Igor Kellor is a multimedia whiz and a very clever person. He’s the creator of the musical Mackris v. O’Reilly and the blog Hideous Belltown.

Now he’s got a CD out (also available online), Greater Seattle.

While billed under the band name Longboat, Keller provides almost all the instrumental sounds (mostly synths) and all the lead vocals.

Don’t expect any perky paeans to tourist vistas and real estate opportunities here. Kellor has more ambitious agendas.

He offers snappy, snarky cabaret ditties about 10 Seattle neighborhoods (including Harbor Island!) and five outlying communities. Each tune is influenced by a different musical genre. Some of the melodies and arrangements match the tone of the lyric tales; others starkly contrast with them.

“Belltown” is a dirge, befitting the chorus of “downtown’s afterthought.”

“Ballard” is a sad sea shanty, about the upscaling away of its entire heritage.

“Fremont” is an uptempo hoedown, even though Keller sings that “To me Fremont will always be/The gateway to Ballard.”

“Downtown” is a brisk calypso-beat tale about the police shooting of John T. Williams.

Some of the songs are more up to date than others. The opening track, “Bellevue,” features the standard stereotype of the Eastside’s largest city as a whitebread conformist nightmare. In real life, it’s becoming more ethnically diverse than Seattle.

Kellor also doesn’t care much for Mercer Island (“It’s clear that money can’t buy taste”), Buren (“Visiting here makes your mind go numb/It’s much like a bug in your cranium”), and Federal Way (depicted as an ideal home for “a violent modern man”).

And he absolutely loathes Edmonds (“A police state/Bad cops rule this town”), recounting a story of “teenage drivers against police cruisers.”

Kellor wraps up all this sharp civic commentary with a sharp change of pace and attitude, a pleasant rendition of “Seattle” (the old Here Come the Brides theme) joined in by a trumpet, trombone and tuba.

Greater Seattle is an ambitious, brusque love letter to the city, warts n’ all.

• Where the state bugged out, private promoters are pitching in to promote Wash. state tourism.
• The final public appearance by J.P. Patches was a heart rendering occasion, even for those of us who weren’t there.
• As Frank Sinatra once sang, “Oops there goes a million kilowatt dam.”
• Word from Spokane is the feds still hate the medical marijuana movement.
• The best part of the Emmys was what didn’t happen.
• Today’s instance of a right-winger “joking” about how fun it would be to murder all the liberals: Andrew Breitbart.
• Netflix’s grand strategy is now revealed. The online streaming-video service and the DVD-by-mail service will be split into two separate brands, requiring separate memberships. The DVD service will be rebranded “Qwikster.” About as insipid a name as I’ve heard, at least since the first dot-com crash of a decade ago. (You know, those bygone days of Beenz, Kozmo, Flooz, MyLackey, HotBot, Go, Go2, Go2Net, et al.)

The downtown Seattle Borders Books closed earlier this week after 17 years. (The Redmond store closes Sunday, among the busted chain’s final outlets to close.)

from inmagine.com

There seems to be a growing book genre, about Seattle white women telling their life stories via their yoga experiences.

First was Presidential sister Claire Dederer’s Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses.

Now we’ve got Suzanne Morrison’s Yoga Bitch: One Woman’s Quest to Conquer Skepticism, Cynicism, and Cigarettes on the Path to Enlightenment.

In which, I presume, Morrison attempts to conquer skepticism, cynicism, and cigarettes, and achieve some form of enlightenment.

Is there room for more than one self-reflective yoga queen in this town?

And if not, how will they duke it out?

Perhaps they could stage a stand-off (or pose-off) on the stage at Hugo House. A series of increasingly difficult poses, to be maintained for at least two minutes each.

By the time they get to the upward-facing two-foot staff pose, we should have our winner.

designsbuzz.com

• The Seattlest gang’s putting out, in installments, a revised and updated “guide to Seattle stereotypes.”
• Neighborhood activists are starting a tiny but intelligently stocked mini-grocery in the Lost Valley of Delridge, an area bereft of places selling anything more nutritious than Budweiser.
• What’s the biggest fear of people buying into a 33-story condo tower? That somebody will block their view with a 40-story condo tower a block away.
• Let’s try to get this straight. A candidate for King County Council has a brother who administers an arts program for at-risk youth. Said arts program puts out, for the first time in its history, a “student made” newspaper. Said paper includes several mentions praising the administrator’s sis and several other mentions disparaging her election opponent. Oh, and the thing was partly made with City funds.
• Microsoft’s immensely profitable. Its stock price has essentially been “flat” for some time. One more reason for America’s socio-economic nabobs to stop believing in the Almighty Stock Price as the all-determining value of everything.
• Progressive economist Remy Trupin looks at Wash. state’s no-end-in-sight budget hole and insists that from this point on, “further cuts are not an option.”
• A hundred years ago, eight destitute young women were killed in an accident at a Chehalis explosives factory. Their joint grave has finally been rediscovered.
• The Illinois company now calling itself Boeing has friends among the House Republicans. That body just approved, in a symbolic gesture certain to sink in the Senate, a bill to strip Federal protection for workers whose jobs were outsourced as punishment for union organizing.
• If we must say goodbye to Cyndy’s House of Pancakes on Aurora (closed as of July after 53 years), at least we can be consoled that housing for the formerly-homeless will go up on the site.
• There was a hearing about a plan for a homeless shelter in Lake City. The senior-housing developer SHAG bused in residents to speak against the plan. One of these speakers called the homeless “garbage.” Brutal insensitivity: It’s not just for Republican campaign events any more.
• Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy: There’s an FBI corruption probe of figures surrounding Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and cronies.
• The 3-D movie craze? Dead already. Again.
• How will the record labels survive? Some are diversifying into other businesses. Such as, according to a Federal indictment, international cocaine smuggling. (I know what you’re thinking. Drugs in the music industry? Never!)
• We go out on a snarky note with some books Borders can’t even give away.

scene from antiwar protest downtown, march 2003

After all the recycled bluster about the police and the firefighters and especially the troops, about the valiant politicians and the flag waving celebrities, about the need to never forget the horrible day which begat the horrible decade of the endless wars and the mass intimidation and the institutionalized fear mongering and the ugly racism and the corruption of democracy, what more is to be said?

Quite a bit.

We can remember the World Trade Center’s Seattle architect, Minoru Yamasaki (1912-1986). His local works include Puget Sound Plaza, Rainier Square, the Pacific Science Center, and the IBM Building (based on his early WTC design work).

Yamasaki didn’t live to see the towers attacked. But he knew the consequences of war-inspired fear and prejudice.

It was only the intercession of an early employer, and the fact that he was working in the northeast at the time, that got him exempted from the WWII internment of western Americans of Japanese ancestry.

We can remember the opportunities for international cooperation to build a safer world. And how those opportunities were deliberately quashed by the Bush-Cheney regime.

We can remember the Patriot Act, the TSA, the “total information awareness” domestic eavesdropping scheme, the media’s ignoring of an initially strong antiwar movement, and all the big and little ways the regime waged war on its own citizens.

We can remember the Americans troops still in harm’s way in Afghanistan and, yes, in Iraq. And those who didn’t make it back. And those who are back home but seriously harmed physically and psychologically, and who have received insufficient care.

We can remember the thousands of Iraqis and Afghanis who had nothing to do with the original attacks but died in the ensuing wars and occupations.

We can remember we still need exit strategies from both occupations, strategies that will protect Iraqis and Afghanis of all sexes and ethnicities.

We can remember the terrible damage wrought on the U.S. budget by war spending, combined with the millionaires’ tax cuts and the rest of the neocon economic misadventure.

And remembering all that, we can say, yes, “never again.”

Never again will we be manipulated by fear, either by foreign civilians or by our own leaders.

Never again will we let peace and reason be treated as dirty words.

Never again will we invade first and ask questions later.

Never again will we strike against entire nations over the horrendous crimes of a few dozen individuals (most of whom had never lived in either invaded nation).

Never again will we allow fear of “Islamic” fundamentalist repression to become an excuse for “Christian” fundamentalist repression.

Never again will we sacrifice our freedoms under the excuse of protecting them.

College football season is among us. This means I need to remind some of you:

The University of Oregon is the Ducks and is in Eugene. (It is also known sometimes as “Nike U.”)

Oregon State University is the Beavers and is in Corvallis.

I attended (briefly), and am still fiercely loyal to, the latter. Once a Beaver, always a Beaver.

• Those of us who were looking forward to that separatist, elitist Burning Man institution’s imminent demise are outta luck. A nonprofit is being formed to take over future annual festivals. Among other effects, it means those who go there this year for the first time will get to annoy everybody back in their hometowns in subsequent years, with sermons about how much more “pure” the festival used to be.
• Ex-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld held a book signing in Tacoma. Antiwar activists, including the widow of a Ft. Lewis soldier who committed suicide, tried to disrupt the proceedings and got roughed up.
• Can something really be done to stop drug selling in Belltown? I say, it’s not likely as long as the First Avenue glamour-bar scene keeps attracting so many affluent drug buyers.
• Ain’t them Sounders something? Well, yes they are.
• Despite the elimination of state tax breaks for filmmakers, one production is underway on the Eastside—a horrific true-life drama.
• As Wash. state’s government payroll gets smaller, it’s also getting whiter. Gov. Gregoire’s response: more “staff reviews” and talk about the importance of diversity.
• Gay marriage—here next year?
• For reasons I won’t get into, I witnessed the closure of the (high level) West Seattle Bridge late Saturday night. Sadly, it wasn’t due to road work, but to a jumper, who eventually “succeeded.”
• Gawker’s unsupported rant that Seattle was “a very annoying place” has made Seattlest’s “Seattle stereotyping hall of shame.”
• Qaddafi, Gadaffi, Gadhafi, however you transliterate the name—he lived the typical dictator’s opulence amid public squalor. And his son and daughter-in-law were grotesquely brutal to the household staff, in ways unimaginable outside of a Japanese gore movie.
• Megabucks campaign financing just continues to get bigger and more corrupt. But you knew that.
• And Republicans increasingly bind themselves around an anti-science, anti-thinking ideology. But you already knew that.
• Ad Age lists some lessons from past recessions, for those businesses that still need to sell tangible products to U.S. consumers.
• I keep getting asked about this, so for the record: The L.A.-based chain In-N-Out Burger is not, repeat NOT, opening in Bellevue. Not this year, not next year. It was just an Eastside food blog’s April Fool’s gag. Need proof? Just look at the link in the story for “View renderings of the new restaurant here.”

• Warren Buffet “saved” Bank of America with a $5 billion investment. So now what should he do with it? How about breaking it up? Sell Merrill Lynch to help pay for Countrywide’s involvement in the mortgage bubble and subsequent crash. Then turn the retail banking operation into regionalized spinoffs attuned to their local communities rather than to the Wall St. casino.
• Seattle Weekly shrinkage watch: Seattle Bike Blog believes SW editor Mike Seely’s “ill-informed and widely off base” rant against the City’s “road diet” programs (re-laning schemes, sometimes including separate bike lanes) is part of a desperate agenda to bash Mayor McGinn for anything and everything, including programs actually started by the previous mayor.
• Media Matters parses, and debunks, the arguments made by media toadies in favor of Boeing’s union busting drives.
• Seattle’s new art mecca? The now sparsely occupied interior-decorator showrooms at Georgetown’s Seattle Design Center.
• James Altucher lists some little known facts about the recently retired Steve Jobs. These include several less than flattering things. None of those involve his role in the outsourcing of almost all North American consumer-electronics manufacturing.…
• …while Kelefa Sanneh believes the iPod phenom, with its penchant for mixing and mashing, has driven the music biz back toward flashy hit singles.
• The story we linked to yesterday, the one that was all aglow about Iceland flouting the global bankers? Seems it was somewhat exaggerated, alas.
• And for political point making combined with snarky laffs, explore the highly unauthorized by any campaign committee site, “What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far?“

• The rules of cricket.
• The real names of the Residents.
• Who the characters “really were” in any ’50s-’60s novel set in New York City.
• What’s under a kilt.
• What’s under a Utilikilt.
• What heroin use feels like.
• What (insert name of debilitating disease here) feels like.

pride parade viewers at the big popsicle

(A relatively long edition this time, bear with.)

• So, who’s responsible for the giant Popsicle art piece (an instant popular hit!) at Martin Selig’s Fourth and Blanchard Building? It’s Mrs. Selig.
• Architecture critic Lawrence W. Cheek sees the Amazon.com campus in South Lake Union as “sleek, stiff, anonymous modern boxes, impeccably executed, with rarely a whiff of whimsy or personality.”
• Wright Runstad, the real estate developer who’s got the lease on most of the old Beacon Hill hospital building (where Amazon.com was headquartered until recently) have proposed a deal with King County. The county would move its juvie court and jail up the hill (paying rent to WR), while selling WR the current juvie campus south of Seattle U (nine eminently developable acres).
• UW computer science researchers are trying to write an algorithm to generate “that’s what she said” jokes.
• Some anonymous person posted crude web-animations snarking about fictionalized versions of Renton police personnel. Renton police want to find and jail whoever did it; thus proving themselves eminently worthy of such ridicule.
• Without illegal immigrants, say buh-bye to Wash. state agriculture.
• Local composer David Hahn pleas for an end to the decimation of arts funding.
• Family and friends of the slain native carver John T. Williams have finished a memorial totem pole. The 32-foot carving is supposed to be installed in Seattle Center. Sometime.
• White artists in South Africa are now depicting themselves as outsiders.
• Bad Ads #1: When fashion magazines and their advertisers depict 10-12 year old girls looking “sexy,” are they really promoting anorexia?
• Bad Ads #2: Did the London Olympics promoters who used the Clash’s “London Calling” in a commercial even listen to the song first?
• Do violent deaths really rise during Republican presidencies? One author claims so.
• Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign has a new advisor. It’s Robert Bork, the onetime Supreme Court nominee. Bork, you might recall, hates porn, birth control, feminism, the Civil Rights Act, and free speech. Romney, you might recall, is billing himself as the sane alternative to the other Republicans who want to be President.
• Economist Umair Haque, whom I’ll say more about next week in this space, believes declining consumer spending isn’t part of the problem, it’s part of the solution.
• For two consecutive years, a suburban Minnesota high school’s idea of homecoming-week fun was to have white kids dressing up like stereotypes of black kids. Somebody finally sued.
• There’s another political move to negate your online rights. As usual, the excuse is “protecting children.”
• Contrary to prior announcements, Jerry Lewis will not make a cameo final appearance at this year’s muscular dystrophy telethon (itself no longer a true telethon, just a really long special). Perhaps that means the show can finally stop depicting “Jerry’s Kids” as pitiful waif victims, and instead depict ordinary, fully extant boys and girls (and men and women) who simply have a medical condition.

bachmann family values?

• No, Michele Bachmann, slaves did not have stable marriages and families. Not when spouses could be re-sold to separate masters or be used as involuntary sex toys.
• Today’s anti-deep-bore-tunnel sermon comes to you in the form of cute CGI cartoon characters with synthesized voices.
• As for the tunnel project we like, the Capitol Hill light-rail tunnel is being dug by a 21-foot-wide boring machine nicknamed “Brenda.” Make your own 90210 jokes here.
• Painting murals on street surfaces—do they reduce traffic speeds, or encourage dangerous games of pedestrian hopscotch?
• The Midwestern union buster wannabes who now run Boeing are being very secretive in their “southern strategy.”
• Admitting your addiction to Facebook is the first step toward regaining control of your life. Yes, I found this link from Facebook.
• Woke up, it was a Chelsea mornin’ and the first thing that I heard was the historic hipster hotel’s been sold to speculators who want to turn it into rich folks’ residences.
• Post-made-up-“crisis” updates: Joe Biden allegedly called Congressional Republicans “terrorists.” Less famous commenters say the GOPpers are waging a “war on America” and claim they “fit the profile of the classic abuser.” Another e-pundit wonders whether the Bushies deliberately left the nation incurably “bankrupt, corrupt, ungovernable.”
• On a lighter note, here’s some fun stuff found at Grocery Outlet.

from boobsdontworkthatway.tumblr.com

• Comic and fantasy artists, and their fans, have long been stereotyped as guys who don’t know anything about women. Here’s visual evidence supporting the allegation, in a blog entitled “Boobs Don’t Work That Way.” (And here’s some advice from artist Max Riffner on how to draw women as if you paid attention to them.)
• Wu’s boo-boo puts Wu in deep doo-doo.
• If all-electric cars take off, how will we make and distribute the electricity needed to run them?
• Author Robert S. Becker is one of the commentators who sees the ideological roots of American conservatism in the heritage of the Deep South, in its economy of big corporate farms led by self-styled “rebels” and operated by cheap and/or enslaved labor.…
• …while Paul Krugman has had it up to here with the myth that there’s a “centrist” silent majority, made up of “swing voters” who somehow happen to completely agree with the D.C. pundit caste.
• Phony debt “crisis” conspiracy theory of the day: Are Republicans luring Obama into unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, as an excuse to impeach him?
• The post-lockout Seahawks will do without the star quarterback who stayed a little too long.
• Councilmember Nick Licata would like a city park dedicated to Seattle writers. I might have a snark about this a little later on.
• This year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada will be the last. Now, all the Seattle artists who only show their work at Burning Man might have to actually exhibit it to (gasp!) locals.

• Gubernatorial candidate Jay Inslee made a bold move when he suggested that the state’s Investments Board could put more pension fund money into Washington businesses. Now, Inslee’s backed off that a little.
• Remember suburban sprawl? Now, at least in apartment construction, almost all the region’s new development is in Seattle.
• Meanwhile in the suburbs, local small businesses are among the enterprises learning what they can do with abandoned big-box retail spaces.
• The now-shuttered Columbia City Cinema is a mess. The building, and the finances behind it.
• Nationally, Mark Sumner insists there is no federal fiscal crisis, only a trumped-up right wing power play.
• The group United for a Fair Economy has a chart of 11 different “Things the Wealthiest Americans Can Buy for the U.S. (that most families can’t afford for themselves!).” For instance, the nation’s richest 400 households could pay off the whole country’s credit card debts.
• The Rupert Murdoch phone-hacking scandal continues to obsess pundits everywhere. At The Observer (the Sunday-only sister paper to The Guardian, the left-leaning U.K. daily that broke much of the scandal’s details), Henry Porter claims that, at least in Brit domestic politics, “the door has shut on Murdoch.”
• And an unsigned piece in The Times of India sums up the standard operating procedure at Murdoch’s UK tabloids, even without their ickiest invasions of privacy, as “exploiting the pornography of sorrow.” A lot of U.S. media could be similarly accused.
• We close for today with Roger Ebert righteously snarking against rewritten “easy reading” versions of The Great Gatsby (possibly created for adult ESL classes):

There is no purpose in “reading” The Great Gatsby unless you actually read it. Fitzgerald’s novel is not about a story. It is about how the story is told. Its poetry, its message, its evocation of Gatsby’s lost American dream, is expressed in Fitzgerald’s style–in the precise words he chose to write what some consider the great American novel. Unless you have read them, you have not read the book at all. You have been imprisoned in an educational system that cheats and insults you by inflicting a barbaric dumbing-down process.

Is it hypocritical for me to insult a politician or pundit as a “corporate whore,” when I have respect and admiration for actual whores?