bill gates mansion; from cybernetnews.com

• John Burbank says something that needs to be repeatedly said: Washington is a wealthy state with a starved civic infrastructure, due to our over reliance on the regressive sales tax.
• Before this week’s winter weather, our pals at Capitol Hill’s Ghost Gallery got flooded by a leaky ceiling. The landlord won’t even help pay to fix it. They’d like our help.
• It was planned in expectation of just another Seasonal Affective Disorder winter, but it’s still welcome in the aftermath of Snowtopia. Local artists Susan Robb, Sierra Stinson, and  Jim Demetre have schedule an arty Seattle version of a winter carnival. They call it “ONN/OF.” It incorporates a number of installations and performances, all using “light” as a theme. It takes place in Ballard (specifically 1415 NW 52nd St.), Jan. 28-29. Contributors include ex-Seattle musician Otis Fodder (now based in Montreal, where they’ve always had a winter carnival) and his band the Bran Flakes.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: As a Stranger snark video shows, the Weekly has adopted an ugly squat-square page size, in keeping with other New Times Village Voice Media papers. That wasn’t enough to keep this week’s edition from topping off at a mere 48 (smaller) pages.
• Update: The outdoor feeding program for the homeless, the one the city wanted to shut down? A compromise arrangement may be in the works.
• Thing you might not have expected five years ago: Microsoft’s quarterly profits are flat, as fewer new PCs get sold. It’s not just a matter of new digital platforms. It’s also a matter of companies and individuals deciding the PCs they’ve got are good enough to keep until finances improve.
• William Greider points with thinly disguised glee at Mitt Romney’s primary opponents claiming to despise “vulture capitalism.”
• The copyright lobby didn’t need draconian censorship bills to nab file-sharing giant Megaupload, for better or (in my opinion) for worse.
• More deadly seriousness from “humor” site Cracked.com: “The 5 Stupidest Habits You Develop Growing Poor.”

light in the attic records

The dean of Seattle record producer/engineers passed away peacefully Tuesday at age 81.

Barton spent more than 50 years recording just about anything there was to record here, from jazz and opera to radio shows and commercial jingles. This included several band-released soul 45s from the early 1970s, whose rediscovery spawned the ongoing Wheedle’s Groove project.

But he will be forever known as the “father of the Northwest sound.”

Peter Blecha’s astounding profile of Barton at HistoryLink.org barely scratches the surface of all he did.

For now, let’s just list a few of the many artists with which he worked, many of whose sonic “voices” he’d helped define:

The Kingsmen, Sonics, (Fabulous) Wailers, Frantics, Ventures, Fleetwoods, Little Bill, Don and the Goodtimes, Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts, Bonnie Guitar, Stan Boreson, Pat Suzuki, Danny O’Keefe, Brothers Four, Dave Lewis Trio, Dynamics, Galaxies, Daily Flash, Springfield Rifle, Black on White Affair, Lewd, Girls, Young Fresh Fellows, and so many many more.

revel body, via geekwire.com

• Seattle’s really got some high-tech hardware geniuses. Among them: the folks who’ve taken the same principles behind the Sonicare toothbrush and applied them to create advanced 21st century vibrators! (Really.)
• We’ve previously mentioned the strong presence of women’s erotica among Amazon’s e-book sales. Now come charges that some of the self-published smut books are stolen from stories posted for free viewing on erotica websites. (These allegations are against the small-time publishers, not Amazon.)
• Crazy Wall St. idea of the week (thus far): A local corporate-buyout analyst showed up on CNBC and said Microsoft should buy Barnes & Noble.
• Here’s one way to make money off of the walking renaissance. Make a big venture-funded software thing to help folks find homes to buy in walkable neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish believes the state budget mega-crisis might, just might mind you, lead to talk, or even actual action, toward reforming Washington’s mighty regressive tax system—by far the principal failing of a local “progressive” politic that never dares challenge big business.
• On a related matter, state House Speaker Frank Chopp is floating the idea of Wash. State running its own bank, just like North Dakota. Or something as close to a bank as the state constitution now permits.
• The Mariners lose one really good pitcher, gain one maybe decent-hitting position player. What could possibly go wrong?
• Who knew the original Ladies’ Home Journal was so prescient? A 1911 list of “What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years” predicts “telephones around the world,” airplanes used as “aerial war-ships,” automobiles “cheaper than horses,” “trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour,” grand opera “telephoned to private homes,” photographs “telegraphed to any distance,” “cameras electrically connected with screens at opposite ends of circuits,” ready-to-eat meals in stores, genetically modified foods, and even global warming. Writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. did get a few things wrong, such as “hot and cold air from spigots,” the deliberate extinction of mosquitos, and the removal of C, Q, and X from the alphabet. Watkins also didn’t predict that his magazine would still be in business today, after many of its compatriots went to the great newsstand in the sky.
• Clever videomakers in Montana have released a thoroughly obliterating parody of a particularly dumb “rebel lifestyle” pickup truck commercial.
• And a great big thank you for those who attended the Seattle Invitationals Sat. nite, at which I performed what I hope was a respectful, straightforward rendition of the Presley classic “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care).” Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, I’d wanted to perform the best song from It Happened at the World’s Fair. But the live band didn’t know it. So here it is for all of you, in the original rendition.

grouchymuffin.com

Don’t ask me how or why, but I’ve again gotten volunteered into performing at this year’s Seattle Invitationals, a contest for Elvis Tribute Artists (ETAs). It starts at 8 p.m. tonight (Sat. 1/14/12) at the Experience Music Project within Seattle Center. Be there or be Pat Boone.

• It was that rare example of a small entrepreneurial outfit thriving within the nesting arms of a global brand. But no more. Raise a pure-cane-sugar-sweetened toast to the demise of Dublin Dr Pepper.
• What if they gave a gay-marriage debate and none of the “antis” came?
• A Wall St. Journal essayist believes Eastman Kodak might have survived the film-to-digital metamorphosis if only it hadn’t been HQ’d in the company town of Rochester NY, where management felt too beholden to company-owned factories and U.S.-based union workers. I say bosh. Kodak once had great marketers and designers who knew the shtick of “planned obsolescence,” issuing new consumer film formats every two years (and pressuring local processing plants to re-gear for each of them). The digital realm, where obsolescence is a natural byproduct of rapidly improving technologies, should’ve been perfect for them. But they let Japanese companies out-market them. A shame.
• Wendy Gittleson at AddictingInfo.org exaggerates a little when she claims Bain Capital (Mitt Romney’s former corporate-raidin’ firm) “owns most conservative and some liberal radio stations,” and that these forces are helping make Romney’s nomination a done deal. Bain is a non-controlling shareholder in Clear Channel (owner of some 1,000 radio stations of various formats, including KJR-AM-FM here) and Premiere Radio Networks (syndicator of many conserva-talk stars, plus libs Randi Rhodes and Jesse Jackson). And many Premiere conserva-talkers have been part of the right’s “anyone but Mitt” crusade.
• Another state’s Republicans want to force mumbo-jumbo “creationism” down public school students’ throats. And college students’ throats too.
• In 2006, the Federal Reserve Board fiddled while the housing bubble prepared to burst.
• Mr. Krugman explains better than I: “America Isn’t a Corporation.” Running government “more like a business” never works. Especially when the model for “business” is today’s dysfunctional, hyper-corrupt corporate world.

iloveyoubluesky.blogspot.com

• How-the-mighty-have-fallen dept.: Last year folks mourned the end of Kodachrome slide film. Now, Eastman Kodak itself may declare bankruptcy. The only thing that could delay that move: a fire sale of Kodak’s patents, its only remaining valuable assets.
• The Wash. State Supreme Court ruled the state Legislature is failing in its constitutionally assigned task to fully fund K-12 education. But the court didn’t prescribe any specific action to remedy this. I’m hoping this means the days of brutal, all-cuts state budgets are finally over.
• Speaking of which, some legislative Democrats have another state income tax proposal going, as part of an overall tax reform package. We’ll see how far this one goes.
• The movie biz had a lousy ’11, but music sales (led by commercial downloads) were up 6.9 percent. Non-major-label releases, however, were stuck at about 12 percent of total sales.
• The folks who created the “phone book art space” Gallery 206 tried to give it away to the Seattle Art Museum. They said no, expectedly.
• Not as gruesome as you might have thought: The guy who tried to drive alone in the HOV-only freeway lanes by having a dressed-up skeleton in the passenger’s seat? It was just a plastic skeleton.
• Yesterday when we said Boeing Wichita’s demise was Seattle’s gain? Nope, not really. Blame the obsession by corporate hotshots with outsourcing everything, even if it costs more in the long run.
• Update: That smashingly good sounding “Electronic Literature” exhibit in town, tying in with the Modern Language Association convention at the Convention Center? If you live here, forget about seeing it. It’s only for ticketed convention goers, despite what its web page says.
• R.I.P. Robert Jenkins, a figure in the Seattle music scene for more than three decades. I knew him in the ’80s, playing guitar for Audio Leter, Officer Down, and the New Art Orchestra, among many other combos. Lori Goldston’s obit says Jenkins…

…had an otherworldly timbral and expressive range with both guitar and voice, ranging from beautifully sweet to guttural monster-from-Hell.

4cp.posterous.com

• John Hilgart has a whole web-gallery site of old-time comic book art, in the form of enlarged details from individual panels. And he’s got an aesthetic essay praising the medium as it had been in the pre-“graphic novel” days. Hilgart’s specifically talking about the comics’ crude, now obsolete, four-color printing process. His essay’s title: “In Defense of Dots.”
• Paul Constant offers up a long, devastatingly funny essay on the Iowa Caucuses, without once mentioning Dan Savage’s successful re-definition of “santorum.”
• Chauncy DeVega’s take on the caucuses: The GOP has now fully coalesced around a platform of “‘common sense’ racism.”
• You might not have heard lately from “Walden Three,” Greg Lundgren’s scheme to put a multimedia arts center into the old Lusty Lady building, and to privately fund it all under the auspices of a documentary film shoot. Lundgren’s still at it.
• In the fixed game of job blackmail, Seattle’s gain is often some other burg’s loss. That’s what happened when Russell Investments moved north from Tacoma. Now it’s happening again with the demise of Boeing Wichita.
• Blogger “Rottin’ In Denmark” has posted a love letter to Seattle, entitled “My Hometown Is Better Than Yours.” Much more than a mere series of tourist photos, it’s a series of municipal one-upsmanship boasts captioning each still:

Seattle invented bricks and mortar in the 5th century BC. Then in the 20th century AD, it invented Amazon.com and made them obsolete.

The sun is literally always shining. Those clouds were artificially pumped in because there were out-of-towners visiting and we didn’t want them to stay.

(beneath a shot of an Olympic Sculpture Park installation) This is a totem we erected to protect us from Courtney Love.

1944-era logo of the first seattle star, now topping the new seattlestar.net

• With the new year we must say goodbye to Swerve, the downtown retail core’s last speciality music and video shop. Its owner had insisted the store was profitable, but she had a new opportunity out of state. With Borders gone, and new Target, Nordstrom Rack, and J.C. Penney outlets still unfinished, Swerve’s loss just adds to the number of holes in downtown’s shopping spectrum.
• Also gone is Seattlest, the locally run but out-of-town owned culture and entertainment site. Its contributors have gravitated to some new all-local startups, including SEA live MUSIC (the name says it all). Another new refuge for Seattlest vets is the cross-genre arts site The Seattle Star. Its founders deliberately chose a name previously used first by a small but spunky afternoon daily (1899-1947) and then by Michael Dowers’ still fondly remembered comix zine (1985-89).
• The indie Greenwood Market, after several years of uncertain future, is finally being razed so Kroger can expand its adjacent Fred Meyer.
• As another dreary Legislative session’s about to start, ex-State Rep. Brendan Williams bashes Oly Democrats as professional cavers.
• R.I.P. Ronald Searle, 91, satirical illustrator ne plus ultra and “Britain’s greatest graphic artist.”
• The feisty-as-ever Roger Ebert has a list of reasons why movie revenues were way, way down in ’11. “Too many sucky movies” isn’t even on the list.
• We’ve linked in the past to gadfly pundit Glenn Greenwald and his diatribes against those he believes are too capitulant toward the right. He’s added Obama, and anybody who supports Obama, to his targets. But Greenwald went too far when he alleged that Obama could “rape a nun” on live TV and his supporters would still back him.
• Speaking of rash allegations, Bloomberg.com’s got a UK academic who claims Wall Street, and perhaps U.S. business in general, has been taken over by “corporate psychopaths.”
• We close with a lovely picture of the highly unofficial “Occupy the Rose Parade” float, a 70-foot octopus made from plastic grocery bags. Looks just like an oversize version of something you’d see at any Fremont Solstice Parade.

The new year draws nigh. Around here, that predominantly means one thing. It means we seek your nominations for MISCmedia’s 25th Annual In/Out List, North America’s most accurate predictor of future trends (in a vast array of categories). Tell us your forecasts of what will become hot and not-so-hot within the next 12 months. (Not merely what’s hot and not-so-hot right now.)

Now, in random-linkland:

• Knute Berger has kind words for Lorraine McConaghy’s new Wash. state history tome New Land, North of the Columbia. McConaghy bases her tales on verbatim documents of the periods she explores. This gives her book a real “you are there” feeling, and brings to life events and historical figures which have often been laden with Edwardian creakiness (an image promoted, in many cases, by the historical figures themselves).
• Someone’s put together a list of every all ages show ever held at the long-since demolished RKCNDY club on Yale Avenue from 1996 to 1999. (RKCNDY had previously been a 21-and-over venue since 1991; its site now holds the SpringHill Suites hotel.)
• Charles P. Pierce at Esquire looks at one of this election cycle’s wannabe Third Parties and asks what’s the whole point, if it just gives us yet another champion of the billionaires? (Note that even Esquire, one of those magazines that always points with pride to its advertiser-friendly “upscale” readership, now finds the need to jump on the class-struggle bandwagon. This is actually a sign that the message is getting through.)
• On a similar note, George Monbiot explains better than I can how corporate “libertarian” ideology extols the name of “freedom” as it seeks to make almost all of us much less free. (“Freedom Is Slavery,” indeed.)
• For your listening pleasure, here’s Teutonic punk priestess Nina Hagen in her early years, when she was expected to conform to East German aesthetic as well as ideological strictures.
• If you still yearn for the holiday spirit that never was, relive the fantasy in old Christmas catalogs.

Besides my current contract job deep within the belly of the publishing beast (now on week 12 of what was to have been 7.5 weeks), I’m coming off of a horrid and still undiagnosed chest thang that had me coughing and hacking like hell.

So I’ve been spending most of my non-working hours resting, not preparing blog posts.

Here are some random links I’ve been saving up.

• “Metronatural,” Seattle’s second dumbest tourism slogan (after “The Emerald City”), may be on the way out.
• The 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair approaches. The Seattle Channel’s ready with a handy video retrospective.
• Eric Scigliano goes to the once lily white suburbs of south King County to check out the ethnic variety that’s settled in there, as well as the recessionary troubles.
• Sen. Bernie Sanders has proposed a constitutional amendment to get corporate megabucks out of American politics. Nobody expects the proposal to move an inch in the megabucks-owned Congress. The alternate route would be a new “constitutional convention,” which could put up such an amendment for passage by state legislatures (which are also more or less megabucks-owned).
• The Wall Street banksters own so many politicians that nobody dares to officially investigate all their funny-money nonsense.
• Local music mainstay Jesse Sykes complains there’s too much music out these days. Jake Uitti responds by accusing Sykes of having a “fold city” mentality. Uitti defines that as…

A state of being defined by lack, self-oppression and ultimately the judgment of others.

Lisa Faye Beatty, 47, the third and last guitarist in legendary Seattle punk band Seven Year Bitch, died Friday. She had a motorcycle accident in Mentone, CA, near where she’d grown up.

Beatty had been 7WB’s live sound engineer before she replaced guitarist Roisin Dunne in 1997. Dunne, in turn, had replaced founding member Stefanie Sergant, who’d died under drug-related circumstances in 1992.

The band broke up shortly after Beatty joined it, with its members moving to different parts of California. Beatty played on tracks for a planned fourth 7YB album, which was never finished.

a teenage pugmire as 'count pugsley'

Before he gained national cult fame as “the world’s greatest living Lovecraftian writer,” Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire already had several other claims to fame.

He’d played the costumed mad scientist “Count Pugsly” at the Jones Fantastic Museum in Seattle Center.

He’d published Punk Lust, a literate and intimately personal zine chronicling his life as a queer Mormon, doing restaurant work to support his obsessions with punk rock, horror fiction, and Barbra Streisand.

He’d been a constant figure on the local music scene, sometimes appearing at events in goth-white face paint with ruby red lipstick.

Finally, in recent years Pugmire’s horror fiction has risen in stature, from a few short stories in scattered anthologies to full-length, limited edition books.

He hasn’t been very visible lately. He was stuck at home, taking care of a dying mother.

Now he’s the patient. He’s reportedly now in a Seattle hospital, dealing with a worsening heart condition.

Several days ago he wrote a blog post announcing his retirement from writing. In it, he described his condition as follows:

I have been extremely ill for over a month, and it doesn’t seem like I’m gonna get better any time soon.  Tonight has been one of the worst nights.  I think my ailments are a combination of heart disease and lingering bronchitis.  One of my ailments is coranary arterial spasms, which happens usually when I recline in bed and try to sleep–they jerk my body and produce a little yelp, making sleep impossible so that I am a zombie moft of ye time.

I know no more about Pugmire’s condition at this time. Will Hart, at the horror blog CthuluWho1, is keeping track.

'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.