american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

donald levin's holdings range from cancer sticks to hockey sticks.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has confirmed the rumors (mentioned here a few weeks back) that Donald R. Levin, owner of a minor league hockey team in Chicago, is interested in owning a new or moved National Hockey League team in Seattle.

Levin’s interest in the Seattle sports world has been known for a while. Last July, KIRO-TV reported Levin was looking into potential Bellevue sites for a new NHL arena. But the Globe and Mail story says Levin’s willing to be roomies with Chris Hansen, who wants to build an NBA arena in Sodo.

Besides the American Hockey League’s Chicago Wolves, Levin is the principal owner of the privately held D.R.L. Enterprises.

It’s a mini conglomerate built around Republic Tobacco. Levin built that from a single smoke shop in the Chicago suburbs. From there he moved into wholesaling, and eventually into manufacturing.

Republic’s properties include JOB rolling papers* (bought from the original French owners), Drum and Top “roll-your-own” tobacco (bought from R.J. Reynolds), and assorted other brands in assorted countries.

Levin has funneled some of his cancer-puff profits into businesses with brighter futures; principally industrial leasing (including aircraft, though I don’t know if that includes Boeing aircraft) and licensed sports gear and merchandise.

And, according to the Chicago Wolves’ website, Levin has “made nearly 20 motion pictures distributed in the U.S. and overseas.”

The Wolves’ site doesn’t identify them, but the Internet Movie Database lists 12 films produced or executive-produced by Levin from 1983 to 1995. They include:

• the Stephen King bomb Maximum Overdrive,
• the Jamie Lee Curtis soaper Love Letters (in partnership with Roger Corman),
• the camp-classic thriller Angel, and
• the late director Zalman King’s softcore classic Two Moon Junction (which launched the career of our idol Sherilyn Fenn).

In other words, he sounds just like our kind of guy.

* (PS: Yes, I am aware that rolling papers are sometimes filled with a substance other than tobacco. If you can find a relevance from that fact to this story, go ahead.)

4cp.posterous.com

• John Hilgart has a whole web-gallery site of old-time comic book art, in the form of enlarged details from individual panels. And he’s got an aesthetic essay praising the medium as it had been in the pre-“graphic novel” days. Hilgart’s specifically talking about the comics’ crude, now obsolete, four-color printing process. His essay’s title: “In Defense of Dots.”
• Paul Constant offers up a long, devastatingly funny essay on the Iowa Caucuses, without once mentioning Dan Savage’s successful re-definition of “santorum.”
• Chauncy DeVega’s take on the caucuses: The GOP has now fully coalesced around a platform of “‘common sense’ racism.”
• You might not have heard lately from “Walden Three,” Greg Lundgren’s scheme to put a multimedia arts center into the old Lusty Lady building, and to privately fund it all under the auspices of a documentary film shoot. Lundgren’s still at it.
• In the fixed game of job blackmail, Seattle’s gain is often some other burg’s loss. That’s what happened when Russell Investments moved north from Tacoma. Now it’s happening again with the demise of Boeing Wichita.
• Blogger “Rottin’ In Denmark” has posted a love letter to Seattle, entitled “My Hometown Is Better Than Yours.” Much more than a mere series of tourist photos, it’s a series of municipal one-upsmanship boasts captioning each still:

Seattle invented bricks and mortar in the 5th century BC. Then in the 20th century AD, it invented Amazon.com and made them obsolete.

The sun is literally always shining. Those clouds were artificially pumped in because there were out-of-towners visiting and we didn’t want them to stay.

(beneath a shot of an Olympic Sculpture Park installation) This is a totem we erected to protect us from Courtney Love.

costco store-brand whiskey, from rebelbartender.com

• The initiative to Costco-ize Washington’s liquor business? Less popular now than in previous polls.
• Good news, or as close to good news as we’re likely to get, i/r/t govt. budgets. The proposed city budget doesn’t cut human services, and the county budget doesn’t cut anything.
• MTV’s The Real World is coming back to Seattle. In other news, MTV still exists.
• Some people would apparently rather wear their vegetables than eat them.
• A Boeing 787 was finally turned over to an airline, three years late. How’s that whole outsourcing/union-busting thing workin’ out for ya?
• Nobody was hurt when Gov. Gregoire’s car was sideswiped by another car on I-5.
• You can always count on College Republicans to believe racist “jokes” are cool.
• The “Occupy Wall Street” protests finally get some media attention, thanks to brutally over-reactive cops.
• The potential price of eco-friendliness: “A car wreck that involves an electric vehicle or a hybrid can pose grave risks to emergency personnel.”
• Sean Penn, diplomatic superstar?

from smelllikedirt.wordpress.com

• Seattle’s rotting produce and other food waste goes to a composting plant in Everett. Our newest export: stink.
• If, as the Times‘ Danny Westneat claims, Microsoft no longer needs over $100 million instate tax breaks, does the Times still need its own state tax breaks?
• As the last beams at the old Boeing Plant #2 come down, Jon Talton notes that the old Boeing corporate culture is also now mostly gone, replaced by Jack Welch-style cost cutters and bean counters.
• Local essayist Seth Kolloen compares the early years of Pearl Jam to the Kemp/Payton era Sonics. At least we still have Vedder & company.
• Descendents of Capt. William Clark (of “Lewis and…”) built a symbolic canoe for a southwest Wash. tribe, to replace one the captain stole way back when.
• A few right wing writers and pundits have identified the biggest force restraining their corporate masters from getting everything they want. It’s democracy. Therefore, to these guys democracy is something icky that must be done away with.
• A few handy comparisons between right-wing fantasyland and reality.
• You’ll have to listen instead of getting to read, but here’s an argument for the premise that punk rock was invented by Jews.
• Sara Horowitz sees a new “middle class poverty” in which everybody’s treated as (and as badly as) freelancers, and envisions a “jobs plan for the post-cubicle economy.”

(NOTE: Due to time constraints of an employment-related variety, these might not appear as frequently during the next few weeks.)

• Seattle’s not the only city with no NBA basketball these days, as the lockout cancels the first preseason games.
• Just as we’d figured, the Illinois company calling itself Boeing has been out to bust its unions by dumping its Washington heritage.
• Seattle ranks #7 in a list of the top transit-using metro areas.
• Novelist Anne Marie Ruff has a theory why there’s no cure for AIDS yet—because a cure wouldn’t be as profitable for the drug companies as expensive lifetime treatments are.
• Canada’s hard-right federal government is imposing harsh minimum sentencing laws on pot growers caught with as few as six plants. B.C. provincial officials fear it could swamp its already overcrowded prison system.
• A guy in Montana was attacked by a bear. The guy’s friend fired a gun at the bear. Missed the bear. Hit the guy.

There’s one thing I sure don’t want you to miss. It’s at 5 p.m. today at the new Elliott Bay Book Co., on 10th Avenue between Pike and Pine on Capitol Hill. Be there or be trapezoidal.

designsbuzz.com

• The Seattlest gang’s putting out, in installments, a revised and updated “guide to Seattle stereotypes.”
• Neighborhood activists are starting a tiny but intelligently stocked mini-grocery in the Lost Valley of Delridge, an area bereft of places selling anything more nutritious than Budweiser.
• What’s the biggest fear of people buying into a 33-story condo tower? That somebody will block their view with a 40-story condo tower a block away.
• Let’s try to get this straight. A candidate for King County Council has a brother who administers an arts program for at-risk youth. Said arts program puts out, for the first time in its history, a “student made” newspaper. Said paper includes several mentions praising the administrator’s sis and several other mentions disparaging her election opponent. Oh, and the thing was partly made with City funds.
• Microsoft’s immensely profitable. Its stock price has essentially been “flat” for some time. One more reason for America’s socio-economic nabobs to stop believing in the Almighty Stock Price as the all-determining value of everything.
• Progressive economist Remy Trupin looks at Wash. state’s no-end-in-sight budget hole and insists that from this point on, “further cuts are not an option.”
• A hundred years ago, eight destitute young women were killed in an accident at a Chehalis explosives factory. Their joint grave has finally been rediscovered.
• The Illinois company now calling itself Boeing has friends among the House Republicans. That body just approved, in a symbolic gesture certain to sink in the Senate, a bill to strip Federal protection for workers whose jobs were outsourced as punishment for union organizing.
• If we must say goodbye to Cyndy’s House of Pancakes on Aurora (closed as of July after 53 years), at least we can be consoled that housing for the formerly-homeless will go up on the site.
• There was a hearing about a plan for a homeless shelter in Lake City. The senior-housing developer SHAG bused in residents to speak against the plan. One of these speakers called the homeless “garbage.” Brutal insensitivity: It’s not just for Republican campaign events any more.
• Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy: There’s an FBI corruption probe of figures surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and cronies.
• The 3-D movie craze? Dead already. Again.
• How will the record labels survive? Some are diversifying into other businesses. Such as, according to a Federal indictment, international cocaine smuggling. (I know what you’re thinking. Drugs in the music industry? Never!)
• We go out on a snarky note with some books Borders can’t even give away.

from alleewillis.com

• The Martin Luther King Memorial in DC will not be dedicated this weekend as scheduled, due of course to the hurricane. That gives more time for critics to bash the whole thing—for being designed and built in China (allegedly by unpaid labor); for being backed by big corporate interests King might have protested against; and for generally depicting King as a “dreamer,” not the rabble rouser and afflicter of the comfortable he really was.
• Veterans’ activists allege the suicide of a Ft. Lewis soldier a few weeks ago should be considered murder, committed by a military that utterly fails to tend to Iraq vets’ post-traumatic and other disorders.
• Campagne, the longtime upscale Pike Place Market restaurant that’s produced the annual Post Alley Bastille Day fetes, will now be called “Marché.” I guess it’s OK since that outfit a couple blocks away isn’t using the word anymore.
• The Boeing 787 was officially approved for passenger travel, more than three years behind schedule.
• Erica C. Barnett asks why the $400,000 the City contributes toward Metro Transit’s potentially doomed Ride Free Area couldn’t instead be used to buy automatic ticket-selling machines. Because that’s not free downtown transit for the people who need it, that’s why!
• In other transportation news, the Sightline Institute has the good news that young adults are driving a lot less these days.
• MSNBC host Dylan Ratigan has a new name for the billionaires and their cronies grifting from the rest of us for their own needless gain—”corporate communism.”
• Was your favorite American-made electric guitar built with endangered imported wood?

• Warren Buffet “saved” Bank of America with a $5 billion investment. So now what should he do with it? How about breaking it up? Sell Merrill Lynch to help pay for Countrywide’s involvement in the mortgage bubble and subsequent crash. Then turn the retail banking operation into regionalized spinoffs attuned to their local communities rather than to the Wall St. casino.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Seattle Bike Blog believes SW editor Mike Seely’s “ill-informed and widely off base” rant against the City’s “road diet” programs (re-laning schemes, sometimes including separate bike lanes) is part of a desperate agenda to bash Mayor McGinn for anything and everything, including programs actually started by the previous mayor.
• Media Matters parses, and debunks, the arguments made by media toadies in favor of Boeing’s union busting drives.
• Seattle’s new art mecca? The now sparsely occupied interior-decorator showrooms at Georgetown’s Seattle Design Center.
• James Altucher lists some little known facts about the recently retired Steve Jobs. These include several less than flattering things. None of those involve his role in the outsourcing of almost all North American consumer-electronics manufacturing.…
• …while Kelefa Sanneh believes the iPod phenom, with its penchant for mixing and mashing, has driven the music biz back toward flashy hit singles.
• The story we linked to yesterday, the one that was all aglow about Iceland flouting the global bankers? Seems it was somewhat exaggerated, alas.
• And for political point making combined with snarky laffs, explore the highly unauthorized by any campaign committee site, “What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?“

It was a corn-doggy sunny Sunday afternoon when I went to the Seafair hydro races.

Took the light rail to the Othello station, then a free shuttle bus to the southern end of Genessee Park. That got me to a lot of people milling about at fast food and military-recruiting booths.

Inside the admission gates, initially, were more of the same. Then approaching the lakefront you got the bigger sideshow attractions, such as the Seafair Pirates.

One of these attractions was a daylong demonstration of something called “Hyperlite,” a water skiing experience using ropes and pulleys instead of a tow boat. (Yes, that was my excuse to ask you to say “tow boat” five times fast.)

Oh yeah, there was that highly publicized intermission act, which newbies increasingly mistake for the star attraction. It’s loud. It’s fast. It’s shiny. It’s simple to “get.”

But for Seafair’s steadfast true believers, it’s not the big thing.

This is.

The combination of subtlety and power, of quiet water and loud machinery, of stillness and speed, of steamlined curves and pure aggression, of hand craftsmanship and industrial might.

Here’s the Graham Real Ventures boat. It’s one of the “Unlimited Lights,” the smaller class of boats that raced on Seafair Weekend. Yes, I know “Unlimited Lights” is an oxymoron derived from a misnomer. (The bigger boats have long been under various size and horsepower restrictions for safety’s sake.)

But they’re still fast and exciting. And because they use piston engines, they generate the kind of noise that old timers like me find comforting, not annoying.

Above is the boat of Kayleigh Perkins, the only female driver in this past weekend’s lineup.

And this is her boat after it flipped over in the air during the lights’ championship heat, the only accident of the day. (She got out of the boat safely and was apparently fine.)

With Budweiser’s departure from the circuit, the Oberto beef jerky-sponsored team has been the team to beat in recent years.

But it wasn’t the only boat out there.

I happened to be positioned near a group of loyal Oberto fans. Would they find themselves satisfied at the end of the championship round?

Why yes, they would.

As for me, I sunburned through my shirt and had to have a long nap once I got hope. And it was completely worth it.

• Our ol’ pal David Goldstein floats the idea that Metro Transit perhaps should be broken up, with Seattle resuming authority over in-city bus routes (including funding authority), intercity routes given over to Sound Transit, and King County keeping the rest of the system. (Seattle ran its own bus routes before Metro was formed in the early 1970s.)
• Meanwhile, Jason Kambitsis at Wired.com believes transit is a civil rights issue. It allows lower-income people to get to work and other places without the relative huge expense of car ownership.
• Another bicyclist was struck by another hit-and-run driver in Seattle. Fortunately, this victim will live.
• In what might be a grandstanding move but is still welcome, state Attorney General (and gubernatorial candidate) Rob McKenna is lashing out about what he calls Bank of America’s shoddy foreclosure practices…
• …and the Washington Mutual execs who steered the state’s last homegrown big bank into the heart of the mortgage-bubble disaster won’t be prosecuted.
• The Mariners have finally gotten rid of designated hitter Jack Cust, whose very name invokes what M’s fans have done a lot of this year.
• The young City of SeaTac finally got its first big protest march (by and for hotel workers).
• Would the Midwestern funny-money fiddlers who now run Boeing really ruin the company’s whole quality reputation and value chain just to stick it to Wash. state? Maybe.
• When inappropriate quasi-racist comments about Obama will be made, Fox News will make them.
• Another slice of the media biz that’s in apparently inexorable fiscal decline: cable porn. The Gawker.com story about this, naturally, can’t stop repeating the word “shrinkage.”
• To end on a fun note, here are some cool pictures of old cassette tapes.

bachmann family values?

• No, Michele Bachmann, slaves did not have stable marriages and families. Not when spouses could be re-sold to separate masters or be used as involuntary sex toys.
• Today’s anti-deep-bore-tunnel sermon comes to you in the form of cute CGI cartoon characters with synthesized voices.
• As for the tunnel project we like, the Capitol Hill light-rail tunnel is being dug by a 21-foot-wide boring machine nicknamed “Brenda.” Make your own 90210 jokes here.
• Painting murals on street surfaces—do they reduce traffic speeds, or encourage dangerous games of pedestrian hopscotch?
• The Midwestern union buster wannabes who now run Boeing are being very secretive in their “southern strategy.”
• Admitting your addiction to Facebook is the first step toward regaining control of your life. Yes, I found this link from Facebook.
• Woke up, it was a Chelsea mornin’ and the first thing that I heard was the historic hipster hotel’s been sold to speculators who want to turn it into rich folks’ residences.
• Post-made-up-“crisis” updates: Joe Biden allegedly called Congressional Republicans “terrorists.” Less famous commenters say the GOPpers are waging a “war on America” and claim they “fit the profile of the classic abuser.” Another e-pundit wonders whether the Bushies deliberately left the nation incurably “bankrupt, corrupt, ungovernable.”
• On a lighter note, here’s some fun stuff found at Grocery Outlet.

• 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.”

(Slow news day edition.)

• In case you wanted another reason to cuss Boeing’s current management (besides paying no taxes whilst living off the Pentagon teat), Glenn Hurowitz at the local eco-zine Grist chides ’em for falling behind Airbus in the race to make more eco-friendly aircraft. Then he cites this as just one more example of Boeing’s corporate ball-dropping:

Boeing is still paying for abandoning its once-successful strategy of long-term investments in innovative, groundbreaking products like the 747 jumbo jet in service of short-term profits meant to goose its quarterly earnings.

• Longtime readers know I almost never quote NPR here. (Heck, I almost never listen to that marathon snoozefest of self absorption.) But here’s a neat little item by them about “how much does it cost to make a hit song?” The song in question is a producer-driven Rihanna track. As one web-page commenter to the story noted, nowhere in the entire piece is the word “musician” uttered. Indeed, nowhere is it mentioned how any non-vocal sounds on the recording are created.
• If there were still going to be daytime soaps, here’s a new potential plot chiché for them: frozen fertilized embryos. Siblings conceived at the same time but born years apart.
• David Swanson thinks he knows how we actually could get Clarence Thomas off the Supreme Court…
• …while Ezra Klein’s got a handy rhetorical device for following the federal debt-ceiling debate hoohah. Whenever a Republican is quoted blathering about “taxes,” replace the phrase with “blowing up the moon.”

Whilst perusing SeattleTimes.com’s old stories about the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, I discovered this headline from May 2007: “This is a composite guy’s dream.”

I can see it now:

COMPOSITE GUY! Assembled from spare parts! He’s got the heart of a nun, the brain of a rocket scientist, the hands of a surgeon, the legs of an Olympic distance runner, the arms of a warrior, and the guts of a CHAMPION!