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this year's space needle fireworks were sponsored by t-mobile and heavily emphasized the color 't-mobile magenta.'
As promised previously, MISCmedia is back for two-ought-one-five with a new commitment to try and make sense (or at least document the nonsense) of Life in the Demitasse Size City.
To start things off, and for the 29th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most trusted (and only accurate) list of its kind in this and all other known media relay systems.
As always, this list operates under the premise that the future is not necessarily linear. It compiles what will become torrid and tepid in the coming year, not necessarily what’s torrid and tepid now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some RadioShack stock to sell you.
frederick & nelson christmas display, via 'patricksmercy' on flickr and sandra bolton on pinterest
I’ve not been in the mood to make blog posts for the longest time.
The mood I’ve been in has been something other than the positive, assertive persona I’ve maintained in the blog and its print precursors over the years.
Besides, the ultra luxury-obsessed, alpha-techie ruled city that is much of modern-day Seattle is, in many aspects, so different from the funky, spunky, and, yes, grungy city I had known and loved. To truly cover the “pulse” of such a place, one would need to care about hedge-fund-financed dotcoms and hundred-dollar-a-plate bistros a helluva lot more than I ever will.
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And then there’s the matter of trying to convince people, even long standing acquaintances, that I need a job.
NOT an idea for something to write about, but a job.
NOT an unpaid writing “opportunity” for a commercial website, but a job.
It doesn’t have to be “writing” work, just paying work.
I’ve told this to everyone, sometimes repeatedly.
But some people I’d known for years didn’t get it.
They seemed to believe that, since they had identified me as “a writer,” all I needed was to “write” all the time.
(“Don’t worry about the money,” one dude sincerely exhorted me one evening, after I’d almost lost my second apartment in one year.)
The only way I thought I could convince these folks that I needed actual monetary income, not sub-minimum-wage (or, worse, “for the exposure”) freelance crap, was by ceasing to “be a writer.”
It didn’t really work. Either at convincing these well-meaning but ignorant folk, or at getting me a real for-the-money job. (I have gotten a long-term-temp, part-time dishwashing gig, but that’s it.)
So I’m quitting the quitting.
Actually, I have been posting on so-called “social media” sites all this time. I like the knowledge that someone’s at least reading my stuff when I post it there.
But the MISCmedia site, I promise for real this time, will be back in full force in Two Ought One Five.
I’ve got a major publishing project in the works (still), and a plan to revamp the site into a daily local news “aggregation” and commentary source (still).
But we’ll start the year, as we always have, with the mellifluous MISCmedia In/Out List, always the most accurate list of its type seen anywhere at any time.
And, as always, we need YOUR input to make it happen.
In the comments box below, please recommend what will become hotter and less-hot in the twelve months to come, in the fields of music, fashion, food/drink, the arts, architecture, socio-political trends, etc. etc.
The list’s simple rules, as always:
Good luck, and good predicting.
Went to the ol’ hometown on Tuesday. Marysville had never been a particularly “fun” or “friendly” place. Even the tiny “old” downtown has essentially no “street life.”
You drive, or are driven, everywhere, across long and increasingly crowded roads between subdivisions, strip malls, churches, schools, the golf course, the casino, the surviving still-rural patches, and the relatively low-density sidewalked streets of the original central town.
Still, there is a sense of community.
And it comes together in times of crisis, of which last week’s is the biggest in years.
These ribbons are in the Marysville-Pilchuck High School colors. When the old Marysville High (in the old town) was merged with the newer Pilchuck campus (out further into the suburban sprawl), the combined institution took Marysville High’s colors (strawberry red and white) and team name (Tomahawks).
We now know a little more about the boy who committed the murder-suicide shootings at Marysville-Pilchuck High. He’d had an emotional breakup with a girlfriend (who didn’t go to MPHS); and he may have wanted to get back at the same-age relatives and friends whom, he may have decided, had helped to cause that breakup.
But it still doesn’t really make any sense.
mark mulligan, ap via seattlepi.com
I had to break my three-month unplanned blogging hiatus to write about this.
But it’s been more than three days since the event, and I still haven’t figured out what to say.
As a few of you know, I went to the old Marysville High School. After I left, it merged with the newer Pilchuck campus. The combined Marysville-Pilchuck school took Marysville High’s red-and-white colors and “Tomahawks” team name.
My younger brother attended MPHS. (The campus is just up the road a bit from the family’s old house.) He knew many of the families involved in last Friday’s horrible shooting, including the extended family that included the shooter and the shooter’s cousins (two of the victims).
Marysville was never much of a town. The half-mile square old town (grid streets, sidewalks) was just a centrifugal point for miles of suburban and exurban sprawl, and for the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
“The Rez” was where dozens of tribes (some of whom hated each other) had been forcibly relocated in the second half of the 19th century. While the Tulalips as a whole were not as impoverished as some other tribes, they still had to deal with issues of cultural identity, drug/alcohol abuse, and the rest.
I left Marysville long before the shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, was born. But Everett Herald writer Andrew Gobin did know Fryberg. Gobin can’t figure out what happened either.
But if he or I don’t have a clue, at least we’re more knowledgable than the wingnuts who are already spreading so-called “false flag” conspiracy theories and blaming, of all people, New York ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg. (The premise being that gun-control advocates would hypnotize boys into shooting people, in order to promote taking guns away from other people.)
It’s patently false and ridiculous, but it’s more of a “rational” explanation than anything you can find in the reality of the tragedy.
Yep, this li’l venture in snarky commenting and pseudo-intellectual aggrandizing has gone on now for one score years plus eight. Slightly over half my life.
The last few months, I know, I’ve been away from the site a lot.
It’s not that there hasn’t been a plethora of potential subject matter, both on the local front (the waterfront tunnel machine’s woes, the rise of jocks-with-laptops aka “brogrammers,” the ugly new buildings going up everywhere) and the national-p0p-culture front (weird crimes, dumb online “meme” obsessions, the ongoing collapse of almost all professionally-made media genres).
It’s just that the site/column’s “persona” isn’t a personality mode I’ve been into lately.
For the past two years, ever since my mother’s death, I’ve been forced to scramble and hustle just to keep a roof over my head.
Some acquaintances and friends have understood this.
Others have just told me, why don’t I just write full time? They offer “cool” book ideas, imagining that that’s a viable substitute for the real job I tell them I really need. They tell me to just “do what you love” and “don’t worry about the money.”
But I do have to worry about the money. (Despite the occasional rumors over the years, I’m not, and have never been, independently wealthy.)
And I’m working on that, on several fronts.
Among them are two new projects in the “writing” line, neither of which I’m ready to announce right now.
Watch this space for further details.
Just a heads-up here. I’ve been busy working a part-time job while looking for a full-time job, while also pursuing a book project I still can’t announce yet.
And I’ve been toying with new formats and shticks for this site.
But I’ll have new full-length and quickie material soon. Within days even.
An abscess does NOT make the heart grow fonder.
I can reasonably state that I wasn’t the only person in Seattle who wanted to personally witness 2013 go bye bye. Certainly, the bottom of the Space Needle had even more than its regular yearly throng of fireworks watchers.
Before the blast, the Needle was bathed in a very pleasant plum-esque lighting scheme.
Then, right on time, the big kaboom began.
By the end of the seven minute spectacular, the smoke had failed to disperse, leaving the whole tower looking like, as one KING-TV commentator called it, “internally illuminated cotton candy.”
Due to some wonderful donations from you loyal readers, MISCmedia.com lives for another year.
And it’s time for our annual tradition, unmissed since the pre-online days of 1986: Our annual In/Out List. As always, this list predicts what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming year, in any category you can imagine (except the really boring categories such as drugs and porn).
Get your suggestions in via our handy dandy comment thread or by email to clark (at) miscmedia dot com.
Most of you know about the horrors inflicted on May 30, 2012.
About the crazed disgruntled customer who strode into Café Racer and shot five people, four of them fatally.
Who then got on a bus to downtown, where he killed a woman to steal her car.
Who then drove to West Seattle, where he killed himself as police closed in on him.
For a lot of people around the Seattle music, art, and nightlife scenes, it was a day of shock and devastation.
For me, it was just the start of the worst two weeks of my life.
While all the mourning was going on around me, I had a little birthday, gave one of my semiannual Costco Vanishing Seattle book signings, and visited the Georgetown Carnival. Racer owner Kurt Geissel was at the latter, essentially showing concerned friends that he was surviving.
It was there that I got the cell call from my brother.
My mother had gone into the hospital, for what would be the last time.
Two buses and two hours later, I was in Everett.
She had stayed un-sedated long enough for me to arrive and pay my respects, along with seven or eight of her closest friends.
An hour after that, she agreed to take the morphine.
She passed on 54 hours later.
She had always been there for me.
Now I was truly on my own.
It was, and continues to be, a struggle.
Only now am I beginning to get something of a life back together, thanks to the help of many of the same people who kept one another together after the Racer tragedy.
'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:
slate.com
lindsay lowe, kplu
beautifullife.info
My mother did so much more than simply make me. She was my anchor, my unconditional “home base.”
Others will talk about her as a tough lady of hearty eastern Washington pioneer stock, sturdy support system to friends and strangers, a bulwark of the Snohomish antique-shop strip, and a valiant survivor of condition after condition (breast cancer, macular degeneration, chronic bronchitis, two fractured vertebrae, and finally a series of heart attacks).
But I will think of her (always) as a gentle heart within a tough-as-steel soul.
I spent much of the past weekend at Providence Everett Medical Center. My mother, who would be 82 next month, is in a medically-assisted unconscious state following a relapse from her third heart attack. Her condition is currently stable; when it changes I’ll let you all know.
