foodbeast.com

• Margarita flavored Bud Light: sign of the apocalypse #6 or #7?
• Winning bids for the state liquor stores (or rather, for the right to apply for licenses, negotiate leases, and take over inventory at the stores) are now in. Individual winners have apparently not yet been posted anywhere, but the store at 12th Avenue and East Pine Street went for a cool half million. The state’s total take (should all the sales go through): over $30 million, more than four times estimates reported just last Friday.
• Yesterday, we mentioned how Deluxe Junk, the lovely vintage everything store that’s one of the last remnants of “Fremont funk.” faced a sudden eviction by the Masonic lodge that owns its building. Apparently there’s a settlement; alas, Deluxe Junk will still leave the premises, at the end of June.
• The Real Change folks will get their protest camp in Westlake Park after all.
• One little-publicized event at the big Space Needle anniversary gala: a protest by Needle restaurant workers.
• The Canucks have made sure there won’t be riots in the Vancouver streets this June.
• Here’s a long, loving profile of ex-Seattleite and comix genius Lynda Barry.
• Google and Facebook: They’re hot now, but could they stumble as computing goes mobile?
• Author Michael J. Sandel places blame for the market-ization of almost all of western society. He says the economists did it.
• Paul Krugman blasts Romney, assuredly not for the last time.
• A Georgetown prof really dislikes the Facebook-spawned overuse of the verb “Like.”
• Toby Litt in Granta wonders whether long-form literature can hold an audience, or even be considered relevant, in an age of multitasking and incessant distraction. I say bah. Folks who can finish umpteen-level video games or watch entire TV-show seasons in one weekend can enjoy a story of a few hundred pages.
• Sorry, but I can’t trust any list of the “ten most harmful novels for aspiring writers” that excludes Bukowski.
• The top black women’s magazine hired a white guy as managing editor. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that he turned out to be a not-so-secret racist wingnut.
• Steven Pearlstein reminds you that some politicians actually want you to be turned off from politics. Remember: Not voting = voting a straight right-wing ticket.
• Making stuff in China will cease being cheap sooner or later. China’s other outsourcing advantages might remain (lax environmental enforcement, autocratic government, brutal suppression of dissent).
• TV ratings, both broadcast and cable, are way down, especially among younger viewers, and especially in terms of “real time” viewing (i.e., without DVRs; i.e., with the commercials). The hardcore TV haters will naturally ignore this, and will continue to insist that Everyone Except Them is a vidiot sheeple.

abc photo via chicago tribune

The “world’s oldest teenager” was originally only a decade or so older than the teens who danced on the first incarnation of American Bandstand.

It had begun as a local Philadelphia show, started and hosted by others. (The first host got fired after he was arrested for drunk driving and implicated in a pimping ring.)

Dick Clark took over the show in 1956. The following year he got it placed in a weekday afternoon slot on ABC, the distant-third-place network at the time.

The next six years could be considered the “high point” of Bandstand, in influence if not ratings. It was telecast live every afternoon. It featured lip-sync performances by nearly every major rock star. It was the only regular national outlet for the music that would define its time. His super-clean-cut good looks and reassuring demeanor helped make that wild teenybopper music parent-friendly–including the music of black artists, who were on the show from the start.

Unlike many producers of the time, Mr. Clark kept kinescope films or videotapes of Bandstand’s entire 33-year run; an invaluable archive of many singers’ first or only U.S. TV appearances.

He quickly expanded into related ventures, including record labels (somehow avoiding implication in the “payola” scandals of the day) and package touring shows (including integrated revues, even in the deep south where such things were just not done).

In the 1963-64 season, when the Beatles (one act that didn’t appear on the show) would change pop music again, Bandstand moved to Saturday mornings and to L.A. These shows were taped in four- to six-episode batches, making them less in tune with the music world’s convulsions.

Once ensconced in Hollywood, Mr. Clark established a production “factory.” His company made Where the Action Is, the telecast of the Golden Globe Awards, the American Music Awards, New Year’s Rockin’ Eve, TV’s Bloopers and Practical Jokes, radio countdown and nostalgia shows, and even the psychedelic-exploitation film Psych-Out. He started rock-nostalgia theme restaurants and American Bandstand venues in Reno and Branson.

He also appeared on other producers’ programs, including 14 years on the Pyramid game shows.

He starred in 1960’s “serious” teensploitation film Because They’re Young. In 1967 he played the killer on the final episode of Perry Mason, symbolizing the youth culture that had made programs like Mason seem passé within the TV industry. And he had cameos on dozens of scripted shows, most notably on Police Squad! (desperately seeking his next fix of “miracle youth cream”).

A 2004 stroke ended his on-camera career, except for annual cameos on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. But he kept on producing (Boston Legal, Codename: Kids Next Door, So You Think You Can Dance). Dick Clark Productions will continue, one of the last prime-time producers not owned by a network or a movie studio.

Less than two weeks after the death of Mike Wallace, Mr. Clark’s loss further shrinks the number of early TV performers still with is. His legacy as a pre-MTV music introducer lives on in this post-MTV era.

david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com

And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!

• Richard Beyer, 1925-2002: The Waiting for the Interurban sculptor didn’t invent Fremont’s image as a funky/artsy neighborhood. But his work publicized this image as much as anything.
• Something You Might Not Have Known Dept.: Seattle gets a small but impressive portion of its electricity from methane at an Oregon landfill.
• You’ve got two more chances to have your say about Metro’s plan to ax the downtown Ride Free Area, at County Council meetings on the 16th and the 25th. Let ’em know you want/need/demand robust free downtown transit service.
• Third Avenue in Belltown now has those “daylight-like” street lights. Next step in resurrecting Third: making the street and its buildings look cleaner.
• With the legislative session finally over, Rob McKenna can legally raise campaign money. Thus, Washington’s gubernatorial campaign is now truly underway. Watch for McKenna to simultaneously run with and against the national Republican agenda—something Jay Inslee will try to stick onto McKenna at every opportunity.
• St. James Cathedral is among the churches that won’t take part in the Catholic archdiocese’s initiative petition campaign to overturn gay marriage.
• When can you start getting a legal drink in Wash. state after 2 a.m.? Perhaps in November (just perhaps).
• Bizarre Patent Application of the Day: GeekWire says Microsoft wants to patent “monetizing buttons on TV remotes:”

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.

• Frances Cobain still can’t get away from her mom’s meddling.
• A Spokane nursery put up a billboard reading “Pot Dealer Ahead.” The ad was complete with an image of some flower pots, in case people didn’t get the joke (it being Spokane and all). Some people are vocally not amused (it being Spokane and all).
• The U.S. Border Patrol in this state continues to behave like a gang of racist tools.
• North Korea just can’t keep it up.
• Reversible male contraception is finally in the domestic testing stage, despite Big Pharma’s longtime disinterest.
• Jed Lewison at Daily Kos parses the anatomy of a Mitt Romney lie, that over 90 percent of U.S. job losses have gone against women. In reality (instead of Fox News Fantasyland), most folks laid off in the Great Recession were men. But new or revived jobs the past two years have also gone mostly to men (56 percent).
• The Murdoch media empire’s phone and email tapping scandal is reaching the U.S. But Murdoch’s domestic properties are not implicated, at least not yet. This is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, tapping into Hollywood celebrities’ phones and emails.
• Ari Rabin-Havt at HuffPost claims right wing racism no longer bothers with coded “dog whistle” messages, but now spews its hate openly and proudly.
• What Omar Willey says about seeking good web comics applies to just about all web “content”: “How do you find all this stuff?” (The stuff worth reading, that is.)

• Seattle voters will have the chance to bring library service back from several years’ worth of drastic cuts. You know where I stand on this.
• Meanwhile, in the land of Jorge Juis Borges’ surreal library stories, the Argentine government has banned all book imports. The lame excuse is that they could contain dangerous levels of lead. Ebooks and their reading machines, and domestic reprints of foreign books, aren’t affected.
• The local Catholic Archdiocese, once a liberal “social gospel” bastion, has turned hard homophobic.
• Northwest fishermen worry about Japanese tsunami debris showing up in their waters. Talk about your deadliest catch.
• An activist group called Seattle’s greatest family-owned bakery an unfair employer, and staged a protest. Loyal customers staged a counter-protest. Cookies were tossed. Literally.
• The two African Americans who publicly claimed Seattle Police had stopped them for no good reason, got stopped by Seattle Police again.
• A dead orca in Washington waters has caused some to sing “Blame Canada.”
• The UW invented kidney dialysis. Now it’s working on what might replace it.
• The rise in cable-TV subscribers becoming former cable-TV subscribers has attracted even the financial community. One analyst hints there’d be even more cord-cutting, except that many folks are keeping cable subscriptions for Internet access.
• The alleged “liberal media” in a “liberal state” sure don’t seem to like Jay Inslee.
• We’d earlier mentioned that print newspaper ad revenues had sunk to 1984 levels. Someone took those figures, adjusted ’em for inflation, and concluded newsprint ad money is actually at its lowest level since 1950. (The U.S. population then was about half what it is now.)
• Young adults aren’t just not reading print newspapers. They’re also driving a lot less and biking a lot more.
• I’m pretty sure the only people who read the Seattle Times editorials anymore are the bloggers who righteously trash them.
• “In Russia, a lack of men forces women to settle for less.”
• How can something that barely has 10 employees and has not apparently made a cent in profits be worth a billion dollars?

casey mcnerthney, seattlepi.com

• Will the student-made, privately-financed, but oversize Lake City Way bike rack be allowed to stay?
• Happier real estate news for a change: El Centro de la Raza’s affordable-housing project on Beacon Hill is finally a go.
• Cornish College to Mike Daisey: No honorary degree for you!
• Sasha Pasulka at Geekwire says Seattle dot-coms really need to brush up on their marketing to users. I have an additional idea, for dot-coms here and elsewhere: Pay a living wage to the people who make the content (you know, the stuff people actually see when they log onto your site), not just the coders and the execs.
• Does anybody really want to live in “America’s #1 city for hipsters“?
• The U District’s Metro Cinemas tenplex has been sold to a Robert Redford-led consortium.
• One of the big Republicans in the State Senate wants to eliminate medical assistance to the poor, while he himself gets monthly disability payments. He sez, of course, that he really deserves the aid; while those pesky poor people are only sick because of “poor lifestyle choices” they’ve made.
• Martin H. Duke at the Seattle Transit Blog offers up one way how non-subsidized, affordable urban housing comes to exist…

…In the long term today’s affordable housing comes from yesterday’s luxury flats, and cutting off the supply of the latter will deny our children the former in the absence of massive, unsustainable public subsidy.

• The “Painter of Light” has now gone into the light.
• In what Jezebel.com claims to be a “revolutionary” business venture, three business students at a German college have placed ads for “the world’s first free sex brothel for women,” with themselves as the volunteer gigolos. They say they’ve had five “clients” thus far, out of 80 email inquiries. I wouldn’t call it a “business” per se, as no money’s involved. Rather, it’s a marketing operation, with these guys promising they’ll satisfy the women while making no demands of their own.
• Looks like it’s going to take court action to stop Michigan’s right-wing monopoly government from essentially turning that state into a dictatorship.
• Mobutu Sese Seko at Gawker decodes decades of right-wing racist-code-word politics, and sees them culminating in the backlash campaign to defame the Florida shooting victim.
• Lynn Parramore at Alternet insists big corps. are not “job creators” but rather instigators of layoffs, offshoring, and massive wage cuts; and will probably continue to be so.
• Rick Ungar at Forbes (yes, Forbes!) offers a simple answer to the health care crisis: Single-payer plans, established at the state level. He says this “dose of socialism” would be a boon to businesses in states that adopt it.
• The Economist has found at least one dead shopping center that’s being put to new use. It’s in San Antonio, and it’s become the HQ of a web hosting company. We already did this in Everett, where Fluke Manufacturing turned an old big-box strip mall into an electronic test-equipment factory. (Too bad they didn’t call the place “Ye Olde Mall.”)
• Neuroscientists claim stories “stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.” How to intrepret this: not as another excuse for the “eat your broccoli” definition of book reading; but as a lure, a promise that fiction gives you mental/emotional turn-ons of a kind you can’t get from games or movies.

The American parade of pathetic little bigots, who falsely imagine themselves to be valiant crusaders instead of the bullheaded jerks they really are, just goes on and on.

Recent examples:

• A few Hunger Games viewers sent out Tweets® expressing shock and even disgust that some of the main characters were played by black actors. Characters who weren’t even villains!
• The usual wingnut websites and comment boards, and at least one Fox “News” show, spread deliberate lies claiming that teenage Florida shooting victim Trayvon Martin was a “gangsta” and a drug dealer. And even the local cops in the town where it happened are in on the smear.
• For background, Pulitzer Prize author Isabel Wilkerson summarizes the long, sad history of Florida racist violence.
• And this isn’t “today” breaking news, but Frank Rich at New York magazine has a thorough bit-by-bit deconstruction of the Republican war on women; a war which, despite this war’s own proponents’ flaming denials, does exist. Rich also mentions some Republican insiders who’ve expressed major worry and even “a dawning recognition that a grave danger had arisen—not to women, but to their own brand.”

Thursday’s Oregonian has a rather complex story of violence and desperation, set at a Goodwill outlet store.

It seems the subculture of “professional thrifters,” shopping for stuff to resell on eBay, Amazon and elsewhere, has gotten more extreme, and even brutal, during the Great Recession. Folks are spending all day in the bigger thrift stores, pawing over everything and even pushing other shoppers out of their way.

The story particularly mentions one used-book reseller named Pedro Rolando Reynaud Erazo. Along with his brother and an entourage of assistants, he spent his days grabbing books by the armful at Goodwill outlets (the bigger warehouse stores, where stuff that doesn’t sell in the regular Goodwills gets sent). They used portable bar-code scanners to help find the few volumes with resale value, then tossed all the rest. During these day-long sieges, they’d push other shoppers and even store employees out of their way.

A female shopper charged Erazo with following her around the Hillsboro Goodwill outlet store, yelling and calling her names. And more:

He pushed her on 10 occasions. He punched her. He even warned her: “(y)ou should be afraid of me. They’re not going to stop me. I can do whatever I want.”

The woman applied for, and received, a “stalking” (restraining) order against the aggressive entrepreneur.

But an appeals court reversed the ruling; claiming that…

she hadn’t proven that Erazo subjected her to at least two “contacts” that would cause her to fear for her own safety. The court ruled that while the punch qualified as one contact, the 10 shoves weren’t truly dangerous. What’s more, Erazo’s reported threat didn’t instill “a fear of imminent and serious personal violence.”

Anyway, the article continues, Erazo is no longer a threat to this particular woman, as he’s left the state of Oregon.

He now lives in the Seattle area.

And his organization has reportedly operated the same “hoarding” and “scooping” tactics at thrift stores and used-book sales around here since at least 2010.

One thing this ongoing grossness proves is something I’ve been saying for some time: books really are a big business.

(Note: There are other online pieces about Erazo. But I’m not linking to them because they veer off into stupid racist tirades, under the excuse that he was born in Honduras. His aggression and his attitude problem would be just as icky and dangerous if he were a WASP fratboy.)

existing blue tree in vancouver bc; konstantin dimopoulos via kplu.org

• Get ready to see some blue trees next month, in Westlake Park and along the Burke-Gilman Trail. The tree-painting art project is part of a public awareness campaign about global deforestation.
• The first big tunnel digging machine finally broke through at the Capitol Hill light-rail station site, hours too late to make the late TV news.
• Microsoft tries the self-deprecating “we’ve learned from our past mistakes” funny commercial schtick, and it doesn’t even seem awkward or forced at all.
• At least 40 percent of all post-traumatic stress disorder patients at Joint Base Lewis-McChord found their diagnoses later “reversed.” That means they were declared not PTSD-stricken after all, and therefore eligible to be sent right back into combat duty.
• Couldn’t happen to nicer guys: A Goldman Sachs affiliate may be about to default on 11 Seattle and Bellevue office buildings, which the firm bought for nearly $1 billion five years ago.
• Sara Robinson at AlterNet blames “conservative bullying” for making America into “a broken, dysfunctional family.”
• Sixty years ago this week, the first live event billed as a “rock n’ roll concert” ended in riots on the streets of Cleveland. The reason: The ticket printers accidentally printed tickets to two different shows as if they were the same show on the same date.
• A handy rule-O-thumb: Any previously unheard-of singer performing mechanical rote versions of black musical styles from 20 years or more ago is probably white.
• As Danny Westneat insists “art is no excuse” for Mike Daisey to make stuff up about Chinese tech-gadget factories, blogger “La Bohrer” concludes that the late beloved fiction author David Foster Wallace also stretched the facts in at least a couple of his “nonfiction” essays.

early 'new yorker' writer janet flanner photographed by bernice abbott; tacoma art museum

• Tacoma’s getting what was too hot for the Smithsonian, a photo exhibit of 150 years of gays in America.
• There’s an art vending machine in Ballard now! But, despite what this story says, it’s not the first in town. There’s already one at the Hideout bar on Boren and Madison.
• Local animator Drew Christie asks your sympathy for the poor, put-upon Nutria.
• The Voice of America (yes, they’re still around) reports about beloved local artist Ginny Ruffner and her courageous comeback from a horrific car crash.
• The UW men’s basketball team has won “the championship of the West” and is still in the running for U.S. sports’ most famous consolation prize.
• Folks are still trying to bring Dennis Kucinich to run for Congress in Wash. State.
• Auto racing in King County has apparently been saved.
• Who’s profiting from America’s health care system and its runaway costs? Not Swedish Hospital. They’re losing a quarter million a day.
• Microsoft’s giving police departments a software tool to create “digital fingerprints” for any online image. They say it can be useful in tracking down the sharers of child porn. But as we’ve learned, “cracking down on child porn” can be invoked as an excuse for every creepy Big Brother tactic.
• Will the Florida teen shot for apparently no other reason than walking while black ever get real justice?
• This Raw Story piece about an FCC decision, setting aside hundreds of new low-power radio frequencies for actual local stations instead of mere repeater transmitters, exaggerates when it says the move represents “a critical blow to right wing radio dominance.” After all, these new local stations could host their own homegrown right-wingers.
• A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter who wrote about what he calls “the real Foxconn” insists the massive Chinese high-tech subcontractor is actually a pretty good employer, considering.
• Dyske Suematsu asks rhetorically why more Americans don’t like jazz. Suematsu’s rhetorical answer is just standard square-bashing elitist yawn city. Look: Advanced, specialty versions of ANYTHING are going to mainly appeal to niche audiences. Light aircraft. Eighteenth-century history. Foreign film. French wrought-iron sconces from the 1930s. And so on.
• UK author China Mieville wants you to frustrate and “unsatisfy” him. Preferably now.

crosscut.com

• Ex Seattle First Brother Bob Royer looks back at one of the city’s first prominent newspaperwomen. Fun fact: In the late 1930s, the Seattle Times had six people working in the “society” section; an expense more than made up by the amount of “women’s” oriented advertising in the section. Speaking of which….
• The P-I globe will remain standing, somewhere. That’s nice. But it’s not just the globe that I’d wanted preserved. Speaking of which….
• Newspapers are losing $7 in print ad revenue for every $1 they gain in online ad revenue. This is from a Pew Research study. The study’s authors claim papers “need to prioritize digital ad revenues” in order to survive. But what if that’s still not nearly enough? The study cites a “success story” of a small paper (20,000 print circ.) that’s now making $670,000 a year online, compared to $8 million from print ads. That doesn’t look like a bright future to me.
• The new Miss Seattle used to be a Miss Phoenix. Last December she Tweeted® how she “Ugh can’t stand cold rainy Seattle and the annoying people.” She has since apologized.
• Could liquor privatization in Wash. state really get derailed by a court challenge on techinical issues in the original initiative?
• Repercussions continue from Friday night’s Republican coup in the state Senate. The all-cuts budget they rushed through, with the help of three turncoat conserva-Dems but with no public hearings, turns out to hurt K-12 education and devastate services for the neediest.
• Also, the GOP’s parliamentary trickery doomed about 20 non-budget bills from the state House, which died because the Senate didn’t take action on them by midnight Friday.
• Meanwhile, the national Republicans, becoming shriller and stupider every week, have firmly (and probably fatally) tied their fate to the aging, non-college-educated, white male demographic. And they’re “appealing” to this last remaining constituency by treating them like idiots.
• Oh, and the even more batshit-n’-bigoted than ever Limbaugh? He’s lost a third of his ratings in the last few years. (However, some of that loss can be attributed to more accurate means of measuring radio listenership.) But in any event, the right wing “outrage machine,” which includes Limbaugh and his many imitators, may have finally become too petty and brutal for its own good.
• Besides, there’s a problem with trying to bring sexuality and women’s lives back to what they were in the 1950s. It wasn’t working then either. As local author Stephanie Coontz points out, “Teenage childbearing peaked in the fabulous family-oriented 1950s.”
• The GOP-controlled U.S. House is pushing through a bill that would crack down on protests anywhere a federal official might be present. At least, that’s what a worst-case interpretation of its “imprecise language” might infer.
• We know the 9/11 bombers came from Saudi Arabia. But did the Saudi regime itself collude in the attack? Two former U.S. Senators say maybe.
• A megarich hedge fund manager write lucidly about the failures of capitalism in regard to preserving a sustainable society.
• What if crossword puzzle editors wrote poetry?
• Finally, here is a handy pie chart of “excuses conservatives make when facts prove them wrong“:

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

wallyhood.org

My adventure in Bellingham this past Sunday was cold but lovely. Will post a complete post about it a little later on.

And I’ve got another presentation coming up this Saturday, right here in Seattle! It’s at 2 p.m. at the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in pontificous Pioneer Square. (That’s right across from Zeitgeist Coffee.) This one concerns my ’06 book Vanishing Seattle, and perhaps all the things that have vanished around here since then. Be there or be frostbitten.

Now, to catch up with a little randomness:

• Writer Jonathan Shipley would like to hear from anyone who lived or worked at or was involved in the Home of the Good Shepherd (1906-70), the former Catholic “wayward girls” institution, whose building is now a community and arts center.
• One of my current projects is an essay about the “future of news.” It will start with the proclamation that web ads, by themselves, will almost never pay enough to support original, professional journalism. No matter how hard you pander to the advertisers.
• The admirable local-politics site Publicola has faced this fact, and has begun appealing for donations.
• Facebook: Soon to have more ads in your “news feed” from companies you don’t even “Like®”.
• Under current legislation, city authorities would have more authority to kick people out of Westlake Park (including protesters?).
• Ron Sims says it better than I can: We’ve cut too much from higher-ed in this state already.
• Gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna won’t endorse a GOP presidential candidate. This is smart strategy for the current state attorney general. If he wants to win even a single moderate crossover vote, he’ll need to stay as far away as he cam from the “I’m a bigger bigot than you!”/”No, I am!” Republican presidential field.
• The Seattle Times, now mostly ensconced in its new smaller digs, has put up a retro Times Square-esque news ticker sign, where people stuck in traffic halfway up Denny Way can learn all that’s going on.
• The construction bust (at least in greater downtown): Wasn’t it wonderful? Now there’s gonna be 40 stories of apartments next to the Paramount.
• I’ve been a skeptic of Bill Gates’s education-reform schemes (i.e., bust the teachers’ unions, and spend on fancy tech even if it means firing teachers). But today he makes a good point, that you can’t get employees to work better if you treat them as objects of incessant ridicule.
• The Koch brothers: Not only big anti-Obama Super PAC donors/organizers, but also leading oil price speculators. I’m not alleging any dot-connecting, but you might.
• Jonathan Chiat at New York magazine has a theory for why the far right wing (and its corporate puppet masters) are tripling down on the hate- and fear-mongering this year. It’s because the far right’s traditional chief audience (non-college-educated whites, particularly white males) is aging and dwindling, both in number and as a part of the total electorate. This may be the last Presidential election in which this audience can be effectively exploited.
• Did Ralph Nader really endorse Ron Paul, or is the hereby-linked rant a gross exaggeration?
• Ex-Seattle monologuist Mike Daisey talked a bit about sweatshop labor in his Apple-themed piece last year. Now he’s bashing the defenders of the Chinese factory system.
• It’s the fourth anniversary of the last Leap Day. That was when the soap opera Guiding Light (then the longest-running dramatic production in the world) introduced a new reality-show-like production technique. (Even the studio scenes were shot with hand-held minicams.) The new look failed to save that show, or the three other soaps (which held to their standard styles) that got canceled after GL was.

A self-described “white gay male” guest writer at a feminist site re-introduces the allegation, made previously by others, that Dan Savage is an implicit racist, and that Savage cares more about homophobia than about racism or any other form of injustice.

The writer, Kirk Grisham, points out that Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign gives several examples of horribly bullied white gay kids, but hasn’t said much about bullied black or brown or working-class gay kids.

(The campaign also neglects kids who are bullied for any reason other than being gay, but that’s not part of Grisham’s argument.)

Grisham goes on to cite two things Savage has written, but which he’s since rescinded.

One was a rant against African Americans in California who voted for the first time in 2008 to support Obama. Savage originally, partly blamed these voters for the success of the anti-gay-marriage initiative that was also on that state’s 2008 ballot.

The other was Savage’s endorsing Christopher Hitchens’ Iraq War defense, along the line that U.S.-forced regime change would propel social progress and freedom in the Middle East.

He’s since gone on the record contradicting both previous opinions.

I’m not in the business of defending or decrying any ex-boss of mine.

But I will say that “It Gets Better” is built on top of standard, unquestioned liberal notions of “identity politics.”

And that “identity politics” is the continuation of demographic marketing by other means.

It divides, when we should be uniting.

We need to make a better world for everybody. Not just for people in “our” category.

filmfanatic.org

• Forget the movie and the two bios, all full of fiction. In reality, Frances Farmer was not lobotomized. Her story’s still mighty tragic, though.
• Architect Matt Roewe suggests a new, novel public transportation solution—a passenger gondola from the waterfront to Capitol Hill, ending atop a 16- to 40-story tower above Broadway.
• Even some longtime Seattle citizens don’t realize the Army has held on to pieces of Fort Lawton, now surrounded by former fort land that’s now Discovery Park. That ends Saturday.
• The last iPhone-incompatible cell service operator, Bellevue-based T-Mobile, won’t be such anymore. They’re not going to sell the iPhone any time soon, but their data plans will at least work on it once the upgrades are done.
• Yep, looks like another stupid all-cuts budget in the Legislature, kicking the can of our regressive revenue system down the road again. However, at least Basic Health (or what’s left of it) is preserved in one of the competing budget proposals.
• The memorial totem pole to slain carver John T. Williams will be unveiled this weekend at Seattle Center.
• The Seattle Times wants to sell its now ex-headquarters buildings for $80 million, twice their appraised value. That would help the company to meet its pension obligations, and perhaps even help subsidize the paper.
• Artists’ rights outrage of the week: “…A Florida judge ruled last month that iconic funk king George Clinton doesn’t own the rights to any music he created from 1976 to 1983.” That pretty much includes anything you remember from the P-Funk heyday.
• Sponsor tie-ins and product placement, those savior/banes of modern bigtime movies, just get more ridiculous every year. Now The Lorax, that story-sermon against runaway consumerism and “stuff”-ism, is being used to sell SUVs.
• Google’s latest potential new hardware product is something out of a modern dystopian novel. It’s “augmented reality” eyeglasses that display informative texts, social media updates, and, yes, ads.

joe mabel, via wikimedia commons

• How comprehensive can a list of the “10 Greatest Homes in Seattle History” be if it leaves out the Montlake spite house?
• Something I never thought I’d see: young adults joining Elks lodges. Back in the middle of the last century, Elks clubs were huge. The one in Everett, where my father attended, had that town’s best bar, gym, and private pool, and its only live music lounge. But the national Elks were among the last American social institutions to confront their own racist/sexist policies, and hence got branded as reactionary fuddie duddies. The new Elks are promoting themselves with that so-courant “social” mantra, and cheap drinks.
• Linda Thomas would like to remind you that Microsoft XBoxes and Amazon Kindles are also made at the same notorious Chinese factories used by Apple.
• Thomas also performs the ever popular local-angle-on-big-story shtick, with “Local duo penned popular Whitney Houston hits.”
• Not so fast, arena-hopers: Efforts are indeed being made to keep the NBA’s Sacramento Kings and the NHL’s Phoenix Coyotes right where they are. At worst, this would give the arena developers more time to acquire the rest of the land they’d need and to design the thing.
• Meanwhile, Goldy dumps righteous scorn on the hippie sports-haters.
• Mayor McGinn’s “State of the City” address mentioned the usual things (Amazon, arena, jobs, education, crime, etc.). But he also mentioned race discrimination in housing (still going on) and attempts to pull up African American school graduation rates. Unlike some ’60s-generation white people around here, McGinn actually knows there have been actual black people here other than Hendrix.
• Knute Berger sees developers and Seattle’s civic establishment as preparing for a post-recession boom.
• The state budget deal: done with mirrors.
• Who’s not making money from the Facebook IPO? The $1-an-hour foreign laborers who censor your pictures on the site.
• Meanwhile, Jeff Jarvis thinks journalistic institutions should become more like Facebook. Whatever that means. Let me explain briefly why this is hokum: Professional journalism (no matter what contrived “social” or “search” elements are tacked onto it) is someone relaying/interpreting information, telling factual stories for collective audiences. It’s nothing even vaguely similar to the huge censored chat room that is Facebook.
• Amanda Marcotte says the Girl Scouts, current topic of a trumped-up right wing smear campaign, really were progressive at the start, just by having girls do the same “scouting” things boys were doing.
• D.L. MacKenzie boils down the whole Libertarian thang into a simple mantra, in which Business is supposed to be Always Good and Government is supposed to be Always Bad. (As you might expect from this summary, MacKenzie interprets this mantra as a gross oversimplification, at odds with the complications of the real world.)
• Where not to go to get away from drugs: small towns.
• My fave recent American author David Foster Wallace would have been 50 this week. He never even got to live to see The Year of the Trial Size Dove Bar (a shtick in his most famous work Infinite Jest).