• I’ll have my own comments about the big Sub Pop anniversary shindig in a bit. But here’s Charles Peterson’s definitive pic of the event.
• The next local funky institution to fall victim to overdevelopment: the venerable downtown music club Noc Noc.
• We already told you of the development scheme that would erase Wallingford’s beloved Chinese restaurant and dive bar Moon Temple. Now it turns out CVS, a pharmacy chain with little presence in this region heretofore, is anchoring the project. A petition has been started.
• One of those Forbes.com “contributors” describes today’s Pearl Jam as a “mature lifestyle business.”
• How do artists make it fiscally in today’s Seattle? With great difficulty.
• The Pike Place Market’s “gum wall” is bigger than it’s supposed to be.
• At Microsoft today, “radical” reorganizations are almost as frequent as they used to be at Apple. (By the way, here’s what Jean-Louis Gassée, who led Apple during some of that firm’s reorgs, had to say last year about MS’s callous way of picking people to fire.)
• UW students are planting anti-human-trafficking messages with feminine napkins. The story doesn’t say how the students plan to get the products to the intended recipients.
• Alaska Airlines doesn’t want the City of SeaTac to impose “living wage” requirements on airport-based workers.
• Still need a tourist destination for the rest of this summer? Check out Pocatello ID’s “Museum of Clean.”
• Some extremist nutjob tried to pass off footage of the 2011 Vancouver Canucks fan riot as if it were Miamians protesting the Zimmerman verdict, instead of depicting the peaceful, anti-violence protests here and elsewhere.
• Mark Sumner at Daily Kos ponders whether humankind’s strive toward a greater future could just putter out.
• Bob Moser at The American Prospect sees the south turning solidly progressive, but perhaps not for another decade.
• Some YouTuber has edited all of Terry Gilliam’s animations from Monty Python’s Flying Circus together into four complilations.

• Nostalgia Alert: M.J. McDermott, KCPQ’s morning weatherperson, was “Ronnie” on Roscoe and Ronnie, the last local kids’ show on commercial TV. It was axed in ’95, when KSTW’s out-of-state owners killed all that station’s local programming. Now she’s petitioning the FCC, to encourage shows like that to be brought back.
• Roberta Byrd Barr, recently deceased at age 74, was Seattle’s first female high-school principal, and the first African-American to host local TV public-affairs shows.
• Seattle without the original Ivar’s Acres of Clams? It could happen, for as long as nine months. It’s one of 15 waterfront businesses the City wants to pay to keep closed during tunnel construction.
• Seattle Times Shrinkage Watch: Executive editor David Boardman’s quitting after 30 years, to work at Temple U in Philly.
• Seattle Central Community College’s health-ed programs could move into part of the old Beacon Hill hospital tower that was once Amazon’s HQ.
• Amazon’s getting into comix publishing, specializing (at least at first) in adaptations of Nerderati-favorite novelists.
• Edward Snowden: Courageous whistleblower or right-Libertarian Obama-basher?
• The Beats: Daring nonconformists or sexist dweebs?
• UK publisher Felix Dennis sold the U.S. edition of Maxim and two other “lad mags” for $250 million. Six years later, Maxim is for sale again, for a mere $20 million.
• A federal judge has ruled against Apple and the big book publishers in that e-book price-fixing suit.
• Health Scare of the Week: Fish oil capsules could give men cancer.
• Just because most people who believe themselves to be MSG- or gluten-intolerant probably aren’t, it doesn’t mean they don’t get real symptoms.
• Take away the “hipster”-bashing headline and there’s still a potential real problem with people who decide they can’t run their backyard chicken coops anymore, and who just drop off the critters at animal shelters.
• The Quebec oil-train disaster was caused by plain ol’ crude catching on fire, just like in the Gulf of Mexico.
• The Next Big (Televised) Thing, according to the Norwegians: “Slow TV.” Long-attention-span (or simply hypnotic) umpteen-hour, real-time explorations of train trips, knitting demonstrations, and salmon fishing.
• After 40 years as everybody’s favorite “obscure music” band, the Residents deserve better than for have Ke$ha’s backup dancers to steal their trademark eyeballs-and-tuxedos look.
• Back in the mid-’90s, Penn and Teller set out to create the world’s dullest and most infuriating video game. They probably succeeded.

the new yorker

• Today’s educational cartoon: “The History of Western Architecture in Under 15 Minutes.”
• Nope, there won’t be an NHL hockey team in Seattle next season. But you probably suspected that would be the case. I don’t want Seattle to be invoked as “leverage.” I want Seattle to have a team.
• I’ve been learning first hand how too-damn-high the rent is around these parts these days.
• How does a metal piece from a wood-chipper machine fall from the sky and crash into a Seattle house? And will the Coen brothers make a movie of it?
• Jason Everman is more than the guy who got kicked out of both Soundgarden and Nirvana. He later became a member of the U.S. Army Special Forces in Afghanistan, and a real war hero.
• The only self-proclaimed socialist in this year’s Seattle mayoral race was among several foreclosure protesters arrested at a Wells Fargo branch downtown.
• Did a Seattle “drifter” really murder a CIA-connected Wall St. financier in 1985? And even if she did, was there, you know, something more behind the act?
• Steinway (which owns several other famous musical-instrument brands as well as its legendary pianos) was bought by a leveraged-buyout specialist known infamously as an “asset stripper.”
• The Jacksonville Jaguars have a sure-fire idea for getting more fans at home games: let the fans watch telecasts of better NFL teams on stadium monitors.
• Douglas Englebart, R.I.P.: The inventor of the computer mouse was also part of many research projects that took computing from the realm of punch cards to PCs and the Internet. (He was also a Portland boy and an OSU alum!)
• Could the original Lone Ranger (debuting on Detroit radio in 1933) have been based on an African American Deputy U.S. Marshal?
• Slate’s Barry Friedman and Dahlia Lithwick assert that “the left” should be about more than easy-to-frame, easy-to-poll issues such as gay marriage. It should be about democracy, economic fairness, saving the planet, abortion rights, and other tough topics.
• And remember everyone, have yourselves a fab holiday and celebrate this nation’s traditions appropriately. I will do so by singing our national anthem with its original lyrics (an English drinking song about the joys of carousing and screwing!).

via wikipedia

the fullbright company

The Penny Arcade Expo (PAX) is one of the video-game industry’s biggest conventions. Appealing to both fans and industry people, it often sells out its annual occurrence at the Washington State Convention Center.

One game company, with a major new product to promote, won’t be there.

The Portland-based Fullbright Company has a “story exploration” title Gone Home. Set in a large, mysterious Oregon house in 1995, it includes musical tracks by ’90s Riot Grrrl-era bands Bratmobile and Heavens to Betsy.

Fullbright got an invite to show off Gone Home at PAX’s “Indie Megabooth,” a portion of the Convention Center show floor dedicated to games from small developers.

Fullbright’s small staff turned the invite down.

They cite several reasons, but basically they’re offended by stances and “jokes” made by PAX founders Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik.

•

It’s a long story, but here’s the short version:

PAX, as anyone who’s even thought of going to it knows, is an offshoot of Penny Arcade, a web comic by Holkins and Krahulik. The strip is full of in-jokes about games and gamers.

In August 2010, PA ran a strip called “The Sixth Slave.”

The strip was a one-off gag about user challenges in multi-player games such as World of Warcraft, in which users challenge other users to “kill 10 bad guys” or “save five prisoners” in an allotted amount of time.

In the cartoon, a character pleads with another character to save him from slavery:

…The comic features a (white, male) slave begging for rescue from another character. “Hero!” he pleads. “Please take me with you! Release me from this hell unending! Every morning, we are roused by savage blows. Every night, we are raped to sleep by the dickwolves.” The hero tells him, “I only needed to save five slaves. Alright? Quest complete.” The prisoner protests, “But…” The hero interrupts him, “Hey, pal. Don’t make this weird.”

The above description comes from a post by guest blogger “Milli A”, at the feminist/political blog Shakesville. As you might expect, she didn’t like the gag at all.

She explained that she didn’t like any reference to rape in a context of attempted humor. Even in meta-fantasy situations; even with a male victim; even when it’s mentioned as a violent crime, within a list of other violent crimes.

Holkins and Krahulik’s attempted explanation in a subsequent strip merely further annoyed critics. Many of these critics interpreted the explanation as the product of game-geeks who didn’t “get” the experiences of real-life victims of violence.

Holkins and Krahulik’s subsequent responses to the increasing controversy seemed to depict their critics as outsiders who didn’t “get” gamer culture and the strip’s humor (which, admittedly, is sometimes morbid and often requires deep knowledge of gamer tropes).

Krahulik, in particular, seems to have gone “extreme” in condescending Twitter and email “jokes” about the critics. It’s as if he were consciously trying to affirm the common stereotypes of male game-geeks (and of male scifi/fantasy geeks in general) as socially-inept dweebs who can’t relate to anyone outside their own subculture, especially if that anyone is a female who’s not wearing spandex.

This is a shame for many reasons. One reason is that PA and PAX have been supportive of female gamers and game creators in the past.

Can they realize, and once-n’-for-all state, that there’s nothing daringly “politically incorrect” about their past statements?

As you may know, Doctor Who fans are among the most rabid in all of scifi/fantasy fandom.

It was fans’ continued devotion to the original Who series (1963-89) that eventually persuaded the BBC to “reboot” the franchise, premiering in 2005.

And these fans have their own ongoing quest for their own Holy Grail—the episodes of the original DW series that the BBC destroyed (via erased tapes and rubbished film prints) back in the early 1970s, when old black-and-white entertainment shows were considered worthless.

Discoveries of old syndication prints in recent years have reduced the number of “Missing Episodes” down to 106. All of those are from 1964-69 and feature the show’s first two stars, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton.

Every so often, rumors would come up within fan circles and on DW online message boards, claiming more missing episodes had been unearthed. These rumors often crop up around April Fool’s Day. Fans have learned to routinely dismiss them, unless and until the BBC officially says something.

As DW‘s 50th anniversary approaches (it first premiered in Britain on the day after JFK was shot), the rumors of found episodes have resurfaced.

And they’re more grandiose than ever.

Instead of just a few individual episodes or story arcs being supposedly found, this time a whopping 90 episodes, comprising all or part of 23 story arcs, are supposed to now be on their way toward a DVD loading slot near you.

The same cache of off-air film prints supposedly also includes discarded installments of other BBC shows, and duplicate prints of some already extant DW episodes.

At least that’s what Rich Johnston, writing at the UK fan site Bleeding Cool, says he’s heard.

Mind you, Johnston isn’t claiming the rumors are true. He’s just spreading them.

Johnston’s also posted a quote from one professional film archivist, who’d been attached to the rumor, and who emphatically denies any involvement with or knowledge of any found DW episodes.

And Johnston’s reported an official BBC no-comment.

•

Over the decades, the missing episodes have engendered a global, volunteer fan industry.

Long before the Internet, the DW fan community exchanged information and documents about the episodes.

The soundtracks to all the lost episodes were found, having been recorded by young fans off of the original telecasts.

Some fans even had off-screen home movies of brief scenes.

As home-video equipment got cheaper and better, fans made “reconstructions” of missing episodes, using the soundtracks and existing (or digitally re-created) still photos.

There have even been fan-made animated versions of the episodes, made in styles ranging from amusing to creepy.

BBC Video made two of its own reconstructions for a few VHS and DVD releases of extant DW stories, and has commissioned professional animations of nine episodes.

Meanwhile, fans and film/video collectors (along with the BBC) have hunted down syndication prints originally rented out to broadcasters around the world.

What if all this were to suddenly (mostly) end?

What if almost all the black-and-white Doctor Whos did appear, ready for restoration and release?

Then all these people, who learned (or taught themselves) all these skills, can use them to create their own stories.

Then the original DW could become just another beloved old TV show, which people would view and admire but not necessarily feel a part of.

Nah. That couldn’t happen, not in all of time.

lynn emmert via fantagraphics.com

I swear I’m gonna have thoughts about the end of the Egyptian Theater and other things soon. But there’s only one story for me for today.

Kim Thompson, co-owner and co-publisher of Fantagraphics Books and The Comics Journal, died Wednesday morning, less than four months after being diagnosed with lung cancer.

The Danish-born Thompson grew up loving both European and American comics, from crude superhero fare to slick French graphic albums. He came to the U.S. at age 21 and immediately became friends with Gary Groth, who’d started The Comics Journal with Mike Catron as a teenager. When Catron moved on to DC Comics, Thompson became Groth’s partner at the Journal. By the early 1980s, they’d branched out from reviewing comics into publishing their own.

By 1989 they moved their already substantial operation from the L.A. suburbs to Seattle.

I came to know, and work for, them soon after that.

In the office, Thompson played the “good cop” role. Where Groth was a demanding taskmaster and a hard-nosed boss (at least back then), Thompson was more easygoing and soft-spoken. He still had the same painstaking care as Groth for putting out the best comics and books possible, and for getting the most production value out of an in-house design shop run (at that time) on bobby pins and baling wire (and top talent, such as the late graphics ace Dale Yarger).

Thompson could also hold his own in making deals with comics creators, distributors, and retailers, and with the mainstream media. He famously told the Village Voice, “[L]et’s face it. If you’re a shop that has any claim to carrying alternative comics and you’re not carrying [Daniel Clowes’s] Eightball or [Chris Ware’s] Acme Novelty Library, that’s stupid.”

Eventually, Thompson got to make his books’ physical aspects as slick and professional as the content of the art within them, expanding from magazines and trade paperbacks into hardcovers and slipcase box sets.

Groth and Thompson’s books won awards in and out of the comics/graphic-novel niche. With recognition came clout, the kind of clout that got them the reprint rights to Peanuts, Donald Duck, and many other classics.

Their original publications, from Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World to Joe Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, continually redefined the range of stories and moods the medium could convey. Comics were more than (as the tired cliché went) “not just for kids anymore.” They were a true art form; and, thanks partly to Fantagraphics and its stable of creators, the “mainstream” audience began to recognize this.

As the book trade roiled at the “disrupting” influence of e-books and chain bookstores’ rise and fall, Fantagraphics continued to grow. Its beautiful hardcover packaging helped readers to see its titles as art works in themselves, things people wanted to own as physical, tangible objects.

Thompson’s legacy, besides the many great cartoonists whose work he helped assemble, promote, and nurture, could be this packaging.

In it, he showed the rest of the (print) book industry how to stay in demand.

• The only thing more improbable than the idea that the average human 100,000 years from now will have Margaret Keane painting-size eyes is the idea that the average human 100,000 years from now will be white.
• Novelist David Guterson gave a commencement speech at his alma mater,Roosevelt High. Some parents booed the speech, apparently believing it was too “negative” for their precious children. The speech itself turns out to be skeptical about the pursuit-O’-happiness thang but still relatively upbeat at its conclusion.
• So soon after getting our collective hearts broken over the NBA (again), Seattle sports fans have a new thing about which to blindly hope against hope. It’s the National Hockey League’s Phoenix Coyotes. They’ve been floundering down in the desert. The league supposedly has a plan to move the team here, perhaps as early as next season.
• KING-TV and its sister operations (KONG, NW Cable News) are being bought out by Gannett, along with the rest of the A.H. Belo Corp. Like Belo (which began as the publisher of the Dallas Morning News) had done when it bought KING, Gannett’s strategy here is to add profitable (for now) broadcast properties to help shore up its more troubled newsprint assets. (Update: Gannett only bought Belo’s broadcast properties, not its newspapers.)
• Tacoma really doesn’t like citizens painting “rogue crosswalks.”
• CBS News’s smartypants explain “why geniuses don’t have jobs.”
• Time quotes some security-establishment defenders who really, really want to see the whole anti-domestic-surveillance crusade crushed.
• An Australian ad agency asked feminist writers to write about the meaning of artificial sweeteners in women’s lives, and to do it for free. Here come the brutally snarky retorts.
• This list of words remembered today only as parts of hoary catch phrases leaves out such personal favorites of mine as “petard,” “Gangbusters” (originally a radio show), and “poke” (as something you shouldn’t buy a pig in).
• You remember how Facebook first started as a “hot or not” listing of Harvard women? There’s a new “hot or not” application on the site. It’s just for women. It uses male FB users’ profiles without their permission.
• It’s the 50th birthday of one of my favorite forgotten childhood icons: Mr. ZIP!

via musicruinedmylife.blogspot.ca

The Fastbacks, the “Seattle Scene’s” most enduring band (and one of its most loveable), recorded lots of great cover songs (originally by the Raspberries, the Sweet, and even Sesame Street!) in addition to their many originals. Some of these were buried on “tribute” compilation CDs. Here’s a list of 17 such tunes, and a slightly longer but still incomplete list.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• According to Richard Metzger, the greatest document of Paul McCartney’s post-Beatles musical career is a concert doc filmed in Seattle—in the acoustically notorious Kingdome, even.
• David Meinert’s growing restaurant empire will include the successor to Capitol Hill’s legendary dive bar the Canterbury.
• Time to restart the neo-Sonics rumor mill again. Now, Chris Hansen and co. are reportedly negotiating for an expansion franchise.
• The state’s thinking of authorizing private pot smoking clubs. I only ask that they be ventilated in such a way as to keep that weed stink off the streets.
• The Republican-stalled Legislature still hasn’t saved King County Metro Transit. But, on the Seattle-only transit front, Mayor McGinn still plans to invest in a new downtown streetcar line. This probably means the mourned Waterfront Streetcar will remain dead for the foreseeable future.
• Meanwhile, the second Monorail Initiative tell-all book is out. It’s called Rise Above It All. It’s written and self-published by Dick Falkenbury, the ultimate political outsider and co-instigator of the plan that would have had trains on grade-separated tracks, roughly where the RapidRide C/D bus goes now.
• MTV’s playing music videos (remember them?) again. But just for half a day, on the Fourth of July.
• A woman at the big video-game industry confab Tweeted® a complaint about the lack of female starring characters in new video games. Cue the bigoted trollbots in 5, 4, 3….
• R.I.P. Arturo Vega, associate of the Ramones for their entire band-career and designer of the group’s “All American” logo (still worn on T shirts by people who weren’t alive when the band was together).
• Steven Spielberg sez the reign of action mega-blockbusters (and of the big Hollywood studios!) is only a few box-office flops away from being over. Then he says audiences can expect really high prices for the privilege of seeing a movie in a theater (yes, even higher than they are now).
• Robert Reich sez we could have full employment, even in an age of robotized manufacturing and other techno-“innovations,” if we only had the political will to make it so.
• A UK pundit with the appropriate name of Tom Chatfield agrees with me that society, far from becoming “post literate,” is actually more dependent upon written language than ever. And he ponders whether it’s a good thing:

There is no such thing as a private language. We speak in order to be heard, we write in order to be read. But words also speak through us and, sometimes, are as much a dissolution as an assertion of our identity.

• Turns out the heroine from Brave isn’t the only female character in cartoons (and toys) to have been “tarted up” in recent years. Just look what they’ve done to Strawberry Shortcake!

ebay photos, via thestir.cafemom.com

wu ming, via daily kos

• Let’s put credit where credit is due, to the right-wing initiative maestro who hates all non-private-car transportation, but whose schemes leave even that mode vastly underfunded in this nation’s-most-regressive-tax-system state.
• Today in clothing named after people famous for not wearing any, a fashion chain called “Bettie Page” is opening its first local branch on Capitol Hill.
• A Walla Walla high-school principal is convinced that severe discipline against problem students only makes things worse. By taking more pro-active approaches, suspensions at his school have plummeted.
• One of the lesser publicized YouTube memes involves video gamers posting clips of their gameplay prowess. Now, Nintendo is claiming copyright on all these clips.
• A guy in Ballard’s got a Kickstarter to fund a small but free performance space for theatrical and musical performers.
• There are supposedly more high tech jobs available in the Puget Sound country than there are people to fill them. Now if we could only get jobs for a couple of non-coders….
• Have Catholic bishops quietly taken control of all health care decision making in Wash. state?
• David J. Ley at Psychology Today claims that sexual violence has gone down wherever “societies have increased their access to porn.”
• The just-ended TV season has been, viewership-wise, “one of the worst years ever in the history of network TV.”
• Meanwhile, brick-n’-mortar bookstores saw a huge jump in foot traffic this past quarter.
• Some 56 more-or-less “adult” comix titles have been excised from Apple’s App Store. Again.
• Will someone just kill the thin sheet calling itself the Village Voice already (or at least turn it into a bohemian-radical nostalgia rag)?
• A Simpsons street opens later this year at the Universal Orlando theme park. It’ll be the Violentest Place on Earth! (Sorry, no Itchy and Scratchy Money accepted.)

via cartoonbrew.com

via geekwire.com

• A female and a male employee at a local gaming company didn’t like the kickass-warrior bikini babe poster put up prominently in the company’s office. So they made a similar poster depicting one of the company’s male characters in a beefcake pose. The company’s boss left it up.
• The Punk Singer, a biopic about Bikini Kill rad-feminist singer and zinester Kathleen Hanna, is playing SIFF this year. You may have already heard about the Odd-Couple-with-guitars romance of Hanna and Beastie Boy Adam Horovitz, as depicted in the film. You might not have heard about something else mentioned in the film, a serious health scare she had a while back. It’s hard to imagine someone of Hanna’s carefully crafted public image ever admitting to any vulnerability, but she does so here.
• Meanwhile, Hanna’s onetime protege Carrie Brownstein is not the first alt-music vet to “shill for American Express.” Laurie Anderson did the same gig back in the ’80s (though her ad for the card doesn’t seem to be posted online).
• Melinda Gates is the world’s third most powerful woman, according to one of those magazine list-icles. Numbers 1 and 2 are the heads of state of Germany and Brazil.

capitolhillseattle.com

• Initial designs are now out for the mixed-use megaproject that will replace (while preserving the facades of) the Bauhaus coffeehouse block on East Pine Street. Damn, that looks ugly.
• Dominic Holden thoroughly skewers the regional political meme that roads-only transportation advocates, corporate-welfare boosters, and blockers of affordable housing somehow constitute “the adults in the room.”
• Last Sunday’s Seattle Times depicted south King County as the region’s new nexus of “diversity.” Monday’s Times depicted the same spot as the region’s new nexus of poverty. (Note: This post originally, incorrectly, said both articles had run in Sunday’s paper.)
• SeattlePI.com Shrinkage Watch: The thin gruel of the ex-newspaper site just got thinner with the disappearance of Casey McNerthney, who just got poached by KIRO-TV.
• Whatever happened to the great Seattle tradition of quasi-illegal “guerrilla art”? Terror paranoia, among other things.
• Seattle’s next best hope for a neo-Sonics basketball team: the notion that the NBA might consider an expansion team, once commissioner and not-so-covert Seattle enemy David Stern is finally gone.
• You know the mini-scandal that Disney marketeers were transforming the heroine from Brave into the sexy princess type that, in the film, she overtly refused to be? They’re backing off from that now.
• In The Office (US version), Staples was often name-dropped as Dunder Mifflin Paper’s biggest Goliath-esque rival. Turns out that was paid product placement. And a Staples subsidiary is now selling official Dunder Mifflin branded office products.
• If you’ve followed the Silvio Berlusconi sex and corruption scandals, you can expect there’s a lot of colorful Italian political slang.
• Timothy Noah insists economic inequality is as much a matter of a “skills-based gap” (i.e., the “educated class” pulling away from the traditional working class) as it is a matter of 1-percenters’ greed.
• Earl Ofari Hutchinson invites you to continue to “yawn” at the newest batch of trumped-up pseudo-scandals attacking Obama.
• In this digital era, one analog institution has curiously survived. I speak of shortwave radio stations broadcasting coded messages interspersed with strange musical “signature” sounds, a.k.a. “numbers stations.”
• Creepy, kitschy Japanese pop culture continues to forge new ground with “human doll cloning,” dolls with 3-D printed scans of real people’s faces.
• Data analysis meets film nerd-dom in a 2-D chart of which film sequels outperformed their predecessors, in terms of Rotten Tomatoes fan approval.

boxofficequant.com

• Exhibit A: Web cartoonist Allie Brosh offers a poignant, funny, unflinching, harrowing account of her bout with severe depression.
• Exhibit B: Psychology Today’s got a cover story called “Confessions of a Sociopath.” She’s cool-headed, icy-blooded, and immune to others’ emotions. Of course, she’s a former trial lawyer. (And a Mormon.)
• Exhibit C: Harvard historian Naill Ferguson recently gay-bashed the late UK economist John Maynard Keynes. Ferguson alleged that Keynes, as a childless hedonist (he’d actually been married to a woman who couldn’t conceive), didn’t give a darn about society’s long-term future. Ferguson essentially compared Keynes’s advocacy of government stimulus programs instead of “austerity economics” to a fiddling grasshopper sneering at hard-working ants. As Canadian cultural historian Jeet Heer explains at the American Prospect, this dichotomy has been at the heart of both economic and moralistic arguments since the days of the Greeks.

via wikipedia

Pay close attention to the above image.

It indirectly has to do with a topic that’s been going around here of late, including on this site.

The premise: Seattle has become the new nexus of the book industry.

Amazon now firmly pulls the strings of both print and e-book sales, at least in the realm of “trade books.”

Costco and Starbucks also hold huge influence over what the nation reads.

Nancy Pearl’s NPR book recommendations hold huge sway.

And we buy lots of books for local consumption, giving Seattle readers an outsized role in making bestsellers and cult classics.

See anything missing in the above?

How about actual “publishing” and “editing”?

•

Now to explain our little graphic.

Cincinnati companies once had an outsize influence in the TV production business.

Procter & Gamble owned six daytime soaps, which in turn owned weekday afternoons on the old “big three” networks.

Taft (later Great American) Broadcasting owned Hanna-Barbera, which in turn owned Saturday mornings on the networks.

But if you think of TV content actually shot in Cincinnati, you’ll probably remember only the credits to the L.A.-made WKRP In Cincinnati.

And maybe a similar title sequence on P&G’s N.Y.-made The Edge of Night.

We’re talking about one of America’s great “crossroads” places. A town literally on the border between the Rust Belt and the South, in a Presidential-election “swing state,” often overshadowed by cross-state rival Cleveland. A place with innumerable potential stories to tell.

But few of these potential stories have made either the small or big screens.

The last series set in Cincinnati was the short-lived Kathy Bates drama Harry’s Law.

The only TV fare made in Cincinnati has been a couple of obscure reality shows.

•

The lesson of the above: prominence in the business side of media content isn’t the same as prominence in the making of media content.

What of the latter, bookwise, is in Seattle?

Fantagraphics has tremendous market share and creative leadership in graphic novels and in comic-strip compilation volumes.

Amazon’s own nascent publishing ventures have, so far, aroused more media attention than sales.

Becker & Mayer packages and edits coffee-table tomes for other publishers, and now also provides books and “other paper-based entertainment… direct to retailers.”

The relative upstart Jaded Ibis Productions combines literature, art, and music in multimedia products for the digital era.

We’ve also got our share of university presses, “regional” presses, and mom-n’-pop presses.

Still, the UW’s English Department site admits that…

Seattle is not exactly a publishing hub… so job openings are very limited and most local presses are small and specialized.… In any location, those seeking jobs in editing and publishing far exceed the number of jobs available; competition is very vigorous.

And these are the sorts of jobs people relocate to get, or even to try to get.

•

Of course, Seattle also has many writers and cartoonists of greater and lesser renown. But that’s a topic for another day.

neil hubbard via cousearem.wordpress.com

• It was 37 years ago this month: The TMT Show, the first faint stirrings of Seattle punk rock culture. May Day of the Bicentennial year. Three bands rented a hall in the Odd Fellows building on Capitol Hill. About 100 people showed up. From these DIY roots sprang, directly or indirectly, all the noise that emanated from this burg ever since.
• The City Council’s revised South Lake Union rezone: even fewer affordable housing units than Mayor McGinn’s plan, but more preserved Space Needle views for condo owners.
• The old Seattle Rep space, which became the Intiman Playhouse, is now the “Cornish Playhouse at Seattle Center.”
• Ray Harryhausen, 1925-2013: The king of stop-motion animated fantasy was better known than his films’ official directors, for a good reason. Those dudes were simply in charge of the live-action scenes. The filler, if you will. Harryhausen was the films’ real auteur.
• Ex-Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein sez search engines are getting rich off of the pirated works of fine people such as himself.
• I’m not so sure that there really is a “Conservative Quest to Eliminate Facts.” It’s more universal than that.
• It’s not so much that the tech companies listed in one woman’s Tumbler blog “Only Hire Men,” but that they seem to presume only men will even apply to work there.
• Dear Crowdfunders: Millionaire celebrities and billionaire media titans don’t need your Kickstarter money. Really.
• Even the bosses of America’s hyper-bloated “security” bureaucracy don’t seem to know all that’s in it.
• Recent “good news” about newspapers’ paid readership (in print and online) seems, in some cases, to be exaggerated.
• Blogger Mark Manson has “10 Things Most Americans Don’t Know About America.” Number 5: “The quality of life for the average American is not that great.” Number 6: “The rest of the world is not a slum-ridden shithole compared to us.”
• Allen Clifton at Forward Progressives isn’t the first, and won’t be the last, to remind you Jesus probably neither a corporate lobbyist nor a Tea Partier.
• The downside of traditional publishing: A Brit lady who writes popular children’s books really wants her publisher to stop putting them inside pink covers. She says pink turns boy readers away and distracts from her stories’ often-serious content.
• The downside of modern publishing: An American gent who’s written three novels “to good reviews” (if not good sales) tries self-publishing and finds it to be “the worst.”
• I’d be more interested in Out of Print, Vivienne Roumani’s forthcoming documentary about the digital publishing “disruption,” if the director didn’t seem so obsessed with making everyone younger than herself look like an idiot.
• Let’s close for today with some wonderful old Greek and Greek-American music from the 78 era.

capitol records via wikipedia

• Among the stories I missed by waiting a week to post Random Links: Heart’s well-deserved induction into the Rock n’ Roll Hall o’ Fame.
• Are the Sonics Back Yet? (Day 108): No. But at least we have a date when we might (repeat, might) find out one way or the other: May 13.
• Seattle’s on-and-off-again Fourth of July festivities are on again.
• Seattle’s interim police chief says he’s really, really, really sorry for the video he made mocking the homeless back in the ’80s, using police training-video production gear.
• Is “alternative” music too female-unfriendly? Or is it just corporate “alternative” music festivals that leave the women out?
• The SunBreak explains just why privatized liquor costs more than state-liquor-store liquor did.
• Starbucks is among the companies asking for expanded U.S. tax breaks on overseas revenues.
• Washington’s attorney general wants you to know that T-Mobile’s “no-contract” cell phone plans can still cost you as much as traditional ones.
• Paul Krugman asks whether no one in power even gives a damn about the long term unemployed; while Jared Bernstein at Salon says rising income inequality can’t be fixed unless the campaign-finance system is fixed first.
• The Boston bombing media circus was a pathetic spectacle that continues to spread misinformation.
• Bad news everyone: Futurama is canceled, again, perhaps this time forever (but that’s what they said the last time).
• Speaking of shows (and characters) which have come back from the dead, the once-dead online revivals of All My Children and One Life to Live have miraculously re-revived like Lazarus Dixie. Episodes stream on Hulu.com starting Monday.
• The film itself has gone on to the big Netflix stream in the sky cloud, but the original website advertising Space Jam lives on!
• One or more of Wikipedia’s volunteer editors had been taking female writers out of a page about “American novelists” and into a page about “American women novelists.” But people complained, and the sex-segregation has stopped. This isn’t much different from indie bookstores (like Seattle’s Left Bank Books) separating “women’s fiction” from “general fiction.”
• Can we really blame the whole ’08 economic kablooey on a few coked-up financiers in London?
• AlterNet reminds you that, yes, your bad memories of George W. Bush are fully justified.