I haven’t been in contact with the promoters for more than a month, but the big CD release party for the grunge-years compilation I helped curate starts dark-and-early at 8 p.m. tonight at the Premier club, 1700 1st Ave. S. (that’s somewhere between Krispy Kreme and Sears).

…list-O-linx today, shall we? We shall:

• In the news today, the art deco ferry Kalakala finally gets a piece of good news, in the form of official historic status…. Mayor Nickels’s plan for a Boston-like strip-club zone in the Industrial District moves forward, despite the need to preserve the area for industrial employment…. The Vera Project’s all-ages rock shows will indeed move to the Seattle Center Snoqualmie Room after all, but not until this fall….
• Christopher Frizzelle’s Stranger essay on the doomed-for-development, 100-year-old building housing Seattle’s most hardcore gay bathhouse is notable for several reasons. Chief among them: The research Frizzelle put into the story, giving a sense of history and continuity to a place known for the most fleeting and anonymous of social encounters.
• Virginia Belle asks Democrats to stand up and take pride in themselves for once.
• I’d already been reading online about the amazing bus-only transit system of Curitiba, Brazil, when Jaime Lerner, the architect and ex-mayor who masterminded the thing, came to Seattle to promote his lessons learned. The Curitiba system can basically be described as like a light rail system, only it uses buses on bus-only road lanes instead of trains on tracks. Seattle already has one “busway,” down the industrial district south of the now-shuttered transit tunnel. Future busways could take the place of the now-aborted monorail project, across from the south end of the existing busway into West Seattle, and up through Elliott Avenue/15th Avenue West into Ballard. Bus-only lanes could be added beside, above, or beneath current streets/bridges, or (even cheaper) rededicated from current auto use. Worth thinking about, at least.
• Remember what I said last week about the ’06 Mariners looking pretty good? Strike that; reverse it.

…was so much fun, I think I’ll do it again:

• Right-wing hate radio: Now even more racist than ever?
• First preachers, now political operatives— just what is it about positions of authority and child abuse?
• One of my alma maters, Oregon State, is dumping its cheerleader squad. For once, no team-name puns here.
• Gene Pitney, one dead rock star who got to live a full life.
• Wal-Mart’s sales, profits sluggish— so much for the almighty juggernaut out to take over the world.
• Went to Drinking Liberally last nite; got to meet that week’s special guest star, Darcy “C.D.” Burner. She’s the highly touted Demo candidate in the 8th Congressional District (the Eastside). She’s smart, witty, and forward-thinking. She’s got a good chance of being a big part of taking back the House this fall.
• While there, one DL participant told me his little conspiracy theory about the U.S. government’s attempt to retain control of the Internet’s top-level domain names. This guy claims the Feds just might be preparing to use this power so they can crack down on lefty bloggers. I’m not so sure the Bushies are that smart. That conspiratorial perhaps, but not that smart.
• Tom Stewart, the former state GOP bigwig and medium-time sleaze, is “protesting” Washington’s estate tax by pulling his corporate offices to Arizona. I won’t miss his campaign-law violations or the ludicrously huge U.S. flag atop his Delridge office building. Now if we could only get the hipster and gay restaurants and bars in this town to stop feeding money to his Food Services of America….
• A longer version of my piece about the Capitol Hill shooting victims’ memorial is in today’s print version of the Capitol Hill Times, but not online, at least not yet.

…the big Capitol Hill afterparty memorial service early Tuesday evening. It was large, it was (mostly) somber, it was sad.

But it was also a celebration of life, of the “peace, love, and unity” ethos oft proclaimed by the techno world these past dozen years or so (almost the entire lifetimes of two of the shooting victims).

You’d think that after all these years, the oft-justly-vilified “MSM” (that’s blog-talk for “mainstream media”) would’ve figured out that the dance-music scene ain’t no big bad den of iniquity, except by the standards of far-right prudes. But the ol’ temptation of easy stereotypes reared its ugly head again, as local papers and broadcasters this past week filled too many of their dispatches wtih easy-to-write, easy-to-understand inaccuracies.

The shooting is a one-time event that could have happened in a school, church, shopping mall, or freeway overpass. The music-dance scene in Seattle (particulalry the commercial and nonprofit events with pro security) is about as secure as any young-rebel-hedonist scene anywhere has ever been. And it’s a lot more tolerant and mutually supportive than a lot of the more officially-approved-of youth activities.

This was proven as the memorial service ended and the sun went down. A group of ravers broke up the mass sadness by opening the doors of a parked car, cranking up the car’s stereo, and inviting all to dance the tears away.

Over the years, some music critics have scorned the techno genre for its alleged emotionless monotony. If any of these critics had seen this act of spontaneous defiance/celebration, they’d be singing the proverbial different tune.

No doubt you’ll be hearing about the Capitol Hill house party murder-suicide for weeks to come. I only wish I knew what to say to all my acquaintances in the techno-party world, except: Stay safe. God-as-I-understand-him loves you. Life is just about always worth living. The answers to That Empty Frustrating Feeling don’t come in a bottle, a pill, or a bullet. Be well with one another.

I speak of the one and only Kurt Cobain action figure.

A little over a year ago, a tiny indie record label in Georgia asked me to help curate a compilation CD of ’80s and ’90s Seattle rockers. The result is now out. I didn’t pick the title Sleepless in Seattle. But I did help pick the music therein.

The label had originally hoped to attain tracks by Nirvana and Pearl Jam, but found them beyond its budget. So instead, I fed the label’s people several hundred tracks by less-than-double-platinum acts. Several months’ worth of back-and-forth culling between me and them, and rights negotiations between them and the tracks’ original labels, resulted in 20 songs, mostly from the Sub Pop and C/Z archives. They represent a wide swath of Northwest noise, from the avant-art-noise of the Blackouts to the garage aggression of the U-Men to the acid-pop of the early Screaming Trees to the out-and-out assault of TAD and Coffin Break. There’s even one out-of-state band in the collection, Babes in Toyland.

There were, of course, some disagreements along the way. The LA-based independent promoter who’d been my original go-between with the label once asked, during the selection/culling of tracks, why I hadn’t included the “Seattle bands” Bush, Oasis, and Stone Temple Pilots. I had to explain to him those acts were really from such far-off places as London and San Diego, not here. I also helped persuade the label to axe its initial cover design, a cartoony sketch of longhair flannel dudes, in favor of a photo montage.

Now that it’s out, I like the fact that the compilation focuses on bands that didn’t “make it” globally. It’s more of a living artifact for concentrating on music you haven’t heard a thousand times. Parts of it could represent an average Thursday night at the Central Tavern in 1990.

There’ll be a release party and benefit concert in mid-April. More about that as it gets closer.

…is dedicated to longtime lounge organist Dick Dickerson, bastion of Belltown’s classic Dog House diner and one of the all-time true gentlemen.

There’s an authorized preteen Devo cover band, “Devo 2.0.” Under the aegis of Walt Disney Records, a 10-year-old girl sings note-for-note recreations of “Whip It,” “Uncontrollable Urge,” “Freedom of Choice,” etc. I don’t know if the kid musicians in the video footage are really playing their own instruments; some online sources say the original band actually recorded the instro tracks. Even if the kids are just miming the non-vocal performances, they’re doing a remarkable job of capturing the spudboys’ complex rhythms, chord changes, and time signatures. The CD’s scheduled to be out in mid-March.

…a music festival and nobody showed up, would it make a sound? The Red Bull Music Academy brought dozens of European techno DJs to Seattle from Nov. 7 through Dec. 8. Each year, the “energy drink” people bring assorted mastes and tyros of electronica to a different city.

The academy’s workshops and conferences were hidden behind the obscured storefront of the former Beatty Book Store on Third and Virginia, compared to ROCKRGRL’s highly promoted events in the Madison Hotel.

Aside from fancy brochures and flyers in the participating bars and nightclubs, the Red Bull event was hardly even publicized locally. Too bad; the local electronica scene’s been on stagnant times, and could’ve used some high-profile events to bring back the local crowds—even if the most famous participant at Red Bull was Eumir Deodato, who’d made a hit disco version of the 2001 theme three decades back.

Even Red Bull’s PR packet contained nothing introducing the event to Seattle; only long essays introducing Seattle to the event’s Euro performers and reporters. Some excerpts:

“Seattle, while not as large as the American metropolises of New York or Los Angeles, is host to a bustling, shucking and jiving culture…. Seattle has long had a vibrant Asian and Asian-American population, and well-established communities of Scandinavians, African-Americans, Jews, Latinos and thoroughly Native Americans. The city represents the ‘melting-pot’ that logically fosters around the coastal areas of the United States.”…The grunge proliferation and later Internet boom created a dreamlike atmosphere in the city. RealNetworks, Amazon, and Adobe populated the Employment opportunities section of newspapers with wanted ads. Seattle-baed Starbucks replicated itself exponentially on a tidal wave of too-sweet corporate coffee to jolt the technologically-inclined into their 12-hour workdays…. While the Internet boom and bust were a manic time of too much wealth and then too much poverty, they did help revolutionize the culture of Seattle. The limitations of the finite world were kept at bay, if only briefly, and allowed dreamers to indulge. The staid American work tradition of business attire was cast aside, and three-piece suits were retired in favor of ratty T-sshirts and Levi’s. Tradition was scorned for new invention. It is perhaps for this reason that Seattleites insist on proudly wearing jeans and Teva sandals with white tube socks to restaurants with $200 price fixe menus.”

Streaming audio of the Seattle performances can be heard at redbullmusicacademy.com.

…can’t get enough bodies into the Experience Music Project at full admission prices. He won’t lower those prices, because that would interrupt his long-range plan to make EMP self-supporting. Instead, he’ll broaden the institution’s focus (again), this time with works by big-name painters.

…currently touring in Ireland submits its list of “bands and their corresponding authors.” Nirvana paired up with Wm. Burroughs is appropriate, since Cobain and Burroughs collaborated on a spoken-word CD single. Public Enemy/Langston Hughes and The Doors/Jack Kerouac also seem right, even though Kerouac was more of a jazz fan. Some of the other pairings, though, seem a bit odd, such as AC/DC with Julia Child and Tori Amos with Alice Walker.

…has fingered the real culprit in the music industry’s steady downturn—DVDs. The arrival of film as a home-library product, Norman Lebrecht claims, means “it has left the cinema and joined us for drinks, an emancipatory moment for the last of the great western art forms…. The DVD won’t replace the printed book which has withstood more serious threats in the past half-millennium. But it will accelerate the obsolescence of the audio-only disc, which cannot compete much longer in an image-centred culture.”

THE NOVEMBER BELLTOWN MESSENGER is out at last, and may be our best yet. Read it online or seek it at more than 100 dropoff spots.

RAIN HAS ARRIVED SERIOUSLY in greater Puget Sound this morning, meaning the fourth category of autumnal transition has also arrived. (The prior three stages of fall: Labor Day weekend, the equinox, and the “fall back” to Standard Time.)

The grey has settled in. The washed-out watercolor look will be with us, with occasional sunbreaks, for the next three and a half months or so. This is what breaks the spirits of Californians and proves the mettle of real Nor’Westers. Can you take it?

“Computer chips that store music could soon be built into a woman’s breast implants.”

…the “next Seattle?”