'off the mark' by mark parisi

• R.I.P. Bil Keane, 1912-2011. The Family Circus cartoonist plied the same realm of family homilies and deceptively simple line work for a half century. If Keane’s characters never generated the licensing income of Garfield or Dennis the Menace, they did provide a consistent note of light amusement. By staying within their own fantasy realm, with only the slightest whiff of contemporary pop-culture references. Even more notable was Keane’s good-natured willingness to let other cartoonists spoof the Circus’s delicately insular universe.
• Local singer-songwriter Heather Duby was in a horrid accident in New Jersey. She lost part of one finger, and almost lost both her hands. She’ll need a lot of rehab. There is, as you might expect, a benefit concert 11/26 at the Crocodile.
• Just what the hell is Microsoft doing as a prime sponsor of the Koch brothers’ (funders of all things wingnutted and anti-planet and anti-democracy) big Tea Party conference?
• Brendan Coffey at Forbes lists our own Russell Investments as one of the four companies that essentially control the financial world, for good or ill.
• Reuters notes Seattle’s explosion as a high tech hub. Now let’s work on getting more jobs here for non-programmers.
• The long-lost deleted scenes from David Lynch’s Blue Velvet have been found in a Seattle warehouse, and will be a bonus feature on the film’s DVD reissue.
• Punk rock history is becoming an academic specialty. Maybe I should apply for that teaching certificate.
• Amanda Hess at Good magazine depicts the late Andy Rooney as a reactionary crank who hated minorities, uppity women, and pretty much anything newer than the electric typewriter. She also describes Rooney as a man “who saw the world from his seat in a darkened library of hardcover books.” The combo of book collecting and reactionary crankiness, alas, exists far more frequently in this world than “book people” will admit.
• Paul Krugman proclaims solar energy as now being widely cost effective in many applications.
• Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” PR campaign wasn’t enough to save one horrendously bullied gay teen from suicide. In response, CBC comedy-show host Rick Mercer issued a call for more immediate action:

It’s no longer good enough for us to tell kids who are different that it’s going to get better. We have to make it better now, that’s every single one of us. Every teacher, every student, every adult has to step up to the plate.

Before Thomas Frank became a renowned author of geekily-researched anti-conservative sermon books, he co-ran a tart, biting, yet beautifully designed journal of essays called The Baffler.

It was based in Chicago for most of its existence. Its original focus was the intersecting worlds of corporate culture (including corporate “counterculture”), entertainment, and marketing. (It’s where Steve Albini’s 1994 screed against the music industry’s treatment of bands, “Some Of Your Friends Are Already This Fucked,” first appeared.) As Frank’s concerns steered toward the political, so did The Baffler‘s.

Its one consistent aspect was its irregular schedule. Though it was sometimes advertised as a “quarterly,” only 18 issues appeared from 1988 to 2009.

This will now change.

The title was bought in May by essayist/historian John Summers. Last week, Summers announced he’s attained backing from the MIT Press. MIT and Summers promise to put out three Bafflers a year for the next five years.

This is good news, because we need its uncompromising voice more than ever.

geeknuz.com

• Another nifty book, another nifty book event. This one’s on Thursday, in gallant Greenwood.
• While the “SLUT”-branding skeptics weren’t looking, the south Lake Union trolley has become quite popular, even standing-room-only at commute hours. That’s one reason why the McGinn administration has a desire named streetcar.
• Occupy Seattle’s getting really popular. Except with the cops, natch. But Mike McGinn, who’d previously asked the demonstrators to quietly move to some less conspicuous place, came out and spoke in support of their cause.
• Three hundred more people may be living on the streets as of Tuesday, as the SHARE/WHEEL homeless shelters run out of funding.
• Will the long-stalled development project informally known as the West Seattle Hole finally be built?
• The AP asks whether iTunes saved the music business. Not asked: did the music business deserve to be saved?
• Koch Industries’ record is full of bribery, dirty dealing, and the regular flouting of environmental rules. Yet these guys expect us to let them take over the entire U.S. political process.
• You’d expect Bill McKibben to endorse Occupy _____. You might not have expected the NY Times to like it.
• Some guy named David Leonhardt says America actually had more reasons to be hopeful during the Great Depression than it’s got today.
• As a nearly lifelong Led Zeppelin disliker, I found enjoyment in a video short chronicling the band’s many uncredited ripoffs of R&B pioneers.
• It couldn’t happen to a not-nicer guy: Commissioner David Stern has canceled the first two weeks of the NBA season.

from 'fantomaster' at flickr.com

The first Washington governor of my lifetime could also be considered the state’s first “modern era” leader.

At a time of postwar complacency, just after the fading of “red scare” smear campaigns (yes, there were McCarthy-esque witch hunters here too), Rosellini enacted a bold progressive agenda.

He backed the Seattle World’s Fair.

He helped organize the cleanup of Lake Washington, once a mightily polluted body. He boosted college funding.

He established a separate juvenile justice system, and improved horrendous conditions at adult prisons and mental hospitals.

He boosted economic development and infrastructure investment, including the SR 520 bridge that now bears his name.

And yeah, he also stayed lifelong allies with the likes of strip-club maven Frank Colacurcio Sr., which eventually led to the ex-governor’s last, less-than-positive headlines in the 1990s.

You can disapprove of the Colacurcio connection and still admire Rosellini’s steadfastness to longtime friendships.

And you can look at the whole of Rosellini’s works and see a man who did all he could for what he believed in, even if it cost him most of his political capital before his first gubernatorial term was up.

Would there were more like him today.

Music scene tie in: Gov. Rosellini’s press secretary was Calvin Johnson Sr., father of the K Records swami.

fanpop.com

• R.I.P. Charles Napier, 75. The square-jawed actor appeared in everything from Rambo to Silence of the Lambs and the first two Austin Powers films. But I’ll remember him for his over-the-top roles in four Russ Meyer sexploitation classics, especially as the maniacally villainous Harry Sledge in Supervixens.
• They waited from last night until this afternoon, but city police and Parks Department crews took down Occupy Seattle’s tents at Westlake Plaza. Twenty-five protesters were arrested and released. Protesters say they’ll remain at Westlake, with or without camping gear.
• Memo to Gov. Gregoire: The poor are not a budget line item to be x’ed out when it becomes incovenient.
• Consolidation marches on, health care division: Swedish and Providence want to merge.
• Could (or should) Microsoft buy Yahoo?
• Say goodbye to another big chain bookstore, the University Village branch of Barnes & Noble. Trivia: Its space was originally a branch of the long forgotten department store Rhodes of Seattle. Rhodes’ main store was where the north wing of the Seattle Art Museum is now.
• UW women’s soccer legend Hope Solo is one of four athletes to appear pseudo-nude on alternating covers of ESPN The Magazine’s “Body Issue.”
• A registered sex offender, being transported from Florida back to eastern Washington to face molestation charges, snuck out of the van somewhere in North Dakota. His excuse for escaping, upon getting re-caught: He was hungry because he was a vegetarian.
• Two NY Times bloggers claim domestic debt forgiveness would have drastic economic side effects. This means insiders are beginning to treat domestic debt forgiveness as a serious possibility.
• SST Records honcho Greg Ginn really hates YouTube.

denny hall, the uw campus's oldest building

• We’ve always known the Univ. of Washington has one of America’s most beautiful campuses. Now it’s finally getting national recognition in that regard.
• Meanwhile, the UW is participating in a research study into drunk Facebook photos.
• Mayor McGinn says he admires the spirit behind the Occupy Seattle folks, but still orders them to remove their tents from Westlake Plaza or risk getting arrested. Protesters say they’ll take the risk.
• The American Planning Association calls Tacoma’s Point Defiance Park one of America’s “great public spaces.” As the old bumper sticker says, “Admit It, Tacoma. You’re Beautiful.”
• NYTimes.com’s automated ad placement bots placed an ad for Starbucks’ Italian Roast above an article about you-know-who.
• Starbucks boss Howard Schultz’s next idea to save the economy: donation boxes in the stores, where customers can contribute to community development groups. They’d use the cash to help small businesses create jobs. Of course, if Schultz really wanted to help jump-start the economy at the personal level, he could pay his own baristas a living wage….
• The message from the Gates Foundation, the City of Seattle, and others: Don’t be no fool, stay in school.
• The Zune, Microsoft’s would-be iPod killer, is dead.
• Layoffs hit another supposedly recession-proof industry, nuclear-waste cleanup.
• A cause of death I, for one, hadn’t heard of—”detergent suicide.”
• Lee Fang believes the Occupy Wall Street protests “embody the values of the real Boston Tea Party.”
• Paul Krugman analyzes big bankers’ testimony in a Congressional hearing about the financial crisis. He sees the bankers claiming to be clueless, as an alternative to admitting to be evil.
• Obama’s finally speaking out against GOP state legislatures’ spate of anti-voting laws.
• The Fox broadcast network is threatening to cancel The Simpsons unless its voice actors accept a 45 percent pay cut.
• And now for fun, here are some fun Mexican movie-theater lobby cards.

lpcoverlover.com

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Sylvia Robinson, the singer-producer-entrepreneur whose journey went from ’50s pop R&B to disco to (literally) the invention of hiphop.
• A little-noticed legislative loophole gives Safeco Field a parking-tax deal that could cost the city $300,000 a year. If the Mariners’ management only been that clever in running its baseball team…
• In honor of National Dwarfism Awareness Month. Caffe Ladro made its “tall man” logo shorter.
• A long-stalled Paul Allen Belltown condo tower project will now be built as apartments.
• More dirty business by the big banks: fees for debit card use.
• The allegedly latest thing among the ultra ultra rich: luxury camping, or “glamping.”
• Glenn Greenwald believes corporate-owned media have an agenda in ignoring or scorning anti-corporate activism.
• Toure waxes nostalgic for the good old days of centralized mass-media culture.
• Clean up your dog poop and keep it out of Puget Sound.

Twenty years ago this week, Seattle unleashed three monumental media products upon the world: Nirvana’s Nevermind, Pearl Jam’s Ten, and the first issue of The Stranger.

Hard to believe, but in what turned out to be the final years before the World Wide Web became a universal thing, when online media still meant pay-by-the-minute AOL and CompuServe, was born what may have turned out to be Seattle’s next-to-last important newsprint periodical (Real Change is a few years younger).

This week’s Stranger makes note of the 20th anniversary of a monumental media product. And the anniversary it makes of is not that of its own debut.

from smelllikedirt.wordpress.com

• Seattle’s rotting produce and other food waste goes to a composting plant in Everett. Our newest export: stink.
• If, as the Times‘ Danny Westneat claims, Microsoft no longer needs over $100 million instate tax breaks, does the Times still need its own state tax breaks?
• As the last beams at the old Boeing Plant #2 come down, Jon Talton notes that the old Boeing corporate culture is also now mostly gone, replaced by Jack Welch-style cost cutters and bean counters.
• Local essayist Seth Kolloen compares the early years of Pearl Jam to the Kemp/Payton era Sonics. At least we still have Vedder & company.
• Descendents of Capt. William Clark (of “Lewis and…”) built a symbolic canoe for a southwest Wash. tribe, to replace one the captain stole way back when.
• A few right wing writers and pundits have identified the biggest force restraining their corporate masters from getting everything they want. It’s democracy. Therefore, to these guys democracy is something icky that must be done away with.
• A few handy comparisons between right-wing fantasyland and reality.
• You’ll have to listen instead of getting to read, but here’s an argument for the premise that punk rock was invented by Jews.
• Sara Horowitz sees a new “middle class poverty” in which everybody’s treated as (and as badly as) freelancers, and envisions a “jobs plan for the post-cubicle economy.”

nordstrom photo, via shine.yahoo.com

• Those $85 Starbucks designer tees? All net proceeds go to Starbucks. One more reason Howard Schultz is in the Forbes 400 richest-people list.
• A Starbucks employee in Calif. posted a satirical song about his job onto YouTube. The song became popular; he became fired.
• After 18 years, the homey and low-key Rosebud restaurant/bar on East Pike is calling it quits. The management (which just bought the place from its previous longtime owners) homes to reopen nearby.
• Facebook’s got this big new feature that looks a lot like something already devised by a Seattle startup site.
• The Real Networks spinoff Rhapsody, a subscription online music service, has some sort of free trial thing going on via Facebook.
• Washington state: Now with even more poverty.
• You want across-the-board cuts in all state spending? Fine. Welcome some new early-release inmates, who won’t get the supervision past parolees got.
• Swedish Medical Center to lay off 150 staffers. So much for the aging-boomer-era medical boom.
• The on-again, off-again scheme to drastically redevelop the parking lot north of Qwest CenturyLink Field is on again. For now.
• An unfinished Kent parking garage will be razed and replaced by homes and stores.
• Tacoma teachers’ strike: over.
• Obama’s coming to town. You won’t get to see him.
• The always-lucid Feliks Banel sees the retirement of J.P. Patches in the context of the institutional decline of local TV (particularly local non-news TV).
• The “Occupy Wall Street” folk have finally proclaimed “our one demand”—11 of them, all big-big-picture stuff, essentially adding up to the complete re-orientation of the nation’s government, economy, and society.
• ‘Tis a sad, sad day for all who care about tradition, long-form storytelling, and frequently-remarried drama queens. The final network episode of All My Children airs today.
• On a much happier note, you can become part of a new tradition tomorrow, the tradition of the ped-powered urbanites.

Igor Kellor is a multimedia whiz and a very clever person. He’s the creator of the musical Mackris v. O’Reilly and the blog Hideous Belltown.

Now he’s got a CD out (also available online), Greater Seattle.

While billed under the band name Longboat, Keller provides almost all the instrumental sounds (mostly synths) and all the lead vocals.

Don’t expect any perky paeans to tourist vistas and real estate opportunities here. Kellor has more ambitious agendas.

He offers snappy, snarky cabaret ditties about 10 Seattle neighborhoods (including Harbor Island!) and five outlying communities. Each tune is influenced by a different musical genre. Some of the melodies and arrangements match the tone of the lyric tales; others starkly contrast with them.

“Belltown” is a dirge, befitting the chorus of “downtown’s afterthought.”

“Ballard” is a sad sea shanty, about the upscaling away of its entire heritage.

“Fremont” is an uptempo hoedown, even though Keller sings that “To me Fremont will always be/The gateway to Ballard.”

“Downtown” is a brisk calypso-beat tale about the police shooting of John T. Williams.

Some of the songs are more up to date than others. The opening track, “Bellevue,” features the standard stereotype of the Eastside’s largest city as a whitebread conformist nightmare. In real life, it’s becoming more ethnically diverse than Seattle.

Kellor also doesn’t care much for Mercer Island (“It’s clear that money can’t buy taste”), Buren (“Visiting here makes your mind go numb/It’s much like a bug in your cranium”), and Federal Way (depicted as an ideal home for “a violent modern man”).

And he absolutely loathes Edmonds (“A police state/Bad cops rule this town”), recounting a story of “teenage drivers against police cruisers.”

Kellor wraps up all this sharp civic commentary with a sharp change of pace and attitude, a pleasant rendition of “Seattle” (the old Here Come the Brides theme) joined in by a trumpet, trombone and tuba.

Greater Seattle is an ambitious, brusque love letter to the city, warts n’ all.

by marlow harris, http://seattletwist.com

Tuesday’s Nirvana Nevermind 20th anniversary concert at EMP was a total blast.

Even if you weren’t there, thanks to the live stream from, er, Livestream.com.

You can still view it. Though you might want to fast forward some parts. Thanks to band set-up breaks, it took three and a half hours to get through the original CD’s 13 tracks and 10 other Nirvana songs. Each tune was re-created by a different combo. (The exception: the Presidents with Krist Novoselic; they got to perform two, nonconsecutive songs.)

The evening started off with a total sonic blast, as the reunited Fastbacks (above) completely nailed “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Singer Kim Warnick, like many of the night’s performers, had known Kurt Cobain.

Warnick’s also an ex-roommate of Susie Tennant, the longtime local music scene promoter and publicist. (Tennant had staged the original Nevermind release party at Re-bar.) Tennant has gone through a cancer scare (thankfully apparently over); the concert was a benefit for her treatment and recovery.

The Livestream page had a chat-room corner. Some chatters made snide insults about Warnick’s middle aged appearance. (Just the sort of “fans” Cobain had vocally denounced.)

All the performances were loose, spirited, and enthralling, true to Nirvana’s own rough and tumble gigging.

My own faves included, in no particular order:

• Visqueen’s full-blast “Territorial Pissings;”
• new band Ravenna Woods’ sped-up “Breed;”
• the Long Winters’ emo-y “Something in the Way;”
• Shelby Earl’s soulful “All Apologies;”
• Pigeonhed’s eerie “Heart Shaped Box;”
• Steve Mack (the local boy who made good across the pond with That Petrol Emotion) blasting through “Serve the Servants” with his current band Stag—and with a bleeding head (!).

no, not *that* ziggy.

• RIP: Ziggy comic creator Tom Wilson Sr. (Wilson Jr.’s been drawing the panel for several years now.)
• The Nirvana Nevermind 20th anniversary concert occurs tonight at EMP. It sold out the hour it was announced. But you can still experience the show (a benefit for longtime Seattle music figure Susie Tennant’s cancer treatments). The whole thing will be streamed live online, at 10 p.m.
• The Seattle Storm won’t repeat as WNBA champs, having been knocked out in the first playoff round.
• The owners of the old Twin Peaks sawmill are accused of causing flooding in the town of Snoqualmie, by putting fill dirt on part of the site, thus interfering with drainage.
• The anarchist storefront meeting hall and music club has closed. As would be expected, its operators blamed the cops and “rich, whiny” neighbors.
• Sen. Maria Cantwell’s re-election theme: She’s stood up to Wall Street more than Obama’s done so far.
• Greg Nickels threatens to run for mayor again.
• Now being test-marketed at Costco stores (though not at any around here): wedding dresses.
• PETA now wants to get rid of fishing, at least fishing with hooks.
• Criminals have a new way to learn how to break into businesses—by breaking into their WiFi networks first.
• There’s a “Moving Planet Seattle” rally at Lake Union Park this Saturday. People are converging there from all over town, using any means of locomotion other than fossil-fuel motors. And when you’re done celebrating foot power there, you can head over to Capitol Hill for another celebration of foot power….

designsbuzz.com

• The Seattlest gang’s putting out, in installments, a revised and updated “guide to Seattle stereotypes.”
• Neighborhood activists are starting a tiny but intelligently stocked mini-grocery in the Lost Valley of Delridge, an area bereft of places selling anything more nutritious than Budweiser.
• What’s the biggest fear of people buying into a 33-story condo tower? That somebody will block their view with a 40-story condo tower a block away.
• Let’s try to get this straight. A candidate for King County Council has a brother who administers an arts program for at-risk youth. Said arts program puts out, for the first time in its history, a “student made” newspaper. Said paper includes several mentions praising the administrator’s sis and several other mentions disparaging her election opponent. Oh, and the thing was partly made with City funds.
• Microsoft’s immensely profitable. Its stock price has essentially been “flat” for some time. One more reason for America’s socio-economic nabobs to stop believing in the Almighty Stock Price as the all-determining value of everything.
• Progressive economist Remy Trupin looks at Wash. state’s no-end-in-sight budget hole and insists that from this point on, “further cuts are not an option.”
• A hundred years ago, eight destitute young women were killed in an accident at a Chehalis explosives factory. Their joint grave has finally been rediscovered.
• The Illinois company now calling itself Boeing has friends among the House Republicans. That body just approved, in a symbolic gesture certain to sink in the Senate, a bill to strip Federal protection for workers whose jobs were outsourced as punishment for union organizing.
• If we must say goodbye to Cyndy’s House of Pancakes on Aurora (closed as of July after 53 years), at least we can be consoled that housing for the formerly-homeless will go up on the site.
• There was a hearing about a plan for a homeless shelter in Lake City. The senior-housing developer SHAG bused in residents to speak against the plan. One of these speakers called the homeless “garbage.” Brutal insensitivity: It’s not just for Republican campaign events any more.
• Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy: There’s an FBI corruption probe of figures surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and cronies.
• The 3-D movie craze? Dead already. Again.
• How will the record labels survive? Some are diversifying into other businesses. Such as, according to a Federal indictment, international cocaine smuggling. (I know what you’re thinking. Drugs in the music industry? Never!)
• We go out on a snarky note with some books Borders can’t even give away.

• Lake City’s legendary, recently-closed Rimrock Steak House is saved! Well, maybe.

• Starbucks gave away download codes for a “free” ebook. The document turned out to exclude the novel’s ending, telling readers they had to get the paid version to learn what happens.

• Get ready for Sleepless in Seattle, the Musical. In preparation for years, it’s set to open in L.A. next summer.

• The Longview longshoremen’s strike might be ending.

• J.P. Patches, who announced his retirement from public appearances earlier this summer, will make his last one this Saturday at Fishermen’s Terminal.

• Darn. Just when we were getting used to Dennis Kucinich, turns out he’s probably not coming to stay.

• The Republicans have a master plan for winning the White House. It has little to do with actually fielding a mass-appeal candidate (or even a sane candidate), and everything to do with voter suppression and making the Electoral College even more unfair.

• Earlier this week, we discussed an LA Times essay asking where today’s great recession documentarians were. Well, here are two more places to find them—Facing Change and In Our Own Backyard.