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“?

This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)

• Forbes calls Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the “worst CEO” of a major U.S. company.
• Is the time right again for huge, dense residential mega-projects? The Seattle Housing Authority thinks so. It wants to rebuild Yesler Terrace (a WWII-era low-income apartment site) with a whopping 3,000 privately developed “market rate” units plus office space. That would help subsidize at least as many low-income units as are there now. It would also create a huge new upscale neighborhood just uphill from the International District, and would sop up perhaps 20 percent of new housing construction activity in the whole city.
• Item: A Seattle restaurant’s basement was one huge pot growing operation. Comment: Once again, life imitates the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Guess what? The hedge fund tycoon who wants to own a Seattle basketball team might use the team and the arena deal as hedge fund opportunities!
• Tragic news: Tacoma’s selling two closed library buildings in low income neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ acquaintance Trimpin has another mechanical music/art installation. And it’s even more haunting than his previous works.
• Lit-blogger Nicole Cushing has a beautiful interview with a Seattle treasure, horror author and punk/goth scene vet Willum Pugmire.
• Dept. of Forgotten American History: Author/activist/songwriter Julia Ward Howe created Mother’s Day as an antiwar statement.
• Here’s a concise explanation of just why “business people are terrible at governing.”
• From Cleveland to Pittsburgh and even Detroit, the young and hip (but not rich) are flocking to the Rust Belt cities!
• There’s a new iPad-only online satire magazine called “Punch!”. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary UK satire magazine Punch (published from 1841 to 1992!). Instead, its makers are inspired by the 1980s-1990s U.S. snark mag Spy.
• Publishers of e-books have determined that the best way to keep their authors’ names in the public eye is to have new stuff by them two or more times a year. This means established “name” authors are busier than ever churnin’ out the product.
• Do you, like these e-book authors, desperately need writing inspiration? Take random gibberish letters. Run them through a spell checker. Boom! Random words and phrases to trigger your imagination.

npr.org

• NPR’s Lam Thuy Vo has made a lovely infographic about the billions in earnings resulting from America’s “exports of ideas.” Movies and TV shows bring in $13 billion in overseas revenue. Software: $35 billion. Trademark licenses: $14 billion. “Industrial processes” (patents): almost $36 billion. Now you know why the “intellectual property” industries are so extremely adamant about sealing any potential leak in their legal privileges.
• Elsewhere in infographic-land, here’s a visual essay delineating how marketers, and those who sell services to marketers, have always gamed the system in both “old” and “new” media.
• Obama came to Seattle right after outing himself as a gay-marriage supporter. Yes, there was a lot of cheering for a calculated, Clinton-esque “triangulation” move, carefully strategized to gain more votes than it would cost. And I’m fine with that (the announcement and the local rave reactions to it).
• Tim Eyman: Complete tool of Big Oil and the 1 percent.
• A non-native redwood tree was planted in Tacoma more than 100 years ago. It was recently cut down, executed for the crime of having roots undermining nearby sewers and house foundations.
• Note to news sites: Editing stuff before you post it is a good idea. Especially with headlines involving the name “Dicks.”
• I’ve defended Amazon about other things, but they really oughta keep the HVAC in their warehouses in working order.
• Couldn’t happen to un-nicer guys: Chase loses a cool $2 billion on a single hedge fund.
• A Seventeen reader is petitioning the not-as-classy-as-it-used-to-be magazine. She wants it to depict models more realistically, without excessive Photoshopping.
• The singer for the band Against Me! says he’s going to become a woman. I can just imagine the package tour with Jayne County, Genesis P. Orridge, and Wendy Carlos.
• Public-sector unions in the UK (a place where such institutions still have a big measure of clout) have staged massive protests against government “austerity”…
• …while here at home, two TruthOut.org contributors claim U.S. conservatism has “hit rock bottom,” having devolved into “an unappealing philosophy of political exclusion, environmental degradation, and economic hopelessness.”

Thriller author Barry Eisler, a born-again proponent of self-publishing (and the first established author to sign with Amazon’s publishing division), told a local audience that :

1. The book industry has badly needed a forced overhaul for ages;
2. everyone in publishing who’s neither an author nor a reader is just a “middleman” (yes, even bookstores; yes, even indie bookstores);
3. authors who defend the industry’s business-as-usual are like prisoners who suffer from “Stockholm syndrome;” and
4. Amazon is no “Great Satan,” as it’s been portrayed by the NYC book biz and its NYC media pals. Rather, Eisler claims the e-tail giant is simply “injecting competition into what has been a moribund industry.”

Needless to say, in many parts of the book establishment (the most tradition-bound establishment in all the lively arts), them’s fightin’ words.

•

Meanwhile, authors Sarah Weinman and Maureen Ogle have put up separate online essays. Each questions the future of “serious non-fiction” in the digital age.

Under the old regime, profitable publishing houses subsidized this work with large advances against royalties. In many cases, the publishers knew authors would never earn these advances back. It was the companies’ way of subsidizing prestigious “loss leader” works.

But if self-publishing becomes the new business-as-usual, Weinman and Ogle ask, what will become of long, research-heavy projects—projects that could take as many as five years of an author’s full-time attention?

There’s always Kickstarter.com. That’s where local comix legend Jim Woodring is raising funds so he can work full-time on his next graphic novel.

And there are always grants, fellowships, teaching gigs, and working spouses (for those authors who can land any of them).

And there’s another answer, one that’s right under Weinman and Ogle’s proverbial noses.

Both essayists note that the most successful e-book self-publishers, thus far, are fiction writers who churn out several titles per year.

Non-fiction writers can do likewise.

They can chop up and serialize their longer works, one section at a time.

When it comes time to put out the full book, authors can still revise and re-sequence everything.

•

In another sector of the digital media disruption, music-biz attorney Ken Hertz reminds you that even (or especially) with the new marketplace, bands still face tremendous odds against “making it.”

meowonline.org

• Music/performance-art goddess and ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer explains the secret to her astounding success at raising a recording budget thru Kickstarter. It’s all about the long work of gathering and nurturing as many online supporters as you can:

Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

• After nearly a decade of study and planning, Seattle’s finally giving up on the idea of a city-owned broadband network. Pathetic.
• Time is running out for any hope of saving the historic streamlined ferry Kalakala. Estimated cost of a full restoration: $50 million.
• Ah, if only the Mariners still had some of the players they’d let slip away. If only….
• A Long Island, NY woman is accused of using her hot-dog truck as a cover for arranging “compensated dates” (to use a recent Japanese euphemism). No “sausage” or “buns” puns here, at least not today.
• A Utah woman claims to have found cocaine packed in a box of tampons. Just think of it as an extra measure of pain relief that also leaves you feeling fresh.
• Bill Maher says what everyone except Fox News viewers already knows—that many of the most fervent Obama haters are racist, with different degrees of denial.
• Meanwhile, a Washington Monthly writer believes the Presidential election will be decided by Hispanic voters (i.e., one of the groups the Rabid Right is most virulently bigoted against).
• There’s an anonymous novel out of Portland (originally self published by the author, who only calls himself “The Author”). It’s getting a lot of attention. It’s about a young man’s doomed relationship with “someone who considers Courtney Love to be her role model.” What makes it extra-special is it’s formatted like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” kids’ books. Only every choice “you” make leads to the same miserable ending. I also like the title: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life.
• Not only are grad students getting buried in piles of student-loan debt, they might not even get into the careers for which they’re studying (cf. the rising number of Ph.Ds on food stamps).
• A marketing analyst calls 2012 “the year of inverse retro-futurism.” Whatever the heck that is.

liem bahneman, via komo-tv

• There’s a moon! It’s in the sky! It’s called the supermoon!
• From the Sunday Seattle Times: The Smith Tower is on the rebound; there are sympathetic words toward Occupy Seattle sympathizers; the ex-Kleenex factory in Everett is a toxic waste site; and local students are learning to compose soundtracks for movies and video games.
• We knew it was coming. Now the original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way closes on Saturday.
• What the heck does Jay Inslee gotta do to get some press?
• Silicon Valley analyst Farhad Manjoo can’t figure out Amazon’s long-term business strategy, and ponders whether the company even has one. Hey, I don’t fully understand gravity, but I still know it’s there. Of course Amazon has a strategy. Several of them. It aims to be the world leader in online sales of tangible physical stuff, plus intangible digital stuff; to be the go-to company for online retail back-end functions and fulfillment; to rule “cloud computing” and outsourced computer services; and to remain the 500-lb. gorilla of the book biz. There now, wasn’t that simple?
• At the same site, Trevor Gilbert believes he’s figured out why Seattle has so many leading video-game companies.
• The voters of France, like the protestors of Greece, have utterly and thoroughly rejected recession-extending “austerity” regimes. They’ve elected their first Socialist government in 16 years and sending Nicolas Sarkozy packing. Will this send Sarkozy’s wife, ex-supermodel Carla Bruni, back on the runways?

• “Black Sun,” Isamu Noguchi’s donut shaped sculpture at Volunteer Park, hasn’t just inspired a Soundgarden song. Now it’s also getting its own postage stamp! (UPDATE: Turns out the stamp was issued way back in ’05. I’m even less astute about philately than I am about other topics.)
• Funhouse update: Yes, the defiantly un-cleaned-up punk club in Lower Queen Anne will be evicted, and the building razed for redevelopment, effective this Halloween. Th Funhouse owners are looking for a new location.
• When last we looked, Microsoft was suing Barnes & Noble, claiming its Nook e-book machine violated MS-owned patents. Now, MS is buying a piece of the Nook operation.
• What’s harder to find around these parts than a Thunders fan? A non-geezer-age Republican who liked Romney more than Ron Paul during this primary/caucus season.
• The rainy winter = plenty of hydro power in the coming months.
• As we remember the Seattle World’s Fair and its vision for a World of Tomorrow, a real-life “City of the Future” is being built from scratch in Portugal. Intended to house 150,000 residents, it’s planned to be a “techno-paradise of energy conservation.” Thousands of sensors will monitor and regulate everything from traffic on the streets to faults in the water supply.
• Courtney Love can’t get “completion insurance” for film roles, and the music business is in freefall. With only fashion modeling left to actively maintain her celebrity presence, she’s added a new line, that of visual artist. Samples of her debut exhibition could invite comparisons to the crayon drawings of a child-psychiatry patient.
• Delta Airlines hopes to cushion itself against high fuel prices by buying its own oil refinery.
• Last month was the 60th anniversary of the first toy ad on U.S. television. It was for the original version of Mr. Potato Head (kids had to supply their own potatoes).
• The latest print mag in fiscal rough seas: The American Prospect, for two decades one of progressive America’s top sources of news n’ analysis.
• Anti-dumping tariffs work. They’re causing Chinese companies to open factories in the U.S.
• A London department store’s offering a “luxury champagne lollipop” covered with real gold flakes. Of all the one-percenty things in the world, could this be the one-percentiest?
• Amazingly, I still have to explain to people that I hate existing in freelance-writing hell and I want to get out of it by any means necessary. Perhaps this item, by a guy who got out of the racket, will help these folks get it.

last.fm

Pere Ubu founder, noise-rock legend, and great Clevelander David Thomas is, by his own admission, a middle class boy.

And in a recent interview he claims that…

…all adventurous art is done by middle-class people. Because middle-class people don’t care. Because middle-class people don’t care. “I’m going to do what I want, because I can do something else better and make more money than this.”

At the Collapse Board site (started by ex-Seattleite Everett True), blogger Wallace Wylie begs to disagree:

It surely does not need pointing out that almost every adventurous musical innovation of the 20th Century came from working-class origins. The blues, jazz, country, rock’n’roll, soul, reggae, disco, r&b, hip-hop, techno, house; the list goes on. It would take a mixture of ignorance and arrogance on a monumental scale to appropriate all of these innovations for the middle-classes.

You can probably think of your own exceptions, in music and other artistic fields as well.

Then the Scottish-born Wylie goes on to repeat the longtime meme that most American middle-class teens didn’t know about large swaths of American blues and R&B, until they heard them from British rockers:

…While British bands were playing Chuck Berry, embryonic American garage bands were cutting their chops on ‘Gloria’ by Them. In other words, rock music is a British creation that Americans subsequently copied. Bob Dylan named his fifth album Bringing It All Back Home in reference to the fact that British bands had shown Americans music from their own country that they didn’t know existed and now it was time for an American to take these influences back.

That familiar tale neglects the role American “hip” whites (including Cleveland’s own DJ legend Alan Freed) played in bringing R&B across the color line, leading to the commercial teenybopper variant Freed billed as “rock n’ roll.”

It neglects the white garage bands (such as Tacoma’s own Fabulous Wailers) who studiously covered and imitated their favorite R&B sides, especially during the pre-Beatles years.

Methinks Wylie has his own cultural blinders with which to deal.