washington dept. of natural resources via kxly-tv spokane

• Here’s the big Whidbey Island landslide from Wednesday.
• “Apartments are expensive, hard to find in Seattle area.” Damn. I need one and soon.
• Update #1: The Elvis statue that got stolen from Mama’s Mexican Kitchen in Belltown was found and returned.
• Update #2: Canterbury Ale & Eats, the legendary Capitol Hill dive bar, is still scheduled to close later this year. But its landlord, the nonprofit Capitol Hill Housing, wants to replace it with another “affordable” eatery-drinkery.
• Update #3: The sudden controversy over artist Charles Krafft’s longstanding ultra-right-wing beliefs has made the New Yorker.
• My ol’ acquaintance, painter Billy King, would like a “1 percent for the arts” program for commercial real-estate developments, particularly the ever-enlarging Amazon campus.
• And local sci-fi legend Neal Stephenson would like his fellow fantasists to get back to the old SF game of imagining practical, possible utopias, instead of the escapist cyberspaces and grim nightmare futures they’re mostly imagining these days.
• Michelle Shocked shows up at clubs that canceled her gigs after her anti-gay rant, claiming to be a free-speech martyr.
• “Shoppers tired of Walmart’s empty shelves and long lines are bolting to Costco and Target.” The empty-shelves part is only partly due to Walmart’s notoriously lousy labor policies that drive potential workers away. It’s also due to suppliers getting sick n’ tired of Walmart’s notorious “my way or the highway” stance toward them.
• Salon asks, “Is there anything 3-D printing can’t do?” Actually, there’s a heckuva lot it can’t do. Yet.
• Many (white female) porn stars still refuse to perform interracial sex scenes on camera. Comment #1: Yes, women (including sex workers) should be able to turn down anything they want to turn down. Comment #2: It’s still a sad sign that some performers (and, presumably, viewers), in a genre once thought to be the cutting edge of “free speech” progress, can’t get beyond one of society’s most tired old prejudices.
• Micheal Schuman at Time sees a new relevance for that ol’ policy nerd Karl Marx, as the global one-percenters wage “class struggle” against all the rest of us. But Schuman doesn’t see, or recommend, any serious counter response.

I’ve known, and occasionally worked with, Gillian G. Gaar for as long as I’ve been writing these MISC ventures.

You know her from her contributions to the Rocket, the Stranger, ArtsFocus, Tablet, the Belltown Messenger, and other local and national periodicals; as well as her books about Elvis Presley, Nirvana, the Beatles, and women in rock.

She needs some expensive surgery to restore the vision in her left eye.

Like so many in and on the periphery of the music scene, she has no insurance.

She’s started one of those online fundraising drives.

She’s a quarter of the way to her goal already, and could use your help getting the rest of the way there.

•

Dennis White, who runs the Dadastic! record label, has been making T-shirts commemorating Belltown’s still-mourned Dog House diner and piano bar.

For a limited time you can get one for $17 (with a free CD thrown in), and have $5 of the proceeds go to Gaar’s medical fund.

(The hereby-linked page says the deal is over, but White says you can just mention it when you order and he’ll still do it.)

• I was at the last day of the Alki Tavern, that venerable unrepentant dive bar. So was videographer Nick Adams.
• “Pot tourism” still has a few snags before it can become big business here.
• The Boeing engineers’ union approved the contract proposal they’d previously rejected.
• Post-dam Elwha River: I’m getting sedimental over you.
• Providence’s drive toward near-monopoly status in the hospital biz of much of Wash. state hits a snag, as Olympia hospital employees go on strike. Among the issues: cuts to the employees’ own health benefits, while the CEO rakes in millions.
• The Rev. Rich Lang, writing for Real Change, compares modern society to that once bemoaned by the Bible’s “apocalyptic” writers.
• Apparently, indie-folk oldie act Michelle Shocked (who’d once sort-of claimed to be lesbian 22 years ago) now says she was just kidding when she made virulently anti-gay remarks on stage in San Francisco.
• In brighter women-in-music news, meet “Laura the Luthier,” the collective name for the women who kept Gibson Guitars in production during WWII.
• By now you’ve heard about the Steubenville OH teen-rape verdict, and about certain cable-news commentators who went all over in sympathy with the young convicted criminals while downplaying or making excuses for their crime. Mia McKenzie at the blog Black Girl Dangerous has a slightly different view. McKenzie acknowledges it’s sad that the convicts will go into the “prison industrial complex” like so many kids who aren’t white or football stars. But she still expresses more sympathy to the rape victim.
• That widely disseminated “meme graphic” of a Swedish department store with “realistic” mannequins? The picture’s real. But it wasn’t taken in an H&M but in another store, and it was photographed three years ago.

miyavik.deviantart.com, via sodahead.com

Acoustic/emo/neo-folk/whatever singer-songwriter John Roderick has helped bring back an old tradition at the again-locally-owned Seattle Weekly.

In the heritage of such long-remembered Weekly cover stories as “Should Gays Act ‘Gay’?” and “Is ‘Grunge’ Too White?”, Roderick has crafted the zeitgeist-challenging manifesto “Punk Rock Is Bullshit.”

Before we get into the critique of his critique, let’s let his critique speak for itself a little:

Ultimately, punk rock was a disease of the soul, a doctrine of projecting and amplifying feelings of insecurity and fear outward and inward until the whole world seemed like an ice cave. It wasn’t necessary to judge every new piece of art against unwinnable criteria, or ourselves against imaginary standards of altruistic correctness. It wasn’t preordained that fun, lighthearted inspiration was shallow or contemptible; nor was it true that everything sucked, that life sucked, or that the world sucked. Successful art isn’t always garbage, and lazy, shitty art isn’t always teaching us something.

That’s harsh. (Or, in the made-up “glossary of grunge” published by an ignorant NY Times, “Harsh Realm.”)

Did an entire neo-bohemian generation really let itself be suckered into something this terrible?

Well, no.

“Punk rock” meant many different things to many different people.

To some, it was simply the continuation of dirt metal, stripped down for greater immediacy.

To others, it was a movement to strip rock n’ roll back to its garage rock (if not its R&B) roots.

And yes, to some it was an excuse for drinking, drugging, vandalism, and other unhealthy behaviors.

Calvin Johnson famously redefined punk broadly enough to include innocent teenage love songs—just as long as they were created and distributed in adherence to a strict “indie” ideology.

That was a near-exact opposite of Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren’s “cash from chaos” motto, which involved staging scandalous events for maximum publicity (and commercial) value.

Yeah, there were punks who got all self- (and other-) destructive.

But there were also punks who took the DIY ethos seriously, who built venues and labels and movements.

Punk was/is big enough to include skinheads and longhairs; junkies and straight-edgers; riot grrrls and Suicide Girls®; vegans and 7-Eleven fans; born-again Christians and neo-pagans and devout nihilists and even a few Jews.

•

But, for argument’s sake (and what punk rocker doesn’t like a good argument?), let’s say there’s one particular strain of punk ideology that (1) makes kids believe (for the rest of their lives) that everything completely sucks, and (2) prevents them from doing a damn thing to improve their lives or their world.

It wouldn’t be “punk rock,” whatever that is (see above), that does that.

It’s something within them that does that.

Call it a mental/psychological condition, if you will, with “punk rock” as a thin excuse smeared on top.

As ex-Funhouse bar owner Brian Foss said in response to Roderick,

In my life I’ve always seen joiners, people who need some kind of rule book to live by. Be it religion, or politics, or sports/D&D, or yes, music scenes, some people have little imagination.

I’ve also seen people take inspiration and make up their own shit from whatever culture they were exposed to. Something to prime the pump, jump start their own creations.

Other responses: Megan Seling noting how punk wasn’t intended to defeat Reaganism but help people survive it; Grant Cogswell seeing it as a natural response to the media-conglomerate controlled pre-Internet culture.

• Sound-effect words in comics: to ugly-art maestro (and great Washingtonian) Basil Wolverton, they were an art form all their own.
• The State Legislature could help save Metro Transit. But will it?
• A Chinese-American family gave a lot of Chinese robes and other objects to the Tacoma Art Museum, hoping they would be a permanent reminder of our region’s ugly racial history. Decades later, the museum’s current management decides to auction them off out-of-state. However, the story’s even more complicated.
• Mr. Kim Thompson, one of by ex-bosses at Fantagraphics, has lung cancer.
• The Belltown Business Association’s got a lovely virtual tour of Belltown’s history.
• It’ll take years to even start getting nuke waste out of Hanford’s leaking tanks. And the sequester’s just slowing the task down a little more.
• As T-Mobile prepares to digest MetroPCS, the layoffs arrive. Lots of ’em.
• First, the AOL/Time Warner corporate marriage collapsed. Now, Time Warner itself is splitting up, with the Time Inc. magazines and associated properties sent to fend for themselves.
• 3D printing has come to custom fashion, of the purportedly “sexy” variety.
• Ed Wood’s “lost” last film was found this past autumn, in the inventory of a defunct Vancouver porno theater!
• The “other guy” in the Bill and Ted movies is now a documentary director. (I know, just like anybody with a smartphone-cam these days.)
• Paul Krugman says progressives shouldn’t worry so much about appearing “respectable.”

scarfolk.blogspot.co.uk

• Some clever Brits have devised “Scarfolk,” a blog of made-up historical artifacts from a fictional (and dreary as hell) English town. Along the way, they have a lot of fun with ’60s-’70s UK graphic design.
• An “alternative taxidermy” artist from Tacoma will appear on a reality-TV show on Thursday evening.
• Also on Thursday, a Belltown boudoir-photography studio’s holding a “donate a bra” night to help clothe the needy.
• The next big Seattle Schools scandal: alleged racial double standards in student discipline.
• The secret ingredient of Seattle hiphop just might be Pho.
• Local stoners might want to drag out their right-wing grandparents’ “Get US Out of the UN” signs.
• Another year, another threat of no Fourth of July fireworks unless big donations pour in.
• Perhaps 60 Everett Herald print/distro workers will lose their jobs as Sound Publishing (which already has its own Everett printing plant) takes over the paper.
• The Atlantic, supposedly one of the “success stories” of legacy print media in the Internet age, is not above asking writers to work for free.
• Staged readings from Lolita are in hot water in Russia, thanks to the Putin regime’s calculated drive to demonize liberals and Westerners “for the benefit of a poorer, older, more rural voter base.” Hmm, that sounds familiar….
• It’s a “golden age for corporate profits.” Just not for the rest of us.
• Get ready for North Pole ship crossings, thanks to that climate change that billionaires pay Republicans to claim doesn’t exist.
• Australia’s “multiethnic” TV channel goes to the lands surrounding the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and finds tales of horror and survival.
• Peggy Orenstein notes that the “Disney Princess” characters, and their counterparts in other fictional universes, aren’t really about waiting for a prince as they are about vanity and shopping:

No, today’s princess is not about romance: it’s more about entitlement. I call it “girlz power” because when you see that “z” (as in Bratz, Moxie Girlz, Ty Girlz, Disney Girlz) you know you’ve got trouble. Girlz power sells self-absorption as the equivalent of self confidence and tells girls that female empowerment, identity, independence should be expressed through narcissism and commercialism.

These Streets, the musical revue/play at ACT (running through March 10) about four women in the ’90s Seattle rock scene and two (mostly) supportive boyfriends, was constructed as a series of non-linear “moments.”

Scenes bounced between the past and present; the “past” storyline covers five years in the characters’ lives. Many of these short scenes and mini-monologues depicted single ideas or emotions.

In the show’s spirit, this piece is also a sequence of moments.

•

I mentioned in my 1995 book Loser how the national media’s false “grunge” stereotype included “no women in sight, not even as video models.”

But in the real Seattle scene, women were involved in leading roles from the start. Women were singers, instrumentalists, managers, promoters, venue owners, zine publishers, photographers, DJs, and record-label owners.

In keeping with the scene’s ethos, most of these women weren’t vying for fame and fortune. (The exception, Courtney Love, already had a record deal before she came here.)

But then a scene that, to many of its members, was an alternative to the major-label machine, became re-defined as fodder FOR the major-label machine.

The global music industry, at what turned out to be its peak of money and power, trawled Seattle fishing for superstars. The Gits were negotiating with a label when singer Mia Zapata was killed. Seven Year Bitch released one album on Atlantic, then broke up. But most of the scene’s women were ignored.

Over the years, “grunge nostalgia” books and documentaries (most made by out-of-towners) continued to ignore artists from the scene who hadn’t become big stars, including the women.

One of Harley and Rudinoff’s goals with the play was to remember this forgotten history.

These Streets, along with its concurrent poster-art and oral-history exhibit at the Project Room gallery on Capitol Hill, received massive coverage in local and national media.

The show includes parts of 18 vintage songs, originally recorded by 14 different female-fronted Seattle acts. Having four different characters singing the songs allowed the show’s makers to feature diverse musical material, from ballads (“power” and other) to straight-out punk blasts.

If any of those bands at the time had received a fraction of the publicity These Streets received, who knows what could have happened?

•

In keeping with the do-it-yourself spirit, These Streets was staged and produced by Gretta Harley and Sarah Rudinoff, who’d also written it (with Elizabeth Kenny).

Kenny and Rudinoff played the older versions of two of the characters. Harley sang and played guitar in the show’s tight backup band. Harley had been in the ’90s rock scene with the bands Maxi Badd, Danger Gens, and Eyefulls. She and Rudinoff currently perform as the duo We Are Golden.

ACT Theatre provided the auditorium space and various production services, under its “Central Heating Lab” program. (Carlo Scandiuzzi, ACT’s executive director, had promoted punk and new-wave gigs at the Showbox in the early 1980s.)

Harley, Rudinoff, and Kenny spent two years developing the script and score, based in part on interviews with some 40 Seattle-scene veterans. Twenty-three of these women were featured in historical graphics installed in the ACT lobby.

•

The show’s present-day storyline involves five of the six characters (yes, that’s a plot spoiler) reminiscing about their days of non-stardom, while surveying their later lives of houses, kids, divorces, and stints in rehab.

And they still have the urge to make music and art, to be on stage, to be loud and passionate in front of a crowd.

The world of their youth, the pre-dot-com Seattle of 1989-94,  has largely vanished. The city isn’t the same and neither are they.

According to Harley, the present-day scenes refer to a time when “you’re in this stage of life and you look back and take ownership of it. But then you’re also looking forward for first time in a very particular way. I hope the show helps to illuminate that ownership of this time in our lives, and also look back and say, ‘Hey kid, you had a lot of guts to get up and do that.'”

Harley says the making of These Streets was “a great experience. People who lived it seem to really love it; they feel that it’s very authentic. A couple of people said it inspired them to pick up music again.”

While no further performances have been scheduled past its three-week run, “we’re taking it one step at a time at this point.”

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

via vintageseattle.org and capitolhillseattle.com

• The old Club Broadway disco on Capitol Hill, previously a Masonic Scottish Rite Cathedral, was torn down ages ago, leaving only a “stairway to nowhere.” Surprisingly, given all the other re-development activity nearby, the lot’s going to stay vacant for the foreseeable future.
• How do you honestly talk about the humanities in high school, when one parent’s complaint means you can’t say anything about “racism and social justice”?
• Meanwhile, Knute Berger has a great piece at Seattle magazine about our fair city’s unfair past; specifically, explicit racial discrimination in housing. It existed openly and legally (with contractual “covenants” binding home buyers to never resell to blacks, Hispanics, Asians, or even Jews) as late as 1968. Berger notes that…

In 1964, Seattle voters soundly defeated an “open housing” ordinance that would have let anyone live anywhere. It lost by more than 2-to-1.

• You know how Amazon’s now building three 50-story towers on the Toyota of Seattle, King Theater, and Sixth Avenue Motor Inn blocks. But word just got out that the e-tail giant has options to buy three nearby blocks from the Clise family, who’ve owned the lots since the 1930s. One of these houses the Hurricane Cafe, which for 19 years has carried on the 24-hour dining tradition of the legendary Dog House that preceded it (without, alas, the previous joint’s class).
• Jon Talton wishes Boeing execs would go on an “apology tour” to their workers, the Puget Sound area, and their shareholders, expressing their sorriness over pretty much everything they’ve done this past decade.
• In where-are-they-now? news, ex-Nirvana drummer Chad Channing is back with a new band, Before Cars.
• Gonzaga men’s basketball: #1 in the nation. UW men’s basketball: don’t ask.
• A Republican apologizes for something! It’s for claiming that bicycles pollute just like cars.
• Pot as a business model goes over well in Yakima.
• There are two pending death-penalty cases in King County. They’re both now on hold.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon asks, “Did the Internet kill Girls Gone Wild?” The answer, for good or ill, is no. Joe Francis, founder of the public-nudity video label, is simply going into bankruptcy protection to weasel out of money he owes to a Vegas casino magnate. It’s a personal matter, not directly related to the company.
• Morrissey is still a self-righteous egomaniac, but at least he’s a morally consistent self-righteous egomaniac.
• An LA record-store chain is selling its own digitized versions of out-of-print LPs for download. The company claims it’s legal (it sets aside a portion of each sale into an escrow account, to be sent to copyright claimants if they ask). But is it right?

'out of work sith lord.'

The Emerald City Comicon, held at the Washington State Convention Center, has become an annual sign of Spring’s impending arrival in Seattle. It’s March! Time to shake off that Gore-Tex and wool. Time to reveal the unencumbered Real You to the world, by becoming your favorite fantasy character.

Like most “comics conventions” around North America, including the giant San Diego Comicon, the Emerald City Comicon is only partly about comic books and mostly about fantasy film/TV. This year’s special guests included Star Trek: TNG and X-Men star Patrick Stewart and ’60s Batman stars Adam West and Burt Ward.

But the real stars every year are the attendees themselves, channelling their copyrighted-and-trademarked icons.

Perhaps nowhere was this smelting of commercial art into folk art more obvious than with the guy who played the Star Wars theme on bagpipes, while riding a unicycle.

(P.S.: For a viewpoint on Comicon from an actual comics creator, check out Donna Barr’s blog.)

(Cross-posted with Unusual Life.)

via silver platters and queenanneview.com

• First went Borders; then Swerve at First and Pine; then Easy Street Records on Mercer and Queen Anne Avenue. Now, the Silver Platters music superstore in the east lower Queen Anne district is going away. This leaves the shrunken CD selection at Barnes & Noble as the last music store in greater downtown. Silver Platters will move in June to 2930 1st Ave. S., across from Sears and near the future basketball arena.
• It’s the end of another no-nonsense neighborhood eatery, Claire’s Pantry in Lake City.
• Erica Barnett at Publicola believes Mercer Islanders don’t deserve endless privilege, such as the privilege of not paying future I-90 tolls.
• Downtown merchants believe adding a kiddie play area to Westlake Park will make the retail core seem friendlier to (white upscale) families.
• Dikla Tuchman at local site Jew-Ish offers a loving tribute to the pioneer comics artist Will Eisner, best known as the creator of The Spirit (he wasn’t responsible for the lousy movie version).
• MOHAI has many boxes of Sonics memorabilia, including championship banners, just waiting to be transferred to a new Seattle NBA team.
• There are huge cost overruns and design flaws on the new 520 bridge’s pontoons. Yes, I included that because I love to say the word “pontoons.”
• There’s a newly revised waterfront park scheme. It’s better than the one originally devised by the hi-priced NYC architects. But to me it’s still too devoted to world-classness, not enough to being useful to people who live here.
• Matt Hale, beaten a year ago by still-unidentified thugs after his shift as a Belltown condo doorman, is “still struggling.”
• Hanford nuke-waste leaks could be as high as 1,000 gallons a year.
• Could the making of new pinball game machines finally be on the rise?
• Lost among all the gripes about host Seth McFarlane’s rude unfunniness, there was another controversy at the Oscars (née the Academy Awards, a name totally unuttered at this last ceremony). Rhythm & Hues, which produced the computer animation seen in the multi-award-winning Life of Pi, is bankrupt and laid off  over 200 staffers. It couldn’t compete against subsidized overseas studios. When Pi visual-effects director Bill Westenhofer gave his acceptance speech he tried to mention this, but his mic was promptly cut off when he did.
• In less prestigious protest campaigns, some people are really upset that McDonald’s has phased out Chicken Selects, perhaps the only truly food-like thing on its regular menu.
• James Howard Kuntsler says the “era of the giant chain stores” is over. He thinks it will lead to a resurgence of mom n’ pop retail. I see it as more like the ultimate triumph of Internet “e-tail.”

gawker.com

• Despite the popular belief, Jay Ward didn’t have a thing to do with the ’60s TV cartoon series Underdog. One of the people who did, William Watts Biggers, has died.
• That “retroactive ‘potential dancing’ tax” thang is a real death threat to live music throughout the state. The Legislature needs to hear that you want this ridiculous measure repealed.
• Poor Macklemore. Just as the rest of the nation learns about Seattle’s great white rap hope, people call him a “sellout.”
• We must say goodbye to one of the Seattle art scene’s behind-the-scenes heroes, gallery owner Mia McEldowney.
• Another unexpected fallout of the ebook book: a revived interest in short-story collections.
• Yes, in this Internet age, there are still uncountable films, TV shows, and sound recordings you just can’t see or hear.
• Al Gore asserts that the “Tea Party” movement was really a carefully orchestrated “astroturf” (fake grassroots) “movement,” led by the Koch Brothers and Big Tobacco.
• Those campaigns to get tons of Facebook “Likes”® against cancer, for cute puppies, etc? Yep, they’re scams.

haley young, via seattlemag.com

You really ought to see These Streets, the new play at ACT about five women in the ’90s local rock scene.

Its writers (Gretta Harley, Sarah Rudinoff, Elizabeth Kenny; pictured above) were there. They know of what they speak.

I mentioned in my book Loser how the national media’s false “grunge” stereotype included “no women in sight, not even as video models.”

But in the real Seattle scene, women were involved in leading roles from the start, on stage (Kim Warnick, Sue Ann Harkey, Barbara Ireland) and off (managers, venue owners, photographers, zine publishers, etc.).

Now, the truth may at last become better known.

• Phil Smart Sr., 1920-2013: Whatever qualms he might have originally had about being a WWII vet selling German cars, Seattle’s premier import-car dealer long since got over them. Not that he didn’t have heart. He proved that by donating not just money but time and personal attention to Children’s Hospital and other area charities. I learned through intermediaries that he was a great fan of my book Vanishing Seattle, and ordered copies to give to friends.
• Seattle was named America’s sixth “most walkable big city.”
• There’s a new techno record label in town called “KRecordings.” Are they aware there’s another recording outfit in Western Washington with a similar name, and has been for some 30 years?
• That Wash. Post story linked-to here earlier this week? The one predicting free “super wifi” nationwide, merely pending the allocation of bandwidth? Forget it. Just an urban legend. Darn.
• Remember the inventor of the touch-tone phone by playing some keypad songs.
• Three of the Big Six book publishers are collaborating (don’t dare call it “conspiring”) to start up their own online bookselling site, Bookish.
• And for now, please enjoy French director Patrick Bokanowski’s surrealist short masterpiece The Woman Who Powders Herself.

via imcdb.org

• What was that car in that movie? There’s an online database for that.
• As we patiently await the NBA owners’ vote that will likely bring back the Sonics, there’s word of a hockey team that may be in need of a buyer and/or new home. Seattle, alas, doesn’t have an NHL-ready space. The hockey configuration of KeyArena is too small and awkward. Until a new arena’s built, the closest thing we’ve got is the Tacoma Dome, whose ice-making gear was removed and would need replacing.
• City Councilmember Jean Godden vividly explains why we cannot, dare not, return to the bad old days before legal abortion.
• A homeless camp in Bremerton was shut down after five years.
• Charles Mudede finds sublime meaning in Macklemore’s “Thrift Store” rap.
• KOMO has kind words for Jet City Stream, the new all-local online radio station.
• The recently-deceased dad of local music-scene vet Ben London was an innovative avant-garde composer.
• One of those online coupon dot-coms doubled its sales and still lost over half a billion.
• The return of vinyl has inevitably led into the return of cassette-only music releases and evrn cassette-only labels.
• Zoe Triska at Huff Post really hates classic novels with inappropriate, “commercial” covers tacked on, especially when they’re aimed at teen girls:

the aurora kmart in 2002

• Seattle’s last Kmart store, at 130th and Aurora, has lost its lease and is closing. It first opened in 1968 as a branch of White Front, the long-defunct California chain that begat Toys “R” Us.
• Daniel B. Wood at the Christian Science Monitor asks whether Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is “too high-tech for its own good.”
• Do we want the Arboretum’s “ramps to nowhere,” the only surviving legacy of the rightfully-halted R.H. Thompson Expressway project of the early 1970s, to be removed? I say no.
• Could legal “pirate” (quasi-unlicensed) radio be coming to Seattle?
• How to guarantee a huge turnout at a city hearing: make it about making the rules for legal pot sales.
• R.I.P. Mary Shirley, who with her ex- Microsoft exec hubby was a major art collector and Seattle Art Museum donor.
• Local blue-eyed-rap star Macklemore has one devout anti-fan in Brandon Sodenberg (“safe-as-fuck, liberal meme-rap”).
• In case you’d forgotten, the Chihuly Museum people promised a kids’ playground and a gallery space for other Northwest artists, in exchange for taking up a huge chunk of Seattle Center land. Neither is anywhere in sight.
• In “boring” news, the big waterfront tunnel digging machine got some small but significant damage during testing in Japan.
• Janie Stilgoe at The Guardian says the days of “content” web sites scrambling to game Google’s search results through “search engine optimization” are over. Google’s revamped its algorithms specifically to discourage it. Instead, Stilgoe says web sites (including news sites) should embrace “content marketing,” whatever that is.
• And let’s end it for today with a scenic tour past some “Faded Motels of the Rust Belt.”

via huffington post