• The City of Seattle and the Port of Seattle are getting together to publicize local music at Sea-Tac airport. The campaign will involve piped-in music and in-terminal announcements read by local music stars, plus videos, still images projected on screens, and a local music feed on the airport’s WiFi network. There’s an opening party with four live bands on Saturday. That’s all nice, but what would really make it rock would be Maktub covering Brian Eno’s Music for Airports!
• In the ashes of Masins Furniture’s departure from Pioneer Square and the loss of the nearby 619 Western art studios, ambitious developers say they want to turn two of the three adjoining Masins buildings into “PiSquare Arts,” a complex of work and live/work spaces. The developers vow to make the units “as affordable and artist friendly as we can.” Can any non-subsidized remodel create actual artist spaces, not just architectural offices falsely billed as “artist spaces”? We shall see.
• Who doesn’t like the state’s apparently about-to-pass gay marriage bill? Catholic leaders. Who doesn’t like the Catholic leaders’ dislike? Catholic laypeople.
• Some wags are snickering at Michelle Obama’s current Reader’s Digest cover. They claim she’s making a hand gesture that looks like the American Sign Language image for a certain body part. Of course, she could just be giving a shout-out to her brother, who coaches a certain college basketball team with a certain team name.

uw tacoma

• There are certain streets in any region that fully express the full history and character of their places. Around here, there’s one street that particularly tells the tale of the Northwest, its industry, its development, its hopes and its despairs. I speak of South Tacoma Way. And of the UW-Tacoma students who’ve made a lovely brief history of this important road. It’s available as a free PDF from the link above.
• A couple of Republicans in the state Senate have bravely stood in favor of the gay-marriage bill currently under discussion. Of course, in today’s GOP no good deed goes unpunished.
• Non-scandal of the week: Casual readers might be shocked to learn the University United Methodist Temple holds a weekly “Sext Service.” But it’s really just an informal midweek worship, named after the Latin word for the “sixth hour.” (I was raised Methodist, and they are one of the more liberal mainline-Protestant sects, but they’re not that liberal.)
• No Comment Dept. #1: The Newspaper Association of America’s launched a PR campaign insisting that “Smart is the New Sexy,” and that newspaper reading (print or online) is the way to smartness.
• No Comment Dept. #2: The stolen Seattle men’s pro basketball team will star in a forthcoming Warner Bros. movie. (All right, one comment: Go ahead. Hiss the villains.)
• The intellectual property industry’s Internet censorship drive (via Congress) might be stalled for now, but the industry proceeds on other fronts. Case in point: the Supreme Court’s ruling, on the industry’s behalf, that public domain works can be re-copyrighted.
• David Letterman still has a woman problem.
• Cracked.com, that funny list-based-long-essay site that bought its name from a defunct MAD magazine rival, occasionally runs something that turns out to be deadly serious. Example: “7 Things You Don’t Realize About Addiction (Until You Quit).”

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.

from smelllikedirt.wordpress.com

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

defunct connecticut strip mall, from backsideofamerica.com

• Mark Hinshaw at Crosscut says Seattle’s wrong to demand street level retail in so many mixed-use developments. He says there just aren’t enough viable businesses to put in them. It’s actually a national situation. Even before the ’08 slump, analysts claimed the country had become “overstored,” with too many malls, strip malls, big box outlets, etc. for the available business.
• One successful local retailer, kitchenware king Sur La Table, was bought by the same financiers who also own big chunks of Gucci and Tiffany.
• The big Nevermind 20th anniversary concert opened with the reunited (for now) Fastbacks nailing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Perfect in so many ways.
• “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” is done for. There was a big coming out party for GLBT military personnel at Lewis-McChord.
• For once, a local art work made for display at Burning Man will actually be shown here!
• Tacoma’s life size Boy Scout statue is missing. Scouting officials fear the thieves could just melt it down.
• Thankfully, there will be no Oklahoma or Texas teams in the Pac-12 (previously Pac-10, previously Pac-8) conference. Some sporting traditions should remain sacred.
• U.S. Rep. George Nethercutt (R-Spokane) thinks schools spend too much time and resources on “nonessential curriculum” such as gay history and the environment.
• The big Netflix shakeup is explained by that prime explainer of everything, The Oatmeal.
• BBC Ulster commentator William Crawley explains how to be a Christian anarchist. Hint: It ain’t easy.
• Is the “Occupy Wall Street” protest a bigger thing online than it is as a real-world event? And what are the protesters for, anyway?
• Has Facebook really created 180,000 jobs, as the company claims? Or is this just a new version of dot-com hype?
• Current TV’s next lib-talk franchise: The heretofore Internet-based gabfest The Young Turks, featuring ex-MSNBC dude Cenk Uygur. Still can’t get the channel on my cable system.
• The feds claim the gaming site Full Tilt Poker has degenerated into “a global Ponzi scheme,” funding operations out of money owed to its winning players.
• Soon you’ll be able to preserve the remains of your deceased loved ones in handy liquid form.
• The annual Coffee Fest trade show is at the Convention Center this weekend. It’s intended for people in the business of importing, roasting, selling, and serving the stuff, though many parts of it are also open (for a fee) to those who simply love the java a lot. Of course, there’s also something else this weekend to pump up your pulse.

• A victim of the war-on-terra hype some folks would like brought back: busking musicians on ferry boats.
• Here’s CNN’s take on the scandal of Border Patrol agents unfairly harassing Latino locals on the Olympic Peninsula. The headline: “Border agent says there’s nothing to do, says money being wasted.” In other words, if it weren’t for the war-on-terra hype, none of this would be happening.
• There’s a reason all the local media latched onto the aging Hall and Oates as this year’s big Bumbershoot stars. It’s because they were the only act this year both famous enough and old enough for media people to have heard of. (Apparently, the big name acts now want a cool half million per show. And you were wondering why you haven’t heard many recessionary protest songs by said big name acts.)
• The Neptune Theater’s official re-opening, later this month, will include a one-night nod to the U District house’s roots. I speak, of course, of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which played midnight shows at the Neptune for more than a decade.
• Recession Sign #1: More parents are discovering public schools are just fine after all.
• Recession Sign #2: Realistic novels and stories about the socio-economically struggling are back in vogue.
• Adam Doree wants Steve Jobs to finally get around to donate a few buck to charity already.
• Sady Doyle really, really hates the Game of Thrones books. And Alyssa Rosenberg doesn’t particularly care for Doyle’s putdowns of the books. The point-O-contention: The novels depict women enduring some of the violent brutalities one might find in a violent, brutal fictional setting.
• Elsewhere in genderland, Hugo Schwyzer wants you to define the word “man” to mean not-boy, instead of not-woman.
• The Guardian, ever on the prowl for American weirdness with which to addle and astound its Brit readers, has discovered the “muscular Christianity” in evangelical-fringe books such as No More Christian Mr. Nice Guy. The writer seems to have never heard of the Church of the SubGenius and its “real FIGHTIN’ JESUS.”

• At Grist.org, Claire Thompson looks wistfully at south Seattle’s prized yet delicate ethnic/religious/class diversity, and wonders how it can survive.
• There was a big political science convention in town this past week. (An odd phrase, considering the number of politicians these days who officially hate regular ol’ science.) Anyhoo, Peter Steinbrueck spoke to the gathering about how this country needs more regional decision-making bodies to plan metro-wide futures.
• The head of Belltown’s Matt Talbot Center, a Christian alcohol/drug recovery center, was arrested and is on suicide watch, for “investigation of attempted rape” of a 10 year old boy. Let’s spare the snark and focus on the tragedy for now.
• The head of the Seattle police union apparently believes diversity, tolerance, and common human decency are somehow anti-American. This is not going to turn out well. In fact, it already hasn’t.
• Don’t look for a lot more living wage jobs any time soon. At least not from corporate America.
• Eric L. Wattree believes the nation’s #1 problem isn’t the economy (as putrid as it is), but “the Republican sabotage of America.”
• Finally, here’s a brief peek at Nicholson Baker’s novel House of Holes; specifically at the orgasm sound-effect words and phrases therein.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

My book Walking Seattle, which I told you about here some months back, is finally out.

The big coming out party is Sunday, Sept. 24, 5 p.m., at the Elliott Bay Book Co. This event will include a 30-minute mini walk around the Pike-Pike neighborhood.

When I came up with the idea of a mini-walk, the store’s staff initially asked what the theme of my mini walk would be. Would it be about the gay scene, or the hipster bar scene, or the music scene, or classic apartment buildings, or houses of worship, or old buildings put to new uses?

The answer: Yes. It will be about all of the above. And more.

The reason: Part of what makes Capitol Hill so special (and such a great place to take a walk) is all the different subcultures that coexist here.

A tourist from the Northeast this summer told me he was initially confused to find so many different groups (racial, religious, and otherwise self-identified) in just about every neighborhood in this town.

Back where he came from, people who grew up in one district of a city (or even on one street) stayed there, out of loyalty and identity. But in Seattle you’ve got gays and artists and African immigrant families and Catholics and professors and cops and working stiffs and doctors all living all over the place. People and families go wherever they get the best real-estate deal at the time, no matter where it is.

On the Hill, this juxtaposition is only more magnified.

In terms of religion alone, Pike/Pine and its immediate surroundings feature Seattle’s premier Jewish congregation, its oldest traditionally African American congregation, the region’s top Catholic university, a “welcoming” (that means they like gays) Baptist church, Greek and Russian Orthodox churches, and a new age spiritual center. Former classic Methodist and Christian Science buildings are now repurposed to offices and condos respectively. And yet, in the eyes of many, the Hill is today better known for what happens on Saturday night than on Sunday morning.

A lot of Igor Keller’s Greater Seattle CD is a quaint look back at when this city’s neighborhoods could be easily typed, as they famously were on KING-TV’s old Almost Live!

Perhaps you might find a few more franchised vitamin sellers in Fremont, or a few more halal butchers near MLK and Othello.

But for the sheer variety of different groups and subgroups and sub-subgroups, there’s no place like this place anywhere near this place.

•

Though a lot of the time, these different “tribes” don’t live in harmony as much as in they silently tolerate one another’s presence.

To explain this, let’s look at another book.

British novelist China Mieville’s book The City and the City is a tale of two fictional eastern European city-states, “Bezsel” and “Ul Qoma.” These cities don’t merely border one another; they exist on the same real estate. The residents of each legally separate “city” are taught from birth to only interact with, or even recognize the existence of, the fellow citizens of their own “city.” If they, or ignorant tourists, try to cross over (even if it just means crossing a street), an efficient secret police force shows up and carts them away.

It’s easy to see that scenario as a metaphor for modern urban life in a lot of places, including the Hill. It’s not the oft talked about (and exaggerated) “Seattle freeze.” It’s people who consider themselves part of a “community” of shared interests more than a community of actual physical location.

The young immigrant learning a trade at Seattle Central Community College may feel little or no rapport with the aging rocker hanging out at a Pike/Pine bar. The high-tech commuter having a late dinner at a fashionable bistro may never talk to the single mom trying to hold on to her unit in an old apartment building.

Heck, even the gay men and the lesbians often live worlds apart.

It’s great to have all these different communities within the geographical community of the Hill.

But it would be greater to bring more of them together once in a while, to help form a tighter sense of us all belonging and working toward common goals.

• Local business promoters have prepared an “infographic” hawking Seattle as the best place to start a hi-tech company.
• First, Sonic Boom Records said it would close its recently moved Capitol Hill branch. Now Everyday Music says high rents are forcing it out of its own site on the Hill. The store says it will move, somewhere.
• Seattle Goodwill tried several times over the past 12 years to redevelop its Rainier Valley campus. One scheme would have razed its beautiful mega thrift store for a Target. With the collapse of that and other concepts, Goodwill is finally going ahead with a limited plan to build a new job training complex.
• Alex Carson explains why “Seattle Mariners baseball is like an Elvis Costello album.” An album Carson hasn’t actually heard.
• In more tragic baseball news, a fan at a Texas Rangers game leaned over a railing to catch a ball and fell over.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna spoke to Young Republicans in Bellevue, and tried to have a Democratic Party operative kicked out of the room, even calling police.
• Meanwhile, a national “Christian Left” group bought ad space on Facebook for a quite inoffensive little message. Facebook pulled the ad after conservatives complained.
• A Portland judge approved a bankruptcy plan for the Northwest Jesuits. It sets aside more than $150 million for past victims of abusive priests.
• Meanwhile, a Centers for Disease Control report claims more than half of us had harrowing childhoods, “featuring abusive or troubled family members or parents who were absent due to separation or divorce.” In other news, Leave It to Beaver was never real.

The Oregonian’s got a fascinating look back to the wacky days of the Rajneeshee commune, where enlightenment and free love quickly devolved into terror and murder plots. Ah, it’s always amazing what isolation, a sense of in-group superiority, and a total lack of empathy toward outsiders can accomplish.

There are many threads of influence beneath today’s extreme right wing faux-populism. Here’s one: the religious, political, and sales cult that is Amway.

Online pundit Mike Lux asks, “Why Are So Many Christians Conservative?”

The question should really be, “Why Do So Many Conservatives Claim to be Christians?”

The answer is simple: It’s the “default option” among America’s more conformist strains, at least outside of NYC. It represents obedience to the established authority system.

An essayist with AOL News wishes to praise “America’s Most Diverse ZIP Code.” You’ll never guess where it is.

No. C’mon, guess.

In the Atlantic, Hanna Rosin asks the musical question, Did Christianity Cause the Crash?.

Rosin goes to nondenominational “megachurches” that preach the “prosperity gospel,” often to minority and immigrant churchgoers. Her implied allegation: These churches’ leaders were in cahoots with the big-yet-shady bankers and lenders, delivering the naive faithful into often disastrous mortgages and investment schemes.

To this I’d say yeah, maybe; but a lot of other influences were at play too.

…GOP presidential frontrunners as of this morning, and none of them are Fred Thompson. In other news:

• Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner may face still more delays. How smart does globally-outsourced component construction sound now?
• Raw milk— its proponents claim it’s really good for you. Except when it isn’t.
• An appeals court ordered the Belltown-based Mars Hill Graduate School (not connected with Mars Hill Church) to pay $300,000 to its first female faculty member, in a long-standing discrimination suit.
• REI’s building an eco-friendly store in Texas. Now the weekend warriors who drive 75 miles or more to their wide-open spaces can feel a little less guilty.
• A state legislator would like to ban plastic grocery bags. Yeah, but then how will our children learn the pleasures of self-asphyxiation?
• There was a cable TV outage in Kent Tuesday, due to pranksters shooting at utility lines.
• Richard McIver’s charges were dropped, one day before his domestic-abuse trial was to have started.
• Tully’s Coffee underwent another executive purge. Make your own “grounds for concern” joke here.