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).

As the eyes of the Earth turn again to Mars, let us look back at one of the most surreal and modern-arty “educational” films ever made, the Disney studio’s animated docudrama Mars and Beyond. Made in luscious color, it premiered in black and white on the Disneyland anthology TV show in 1957, just months after the Soviet satellite Sputnik launched the “space race.”

• The beautiful 1906 former home of the progressive Seattle First United Methodist Church will become the next home of the homophobic, reactionary Mars Hill Church.
• Ezell’s Fried Chicken isn’t Ezell’s fried chicken anymore. Ezell Stephens was kicked out of the operation by now-former business partners. He’s now got a new chicken chain, Heaven Sent.
• Gibson Guitar now admits it did, indeed, illegally import endangered “exotic woods.”
• Companies who treat customers rudely can’t hide in the age of social media. Today’s example: Horizon Air.
• Local singer-songwriter and lush-soundscape creator Erik Blood has a new concept album, all about nostalgia for the days of “porno chic.” Title: Touch Screen.
• Another creative indie music maker, “geek rock” troubadour Jonathan Coulton, wonders out loud what’ll happen when home 3D printers can produce fully functional substitutes for manufactured consumer goods.
• And Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan decries the Pitchfork festival circuit as the ruination of any real “alternative” music.

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.”

ioffer.com

The first Spider-Man cartoon series (ABC, 1967-70) is fondly remembered by the geekerati, not only for its low-budget thrills but for its bold, saucy, spooky music.

You know the theme song, perhaps from its many remakes and cover versions. (It’s the only song the Ramones slowed down when they covered it!)

The background music has been a lot harder to track down.

Among the reasons why:

• No soundtrack album was made at the time of the original series run.
• The series had two different production companies, one of which folded after the first season.
• The animation was produced in New York, but the soundtracks were produced in Toronto (for budget reasons).
• Nobody held onto any detailed production notes.

Fans eventually figured out that most of the music cue for seasons 2 and 3 came from KPM, a “library music” provider based in London (and now owned by the about-to-be-dismembered EMI).

Once KPM put up a website with samples of its library, these fans sorted out which tracks had been used on Spider-Man, and began to post some of them online.

But that left the season 1 background cues, composed expressly for the show by Ray Ellis and Bob Harris.

As this 2007 story on WFMU’s blog goes, some longtime fans of the show tracked down Ellis in L.A. He told them he’d left the original tapes behind when he moved from New York, but would track them down the next time he went there. Ellis died in 2000, before ever making that trip.

Other fans later reached Harris’s widow, who said she had no idea about the Spider-Man music tapes’ existence.

Not only were the original recordings a dead-end, no M&E tracks (music-and-sound-effects soundtracks, which some studios keep for foreign-language redubbing) were around either. Only the dialogue-heavy final episodes.

Dan O’Shannon, a writer-producer who’s worked on Cheers, Frasier, and Modern Family, is another of the ’60s Spider-Man‘s lifelong obsessive fans. O’Shannon’s taken it upon himself to reassemble the first-season cues.

So far he’s posted 34 tracks. He’s mixed and matched sections of the same tunes from different episodes (or different parts of the same episode) to avoid the dialogue.

O’Shannon hasn’t, however, been able (or wanted) to edit out the frequent THWIP! sound effect of Spidey’s web shooters.

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.)

The Seafair Torchlight Parade is more than a relic of “a simpler time,” or an opportunity for Seattle merchants and restaurants to make money from visiting suburbanites and exurbanites.

It’s an opportunity for all of us to get back in touch with the values and aesthetics that helped make this city great.

At a time and place where these values are often scoffed at, Seafair proclaims there’s still plenty to admire in squareness.

Squares gave us the Space Needle. Squares gave us Boeing (and, hence, the “international jet set”). Squares gave us computers and software.

Towns at at least a little removed from the metro core still understand the positive aspects of squareness, and revel in them. I come from one of these.

Remember: Square DOES NOT necessarily equal boring or white. Values of family, tradition, and togetherness cut across all ethnic and subcultural lines.

There are three special things to mention about this year’s parade. The first is the Seafair Clowns’ heartfelt tribute to Chris Wedes/J.P. Patches.

The second thing was something I’d previously noticed last month at the gay parade—spectators using cam-equipped iPads to get a better-than-the-naked eye view of the proceedings.

And finally, what was Grand Marshal (and Fastbacks drummer #2) Duff McKagan doing in a horse and buggy? Wouldn’t a bitchin’ vintage muscle car be more his flavor?

The Burke Museum has posted a lovely You Tube video showing how the Pioneer Square area was not only settled by Seattle’s founders but altered, filled in, and transformed from a little isthmus into the historic district it is today.

• A B.C.-based blogger about classic cartoons offers his own tribute to J.P. Patches, on whose show he first saw many of those shorts.
• Meanwhile, sometime Seattle musician (and this year’s Seafair grand marshal) Duff McKagan cites the Patches show as exemplifying/promoting a quirky, particularly “Seattle” sense of humor.
• Paul Constant believes the Seattle library levy would stand a better chance of passage if its promoters expressed more appreciation toward librarians, not just toward buildings and acquisitions.
• The Dept. of Justice deal with the Seattle Police includes a court appointed monitor and strict reporting of “uses of force.”
• You’ve got about a month to get your needles together for the big quilters’ convention.
• A Florida renegade Republican claims his state party has deliberately tried to suppress the black vote.
• Paul Krugman suggests Mitt Romney’s wealth, and the insularity that goes with it, is his potential undoing.
• If you don’t have health insurance, today’s Republican Party officially doesn’t give a flying frack about you.
• The number of “swing states” in this Presidential election: 8. That’s it.
• Pat Buchanan really needn’t worry about the Republicans facing long-term oblivion as America becomes steadily less white. Some future generation of GOP operatives could easily dump the racism (disguised and otherwise), and instead proclaim that passive-aggressive fealty to Big Money is for everyone.
• Roger Rosenblatt wants writers to “write great;” that is, to go beyond the merely personal and embrace reality’s greater issues.
• In the opposite direction from “writing great,” there’s now an online Fifty Shades of Grey-esque cliché generator.
• And finally, this day’s most incisive, most informative piece of Seattle Times reportage:

Cafe Racer was first opened by Kurt Geissel and then business partner Staci Dinehart in 2003, originally as the Lucky Dog Espresso.

First with Dinehart and then with longtime manager Ben Dean, Geissel built it into a place that was everything to many people—a coffeehouse, diner, bar, dual art-exhibition space (both permanent and rotating exhibits), eclectic live music venue, and gathering place for both Ravenna/Roosevelt area locals and for several citywide subcultures.

Geissel kept his outside day job all that time, pouring everything the cafe made back into it. It made the front page of the Sunday New York Times arts section for its Sunday all-ages improv-music shows, the “Racer Sessions.”

Some of the other people most responsible for Racer’s rise have included:

• Marlow Harris and Jo David (longtime arts-scene figures who curate the permanent exhibit of unfortunate amateur painting, the Official Bad Art Museum of Art),
• Jim Woodring (creator of the acclaimed graphic-novel series Frank; he led drawing classes at the cafe and cofounded its cartoonists’ peer group Friends of the Nib),
• Andrew Swanson (cofounder of the Racer Sessions),
• Leonard Meuse (the cafe’s chef, who kept a varied comfort food menu going in a too-small kitchen space), and
• Drew Keriakedes, aka Shmootzi the Clod (the round-earringed veteran of the local alt-circus and performance art scenes; he booked most of the musical acts at the cafe, and led its Thursday house band God’s Favorite Beefcake).

As you all know, Meuse and Keriakedes were at the cafe the morning of May 30, when a mentally unstable former customer came in and started shooting. He killed Keriakedes and three other people, and shot Meuse. He fled, shot and killed a woman outside Town Hall, took her car, and was finally found by police in West Seattle, where he fatally shot himself.

Geissel has said he was actually making more money with Racer closed, thanks to insurance. But friends and loyal customers pretty much demanded he reopen. After take a couple of weeks off to get his own head together, he and a crew of volunteers cleaned up and repainted the place and installed a new bar.

Reopening day was all hugs and smiles and closure. There seemed to be a collective sense, not of “normalcy” but of triumph. Meuse was working. Woodring was on hand.

So was Geissel, hauling in fresh supplies of hamburger buns and Tater Tots.

He’s said that not reopening would be letting “the bad” win. Bringing Cafe Racer back, he’s also said, was a process fed by “the tremendous love” expressed by everyone who’s frequented it.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

wikimedia commons, via komo-tv

• Drugs? Guns? Codeine pain pills? Forget it. What U.S. Customs is really cracking down against on the Canadian border is a bigger threat to America than all those combined. Beware the dreaded candy Kinder Eggs.
• Starbucks apparently has an image problem in NYC.
• How to get shoppers away from dot-coms and back to the malls? How ’bout wine bars, yoga classes, craft-making groups, and jeans stores with special butt-view mirrors?
• Outside estimates put the cost of a spiffed-up Seattle waterfront near a cool billon. That’s a heckuva lot for what’s essentially just another group of “world class” windswept plazas (and we’ve already got more than we need of those). I still say: scrap most of that, bring back the Waterfront Streetcar, and put an amusement park at Pier 62-63.
• The big winner in the demise of Washington’s state liquor stores? Oregon’s state liquor stores.
• Deja Vu’s Dreamgirls really doesn’t want to leave SoDo, not even for a big buyout by the arena developers.
• In the immortal words of Mr. Costello, I don’t wanna go to Chelsea.
• Link Light Rail is three years old and more popular than ever.
• Macklemore’s new pro-gay-marriage hiphop track is getting quite the national attention.
• Boeing wants more engineers and more training for future engineers. Oh, and it also wants more Federal money.

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.

youchosewrong.tumblr.com

• Ever feel like life’s one big choose-your-adventure book and you’re hopeless stuck on the wrong path? Then enjoy these unhappy endings at “You Chose Wrong.”
• It turns out that with NBC taking full control of MSNBC.com (it already wholly owns MSNBC TV), some or all of the website’s 80 Redmond-based editorial positions will move to the New York region. Just what I need: more laid off journalists in the Seattle area competing for the same scarce jobs.
• The teases of an Almost Live! reunion have been partly revealed. The new venture, The (206), will be an online, not broadcast, series. (This probably means short self-contained skits, not half-hour package episodes.) The only announced performers so far are John Keister, Pat Cashman, and Cashman’s son Chris.
• Got construction or construction-management knowhow but not a job? Do as Gordon Lightfoot said and be Alberta bound.
• When sunscreen is outlawed in Tacoma schools, only outlaws won’t have face blisters.
• KPLU remembers the Seattle (specifically, Cornish College) roots of avant-music giant John Cage.
• Kitty Wells, 1920-2012: The original “queen of country music” had a rawer, less subdued sound and image than Patsy Cline (the only female country singer urban hipsters have heard of, still). Wells’ biggest hit, “(It Wasn’t God Who Made) Honky Tonk Angels,” was an answer song to Hank Thompson’s “The Wild Side of Life.” Today, only country historians remember the latter.
• The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only “online newspaper,” might disappear by the end of the year. The real Daily, thankfully, is here to stay.
• Huffington Post blogger Spencer Critchley (which would be a great character name for a romance-novel hero!) says Romney’s guys are foolishly running a TV-style campaign in the Internet age. By this, Critchley isn’t talking about ad expenditures so much as the operating mentality, imagining that a candidate’s superficial “brand image” is all that matters.

comicsbronzeage.com

Just Sayin’ Dept: Here’s something that hasn’t been publicized much in the World’s Fair 50th anniversary celebrations.

• Could the Almost Live! cast (or a key portion of it) be reuniting in a new project? A site called The206.tv is being coy n’ teasing about it, at least for now.
• Cafe Racer will reopen. And it’ll look better than ever.
• Seattle’s own Ezell’s has the nation’s greatest fried chicken, according to a highly manipulable Esquire online poll.
• Danny Westneat sees the Sonics Arena plan as a much better deal than the one that was used to rebuild Husky Stadium.
• No, there won’t be a zip line in West Seattle’s Lincoln Park.
• No, there won’t be an Airbus factory in Wash. state. But Gov. Gregoire would really like Airbus to buy parts and services from some of the same local subcontractors and suppliers that service Boeing.
• Just as Rush Limbaugh has his paid phony callers, Mitt Romney buses and flies in loyalist rooters to his campaign speeches. Even to the NAACP!
• It’s the 20th anniversary of the first photo ever posted to a Web site. It was a plug for a retro-cabaret combo comprising “administrative assistants and significant others of scientists” at CERN, the Swiss lab where both the WWW was invented and the Higgs-Boson Particle was discovered. The hereby-linked article includes some of their science-nerd-chic novelty repertoire.
• No, online-meme followers, Bill Gates did not speak at some random unidentified high school and tell the kids, “Life is not fair. Get used to it.” That whole text comes from a newspaper op-ed column dating back to 1996.

Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).

• I can tell you that hate-filled, hyper-aggressive online “comment trolls” existed back in the 1980s days of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and 300-baud acoustic modems. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times sees their antecedents back even further. A lot further.
• There’s only one million-selling music album so far this year. It actually came out last year.
• Jon Talton explains how tax cuts are “the god that failed.”
• ACT Theatre will have the U.S. premiere of a play by Brit mega-playwright Alan Ayckbourn next year. And he’s personally coming over to direct it. This is just about the most establishment-prestige you can get in the play world.