The schematic design for the new city hall unveiled last Thursday seemed contrived to raise absolutely no controversy (compared to Rem Koolhaas' Seattle Public Library and Frank Gehry's Experience Music Project). The schematic is conservative without looking dated, open without looking unstructured, graceful without looking fussy, and transparent without looking like a mid-century, glass-and-steel high-rise. It's also wee -- six stories tall and taking up less than half of the block -- much smaller than the buildings it's going to replace. This is City Government as symbol: small and accessible. With all the workings of bureaucracy displaced to anonymous offices in the Key Tower, our elected leadership will look unguarded, accountable, and in control. The council chambers are given their own structure, a pair of sail-like forms connected with huge glass windows -- a structure more churchlike than expressive of civic power. It's a great piece of advertising for a government that wants to see itself, in Mayor Paul Schell's words, as "transparent, accessible, and efficient." Note: Actions speak louder than architecture, now and after this new thing is built.

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This column has chortled about the overexpansion of cinema multiplexes in the past, and a recent Variety article gave more hard proof that the marketplace is going to nail careless multiplex owners who built up screens with little more than a Field of Dreams rationale. Despite the rapid expansion of screens and seats in this, the most recent golden age of Hollywood moviemaking, movie attendance actually fell by a little over one percent in 1999, according to a speech given by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) President Jack Valenti at the ShoWest convention in Las Vegas. On the other hand, total box office receipts climbed by almost nine percent, a figure explained by a 39-cent increase in the average ticket price from $4.69 to $5.08. It's good for the multiplex operators that their flashy new construction lets them charge more for tickets, but I don't think a strategy of charging less patrons more money is very compatible with a 20- or 30-screen movie mall. Eventually, you'll have to get more bums in seats -- or go under.

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Platform, the free, irregularly published local theater journal, will go the way of earlier irregularly published local arts journals like Artery, Reflex, and Aorta if it doesn't succeed in a risky venture to subscription-only distribution. Platform publishers Rain City Projects have set their goal of selling 500 paid subscriptions by March 31; if they don't, they'll fold. Want to be on board? Send a $15 check (good for four issues) and your name, address, and phone number or e-mail address to Rain City Projects at the Broadway Performance Hall, 1625 Broadway, Seattle, WA 98122.

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At this year's Whitney Biennial, dim German-born artist Hans Haacke plans to include Sensation-related art-philistine quotes by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani as part of an installation featuring trash cans and the sounds of marching boots. Haacke intends to use the German Fraktur script, beloved of the Nazis under Adolph Hitler, to display those quotes. Giuliani, quite reasonably, believes the installation is designed to compare him with Hitler -- a comparison that he calls "a grave injustice" to Jews murdered by the Nazis, as well as a "demeaning" of the Holocaust. No, no, says a shocked Haacke: "It's a total misunderstanding of my intentions." Want to understand why "political" artists are generally too stupid about politics to make good art? Want to see the Village Voice's tired Rudy-reactionism and witness a knee-jerk artist-protection mechanism at its most bald? Check out www.villagevoice.com /issues/0011/goldstein.shtml.

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