaks proved the format could indeed work. Even though the show itself only ran 32 hours plus a prequel movie, it showed how different recombinations of drama and humor and atmospherics and pacing and production design and editing could be seamlessly added into the medium.

Before Twin Peaks, TV drama with continuing characters (as opposed to detective/whodunit formulae) meant Dallas and its spinoffs. After Twin Peaks, it meant The Sopranos, Deadwood, Lost, Mad Men, Desperate Housewives, The Wire, etc.

FIXING THE (ONLINE) NEWS, CONT’D: As I might have promised last time, here’s some of what I would do to improve SeattlePI.com.

But first, the answer to “why bother?”

This town needs a primary news source that isn’t the increasingly Foxified Seattle Times.

The local TV newscasts and their affiliated Web sites, themselves shrinking and mayhem-centric, are no substitute. Neither is the feature-oriented KUOW.

Neither are the small, scrappy Publicola and Crosscut. Barring some new venture, that leaves PI.com.
That site’s coverage has steadily improved since its inauspicious start as a standalone entity one year ago. But it still has a ways to go.

First, the easy improvements:

The home page could become more punchy. The “above the fold” portion could take a more Huffington Post appearance, emphasizing one to four major stories.

The Local index page needs to be particularly de-cluttered. It should be the alternate point-of-entry for readers looking for a summary of what important’s gone on in town lately. That means, among other things, taking out the sports headlines (the site already has a separate Sports index page).

The sidebar box hawking “Special Reports” hypes creaky old stories from the print Post-Intelligencer. It’s particularly annoying to see the link to “JOA Update,” which concerned the deal with the Times that ultimately failed to keep the print P-I alive.

Bring on more freelance and part-time “content providers.” Unpaid bloggers are fine for what they’re able to do. But for key subject areas that can really increase a site’s page views, you need people who can afford the time for legwork.

PI.com’s biggest initial mistake was to not include local arts coverage, a proven audience builder. They’re starting to rectify this. They can do more.

Now for the hard part:
PI.com needs to convince Hearst management to let it hire more full-time staff. From all accounts it’s on track to turn a profit once the ad market rebounds, or when additional revenue streams (i.e., an iPad app) become feasible. It can become THE place to go in this region for breaking news, politics, long-form feature writing, sports commentary, and A&E tips. But for that, it needs at least twice the in-house produced content that it’s now got.