makela steward via rainiervalley.komo.com

Welcome to all our kind readers who still have Internet connections after “Malware Monday.” In today’s randomosity:

• Let’s congratulate the Seattle woman who just became Ms. Plus Size America.
• The Tacoma Art Museum is getting a big collection of “western American art,” and a big new building addition to put it in.
• Wash. state’s wine biz has become big enough for the Gallo empire to move in on it, buying up Covey Run and Columbia Winery. I remember, of course, the late ’70s days when Gallo was radical America’s favorite brand-to-hate, a status later taken by Nike and later still by Wal-Mart.
• Another sometimes-radical-hated company, Apple, said it will stop submitting its products for “green electronics certification.”
• Ex-Posie Ken Stringfellow has done a lot since his last solo CD in 2004, including abandoning the States to become a free man in Paris. Now he’s finally getting another set of music out, incluidng a duet with comedian Margaret Cho. Title: Danzig in the Moonlight.
• One fifth of all “adult fiction” physical books sold in the U.S. this past spring were Fifty Shades of Grey (the submission-porn story set in Seattle by a British author) or one of its sequels.
• Underwater oil-exploration teams have found the lost city of Atlantis in the North Sea, if you believe the U.K. tabloid Daily Mail (which you really shouldn’t).
• As banking-behemoth blunders spread to the Brits, one analyst notes that, within the industry, “it had become acceptable or perhaps even encouraged to provide false information.”
• David Carr summarizes recent developments in the newspaper biz, and, as you might expect, sees a biz whose troubles just keep getting worse.
• Romney (hearts) the Koch Bros., those campaign-funny-money far-right oil/chemical/paper-towel barons who occasionally claim to be “libertarian” (as in, you know, protecting the “freedom” of mega-corps to control everything and ruin the planet).
• Extreme heat, like they’ve had everywhere in the contiguous states except here, is lousy for the fish.
• And finally, local-politics site extraordinaire PubliCola is back! Yaaaayy!

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.)

Nothing says freedom, pride, and independence like being able to crack jokes about how nothing says freedom, pride, and independence like watching stuff get blown up.

Especially if it’s at someplace as beautiful and as centrally situated as Lake Union.

Did we mention yet how there was a great huge full moon in a cloudless sky, on the night after the first warm day in weeks? Well there was.

For the first time since the Washington Mutual implosion, Seattle’s fireworks had a big-name sponsor this year (Starbucks). Last year, a local tech-job placement company stepped in; the year before that, local talk radio hosts successfully pleaded for donations to keep the show going.

So: One more “best show ever.” Twenty minutes of color light and noise on a grand scale. And unlike the San Diego show, the rockets didn’t all go off at once.

In case you had a TV on during a home viewing party but muted the sound after the fireworks were over, the band playing live to round out the telecast was Pickwick. They’re the current neo-neo-neo-blue-eyed-soul sensations around town.

Back when the Stranger was still assigning me stories (just never running them), I researched the long and convoluted history of the Eitel Building at Second and Pike. Mr. Savage believed it might be cool to have a story about what he described as “Seattle’s only downtown slum” or words to that effect.

I’d first come to know the 1904-built midrise medical-office building (it was called “the 2nd & Pike Building” by the 1980s) as the storefront home to Time Travelers, a record and comix shop that was a vital early punk-scene hangout.

At the time I researched that later-killed Stranger piece, its then-owner wanted to demolish it for the usual Exciting New Office/Residential/Retail blah blah blah.

But shortly afterward, in 2006, the city slapped landmark status on it, against the owner’s wishes.

At the height of the real estate bubble a few years back, Master Use Permit boards appeared on it proclaiming an imminent 16- to 22-story structure that would incorporate the Eitel’s outer facades but nothing else. That, obviously, never happened.

But now, just weeks before Target opens in the Newmark megaproject across the street, new developers announced a new scheme.

The Eitel will remain intact on the outside, with a “boutique hotel” opening inside sometime in 2014.

•

But to me it will always be what I’ve always known it to be—one of the last major surviving, un-gentrified remnants of what the Pike Place Market and surrounding blocks to be like. A hard, scruffy place whose “original elegance” had long since settled into comfy sleaze.

The Eitel’s storefronts and basement spaces have held a wide variety of uses over the decades, few of them frou-frou.

There was the original practice space for Ze Whiz Kidz, a pioneering gay cabaret troupe. There was the needle exchange. There were several indie and local-chain fast food outlets, including the current longstanding Osaka Teriyaki.

What there wasn’t was anything on floors 2 through 7. The upper floors have been boarded up since at least 1978. Even the occupied parts have had little in the way of basic upkeep.

The one major change to the exterior cladding was a black faux-deco treatment, done some time in the 1970s and not in keeping with its original appearance.

But that just made it a more lovable little victim of neglect.

Nice to know it will survive, even if it’s not as the funky place I’ve known.

'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.

lindsay lowe, kplu

• It’s like Animal Planet’s Whale Wars, only without the whales. It’s Greenpeace submarines trailing Shell oil-exploration rigs in the Arctic.
• There’s a “celebration of life” service for my mother today in Marysville.
• Huge swaths of Wash. state exist in a “rural information ghetto,” with little local news media, little or no broadband access, and even spotty or no cellphone reception.
• Local bands in Spin‘s all-time greatest-band-names countdown include Mudhoney and Bikini Kill. But Motorhead as the #1 greatest band name of all time? Sorry. Do over.
• Speaking of which, Duff McKagan will be this year’s Seafair Grand Marshall. Still waiting for Mark Arm’s equally deserved official recognition.
• Online Media Shrinkage Watch: Salon.com, one of the pioneers of web-based punditry, is bringing in exactly half the revenue it needs to survive.
• Who owns the rights to the classic series Route 66 and Naked City? Hard to tell. What’s more certain is that the two shows’ exec producer had some very rough final days.
• If the producers of The Looney Tunes Show had wanted to effectively depict Bugs and co. in a domestic setting, they should have perused old issues of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies comic books.
• Tired of stick figure construction workers? Then look at these animated .GIFs in which the moving objects tend to be graceful women’s skirts and hair.

beautifullife.info

komo-tv

• More tsunami debris is showing up on Northwest beaches. Darn, I remember when all you’d find there were dead seals.
• Publicola, having just broken up with Crosscut, has announced its nuptials with Seattle Met. The lifestyle mag will own and host the local inside-politics blog, starting some time next month.
• The Downtown Seattle Association’s raising money to install a semi-permanent family playground at Westlake Park (which would just coincidentally make it a less hospitable locale for, say, Occupiers).
• Pearl Jam’s biggest nemesis isn’t Ticketmaster but its own ex-business manager.
• Seattle’s arts world is a nearly half-billion dollar business. And that’s just the nonprofit side.
• But the arts alone (or the gays or the hipsters) isn’t enough to drive a city’s economy, let alone turn one around. That’s the lesson from Minneapolis writer Frank Bures, who’s out to debunk pundit Richard Florida’s whole “Creative Class” shtick.
• KIRO-TV’s exposé of an elementary school janitor was a big hunk of lies n’ half-truths, according to some local “media watchdog” types.
• The president of the U. of Virginia was fired, allegedly for nothing more than insufficiently sucking up to corporate interests.

Band name suggestion of the month: “Premier Instruments of Pleasure.” (From the “Sexual Wellness” section of the Amazon subsidiary Soap.com.)

• The new Microsoft tablet device will be called the “Surface.” How, er, superficial does that sound?
• Plastic shopping bags disappear in Seattle on 7/1. You have 12 days to stock up on those magnificently reusable Bartell Drug bags while you still can.
• Local hiphop artist Prometheus Brown would like you to care about the victims of gun violence, and not only when those victims are white people from “nice” areas.
• Nick Eaton joins city and county officials in jeering at the Seattle Times‘ fact-stretchin’ anti-Sonics arena editorials. In other news, somebody still reads the Seattle Times editorials.
• The waterfront streetcars Seattle can’t seem to find a place for anymore, even though the folks loved ’em? St. Louis transit officials would like ’em.
• There’s a 20-year-old intern/blogger at NPR’s All Songs Considered named Emily White. (This is NOT the Emily White who used to work for The Stranger.) She recently wrote a confession that she’s almost never paid for the music she’s downloaded. In response, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery penned a screed denouncing her and people like her for shelling out bucks for computers and Internet connections but not for the content they thereby attain:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

• Elsewhere in piracyland, when last we mentioned The Oatmeal online cartoonist Matthew Inman, he’d complained about a “social media” humor site that had posted his art without credit or payment. Then an attorney for that site sued him for defaming his client’s character. Inman replied back by starting an online fundraising campaign for the amount of the lawsuit—only with the proceeds going to charities instead. Now, the attorney has re-sued Inman, and has sued the site hosting the fund drive and even the charities it benefits. To quote one of America’s greatest contributions to comic satire, “Whadda maroon.”

• 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.

• Missed the transit of Venus? Fret not! You can still catch The Myrtle of Venus!
• The lovely graphic at the left of this site’s “sidebar” column, inviting donations for the Cafe Racer shooting victims, was done by our ol’ pal Nick Vroman, an ex-Seattleite now in Japan. He’s also got a lovely site reviewing Japanese cult films.
• With the arrival of Wednesday came The Stranger’s package of Cafe Racer shooting and mourning articles.
• Joel Connelly calls the “war on drugs” America’s “second lost war of the half century.”
• Contemporary art, product logos, graphic design, even web page design—all these fields and more are frequently invaded by rank copycats, whose thievery can be caught red-handed at the site You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
• Health Scare O’ the Week: the allegedly imminent arrival of drug-resistant gonorrhea.
• The next frontier in confronting idiot misogyny: Multiplayer gaming.
• Cell phone users are using their cell phones as phones a lot less. Companies plan to respond by raising rates. Huh?
• Our heroine Amanda Palmer wanted to raise $100,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, to release and promote her next record. She ended up raking in a cool million.
• Social-economy guru Richard Florida offers up some theories behind the revival of downtown retail around the country.

The locally owned Wave Broadband is taking over the dreadful and bankrupt BS Cable (Broadstripe). Yay!

The first part of the transition is the switching of “on demand” program suppliers, effective Wednesday.

This means I’m looking over my current “on demand” lineup while I still can.

I didn’t know I received something called The Karaoke Channel!

I’m now listening to lead-vocal-less covers of the greatest hits of yesterday and today, accompanied by scrolling lyrics and generic stock footage of women twirling around on the beach.

Oh, why did I not discover this sooner?

(PS: I could list the songs from which I culled the above images, but I’m certain you know all of them, you pop-o-philes you.)

I’m still having trouble finding words to say about the Cafe Racer tragedy.

At least I can give you pictures of just a little bit of the near-citywide outpouring of grief, condolence, and mutual support.

The above images are from last Thursday afternoon.

The following are from Sunday evening, when the weekly jazz jam session went ahead as scheduled—in the alley between the cafe and the Trading Musician music store.

For up-to-date word about memorial and benefit shows for the victims’ families and the one shooting survivor (taking place all around town, just about every day), go to caferacerlove.org.

Owner Kurt Geissel (who was not on the premises at the time of the shootings) has said he will reopen. Just when, he hasn’t decided yet.

As many of you know, I’ve been at least a semi-regular customer at Cafe Racer on Roosevelt, ever since it opened almost a decade ago as the Lucky Dog Cafe.

It’s been a food, booze, and coffee joint, the site of Marlow Harris and Jo David’s “Official Bad Art Museum of Art,” a space for more ambitious art works, a home to comix-drawing sessions, and an eclectic live-music live music. It was the latter role that got it a big front-page paean in the Sunday NY Times arts section.

The music booker at Racer also led its house band, performing at the space at least once a week. He’d been a sword swallower in the long-running Circus Contraption troupe.

He, and another member of the band, were among the three who died from a gunman’s madness. Even if a motive for the shooting gets discovered, it will still be, and will always be, senseless.

I wish all condolences and serenity to Racer’s staff, its owner Kurt Geissel, and the many communities that coalesce there.

dangerousminds.net

• With the death of Robin Gibb, only one Bee Gee (Barry) is still with us. I could try to say something about this tragic loss; but, you know, it’s only words.…
• The UK mag NME lists “50 Massively Depressing Facts About Music.” Most of them have to do with great artists who’ve sold a heckuva lot fewer units than mediocre artists with great marketing. In other words, the same gripe the oldsters used to say about that teenybopper “rock n’ roll” crap pushing out quality material like “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”.
• As SIFF moves into full gear, a UK film critic has pot out a book listing 100 Ideas That Changed Film. I haven’t seen the full book, but I have seen the list. Not included in it: product placement, Tyler Perry, or “soundtrack” records that don’t include the actual music in the movie.
• The downtown condo biz is apparently back from the dead.
• Wearing hot pink duct tape in lieu of a top in a bar: cool. Freaking out and attacking cops: not so cool.
• The big Facebook IPO is apparently a failure. The offering’s megabank underwriters had to step in and maneuver in order to keep the stock’s price at or near the offering price through the course of the first day. Perhaps “retail investors” felt Facebook was too reminiscent of the first-wave dot coms (no real “product,” just a lot of site visitors (for now; that could drastically change). Or perhaps there just aren’t as many suckers who still have money to waste anymore.
• Thanks in part to our country’s innumerable tax loopholes, the U.S. has done better than some countries at keeping its own super-rich, instead of losing ’em to citizenships-of-convenience in the Caribbean or Singapore (or wherever Mick Jagger officially resides these days).
• “Black bloc” anarchist protests are getting more violent. Official reactions to them are getting more violent than that, on a virtually logarithmic scale.
• Radical playwright Bertolt Brecht had some caustic caution words against folk who considered themselves too good to be involved in politics. (I don’t know whether Brecht said these words before or after he became a stooge for the East German regime.)

u.s. geological survey

Happy Mount St. Helens Day!

• Catholic anti-right-wing-archbishop protests: they’re now held every Wednesday, and they’re not for Catholics only.
• Opponents of liquor privatization in Wash. state are making one last-ditch legal challenge. They might get a decision in two weeks, after the state liquor stores will have already closed.
• There are now fewer non-Hispanic white babies in the U.S. than there are all other ethnicities of babies put together.
• The TED speech by an early Amazon investor about economic inequality and how the rich aren’t really job creators? The speech that wasn’t put up on TED’s site? It’s now been put up on TED’s site.
• And here’s the video of Children’s Hospital cancer patients lip-syncing a Kelly Clarkson anthem.
• More than 30 percent of British adults plan to buy an e-book in the next six months.
• Is North America approaching “peak car“?