619 western's exterior during the 'artgasm' festival, 2002

• We begin with the end of a 27-year tradition. The 619 Western Building artists will hold their actual, for-real-this-time, final First Thursday art show tonight. Like the previous one, it will actually occur in the south parking lot outside the building.
• The feds want to protect Bellevue-based T-Mobile USA from AT&T’s planned takeover.
• Port Townsend town leaders are getting a federal grant to start a privately run, tourist-oriented passenger ferry from Seattle. Rides are expected to go at $20-$25 a ticket.
• Tacoma doesn’t want any more big box chain stores for the time being.
• Employment in Puget Sound country? Rising up to mediocre. In the rest of the state? Still putrid.
• Those “tea party” scream-bots love to interrupt Democratic politicians’ town halls. But when they’re elected, they don’t like to hold any fully public meetings of their own.
• That “Latino gang problem” in south King County, mentioned in yesterday’s Random Links? Keegan Hamilton at Seattle Weekly says it’s way overblown.
• Howard Schultz’s crusade to get CEOs to stop giving to politicians seems to be working. If, by working, you mean cutting off money to Democrats, while the super-PACs giving to Republicans get ever super-er.
• The HP tablet device became so popular at really cheap close-out prices, that HP’s getting more made—to be sold at the same near-total-loss price. This is politely known as dot-com economics at work.
• Just when we got excited that JC Penney was coming back to downtown Seattle, the company has to pull one of the ultimate all-time product FAILs. Yep, we’re talking about the girls’ shirt bearing the slogan “I’m too pretty to do homework, so my brother has do it for me.”
• Glenn Greenwald describes the “war on terror” as “the decade’s biggest scam.” Considering all the other scams competing for that title, that’s saying something.
• What sounds weirder—Al Jazeera’s claim that Dennis Kucinich tried to help Gaddafi stay in power, or the associated claim that Kucinich’s partner in the scheme was a top ex-Bush aide?
• We end with the end of a 42-year tradition. All My Children taped its last network episode Wednesday.

In CityArts, Vito’s and Hideout bar and Vital 5 Productions mogul Greg Lundgren says he wants to create “Walden Three,” a “stadium of the arts” in a “vacant building directly across from the Seattle Art Museum.”

He means the old Seven Seas Hotel building (where the Lusty Lady had been).

While that building’s facade should be kept (even if it doesn’t qualify for landmark status), the now totally unoccupied building (which straddles the steep hillside between First Avenue and Post Alley) could indeed hold the 25,000 square feet of space Lundgren envisions as…

A place where artists and thinkers can train, compete, experiment and perform. A beehive that can electrify our creative class and inspire its audience. An urban station that can constantly produce creative content.

It’s good, nay vital, to have art-making spaces. We need to keep replenishing and replacing the ones we lose (cf. 619 Western).

But Lundgren wants more than studio spaces and a contemporary-arts gallery in a high profile storefront location.

He wants cross-genre programming, and workshops, and performances, and multimedia events, and ongoing efforts to promote and publicize creative work.

And he wants to make a documentary film about it all. A big documentary film. One that would cover 10 years of the space’s development and operations.

Indeed, one of Lundgren’s plans is to budget the entire project, from the building remodel/restoration to the exhibits and workshops, as a film shoot, with the Seven Seas building as its “set.”

But if anybody in the local arts scene can put this ambitions scheme together, he can.

from buzzfeed.tumblr.com

• Spencer Kornhaber at the Atlantic offers a 20th anniversary tribute to Nickelodeon’s original “Nicktoons” cartoon shows (Doug, Rugrats, and Ren & Stimpy). In a break from most commentary about these shows, Kornhaber lavishes attention on the legacy of Doug and gives R&S only a brief aside.
• Fired KUOW weather commentator Cliff Mass has resurfaced with a new gig at KPLU. It’s good to have competition, even among local public radio stations.
• No, the county won’t move its juvenile court and jail into the landmark Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon’s head offices had been). The building and its site just aren’t well configured for such use.
• To go with the planned light rail station for the area, the city’s thinking of rezoning the Roosevelt business district for dense condo and mixed use buildings, up to 85 feet tall. Some folk in the neighborhood aren’t sure this is such a splendid idea. I’m willing to entertain the scheme, as long as the original QFC store (marked for death by the rezoning scheme) remains as a protected landmark.
• Our climate is actually pretty good for solar power, it turns out. It’s just that hydro power is so cheap, solar can’t really compete without incentives.
• Local painter Scott Alberts says all artists need to do to cease “starving” so much is to have a product to sell and someone to potentially sell it to. (Of course, some artists’ most passionately inspired works don’t have mass market appeal.)
• I’ve reached a point of acceptance on a topic that used to enrage me. I have now come to terms with the fact that we will never be rid of the sixties nostalgia industry.
• Richard Charnin claims he can statistically prove the Wisconsin recall elections were stolen.
• Matt Stoller has a new thing for everybody to worry about. Global industrial consolidation means more and more vital things are made in fewer and fewer places, things ranging from broadcast-production quality videotape to flu vaccines. And when the places that make them get disrupted (such as by the Japan tsunami), you get instant worldwide shortages.
• Paul Krugman claims he’s got a surefire, if partial, solution to both the sluggish economy and the federal debt:

…It would involve more, not less, government spending… rebuilding our schools, our roads, our water systems and more. It would involve aggressive moves to reduce household debt via mortgage forgiveness and refinancing. And it would involve an all-out effort by the Federal Reserve to get the economy moving, with the deliberate goal of generating higher inflation to help alleviate debt problems.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

You still have a chance to view the five “MadHomes” along Bellevue Avenue E. They’re open to the public until this Sunday, Aug. 7, noon to 7 p.m. each day.

These house-sized art installations are the brainchild of Alison Milliman. Her organization, MadArt, is dedicated (according to its web site, madartseattle.com) “to bring art into our lives in unexpected ways, and to create community involvement in the arts.”

MadArt curated last year’s sculpture show in Cal Anderson Park and a store-window art display in Madison Park.

But MadHomes vastly outscales either of those projects.

The show’s contributing artists have taken the outsides of the four houses and the insides of three of them (one was still occupied as a residence), plus their front yards and side setbacks, as a three-dimensional canvas, as a setting for “site specific” and interactive works meant to last only three weeks.

And because the houses are going away (to be replaced by a long-delayed condo project). the artists didn’t have to leave the structures the same way they found them.

This meant Allan Packer, one of the show’s artists, could cut holes in floors, walls, and ceilings, from which his cut-out animal figures emerge to greet visitors (as aided by large mechanical devices mainly hidden in the basement).

It also meant Meg Hartwig could freely nail big wood scraps to both a house and to a tree in front of it (which will also be lost to the condo project).

You’ll also see a lot of work that plays in less “invasive” ways with its setting.

These include the SuttonBeresCuller trio’s “Ties That Bind,” comprising 12,000 feet of red straps winding back and forth through one house and along a setback to a second house, creating a labyrinth through the side yard.

They also include Troy Gua’s “Chrysalis (Contents May Shift In Transit),” in which one house has been entirely covered in shrink wrap with a giant bar code sticker.

There are also pieces that could theoretically be re-installed elsewhere upon MadHomes’ conclusion.

One of these is Allyce Wood’s “Habitancy.” She’s mounted “tension-wound” string on and between upstairs walls in one of the houses, depicting silhouettes of imagined former occupants (including at least one dog).

Another is Laura Ward’s “Skin.” Ward painted one of the houses with latex rubber, then peeled it off, then stitched those molded pieces into a smaller replica of the house, placed over a tent-like frame.

•

None of this would have been possible without the gracious cooperation of the houses’ current owner, the development company Point32. That company’s going to turn the quarter-block into one long three-story building and an adjoining six-story building at the lot’s north side. The project will adjoin and incorporate the existing Bel Roy Apartments at the northeast corner of Bellevue and East Roy Street.

MadHomes has also drawn the approval of the lot’s previous owner, Walt Riehl. He happens to be an arts supporter and a member of the Pratt Fine Arts Center’s board.

•

Besides being a fun and creative big spectacle, MadHomes means something.

It’s a call for more whimsy and joy in the everyday urban landscape.

Especially now that the new-construction boom has resumed after a two-plus year pause, at least on Capitol Hill.

So many of the big residential and mixed-use projects built on the Hill in the previous decade lack these very elements.

Oh sure, a lot of them are all modern and upscale looking, with clean lines, snazzy cladding, and exterior patterns that make every effort to hide the buildings’ boxy essences.

But there’s something missing in a lot of these places. That something could be described as adventure, delight, or fun.

I’m not asking for huge conceptual art components, of a MadHomes scale, installed into every new development. That wouldn’t be practical.

But there could be little touches that attract a passing eye and give a momentary lift to a tired soul.

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POSTSCRIPT: Eugenia Woo sees MadHomes as not a temporary artistic triumph but an urban preservation defeat. At the blog Main 2 (named for an old Seattle telephone exchange), Woo states that the homes, while under-maintained in recent years, could and should have been kept:

Everyday (vernacular) houses for everyday people represent Seattle’s neighborhoods. The drive for increase urban density does not always have to come at the price of preservation and neighborhood character.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times. Thanks to Marlow Harris of SeattleTwist.com.)

Thursday was “Last Thursday” at the beloved 619 Western art studios. This low-key ending came after 30 years of magic and memories (including two events curated by this web-correspondent), and about a year of wrangling with the city and the state. (The latter wants to drill its viaduct replacement tunnel under the building, and claims the 1910 warehouse structure’s too unsound, in its current condition, to withstand being dug under.)

The 100-some tenants in the building’s six floors thought they had an agreement to get out of the building by next February, while the city offered relocation assistance. Any hope of actually preserving 619 for artists, during or after any rehab, seemed to dissolve away during these negotiations.

Then, earlier this month, came the surprise. The city decided the whole place was just too unsafe even for short-term occupancy. Everybody had to be out by October 1. Public events in the building were banned effective Aug. 1.

One final “First Thursday” was hastily scheduled, retitled “Last Thursday.”

One last chance to ride Seattle’s third coolest elevator.

One last chance to pay respects to the memory of Su Job, the building’s heart and soul for so many years.

One last chance to admire the familiar rickety stairwells.

One last chance to admire, and buy, locally-produced art in the corridors and the studios. (Only some of the building’s spaces were open this final night. Many tenants were already packed or packing up.)

Yes, 619’s got structural damage.

Yes, it needs shoring up, even if the tunnel project’s stopped.

And maybe its occupants would have to split the premises during a rehab, if not sooner.

But it still didn’t have to go down like this.

And I still want the place preserved, as an artist space.

(Some artists will sell their wares outside 619 next First Thursday, Aug. 4. That same evening, a tribute show to the building, Works of History: 30 Years of Anarchy, opens at Trabant Coffee, 602 2nd Ave.)

• Another local bicyclist was struck, and at this writing remains in critical condition, after getting struck by a hit-and-run driver (in, as if you hadn’t guessed, an SUV).
• Crooks in a local art heist had very specific tastes. They only took stuff by one guy, Hispanic-heritage painter Esteban Silva.
• The NY Observer claims Brooklyn’s becoming more like Portland, or rather like the Portlandia Portland.
• Could “Sonics Appreciation Night” at tonight’s Mariners game be one of the greatest single events in M’s history? It’ll certainly rank among this sorry year’s highlights.
• Besides the usual fringe-right-wing suspects, here’s someone else who seems to believe the Norway massacre wasn’t all that awful. It’s Morrissey. He apparently thinks the existence of fast food is a worse crime.
• James Warren, who knew Obama back when, insists the guy’s no Clinton “centrist” but a seeker of deals, a professional bargainer. But is he enough of a hard bargainer?
• Meanwhile, even John Boehner is apparently not looney-right enough for the looney-right…
• …While Robert Reich suggests another force pressuring the Democrats into caving to shock-treatment budget cuts—the Wall St. bond rating cartel.
• The traditionally cars-before-people Eastside is getting its very own light rail line. Sometime in the next decade. Unless Bellevue Square tycoon Kemper Freeman, who hates transit, has his way and stops it.
• Science Guy 1, Fox News 0.

menu screen from 'mickey, donald, goofy: the three musketeers'

• We’ve just gotten over the official end of VHS a couple years ago, when now some are predicting the DVD’s similar fate. Sure, online streaming is cool if you have the bandwidth and can stand the re-buffering pauses at inopportune moments. But what about the bonus features? I’ll say it again: what about the bonus features? I want my bonus features, dammit!
• Our long local nightmare is over. What did it take to get the Mariners to actually win a baseball game after three ghastly, fallow weeks? Perhaps it was the sudden, tragic passing of one of the team’s charter employees (and best loved stadium figures), Rick the Peanut Guy.
• The city’s got a new Transit Master Plan. It identifies corridors that could use some transpo beefing up. One of them is Ballard (where, if you recall, the Monorail Project was to have gone). Now the city thinks it’d be a nice place for a streetcar (which, unlike a monorail, will be subject to the same traffic jams as cars). (BTW, this wish list is irrelevant to the more vital task, that of preserving what transit options we’ve got now from budgetary decimation.)
• On the national front, Jim Hightower pleads for any national politician to pay attention to working people instead of partisan idiocy; while Earl Ofari Hutchinson explains why Obama can’t take the big unilateral steps on the economy that FDR took. And Andrew Sullivan calls today’s GOP “not conservatives but anarchists,” obsessed only with destroying the Obama presidency even if the nation’s destroyed along with it.
• With its never-say-die attitude toward expanding its range of market segments, Costco’s re-formulated initiative to privatize liquor sales has qualified for the November ballot.
• And remember, tonight’s “Last Thursday,” the final public event in the prematurely condemned 619 Western artist studios.

seen outside the capitol hill block party

• The Norwegian mass murder suspect allegedly claims he did it to publicize a manifesto, which (besides pasting in big parts from the Unabomber’s manifesto) exhorts his countrymen toward further violence in support of racism, nationalism, and general jingoism. Look: Slaughtering innocents is not what any truly “superior” person ever does.
• Meanwhile locally, the Nordic Heritage Museum will host a vigil for the shooting victims this Tuesday evening.
• Dan Bertolet’s got a nice roundup of anti-waterfront tunnel arguments. And there’s going to be an anti-tunnel rally next Monday (Aug. 1).
• A poll shows 71 percent of Americans dislike the Republicans’ creation and bungling of the made-up “debt crisis.” Of course, polls like this one don’t matter, since today’s Republicans don’t give a hoot about anybody except the billionaires and lobbyists who own them.

I knew I was going to attend the final group exhibit opening/closing party at the 619 Western art studios.

I didn’t know, until Wednesday, that I already have.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development suddenly proclaimed the building’s tenants have to get out by Oct. 1, six months earlier than the previous eviction date.

And, what’s worse, the tenants can’t hold public events in the building by Aug. 1.

That means no August First Thursday openings.

• When better toilets are designed, the Gates Foundation will design them.
• R.I.P. Bagley Wright, 1924-2011. A Princeton grad from Georgia who married into the Bloedel timber family, Wright was one of the five original Space Needle investors (hence the Needle’s original corporate name, the “Pentagram Corp.”). He also helped run the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, cofounded the medical-devices maker Physio Control, was a key player in downtown real estate development, was a major early investor in Seattle Weekly, and sold the house where Kurt Cobain died. He and his wife Virginia amassed a large contemporary-art collection, some of which is on view at their own gallery space.
• Anand Giridharadas believes it’s all well and good for bright minds to go to work at “social entrepreneur” projects, but he insists that “real change requires politics.”
• Buried in a story about PopCap Games boss Dave Roberts is an important lesson that always needs re-teaching:

…Making simple products is way more difficult than making complicated products…. Simple is more complicated, simple is elegant, simple is harder.”

• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

• How I misspent my Saturday—getting lost in the Seattle Public Library’s historic 1962 World’s Fair pictures. I’m particularly fascinated by the name of a fair exhibit, the “Home of the Immediate Future.”
• Sable Verity wants the Seattle Urban League to come back strong from its recent misfortunes, and believes its once-and-future leader is not the man for the job.
• Close a hillside road. Bring in a dump truck, pre-loaded with 10,000 tennis balls. You can guess the wondrous spectacle that ensues.
• One positive result of the viaduct and 520 highway projects—the discovery of lots of pioneer garbage!
• Everybody in or near Seattle: Go see Mad Homes. It’s a site specific art installation occurring in a group of Capitol Hill houses set to be razed for apartments later this year. The 11 invited artists, given free rein to make “permanent” changes to the structures, have filled them and their front and side yards with fun and fanciful works. It’s up until Aug. 7.

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

• A book industry site asks, “What’s the most beautiful word in the English language?”
• Mayor Mike McGinn, on a crusade to restart big development projects, is proposing, among other things to relax regulations requiring ground-level retail spaces in commercial zones. This would allow all-residential complexes, instead of “mixed use” projects, along retail streets. Publicola’s Erica Barnett hates the idea:

…Recessions aren’t permanent, but land use often is. If we allow developers to build ground-floor housing instead of retail space now, those apartments won’t magically be converted to coffee shops, hair salons, and restaurants once the economy turns around. They will be, for all intents and purposes, permanent residential spaces.

And street-level land use matters. Pedestrians gravitate toward streets that are activated by bars, shops, and restaurants; in contrast, they tend to avoid sidewalks that run alongside apartment buildings and other non-public spaces like fenced-off parking lots.

• In more “hey, he really is a politician after all” news, McGinn ordered the city to stop advertising in Seattle Weekly. The official reason is because the paper’s out-of-state owners also run an online escort-ad site that actor Ashton Kutcher alleges facilitates underage hooking. The Stranger, which has its own in-house sex ad site (whose managers claim to thoroughly check all advertiser IDs), and which endorsed McGinn’s campaign, is not affected by the order.
• Elsewhere, authorities in Snohomish County are going after flashing bikini baristas again. As with last year’s arrests in Everett, these Edmonds arrests are based on the specious idea that breast exposure through a window qualifies as “prostitution.”
• Goodness and Hammerbox singer/songwriter Carrie Akre held her Seattle farewell show on Thursday. She’s been lured away to Minnesota by her day-job career. Now I’ll never get to host the “Carrie Akre karaoke” event I’ve dreamed of.
• Things that don’t belong in the “Recycling” bin: yard waste, old computer equipment, and, oh yeah, dead people.
• There was a fire at the McGuire Apartments demolition site in Belltown. The only result: the building’s owners will have less materials to salvage.
• And, in the only one of these links some readers will care about, there’s a huge scandal a-brewin’ about salmon. Was your last fish dinner really wild-caught Pacific salmon or just a farm-raised Atlantic fish with a false story and a higher price tag?