cafe racer, june 20, 2012

Cafe Racer reopens this Friday.

Here’s the press release by owner Kurt Geissel:

A note from Cafe Racer’s owner:

“No one needs to be reminded of what happened at Café Racer on May 30, 2012.

Each day the grief of losing our loved ones lessens, but not our love for them or the love they brought into our lives. Drew, Joe, Kim, Don and Gloria were people who gave more of themselves than they ever received. This is why the community was so devastated by their loss. This is also why that community of which they were a part of will carry on.

The outpouring of love and support from this community was astounding to me. Not only for the loss of our loved ones, but for the love and concern for Café Racer itself. It became clear to me that the café is more than just a place to pick up a coffee, food or have a drink, but it is a part of the community. The love didn’t just come from the ones we lost, it comes from everyone.

This is the main reason that I’ve decided to keep the cafe open, to forge ahead with the vision that is Café Racer by providing a place for diverse people and groups to come together and have a loving, safe place to gather. There may be some physical changes to the cafe, the main ingredient which makes Café Racer unique will remain the same, Love.

There is no way I can express my thanks to the hundreds of people who gave me, and everyone who is involved with the café, their love and support.

YOU make Cafe Racer what it is.” – Kurt Geissel Owner, Café Racer

Friday July 20^{th –}Seattle: Café Racer will be re-opening its doors to the public

There was a competition going on for short films about Seattle. Some of the entrants (at least they seem like they could be) are showing up online. F’rinstance, here’s a poetic ode to the city by Riz Rollins; and here’s Peter Edlund’s Love, Seattle (based on the opening to Woody Allen’s Manhattan and dedicated to team-and-dream stealer Clay Bennett).

• Health scare topic of the day: “Rabit bat bites.”
• Online scare topic of the day: “We’re all Internet addicts, and we’re screwed, says Newsweek.”
• Those hipster fashionistas at Vice magazine have devised a “Wheel of Punk,” a wheel chart proclaiming what is the most and least punk. The punkiest, in their summation: “Pre-Rollins Black Flag.” The un-punkiest: the Eagles.
• Unpaid Plug O’ the Day: My fellow Stranger refugee Inga Muscio has a “Stop Thinking, Start Writing” class starting here in Seattle later this week.
• Another year, another round of public college fee hikes.
• Another year, another plea to finally get ourselves a progressive state income tax.
• PETA ranks Safeco Field as baseball’s second most “vegetarian friendly” ballpark. #1: would you believe Philly?
• Yep, Senate Republicans don’t want you to find out who’s funding their campaigns.
• “The average Canadian is now richer than the average American.” And not just in Canadian Tire Money.
• There’s a commercial for tourism to Colombia with the slogan “The only risk is wanting to stay.” Forget about those pesky drug wars. Just enjoy the quaint cities and unspoiled beaches. They’re saying this openly and forthrightly.
• It’s one thing to see Photoshopped® fakes of movie stars’ heads on nude models’ bodies. But when a guy sticks Frida Kahlo’s head on nude models’ bodies (bodies that obviously don’t have the real Kahlo’s injury scars), some Kahlo fans get righteously pissed off.

Tuesday was WB-Day in greater downtown Seattle and much of the south end.

In this case, I mean not Warner Bros. but Wave Broadband, the locally based company that’s taken over the bankrupt, inferior-in-so-many-ways Broadstripe Cable.

On Tuesday, starting about 12:20 a.m., the new Wave channel lineup began to “propogate” on my DVR.

Some of the new channels are walled behind new pay-tiers. These include Boomerang (retro cartoons), Ovation (arts and classical music), Comcast SportNet (Portland TrailBlazers basketball), and the Fox and MGM movie channels.

But there are still new fun attractions on the basic and digital-basic tiers, channels Comcast customers have had for some time: IFC, Current, This TV (KOMO’s digital sub-channel).

But the big (or rather, wide and crystal-clear) news is the added hi-def lineup. We now get the HD versions of KSTW (at last), CNN, MSNBC, Cartoon Network, Comedy Central, AMC, TCM, Discovery, the Science Channel, and several more.

The Deadliest Catch, Ice Road Truckers, Whale Wars, and the like are the sort of big-country spectacle that’s just not worth watching in ordinary-def when you can get it in fabulous-def.

Then there’s the likes of Factory Made and Build It Bigger. I’ve come to call these shows “Work Porn.”

You watch them in the day, when you’re sitting with the TV in the background and a laptop in front of you, staring at online job applications.

You see them working. Up and about. Doing stuff. Making stuff.

You get to live vicariously through their active days.

Then when it’s over you realize you’re still sitting with a laptop in front of you at home.

Found in a Hong Kong newspaper.

Happy 7/11 everyone! And we’ve got a new place to get our free regular Slurpee® on this only-comes-but-once-a-year day. This brand new 7-Eleven franchise is on Virginia Street between 8th and 9th, in the cusp between Belltown, the retail core, South Lake Union, and the Cascade district. It’s got all your favorites—burritos, Big Bite® hot dogs, $1 pizza slices, bizarre potato-chip varieties, coffee lids with sliding plastic openings. It closes nightly at midnight, though (sorry, hungry Re-bar barflies at closing time).

• I can tell you that hate-filled, hyper-aggressive online “comment trolls” existed back in the 1980s days of bulletin board systems (BBSs) and 300-baud acoustic modems. Neil Steinberg at the Chicago Sun-Times sees their antecedents back even further. A lot further.
• There’s only one million-selling music album so far this year. It actually came out last year.
• Jon Talton explains how tax cuts are “the god that failed.”
• ACT Theatre will have the U.S. premiere of a play by Brit mega-playwright Alan Ayckbourn next year. And he’s personally coming over to direct it. This is just about the most establishment-prestige you can get in the play world.

Amid all the continuing flap about historic Seattle buildings threatened with doom, there’s one building a lot of people here would like to get rid of, as soon as possible.

It’s a lovely building for what it is. It’s perhaps the architectural ideal of its type of structure.

It’s just in the way of something a lot of people want.

It’s a long, low, large, rustic, wooden industrial building, with an arced roof and bare support beams. A delightfully rundown-looking front office emits that vital “we don’t waste our customers’ money” look.

It’s called United Warehouses. (Not to be confused with the old United Furniture Warehouse, of once-ubiquitous musical TV commercials.)

Since its opening in 1954, the structure has provided short- and long-term storage for the makers and distributors of all sorts of stuff. In recent decades, United Warehouses’ CEO Tom Herche has expanded the operation into six facilities throughout the Northwest region, plus trucking and freight-forwarding services.

The place has a new landlord. And as you might have heard, he’s got big plans for the property. Storing supplies of gardening tools and energy drinks isn’t among them.

Christopher Hansen, a local boy who made good (if you call hedge funds a “good” thing), acquired it and a couple of adjacent parcels, as a site for the big new basketball and hockey arena he wants to build.

As Hansen proved at the fan rally he staged on June 14, he’s got a lot of support among the local populace. There were thousands of never-give-up lifelong Sonics fans, who’d just love to again shout such old team slogans as “Not In Our House!” Hockey fans too, who’ve supported minor league teams and now want the NHL here.

The warehouse building stays put and in use until the arena’s ready to go up, which Hansen insists won’t be until at least one of those teams is a sure thing.

A moved NBA basketball franchise would probably be the first to arrive, because any “new Sonics” could hold court temporarily at KeyArena. That place is still a perfectly fine place for basketball (except to the league’s moneybags), but lousy for hockey.

Even then, the soonest you’ll get to see a game at the ___ Arena (Hansen will undoubtedly sell the naming rights) will be 2017.

Heck, the building hasn’t even been designed yet. I personally hope the new complex incorporates a gently arced roof design as a nod to what came before it.

And the city and county councils want their say on a complex plan to kick in $200 million in bonds to pay part of the arena’s construction, with the funds to be paid back by tax revenue the arena will generate. So far, City Councilmember Richard Conlin appears to be the most hard-to-convince, but this situation fluctuates nearly daily.

Then there’s the little matter of neighborhood traffic, as publicly moaned about by the Port of Seattle and others.

This has to be fixed anyway, as is known to anyone who’s tried to get to downtown from the south end on a Mariners game day. In that regard the arena plan is an opportunity, not a problem. And it’s best to plan and execute that road revamping in the immediate future, during or just after the viaduct replacement mess.

There’s another aspect to all this maneuvering. While it hasn’t been publicized much, the community has already benefitted from Hansen’s dealmaking.

Tom Herche’s privately-held company got nearly $22 million for the United Warehouses property. The proceeds will, in part, help Herche and his wife Mary maintain their lifelong personal commitments to local causes.

The Herches are major supporters of Childhaven, the Healing Center (a grief support community), Rebuilding Together Seattle (providing home repair for low-income homeowners), the National MS Society’s regional chapter, and the Rotary Boys & Girls Club (they host a fundraising picnic for it at the warehouse every August).

Whether or not any puck ever drops or any free throw ever rises at the United Warehouses site, Seattle has already come out a winner.

•

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

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.

A scene from the South Korean film Untold Scandal (2003; dir. Je-yong Lee).

The scene: A clear, warm-enough Memorial Day evening in Fremont. Among those in attendance are families, old timers, and members of the Fremont retail community past and present. Some were close friends; others hadn’t seen one another in years.

There are also a middle-aged male clown, a male bagpiper, a female cellist, and several ladies dressed as “mourners” in black dresses complete with veils, ready to sob loudly on cue. (NOTE: This took place two days prior to the Cafe Racer shootings.)

It is a funeral/wake, a memorial to an institution that had already been all about the remembrance of things past.

Fremont’s “funky” reputation was already established by 1978, when David Marzullo opened Deluxe Junk. “Funky,” at that time, meant low incomes, low profiles, low foot traffic, low rents—and lowlife.

A Seattle Times feature story published around that time described Fremont as a blighted land of empty storefronts, as well as “littered vacant lots, weathered plywood with torn flyers flapping in the wind, peeling paint and a giant disposal-service complex.” Among its 12,000 residents were retirees, street people, and “a number of artists and remnants of the hippie culture.”

When Deluxe Junk opened, it was one of 10 antique, curio, and “vintage trash” stores in the then-rundown neighborhood. The only thing Fremont had more of at the time was taverns.

After a fire made the store’s first location uninhabitable, Marzullo moved into a former funeral parlor on the ground floor of the Doric Temple, a Masonic lodge right on the arterial cusp of Fremont Place, between Fremont Avenue and North 36th Street. (In later years, the block would become home to the kitschy Lenin statue.)

Some of the vintage sellers in the ’70s had dreams that were bigger than their business acumen.

But Marzullo had a knack for the trade.

He priced his goods low enough to move but high enough to pay the bills.

He built a base of customers not only from around Seattle but around the nation and beyond. (In the 1980s, Marzullo was one of the first local dealers to sell American vintage wear and furnishings to dealers in Japan.)

He developed a great sense of what his customers liked.

He maintained a broad inventory range. He stocked vintage fashions, badges, advertising signs, costume jewelry, magazines, board games, kitchen appliances, and household trinkets.

But perhaps Deluxe Junk’s most important speciality was home furnishings from the early to mid 20th century. That’s also the era when most of Seattle’s single-family homes were built. This was the furniture that most truly “belonged” in these homes.

Over the years, the surrounding neighborhood became gentrified. Industrial buildings gave way to tech-company offices. Storefront taverns gave way to brewpubs, soccer bars, and live-music clubs. “Cheap chic” shops gave way to fashionable boutiques.

Deluxe Junk persevered, long enough to itself become a relic of “a simpler time;” even as the collectibles business went online and global (and, in many ways, more mercenary).

In April, a lease dispute developed between the store and the Doric Temple’s leadership.

Supportes of the store claimed Doric leaders wanted to kick Deluxe Junk out, in favor of more potentially lucrative tenants.

The lodge insisted it was willing to negotiate a new lease, as long as Marzullo paid up several months’ worth of back rent.

(UPDATE 6/18/12: Marzullo publicly denied the claim that he’d owed back rent to his landlords.)

After several days of highly public disagreement, Marzullo announced he’d reached a settlement. Without going into details, he said the store would close and he would retire.

And the store would close three weeks before the Solstice Parade and Fremont Fair, Fremont’s busiest days of the year.

Deluxe Junk’s loyal customers and friends took full advantage of a massive closing sale. An online-auction seller bought the store’s whole inventory of 1950s Christmas decor.

Still, there was a lot of cool stuff left in the store’s main room on the evening of the wake.

Some of that was sold on the spot to friends of the store, who were seeking one last remembrance of Deluxe Junk—and of the Fremont that had been.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

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.

This is the Great Wheel, now taking shape at Pier 57 on the waterfront. It is already the greatest addition to Seattle public architecture since the Koohaas downtown library. The rest of the waterfront should be redeveloped around it.

• Is Mike McGinn becoming just like all Seattle’s other recent mayors, a “progressive” who totally sucks up to the real estate developers?
• The state liquor stores won’t all close on May 31. Most will close one to four days earlier. A few have already closed. The stores that are still open have dwindling inventory. Since the supermarkets don’t start selling booze ’til June 1, consider stocking up for the Memorial Day weekend now.
• Getty Images, the Seattle-based king of stock photo licensing, may be up for sale (again).
• The Chicago head office of the company now calling itself Boeing got shut down by anti-NATO protesters. That almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if they’d stayed in Seattle Tukwila.
• South Lake Union is finally getting something useful (besides the Ace Hardware franchise): a Goodwill store!
• The proposed new basketball/hockey arena will work out just fine traffic-wise.
• Breaking news: people like to get stuff if they don’t have to pay for it.
• Hewlett-Packard announces huge layoffs; blames declining demand for PCs in favor of other digital-media devices.
• Paul Krugman, seemingly effortlessly, totally dismantles the Romney economic platform….
• …while author Charles Ferguson explains how “Wall Street became criminalized.” (As if it hadn’t always been so.)
• Unlike author Patricia Williams, I don’t blame book bannings and other assaults against public education on an “anti-intellectual” American people, but on the right-wing politicians who actually committed the assaults. Just as I don’t blame the megabanks’ crimes on their depositors.
• Knute Berger offers some “Simple Rules for Staying Sane in Seattle.” My own first rule: make sure you were already sane before you got here.
• The company whose merged predecessors gave us such great product names as Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, and Chicken in a Biskit announced it’s de-merging. The spinoff company’s new name: “Mondelez.” Doesn’t quite fall trippingly off the tongue.
• In science fiction and astrology, “Planet X” (as in the Roman numeral for 10) is a hypothetical tenth planet orbiting out beyond Pluto. Now, some astronomer says he’s found it, and it’s three times the size of Earth. No word yet on whether it holds massive deposits of illudium phosdex, the shaving cream atom.

The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

• Brendan Kiley tries to parse out what exactly we should call the busters up of stuff on May Day. How about “testosteronic dorks”?
• Joel Connelly, meanwhile, calls the window-breakers “the worst enemies of worthy change.”
• Seattle Times business writer Jon Talton proclaims that “what we have witnessed in recent years in America is not capitalism,” but rather destructive cronyism.
• Ex-Microsoftie turned political activist Jeff Reifman has launched an initiative campaign called I-103. It would establish a “community bill of rights” and a set of workers’ rights, take a symbolic stand against “corporate personhood,” and restrict corporate campaign contributions for city elections. We’ll see how far it gets in a town that likes to be “progressive” only as long as business interests don’t feel threatened.
• Could Microsoft’s investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division finally give MS a toehold in the tablet market?
• The thing about Amazon Kindle e-book readers is that people really need to see them in person in order to understand/appreciate/want them. That’s the one thing Amazon’s not built to provide. So it sells Kindles through chain stores. Only these chains are getting tired of folks looking at stuff in their stores then going to buy it online. One of ’em, Target, will stop selling Kindles in retaliation.
• There’s a new intercity bus line in town. BoltBus will take you straight to Portland in 3.25 hours. Buses leave four times a day from 5th Avenue South near the transit tunnel station. Fares are $27 but with discounts for early reservations and low-demand runs. It’s not really a competitor to Greyhound, because the latter is operating the route under contract.
• Another female teacher, another teenage male student, another sex scandal. This is getting beyond the cliché stage.
• In today’s China, HuffPost blogger Tom Doctoroff writes, many forms of non-marital sex are still illegal; but more and more people engage in them anyway, often openly. Doctoroff says this illustrates China’s current vacillation between “prudence and prurience,” between “‘comfortable’ domesticity and extra-curricular indulgence.” What Doctoroff doesn’t mention: sexual behavior is like that everywhere, in all eras.
• A creative-writing prof claims he’s isolated the 12 winning ingredients of successful bestselling novels. Only thing is, those same ingredients also appear in a lot of works that don’t sell.