1979 ad from vintagepaperads.com

• This list of (mostly dreadful) declining beer brands by the Big Two and a Half (that’s AB InBev, MillerCoors, and the Miller-produced Pabst brands) would seem like a ray of hope for true beer lovers—except that their place on the shelves has been usurped by other brands from the same companies.
• Microsoft is putting out a tablet computer next year. And this time, they hope to get it (and its marketing) right.
• A former Sea Gal (the Seahawks’ cheerleaders/dancers), who became a Price Is Right model, was named in a lawsuit by another Price Is Right model against that show’s producers.
• What’s behind the disembodied feet washing up in B.C. and Washington? As Spike Lee once famously asked, is it the shoes?
• The state Dept. of Employment Security is laying off almost 400 of its 2,500 employees. Alas, it’s not due to a lack of work.
• There’s going to be a graphic novel about the Green River killer. Or rather, about a detective who’d spent many years on the case, written by said detective’s son.
• Teamsters leader James Hoffa came to town. He reiterated what he’d said in Detroit about defeating the right wing. That is, he reiterated what he’d really said, not the right-wing media’s deliberate distortion of it.
• As I’ve written before, one of Seattle’s favorite activities is to proclaim “what this town needs.” Now there’s a whole site where you can leave your own ideas in that regard. It’s Changeby.us.
• SeattlePI.com has an intriguing list of local ’90s celebrities and where they are now. No, Rev. Bruce Howard isn’t mentioned. No, I don’t know what happened to him.
• French women don’t get fat, so the book says. But they do get sexually frustrated. And they sue over it.
• Update: A few days ago we linked to a guy who wished Apple would get around to charitable giving at last. It’s getting around to charitable giving at last.
• Half of Americans ages 16-24 are now unemployed.

sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

• The bad news: The old Heidelberg brewery in Tacoma burned down. The worse news: It was scheduled for demolition anyway.
• Hey you: Got an idea to bring back the Intiman Theatre?
• Your chance to speak out against Metro Transit’s proposed brutal service cuts: 6 p.m. Tuesday at the King County Council chambers, 516 3rd Ave. Be there or be stuck in traffic, forever.

Our ol’ pal David Meinert suggests at Publicola that Seattle could get at least a little out of its deep fiscal hole by opening itself up to casinos, slot machines, and booze in strip clubs.

(UPDATE: And our other ol’ pal Goldy thinks it’s a lousy idea.)

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Thoughts on recent performance events, big and small, on the Hill:

•

1) The Capitol Hill Block Party.

From all accounts it was a smashing success. Some 10,000 people attended each of the event’s three days. Except for one no-show due to illness, all the big advertised bands satisfied their respective throngs. Seattle finally has a second summer attraction with top big-name musical acts. (I personally don’t consider an outdoor ampitheater in the middle of eastern Washington to be “in Seattle.”)

But as the Block Party becomes a bigger, bolder, louder venture, it can’t help but lose some of its early funky charm, and a piece of its original raison d’etre.

Once a festival starts to seriously woo major-label acts, it has to start charging real money at the gates. It’s not just to pay the bands’ management, but also for the security, the sound system, the fences around the beer gardens, and assorted other ratcheted-up expenses.

That, by necessity, makes the whole thing a more exclusive, less inclusive endeavor.

The street fair booths that used to be free get put behind the admission gates. The merchants, political causes, and community groups operating these booths only end up reaching those who both can and want to pay $23 and up to get in.

I’m not suggesting the Block Party shut down or scale back to its earlier, small-time self.

I’m suggesting an additional event, perhaps on another summer weekend. It would be what the Block Party used to be—free to all, but intended for the people of the Hill. An all-encompassing, cross-cultural celebration of the neighborhood’s many different “tribes” and subcultures. An event starring not just rock and pop and hiphop, but a full range of performance types. An event all about cross-pollenization, exchanges of influence, and cultural learning.

It wouldn’t be a “Block Party Lite,” but something else, something wonderful in its own way.

•

2) Naked Girls Reading: “How To” Night.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about a strip club in Los Angeles called “Crazy Girls.” I told him I would rather pay to see sane girls.

Now I have. And it’s beautiful.

“Naked Girls Reading” is a franchise operation, originally based in Chicago. But it’s a perfect concept for Seattle. It’s tastefully “naughty” but not in any way salacious. It’s not too heavy. It’s entertaining. It’s edifying. It could even be billed as providing “empowerment” to its cast.

The four readers last Sunday night, plus the dressed female MC (costumed as a naughty librarian), all came from the neo-burlesque subculture. But this concept is nearly the exact opposite of striptease dancing. There’s no stripping, no teasing, and no dancing. The readers enter from behind a stage curtain, already clad in just shoes and the occasional scarf. They sit at a couch. They take turns reading aloud. When each reader has performed three brief selections, the evening is done.

Each performance has a theme. Last Sunday, it was “How To.” The readers mostly chose types of texts that are seldom if ever read aloud in public. Given Seattle’s techie reputation, it’s only appropriate that we rechristen instructional text as an art form.

Selections ranged from explosive-making (from the ’70s cult classic The Anarchist Cookbook), to plate joining in woodwork, to home-brewing kombucha tea, to deboning a chicken (from The Joy of Cooking), to the famous Tom Robbins essay “How to Make Love Stay.” The women performed these selections with great humor, great voices, and great sitting posture.

Despite what you may hear from the Chicken Littles of the book and periodical industries, The Word isn’t going away any time soon, any more than The Body. Both obsessions retain their eternal power to attract, no matter what.

“Naked Girls Reading” performances are held the first Sunday of each month in the Odd Fellows Building, 10th and East Pine. Details and ticket info are at nakedgirlsreading.com/seattle. The promoters also promise a “Naked Boys Reading” evening at a yet-unset date. (The participles won’t be all that’s dangling.)

Costco’s Washington liquor privatization initiative: Good for chain stores, bad for microbrewers? That’s what the Washington Brewers Guild claims.

The old Rainier Brewery on Airport Way South is contaminated with toxic exterior paints. If a solution isn’t found to remove or seal up the old paint, the whole complex might get condemned and demolished.

It’s a beautiful labyrinth of industrial spaces, now housing artist studios and the Tully’s Coffee head office. (The coffee roasting plant, located in part of the old brewery for several years, is now closed; Tully’s product is now made by Green Mountain Roasters in Sumner.)

This is a landmark. It needs to stay. Period.

A kind reader recently slipped me a rare copy of The Hedonist: In Pursuit of Pleasure and Happiness. It’s a self-published local restaurant and entertainment guide from 1970.

“Typeset” on a typewriter (remember those?) with what look like press-type headlines (remember those?), the slim paperback provides a handy, informal peek at what Seattle was like four long decades ago.

It just happens that 1970 was a very pivotal year around here. The Seattle Pilots baseball team split for Milwaukee after just one season, temporarily dashing civic boosters’ hopes of Seattle becoming a “big league city.” Boeing executed its first massive layoffs, plunging the region into a deep recession that stuck around for several years.

The youth culture was also changing. The flower-power era was quickly fading. The “grownup hippie” milieu of mellow blues-rock bands and foodie bistros was slowly emerging.

In this time of uncertainty, The Hedonist’s editors (William L. Hailey, Joan Frederickson, and Sharon Minteer) and a small team of co-writers took it upon themselves to list the ways a young adult in Seattle could eat, drink, dance, shop, and play.

They tell all about such onetime major city attractions as Morningtown Pizza on Roosevelt (“Come as you are—when you get there, you’ll see that everyone else did, too”), the pre-burger-chain Red Robin near Eastlake (“Once a comfortable, clannish tavern suitable for intimate drunken orgies, the Robin now shelters those who would be hip for a few hours on Friday night and sell shoes and encyclopedias the rest of the week”), and First Avenue’s “amusement arcades” (“films are silent, uncensored, and done on extremely short subjects. No minors, no women allowed to view films and ID please”).

You learn about some of the hundreds of tiny storefront taverns that dotted the city during those days of more restrictive litter laws. Places like the Rat Hole in Wallingford (“shingled walls are covered with posters and road signs; the floor is barely visible through the sawdust covering”), the Century on upper University Way (“a welcome relief from the swinging world of the university beer halls”), and Your Mother’s Mustache in Pioneer Square (“revisit your childhood in the ‘Pillow Play Room’—a bathtub full of pillows, tinker toys and carpeting to sit on”).

What did they say about Capitol Hill? Glad you asked.

A brief chapter about the neighborhood opens with a brief essay by contributing writer Jeannette Franks: “Capitol Hill still hasn’t decided whether it is a haven for hippies, rich kids or little old ladies. Consequently, it has something for everyone, but not a lot for anyone. Shops spring up like mushrooms and vanish as quickly, so don’t get too attached to any one place. The following are expected to be with us for a while, but one never knows just how long.”

A few of the establishments listed in that chapter, and elsewhere in the book, did last a while. Fillipi’s Book and Record Shop ran until 2000 or so; the Keeg’s and Del-Teet furniture stores lasted into the 1980s

We’ve still got the Harvard Exit (“the only movie house with soul”). And the Comet (“This small, friendly tavern on Capitol Hill caters primarily to hip young people…. The management prefers country music, but this is not adamant.”

Where Joe Bar is now, there was once the Russian Samovar restaurant. (“No reservations are necessary to enjoy this old world Russian cuisine, and ‘a little wine for thy stomach’s sake.'”)

Along the 10th Avenue East business strip near the Roanoke Park Place Tavern, there used to be the New York Style Deli. (“Not quite New York style, but good. A little old lady will appreciate your business. Open until midnight.

Those two places I remember. I have no memory of Oquasa Inc. on Broadway (“a head shop with assorted beads, bells vests and candles but no papers”). Nor did I ever visit Demitri’s Coffee House on East Pine (“Demitri has filled all nine of his rooms with fresh flowers, precious old things, bric-a-brac, statues, music—almost anything”).

A short chapter toward the end of the book lists eleven bars and other sites around town “For the Involved Gay.” Only one of these has a Capitol Hill address—Dorian House, the predecessor to the still-operating Seattle Counseling Service for Sexual Minorities.

Then there’s the chapter about “Things To Do For About a Dollar.” It contains an odd little item entitled “Giant Ice Cube.” It reads: “The ice machine at 18th and Madison sells 25-pound blocks of ice for 60 cents. Take these oversized ice cubes to a grassy hill in the Arboretum and ‘ride’ it to the bottom. This may not be a hot idea, but it will freeze your social position in the community.”

I like to think we’ve got better entertainment options than that now.

(Expanded from a column in the Capitol Hill Times.)

Spent a couple hours at tonight’s big P-I employee wake at Buckley’s on lower Queen Anne. At least half the staff had drifted in while I was there. Hugs and toasts and loud Blethen-bashing all around.

As Eli Sanders at The Stranger‘s Slog notes, the P-I Web site’s ever so slightly added more links to outside news sites. Sanders then wonders out loud whether this is a harbinger of a future online-only P-I remaking itself into a local version of the Huffington Post.

Paul Andrews has expanded thoughts about this prospect. Go read his stuff yourself, then come back here.

Back so soon?

OK. HuffPo’s a great site, with healthy readership figures and ad revenues. Andrews is right to nail “news as personality” as one leg of its business-model tripod. (The other two are original blog entries and carefully chosen links to other sites’ news stories.)

It’s the “personality” that differentiates HuffPo from all the headline aggregators out there. At its heart is Arianna Huffington herself (even though she lives in LA and the site’s produced in NY). Her personality, and her range of interests, define the site’s general political POV, its curation of content, and its audience niche.

But despite its slogan (“The Internet Newspaper”), it’s not a source of much primary information. It has a couple of staff reporters, and it pays the Associated Press to post AP articles on its own pages, but most of its news items are carefully chosen (and re-headlined) links to stuff researched and written by others. HuffPo’s blog posts are mostly original (a few are simultaneously “cross-posted” at other sites), but none of them are paid for.

For all its accomplishments, HuffPo’s not the elusive answer to the conundrum of online news reporting and how to pay for same.

HuffPo’s formula, by itself, isn’t going to preserve the P-I as a professionally staffed newsroom.

But it might provide two ingredients toward the final recipe.

One is establishing mutually beneficial relationships with bloggers and solo Web journalists.

The other, more subtle, component is a site’s “voice” (or, to be coldly corporate, its brand image).

The P-I already has a stronger voice than any other mainstream print daily in the region. Thus, it has a head start in this department.

For another angle on branding, consider the Northwest beer industry.

Around the time the P-I shotgun-married the Times in the papers’ first Joint Operating Agreement, the first local microbreweries (Redhook and Grant’s) started up.

At the time, our region already boasted five major breweries, all producing nearly-identical watery lagers, differentiated mostly by advertising. The last of those breweries, Olympia, closed in 2003.

Instead, WA and OR now boast a lively array of smaller outfits creating a vast array of products. These products really are unique, not merely advertised as such.

As news moves online and becomes more decentralized, it will, by necessity, morph from the verbal equivalent of the old stubby-bottle Oly into a wider palette of flavors, crafted on a more artisanal basis.

I’m reminded of how Weimar-era Berlin had as many as 70 daily newspapers. These weren’t all huge endeavors. Some were raucous little scandal sheets. Others were intellectual and ideological journals. But each of them scraped out its own piece of the market.

That’s what news sites will need to do.

Anheuser-Busch surrendered to the Belgian-based InBev. Miller was sold to South African Breweries (which, despite the name, is based in Britain). Coors merged with Molson.

So: What’s the biggest remaining American-owned suds maker?

As you recall, the company now calling itself Pabst is simply a budget-priced marketing company, whose products are made under contract in Miller plants.

Next on BeerInfo.com’s Top 50 list: Boston Beer, a.k.a. Samuel Adams. Boston used to be a “virtual brewer”, like today’s Pabst. But today the majority of its product comes from the former Hudepohl Brewing plant in Cincinnati, bought by Boston a decade ago.

In sixth place stands Pennsylvania’s Yuenling, the biggest remaining regional lager producer.

Several Northwest microbrewers are also on BeerInfo’s list–Widmer, Redhook (both of which have distribution deals with Anheuser-Busch), Pyramid (now merged with a Vermont firm), Deschutes, Full Sail, Mac and Jack’s.

This prominence signifies both the strength of regional specialty brews and the disappearance of the industry’s whole former second tier (Stroh’s, Ballantine, Schaffer, Falstaff, Blatz, Carling, Lucky, Rainier, Oly, Blitz-Weinhard, etc. etc.).

…to the 27 people who attended my li’l book event at the Form/Space Atelier gallery. If I’d known I’d have had a mike and a stage and a desk, I’d have scripted something.

IN SATURDAY’S NOOZE:

• Declared too damaged to be preserved, the City’s allowed developer David Sabey to demolish the Stock House at theold Georgetown brewery complex on Airport Way, the pre-Prohibition home of Rainier Beer.
• A marriage made in heck: Wife runs a street ministry to drug addicts in Tacoma, hubby sells crack in Seattle.
• Sonic Boom Records is leaving Fremont, in another instance of the arty and funky disappearing from neighborhoods that have been sold to home buyers on the basis of their artiness and funkiness.
• BankAmericrap is bailing out Countrywide Financial, onetime big blowers of the housing bubble.
• Wash. state challenges the Bushies on draconian anti-privacy regulations.
• The ferry system doesn’t know where to put all its out-of-commission boats.
• What? You mean to tell me old pier pilings are bad for the water?
• Pat Cashman has a 30-year-old son, who won some online joke-telling contest. In other passage-of-time news, Madonna will be eligible to join AARP this year.
• And in case you haven’t heard, the Seahawks play an extremely important playoff game this afternoon.

…to love one of my alma mamas: Oregon State U. researchers have found beer can fight cancer!

Tacoma’s own Ventures, kings of instro surf-pop lo all these years, have got their totally deserved berth in the Rock n’ Roll Hall O’ Fame.

• Also from T-Town, somebody wants to replace part of the historic ex-Heidelberg brewery with a hotel. Yep, preservationists don’t like the idea.
• Columbia Winery will move its winemaking and bottling operation from Woodinville to eastern Washington. Its retail and “hospitality” operations, which employ more people than its wine production does, will stay on this side of the mountains.
• And the old Olympia brewery might be “sold on the courthouse steps” if a bankruptcy trustee, representing the bottled-water venture that tried to buy it, can’t negotiate a sale.
• In allegedly healthier drinkies, a big Colorado agribiz operation has been selling “organic” milk in several states. Health-food advocates call foul, claiming the big agribiz operation’s breaking or bending the rules on what can be called organic.
• Mayor Nickels’s son Jacob was sentenced for his role in a casino scam operation. Insert your own “Nickels slots” joke here.
• As you might have already heard, twelve ex-Mariners are on the Mitchell Report list of baseballers who’ve allegedly used or trafficked in steroids. Meanwhile, P-I columnist Art Thiel compares the whole scandal to “a look through the keyhole at a ballroom full of elderly, naked dancers. Something exotic is going on, but exactly what isn’t clear, and few are in any trouble aside from embarrassment. At least the line for the keyhole is short.”
• A GOP state legislator from the Eastside decides he’d rather be a Democrat.
• Another urban church is thinking of selling its historic building. University Baptist, a local leader in diversity and social-justice causes for more than two decades, hasn’t decided what to do yet, but has decided to offer up the building and see what offers show up.
• Gov. Gregoire’s latest plan to end the worn-out-ferry-boat crisis: Build three new boats ASAP (insert newsreel footage of the Kaiser shipyards in WWII here), lease one boat from Pierce County immediately, and run special foot boats from Seattle to Pt. Townsend. (I’m holding a group excursion on one of these boats in the next week or two; keep watching this space for details.)
• Sound Transit showed off its plans for an elaborate University transit station. In keeping with the current UW pecking order, the light-rail stop would be close to the football stadium and the medical center, farther from the upper-campus liberal arts buildings.