pitchfork media via cartoonbrew.com

The third most famous band from Aberdeen, the Melvins, talk about their “disastrous” first tour, accompanied by appropriately simple Flash animation. (The second most famous band from Aberdeen, of course, is Metal Church.)

• When an apartment tower goes up on the Lung Association site in Belltown, across from the existing Seattle Heights condo tower, that will be Seattle’s densest residential block (for the time being).
• It’s a sad day for local radio listeners. KMCQ of Covington, the freeform oldies station that had been one of the last commercial music stations worth listening to whatsoever, has switched to a strict-playlist, ’70s-’80s “classic rock” format. Damn.
• Bartell Drugs’ HQ is moving to the West Seattle Corporate Center in Delridge. That building was originally the HQ of Bartells’ onetime arch rival Pay n’ Save, which disappeared several mergers ago. (Some former Pay n’ Save locations survive as Rite Aid outlets.)
• A stock photo of the UW campus is being used in a creepy poster for a potentially creepy romantic comedy movie. (The movie in question was neither filmed, nor apparently set, in Seattle.)
• More state education money without raising taxes, as both gubernatorial candidates promise? Not bloody likely.
• Marvin Hamlisch, 1945-2012: So it’s the laughter that we remember, whenever we remember the way he was.
• Robert Hughes, 1938-2012: I’ll always remember the Australian-born art critic for a scene from the BBC series The Shock of the New. He pointed to an abstract-art chair and noted that “no human bottom” could fit in it comfortably. (Little known fact: He co-hosted the first episode of ABC’s news magazine 20/20, with ex-Esquire editor Robert Hayes.)
• Happy eighth birthday to one of my fave sources of cool and strange music clips, PCL LinkDump (née Pop Culture Links).
• Charles Mudede quotes three other pundits who suggest the only way out of today’s global economic blecch is to revive the ancient Hebrew concept of a “debt jubilee” (or something like it).

nytimes.com via nytsyn.com

• As a fedora wearer since when fedoras weren’t cool, I frankly don’t identify with Montauk, NY’s demonizing of the midcentury style headgear. It has to do with the old fishing town’s backlash against being colonized by (what the NY Times story about it calls) “hipsters.” But (to use NY-area geographic parlance) the Montaukers aren’t really dissing Urban-Outfitters-clad, emo-listening shoegazers from Brooklyn, but rather Ralph-Lauren-clad, gourmet-cilantro-eating 1-percenters from the Hamptons.
• What’s wrong with residents putting in a common sandbox for neighborhood kids along a “planting strip” between a residential street and its sidewalk? Nothing, except of course it doesn’t look boringly world-class enough.
• Item: “Poll shows Americans are losing faith in religious institutions.” Comment: Oops, there goes another leg of the Republicans’ shrinking “base.”
• On a related note, lotsa local Catholics love ’em those activist nuns.
• Following up on a topic discussed here previously, Jacob Silverman at Slate would like online book critics to be a little more, you know, critical.
• You probably didn’t see “the saddest story in the Olympics.” NBC didn’t really cover it. (It involved the women’s side of  a “second tier” Olympic sport (fencing), in a match that included no U.S. athletes.)
• From Annie Hall to (500) Days of Summer (and even stretching back to Bringing Up Baby), there’s been a particularly American romantic-comedy heroine type which the AV Club’s Nathan Rabin has labeled the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” This is the sparkly, spunky force-O-nature who exists, as Rabin puts it, “solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.” (The sitcom Dharma & Greg can be considered an MPDG premise stretched out.) I can attest that such women do exist in real life, and that relating to them, in my experience, is no trip to eternal bliss.
• Local filmmaker Drew Christie offers a short “animated op/doc” (whatever that means) about Hollywood’s recent “allergy to originality.”

google earth via rhizome.org

• Clement Valla at Rhizome.org finds beauty and “the universal texture” within the mistakes of Google Earth’s 3D geographical simulations.
• The musicians’ union would like to create “sustainable” opportunities for local club bands (i.e., gigs with decent pay). Considering how fiscally precarious so many bars and clubs are, this may be a challenge.
• Amy Rolph at SeattlePI.com, trolling for weird items on Amazon to laff at, found a CD of “lullaby renditions of Nirvana songs.” Rolph calls the electronically-rendered music “creepy.” I call it more like a failed attempt to update the shtick of Raymond Scott’s old Soothing Sounds for Baby LPs.
• It’s not that “oldies” music is selling more these days. It’s that present-day music is selling less.
• When classic films meet know-nothing online reviewers, magic happens.
• Apple has again become the world’s #1 personal-computer maker, if you count iPads as computers.
• At last, a new job in this town that doesn’t require programming experience. It’s the making of fake poop, to demonstrate new third-world toilet designs for the Gates Foundation.
• Steven Rosenfeld at AlterNet believes today’s Republicans are “a truly toxic aberration,” an outfit that can only win elections by voter-suppression and other dirty tricks.
• The “future of news” gurus have long claimed that media companies only needed to hustle for all the web hits they could get, and ad revenue would naturally follow. That’s turning out to not be the case; especially with tablet and smartphone users.
• Here’s one Russian guy’s idea of how humans could live forever, for just $50 billion in startup costs:

1. First, invent remote-controlled, humanoid robots.
2. The next generation of the robots would contain transplanted human brains.
3. By the year 2045, people’s memories and personalities would be transferred as software into robotic brains. (As we always say with stories like this, “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)

perfect sound forever, via furious.com

• It was my first real lesson in how to make a print periodical that was neither a corporate “slick” nor an amateur “zine.” It was my entree into several musical worlds, most importantly that of U.S. indie pop/rock. Let us remember the brief, glorious life of New York Rocker.
• Can Washington’s state parks really survive if they have to become self supporting?
• Correction of the day (NY Times):

An earlier version misstated the term Mr. Vidal called William F. Buckley Jr. in a debate. It was crypto-Nazi, not crypto-fascist.

• In the Matrix movies, identity is easily transmutable and fluid. Think about that when you learn that director Larry Wachowski now wants to be known as Lana.
• How do all those “rugged individualist,” “rebel” Tea Party operatives act and sound so much alike? They get special training in exactly what to say, do, and believe.
• Meanwhile, “Conservative Movement” operatives are finally starting to turn against one another, using the same tactics of loud lies they’ve always used against progressives and centrists.
• The latest winner of one of those dumb magazine declarations about “America’s coolest city”? Houston.
• If a Waterworld dystopia ever comes to be, expect the One Percenters to hole themselves up in fancy-as-all-heck “floating cities of the future.”
• Human waste off the Northwest coast, now with extra caffeine.
• The anti-“social media” backlash is fully underway. One disgruntled Facebook advertiser says it was charged for “clicks” on its ads that turned out to have been mostly generated by “bot” programs. And Ewan Morrison at the Guardian implores self-publishing authors to spend less time incessantly hawking their “brands” on Twitter, Facebook, et al., and more time actually, you know, writing.

If you’re going art-crawling this next First Thursday, be sure to see a mini version of the digging machine that will create the Viaduct-replacement tunnel. Go see it even if you normally find such things to be, er, boring.

• Geoff Tate and the other members of local hard-rock legends Queensryche aren’t making up any time soon.
• The City Council thinks it might be a good idea to use part of any new-basketball-arena revenues to help fix traffic in the area; thereby agreeing with what I wrote here weeks ago. Would-be arena developer Chris Hansen doesn’t wanna pay for road-building himself, though. And I agree with that too; the Port of Seattle’s traffic woes in the area already exist, and would continue to exist with an arena or not. The trick is to channel some of the revenue the arena will earn to the city and state (via sales and admissions taxes mostly) into road improvements.
• There’s a “Support the Sisters” march here on Aug. 12, backing activist nuns who’ve run afoul of Vatican dictates.
• Today’s headline-O-the-day, from the Oregonian: “Car thief who was high on drugs and masturbating when he plowed into Portland crime scene will not have to register as a sex offender.” (I’m sure the headline was shorter in the print version.)
• Conor Kilpatrick basts modern libertarianism as being, in part, an effort to make rapacious corporate greed seem “hip” and “cool.”
• If your call to a U.S. company’s call center didn’t go through today, it could be due to the severe power outage in India.
• Seattle law firm Perkins Coie’s major corporate clients include the officially nonprofit Craigslist, which sends lawyers regularly to crack down on “add-on” sites.
• Chris Marker, 1921-2012: The great French maker of philosophical films did a lot more than just “influence” Anglophone productions such as 12 Monkeys. His works are worthy in and of themselves, using sci-fi memes not as a premise for action-adventure but to meditate on the human condition.
• Gore Vidal, 1925-2012: The prolific novelist, essayist, playwright/screenwriter, film/TV cameo actor, Al Gore cousin, sometime failed political candidate, and ever-lucid critic of the American political-industrial complex (“a society that bores and appalls me”) always seemed to glide from highbrow to low; from serious historical works (Burr, 1876, Lincoln) to utter farce (Myra Breckenridge); from major cultural contributions (The City and the Pillar, one of the first U.S. mainstream novels with gay-male protagonists) to for-the-money tripe (co-writing the Caligula screenplay). To the end he remained “complacently positive that there is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

Let’s face it, my fellow futurists.

Outer space is boring. Or rather, being out there would be boring.

No air, no water, nothing to do for light-years.

This is the expression held by German music hall star Marika Rökk (1913-2004) in her big production number “Mir Ist So Langweilig” (“I Am SOOO Bored”). It’s from the 1958 revue film Bühne Frei für Marika (“Stage Free for Marika”).

She portrays an ice princess on some desolate planet, surrounded by a family of male toadies. She langorously sings of yearning for something to do that’s not the same old same old.

She peers out her space telescope, sees happy Earthlings dancing, and immediately sets forth in an amazing gyroscope/spaceship (!).

The ship takes her to a quasi-racist German depiction of an African jungle.

She picks up a (real) snake and dances with it, lying down and spreading her legs (!).

She cavorts for a while with some “natives” and a (real) elephant. (She rubs the bare chest of one of “native” males to see “if the dirt comes off.”)

But even that’s not enough to slake her boredom for long.

(Thanx and a hat tip to Mr. Dante Fontana’s Visual Guidance Ltd.)

1931 soviet book jacket; new york public library via allmyeyes.blogspot.com

• Love old timey design elements in photography, fashion, furnishings, books, posters, ads, packaging, and everywhere else? Then you’ll love Linda Eckstein’s fastidiously curated site All My Eyes.
• Conversely, Angela Riechers at Print magazine’s site disdains all this obsessive old-schooling. Riechers claims the world of graphic design, and perhaps the world as a whole, is becoming infested with “toxic nostalgia.” Among the symptoms she sites is Churchkey, the Seattle microbrew beer that comes only in cans that require an opener.
• Amazon’s sales rose 29 percent over the same quarter last year. But the company reported almost no profits, thanks to big investments in robotic warehouse systems. (Remember what we always say when robots are in the news: “Nothing can possibly go wrong….”)
• David Brewster found someone to take over management of the local-punditry site Crosscut. He’s a longtime functionary at the Gates Foundation. Let’s see how well he can transition from a nonprofit that doesn’t have to raise money, to one that needs to do a lot of that and soon.
• At the end of a long rant, Paul Constant describes Mitt Romney as:

A cowering man in a suit on the screen, waving his hands in front of his face and begging Robocop not to kill him for profiting, for draining the United States dry and exploiting the pain and hard work of others, for doing what businessmen do.

• Meanwhile, Devin Faraci at something called Badass Digest describes The Dark Knight Rises as feeling “like it is composed entirely of knee-jerk conservative nonsense.”
• A (non-cable-dependent) TV network tells you how you, too, can cut the cable.

From Universal’s 1939 serial The Green Hornet, based on the radio show of the same name.

This is as close as I got to Thursday’s appearance by Will Ferrell and Zach Galifianakis at the Local Color coffeehouse on Pike Place.

Nice that their handlers chose a cool independent beanery to plug their new movie The Campaign.

What’s hard to understand is the sheer enormity of the turnout. Besides Pine Street (as seen here), crowds were sardine-packed along Pike Place, Pike Street, and even First Avenue.

Even Ranger Rick, the venerable kiddie eco-icon, showed up, eager for a captive audience to spread his conservation message.

There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

• Health scare topic of the day: “Rabit bat bites.”
• Online scare topic of the day: “We’re all Internet addicts, and we’re screwed, says Newsweek.”
• Those hipster fashionistas at Vice magazine have devised a “Wheel of Punk,” a wheel chart proclaiming what is the most and least punk. The punkiest, in their summation: “Pre-Rollins Black Flag.” The un-punkiest: the Eagles.
• Unpaid Plug O’ the Day: My fellow Stranger refugee Inga Muscio has a “Stop Thinking, Start Writing” class starting here in Seattle later this week.
• Another year, another round of public college fee hikes.
• Another year, another plea to finally get ourselves a progressive state income tax.
• PETA ranks Safeco Field as baseball’s second most “vegetarian friendly” ballpark. #1: would you believe Philly?
• Yep, Senate Republicans don’t want you to find out who’s funding their campaigns.
• “The average Canadian is now richer than the average American.” And not just in Canadian Tire Money.
• There’s a commercial for tourism to Colombia with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Forget about those pesky drug wars. Just enjoy the quaint cities and unspoiled beaches. They’re saying this openly and forthrightly.
• It’s one thing to see Photoshopped® fakes of movie stars’ heads on nude models’ bodies. But when a guy sticks Frida Kahlo’s head on nude models’ bodies (bodies that obviously don’t have the real Kahlo’s injury scars), some Kahlo fans get righteously pissed off.

the bon marche at northgate circa 1956, via mallsofamerica.blogspot.com

• Emily Badger at the Atlantic pontificates that “The Shopping Mall Turns 60 (and Prepares to Retire).” Malls are actually 62 years old, counting from Seattle’s own Northgate. Badger’s timeline dates from urban planner Victor Gruen, who published a prototype concept in an architectural magazine two years after Northgate opened. (The one thing Gruen’s design had but Northgate hadn’t (yet) was a roof on the central plaza.) Badger is right, though, that malls have passed their peak as American institutions. The last new one opened in ’06; big-box stores and strip malls have stolen a lot of their business and clout.
• After years of speculation, MSNBC.com is now wholly owned by Comcast/NBC Universal. It’s immediately been renamed NBCNews.com. Microsoft sold NBC its half of the online joint venture, having divested its interest in the same-named cable channel back in ’05. NBC claims the site’s Redmond-based staff will stay in the Seattle area. [Update: 100 techies will stay here, but around 80 editorial jobs could move to New York.] Microsoft claims it will start its own news site later this year.
• Meanwhile, a recently-unearthed NBC documentary about the deep south during the civil rights struggles reminds us that, at the time, many white southerners actually believed that black people liked being segregated.
• Trend-analyst Richard Florida never said the rise of the “creative class” would be a panacea for the professional caste, or for the cities that hope to attract this caste.
• A hockey fan site ponders what the heck Seattle’s anti-arena factions are thinking:

There aren’t many cities that would seriously consider turning their backs on an investment of nearly $300 million in private capital within their boundaries, particularly during trying economic times.

• Celeste Holm, 1917-2012: The Oscar-winning film star and venerable stage actress had been in financial straits in her latter years. She was estranged from her family after she married a 41-year-old opera singer when she was 87. One of those family members was son Theodor Holm Nelson, the computing visionary who coined the term “hypertext” and inspired much of the conceptual underpinning of this whole WWW thang.

via david haggard at flickr.com

• One of my pop-culture obsessions is the history of cartoons. That’s how I stumbled across this tragic tale of the songwriter who gave us “Whistle While You Work” and “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”. He was a depressive and an alcoholic who shot himself in 1942, with his music for Bambi yet to be released. He was estranged from his 20-year-old daughter from a first marriage; his last wife remarried weeks after his death, to a family employee (who then took her for everything she had and dumped her).
• One of the Seattle music scene’s longest running teamings (over 30 years!) has come to a sudden end. Hard-rock mainstays Queensryche have fired frontman Geoff Tate. Tate tells Rolling Stone the next step will be lawsuits, “and it’s probably gonna get ugly.”
• The lawyer guy who sued local web cartoonist The Oatmeal isn’t suing him anymore.
• Kurt Eichenwald at Vanity Fair says he knows exactly why Microsoft has had what he calls “a lost decade.”
• Here for your comment-thread wins is a handy list of “logical fallacies” used by people who can’t really back up their arguments.
• For a movement that allegedly seeks to persuade us all to the righteous logic of its ways, today’s right wingers can be so inhumanely rude. Today’s example: a onetime 13-year-old “teen conservative idol” who’s now resurfaced as a 17-year-old progressive. The insults by wingnut web-pundits and comment trolls against him, and against his mother, are as predictable as they are pathetic.
• The 24/7 Wall St. site has another list of brands predicted to disappear within the year. Among them: American Airlines, Suzuki cars (in the U.S.), Talbots stores, and two media enterprises that Wall Street Republicans would like to see go away (Current TV and Salon.com).
• David Auerbach at the webzine “n + 1” would like to remind you of the continuing “stupidity of computers.” Still.
• Why does broadcast radio just get blander and less listenable every year? Seattle Weekly found a new villain: the Portable People Meter, which tracks listenership more intensely than the previous diary-based ratings system. I’d place the blame elsewhere, on the huge corporate “station groups” and their anti-creative chains-O-command.
• And finally, please say hello to Gus the Diapered Duck. He appeared this past First Thursday at the Core Gallery in Pioneer Square’s T/K Building. The adjacent feet belong to his mistress, artist Kellie Talbot, who depicted Gus in a series of paintings about a New Orleans character called “Ruthie the Duck Lady.” (And yes, the T/K Building is just up the road from the old Pioneer Square Theatre building, where a certain insurance company used to have its regional sales office.)

'jseattle' at flickr, via capitohillseattle.com

Yes, it’s been nearly a week since I’ve posted any of these tender tidbits of randomosity. Since then, here’s some of what’s cropped up online and also in the allegedly “real” world:

• There’s still no official hint on what the proposed Sonics Arena might look like. But the wannabe developers of East Pine Street’s “Bauhaus block” have released a drawing of their proposed mixed use development. At least in its idealized-drawing form, it’s not as monstrous looking as some other recent structures in the area.
• In other preservation battles, Seattle’s people again rally around a thing about which the elites don’t give a darn. They’re striving to bring back the Waterfront Streetcar.
• Meanwhile, a study claims if the viaduct-replacement tunnel charges tolls high enough to pay for it, drivers will clog the surface streets rather than pay those tolls.
• Seattle Opera faces a $1 million shortfall, and will mount fewer new shows in future years. But don’t count ’em out yet, folks. It’s not over until, well, you know.
• The late writer-director Nora Ephron had many major achievements. Sleepless in Seattle, let us all admit, is among the least of them.
• Did you know there was a real hostelry in Fife called the “Norman Bates Motel“? Emphasis on the was.
• America’s cities: they’re back! (Of course, some of us knew this for some time.)
• In a pleasant surprise, one of the Supreme Court’s pro-one-percenter flank betrayed his masters and voted to uphold Obamacare. In response, some members of the Rabid Right’s noise machine claimed the great American Experiment was over and they’d hightail it to Canada (which, uh, has had universal health care in place for some time now).
• If you’re on liberal/progressive websites at all these days, you’ll find a lot of comment threads hijacked by folk who claim to be lefties disgusted by Obama’s centrist tactics, so much that they won’t vote this November, and want you to not vote either. At least some of these comment trolls turn out to be paid employees of right-wing dirty tricks outfits.
• Rupert Murdoch’s splitting his News Corp. into two companies. One will contain his print properties (including HarperCollins Books, The Wall St. Journal, the New York Post, and his besieged London tabloid operation), plus the iPad “newspaper” The Daily. The other will hold his “entertainment” properties. Yes, Fox “News” goes with the entertainment half.
• Paul Krugman tells the PBS NewsHour all about his “cartoon physics” theory of the American economy.
• Google’s putting out a tablet device with a 7-inch color screen, just like Amazon’s Kindle Fire. But the exciting part of this Wall St. Journal link is at the bottom, where they mention another forthcoming Google hardware product. It’s a streaming-media player that attaches to TV sets, and it’ll be made in the USA!
• Ann Althouse looks at a famous parody of trashy sex novels, and asks rhetorically if those who make and read such parodies are really bashing the potboilers’ readers (i.e., women).
• Nordstrom’s opening a branch in New York City. Make way for NYC media outlets to describe it as a brand new startup.
• Headline: “The media covers Kardashians, not climate change.” Comment: The media covers the-media-not-covering-climate-change more than it covers climate change.

A scene from the South Korean film Untold Scandal (2003; dir. Je-yong Lee).

• Gay marriage update: Now that the opponents of equality have filed enough petition signatures, Ref. 74 goes to the ballot in November. Pro-equality folks, who were asked to “decline to sign” the referendum petitions, will now have to vote “yes” on the referendum itself to keep marriage for all on our state’s books. (Too bad, though, about the “Approve R 74” campaign logo. It looks too much like a Hanford radiation leak.)
• Heads up, TV viewers in Comcast-less areas of Seattle. The full transition from the pathetic Broadstripe Cable to the much more promising Wave Broadband takes full effect on July 17. Soon to arrive at last: Current TV! IFC! Ovation! MLB Network! NFL Network! C-SPAN 2! And HD versions of HBO, TCM, CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network! (Still no Sundance or the French channel TV5, though.)
• In previous posts about the above topic, I’d called Wave Broadband “locally owned.” It’s now been sold to out-of-state private equity interests, but remains locally based.
• That Seattle Children’s Hospital patients’ lip-sync music video, based on the Kelly Clarkson song “Stronger?” The record label got it pulled from YouTube. You can still see it at the Huffington Post.
• CNN wants to pick a fight between Seattle and Portland, apparently in the name of regional bragging rights. Why bother?
• Some Shell Oil execs held a PR fest at the Space Needle, celebrating the opening of a new drilling platform in Alaska. Only the three-foot-tall “oil rig” drink dispenser malfunctioned, making a big mess. Lots of blogs snickered at the ill-timed fail. Except: It wasn’t real. It was all a hoax stunt, devised by anticorporate hoax-stunt devisers The Yes Men.
• We must say goodbye to Travelers Tea Co., the East Indian themed gift, food, and home-furnishings shop and cafe on East Pine, after 14 years. Travelers’ one-year-old second restaurant location on Beacon Hill remains.
• I haven’t seen ’em, but supposedly there are web-guru essays chastizing Pinterest for attracting a predominantly female user base; as if Grand Theft Auto discussion boards were valuable “mainstream” services but “girls’ stuff” was just too insubstantial for tech investors to put their money into.
• An ad man claims we’re heading into “the golden age of mobile.” He means media and advertising made for smartphones and tablets.
• Is an ex-Coca-Cola marketing exec really sincere about renouncing his junk-food-shilling past, or is he just trying to sell himself in a new shtick as a health-food marketing exec?
• The print magazine business has apparently stabilized, if you believe this account from, ahem, a print magazine.
• Colson Whitehead has a lovely memoir of his childhood as a horror movie fanatic.
• Black activist A. Phillip Randolph put out a short book in 1967 advocating A Freedom Budget for All Americans. Randolph and his co-authors claimed their plan, based on Federal economic incentive spending, would essentially end poverty in America within eight years. The whole document’s now online, and it’s full of economic-wonk language to support its claims.