seanmichaelhurley.blogspot.com

• My ol’ pal and fellow Stranger refugee, painter/illustrator Sean Michael Hurley, worked the “safety patrol” at the Downtown Emergency Service Center for the past two years, until earlier this month. Here are his poignant reminiscences of this tough job.
• Not since (or even including) Dukakis have I seen a Presidential campaign come apart at the rivets so thoroughly, so quickly. Having apparently abandoned even most of the remaining “swing states” (of which some polls say there are now only six), the Romneyites are retreating to their remaining hardcore base—their billionaire donors. That’s the reason for the masses-bashing speech Romney gave to some donors last week, which got leaked to Mother Jones.
• Next, the Romney cronies will try to double down on the “culture war” nonsense, to try to keep the wingnuts interested in propping up the GOP downticket races.
• Wall Street was re-occupied, with the expected police over-reaction.
• Timothy Harris at Real Change, meanwhile, insists there’s life yet in the Occupy shtick.
• Nanci Donnellan, KJR-AM’s former “Fabulous Sports Babe,” has had major health issues in recent years, but is still doing the brassy-mama act on the air in Tampa.
• Did a European magician try to copy one of Penn and Teller’s (well, Teller’s) signature bits? Or is it all just another of the team’s elaborate hoaxes?
• Today’s lesson in officially homophobic institutions covering up rampant child abuse comes from the Boy Scouts.
• So the organized anti-American attacks in the Mideast aren’t really due to an awful, no-budget American movie. But if they had been, so many more cringeworthy-bad films are out there. Where’s the rioting over Manos the Hands of Fate or The Wasp Woman?
• There are still vast places in America, nay in Wash. state, where there’s no cell phone service and previous little Internet service. Some people who don’t live in these places imagine them to be heaven. I do not.
• A Tacoma teacher says education reform has become like the unsolvable training exercise in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I think it’s more like one of those Doctor Who season finales that require a millennium or two to resolve.
• Jen Doll at the Atlantic says the changing book biz means the end of the cloying back-cover blurb. (You’ll also enjoy the article’s stock photo of the old Elliott Bay Book Co. location.)
• Harvard researchers claim “a wandering mind is not a happy mind.” I’d tell you more about the story, but I had these 30 other browser tabs open at the time….

via upworthy.com

• In this deck of cards, they’re all “jokers.” Presenting 52 Shades of Greed, a playing-card deck (dis)honoring some of the financial debacle’s greatest villains.
• Amazon’s new e-book hardware shtick: new readers and Android tablets. Amazon’s new e-book content shtick: fiction serials, just like Dickens used to make (well, sort-of).
• Jon Talton sees the Chicago company calling itself Boeing as engaging in a labor-relations “race to the bottom.” And as acting very one-percenty in the process.
• You may have heard about the mysterious, off-and-on, West Seattle Hum. Now at this link, you can hear the hum itself.
• The Seattle Channel and Norm Gregory remember the days when electric streetcars crossed Seattle.
• A study claims up to 30 percent of America’s total health-care spending is wasted, between unnecessary procedures and cumbersome bureaucracy.
• Here’s precisely how Bill Clinton’s Wednesday speech differed from the (shorter) draft approved by the Democratic Convention brass. And here’s how Clinton used specific rhetorical strategies to drive home his messages.
• Here are the Thursday DNC moments by the Foo Fighters, a fictional Gabrielle, a real Gabrielle, Kerry, the Veep, and the Prez himself.
• HuffPost blogger Nomiki Konst believes this might be the last election of the TV era, the last Presidential cycle to be dominated by campaign commercials—and the megabucks fundraising machines needed to pay for them.

As promised, here are my observations of Bumbershoot 2012, Seattle’s annual big culture buffet.

As others have noted, it was a sunny but not unbearably hot three-day weekend, bringing out strong-sized crowd despite the steeper than ever ticket prices. (It was either charge $50 a day, or go back to having no musical stars bigger than Hall & Oates.)

Behold, my first ever deep fried candy bar (a Snickers). Gooey. Messy. Yummy.

How are curly fries made? With good old American industrial knowhow, that’s how.

They may call it the Seattle Center Armory now, but to me it will always be the Center House and/or Food Circus.

In this post-record-industry age, live gigs are more important than ever to a band’s financial model. So are gig posters, as lovingly seen at the latest Flatstock exhibit.

The historic video games exhibit (still up) shows the young’uns what real entertainment was like, 8-bit style.

But amid all the fun there’s some deadly serious stuff. World Vision International would like you to know AIDS is still devastating much of Africa.

This “House of the Immediate Future” was named after a model home full of futuristic devices at the ’62 World’s Fair. The new one exemplifies affordable-housing designs that could be factory-built, then installed on small real-estate footprints.

A few inflatable rides are no substitute for the late, great Fun Forest.

The Toyota-sponsored “Whac-A Hipster” game. Hipster-bashing has become corporate,and therefore beyond passé.

The heart of the “Put the Needle on the Record” exhibit, a mini-recording studio where you can record your own music and/or voices for a time capsule, is this recording lathe that cuts real phonograph-record masters.

Today’s greatest ETA (“Elvis Tribute Artist”), El Vez, does his massive act with a massive in-house video production (like all the big music stages had this year).

An inflatable icon of the original Elvis stood over two exhibits.

To the right, the Record Store, a display of classic vinyl LPs with DJs and live small combos.

To the left, the Elvistravaganza. Marlow Harris and Jo David applied their kitsch curatorial touch to the World’s Fair’s most enduring celebrity visitor. I contributed my (quite modest) ETA talents at the all-day karaoke stage.

As I departed the Center grounds to the soothing strains of Hey Marseilles, I regretted the many acts I hadn’t seen but felt enlivened and revived by the ones I had seen.

degenerateartstream.blogspot.com

• Enjoy some understated, occasionally creepy photos by Ms. Rinko Kawauchi.
• Get ready for cool public art coming to a civic infrastructure project near you.
• Metro’s Ride Free Area is still set to end later this month, with no replacement service finalized. The transition’s probably gonna be rough.
• Contract talks between Boeing and the engineers’ union are going un-smoothly.
• There will be a 24-hour diner on Capitol Hill next spring, on 10th Ave. where the gay bathhouse Basic Plumbing used to be.
• The Stranger asked local artists to fantasize how they’d remake the waterfront. Their various suggestions, together or alone, are infinitely cooler than the official plans.
• Catholic bishops claim the existence of gay marriage would victimize them. Really?
• How does a young person get into a journalism career if she can’t afford to take a long-term, unpaid internship? She hopes for an inheritance.
• The owners of the New Orleans Times-Picayune won’t sell the paper, and they won’t back off their decision to cut it back to three days a week.
• Folks love them some sad songs these days.
• The company behind some of those infamous Facebook games (and their annoying ads and plugs) is fiscally stumbling.
• Harold Meyerson at the American Prospect says the Democrats recognize people’s “interdependence,” instead of the GOP’s Ayn Randian “noble selfishness.”
• Here’s the Bill Clinton barnburner speech. And here are the local-interest convention speeches by Patty Murray and ex-Costco boss Jim Sinegal.

• Jon Rafman finds amazing shots taken by Google Street Views’ nine-camera-equipped trucks, and collects them at his blog 9-eyes.com.
• In one corner, street-team advertising concern Poster Giant. In the other corner, angry women, who will not go away quietly.
• Sun Myung Moon, 1920-2012: Those who didn’t closely follow the Korean religious/political/business/publishing cult master often called him a “right wing Christian.” The “right wing” part was correct enough. The “Christian” part was misleading. Moon’s Unification Church theology and practice were really a lot more unique (i.e., weirder).
• Local college grad Alison Sargent writes in Bitch magazine about her experiences at Mars Hill Church. She describes it as another right-wing cult (albeit more traditionally “Christian” than the Moonies), and a place where “faith and feminism don’t mix.”
• Harvard researcher Steven Strauss ponders whether the rate of techno-progress in today’s world is actually slowing down.
• Bigtime political campaigns are employing polling and demographic stats work so complex, even they might not know how it works or what it means.
• Author Chuck Thompson asks why “so many Southerners think they’re the only real Americans.”

• Bic thought it would be a great marketing coup to come out with a ball point pen “For Her.” (The package says, “Easy Glide: Feel the smoothness.” The Amazon snark-comments begin in 3… 2…
• Sony will sell home TVs with the same ultra-high-def resolution as the top digital cinema projectors. Why, tell me again, are we expected to still go to theaters?
• “Hipster” bashing is officially passé, now that it’s being used to sell Toyotas.
• Just as the political right seems to be collapsing into a black hole of hardcore hate, Fisher Broadcasting decides to bring right-wing talk back to KVI.
• If you really need more anti-Republican ranting (the proverbial fish in the proverbial barrell, shot with the proverbial smoking gun), there’s some here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

chandler o'leary, tacomamakes.com

• A group of artists, including our ol’pal Art Chantry, has collaborated on what looks like something truly lovely—Tacoma landmark playing cards!
• Death Cab for Cutie singer Ben Gibbard, having moved back to Seattle following end end of his Hollywood marriage, writes for a McSweeney’s-affiliated site about reasons for re-electing Obama. Gibbard’s reason: his sister and her lesbian fiancée.
• A “Russia analyst” warns westerners of getting too fond of the Pussy Riot women and their radical-punk protest agenda: “…these young people are as contemptuous of capitalism as they are of Putinism.” And that’s wrong how?
• Naomi McAuliffe at the UK New Statesman suggests that folks who are aghast at a Republican politician’s “legitimate rape” remarks should also not tolerate Julian Assange’s rape-case denials.
• Newsweek cover-story Obama basher Niall Ferguson is, though the magazine doesn’t state it, a professional Republican operative. And here’s a step-by-step demolition of his rant.
• Phyllis Diller, 1917-2012: The original queen of standup comedy was already past 35 and a mom when she first broke into the business. At the time, there hadn’t been a major solo female comedian (as differentiated from actresses or singers who also told jokes on the side) since the vaudeville days. Diller was all jokes, and all woman, confident and brash even when delivering gags of self-deprecation. What’s not as well known is she was one of the few comedians to buy material from outside gag writers, providing career breaks for countless younger comics.

slate.com

• The images used to sell prog-rock LPs are often more intriguing than the noodle-y music itself.
• Jonah Keri at the ESPN/McSweeney’s site Grantland lists 27 notable things about Felix Hernandez’s perfect game. That’s one item for each out.
• And here are some clips and GIFs of Hernandez’s feat, and a video compiling all his 27 consecutive outs.
• When Metro Transit dumps the downtown “ride free area” next month, ride times and congestion could get significantly longer/worse. That’s in addition to the impact on people of all economic castes getting around in the city’s center.
• Tuition at Washington’s major colleges and universities more than doubled over the past 20 years, while average incomes stayed flat.…
• …while state-government employment dropped by more than 15,000 people this past year.
• Bill Maher says outright that “voter ID laws are racist;” while a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri suggests repealing the Voter Rights Act.
• Unknown artists spent a lot of time creating a big installation piece using stuff found inside an abandoned Detroit church.
• Tony Scott, 1944-2012: The director of Top Gun died from a depression-inspired suicide, just like too many of our real-life troops.

amnesty international via pickadolla.wordpress.com

By now you’ve heard and/or read about the Russian protest/music/performance-art collective Pussy Riot.

About the group’s carefully staged protest at a Russian Orthodox church against Vladmir Putin, the political boss of Russia’s current crony-driven, corrupt regime.

About the regime’s rote reaction against the protest.

About the two-year labor-camp sentences dutifully dished out to three Pussy Riot members; following five months of imprisonment and a farcical show trial tainted by allegations that the women were beaten, denied food, and weren’t allowed witnesses to speak in their defense.

About the protests throughout western Europe and elsewhere in support of the group.

I found it all to be an extremely well thought out piece of real-life theater.

The group’s English language name and song titles were clearly intended to generate a global support network.

Their act was inspired both by 1990s U.S. “riot grrrl” bands and the recent Ukranian activist group Femen (who’ve staged topless protests against “sex tourism” in their country).

The concept was to put human faces (albeit sometimes masked faces) on what had been a year of mass protests, in Moscow and elsewhere, against Russia’s increasingly oppressive and even neo-Stalinist system.

This face is young, dynamic, colorful, defiant, female, and (even when fully dressed and masked) openly sexual.

It was crafted as a deliberate contrast to a regime that willingly depicted itself as old, staid, grim, mechanical, humorless, and, yes, patriarchal. A machine as repressed as it is repressive; appealing to fear and bigotry to maintain support among older citizens nostalgic for the days of Soviet predictability.

Anti-Putin and anti-Putinism protests are not confined to Pussy Riot. Mass marches have been held in major cities for more than a year. Putin’s somber bureaucrats have issued increasingly suppressive laws to stop them.

Russia’s opposition is broad and deep, cutting across ethnic and class as well as gender lines.

Pussy Riot gives this opposition a face and a voice the outside world can see and hear.

craig hill, tacoma news tribune

• A Tacoma News Tribune writer finds a retreating glacier on Mt. Rainier looking, from one angle, like the Nike logo. Snark ensues.
• The new Blue Scholars music video combines Sonics nostalgia with good ol’ Seattle diversity, visually expressed in the form of working-class food joints.
• Shell’s building an oil-containment barge in Bellingham. But the thing’s leaking oil. (This is the kind of “oops!” moment anti-corporate performance artists can’t fake.)
• The University Bridge has to be closed to cars and sprayed with water once an hour when it gets this hot.
• Remember, boats shouldn’t get too close to whales.
• Apple has finally responded to the federal lawsuit claiming it and five of the top six U.S. book publishers conspired to fix e-book prices. Apple alleges Amazon was the real “driving force” behind the suit, not any government concern for the book buying public.
• Heidi Kelly at Crosscut believes “suburban women” will go for Romney/Ryan, or at least the “Generation X” women of the “Seinfeld generation” will, for reasoning I am unable to interpret/comprehend.
• Paul Ryan loves Rage Against the Machine. The bands’ members see Ryan as embodying the machine they’re raging against.
• Joshua D. Foster and Ilan Shrira at Psychology Today try to explain why people can be so easily seduced by conspiracy theories, no matter how far fetched those theories can be.
• An Oregon couple is charged with a multi-state murder and crime spree, done with the intention of racially “purifying” America.
• Meanwhile, Juan Cole insists that terrorists are terrorists even when they’re white.
• Mississippi’s scheme to outlaw abortion turns out to be remarkably similar to tactics the state used to use to prevent blacks from voting.
• Lost in the “vinyl revival”: nostalgia for the first mass-market recorded sound medium, the Edison cylinder.
• ESPN’s sports talk show Pardon the Interruption posted this mashup illo of Felix Hernandez’s perfect-game victory dance. (Wild Thing, I think I love you….)

maisonceleste.wordpress.com

• Did Mexico’s Huichol people create what we now know as “psychedelic” art?
• Central Washington’s bad, no-good week was caused by human carelessness. (Remember what Smokey says, everybody.)
• Soon, you’ll be able to go to an Arco station and not be supporting BP—but only if you’re in southern California, Nevada, or Arizona. BP’s holding on to the Arco stations in the Northwest, and to the Cherry Point, WA refinery that feeds them.
• Save the Silver Fork! It’s an indie diner! A real one, not a hip-retro pastiche! It’s the Rainier Valley’s favorite “third place,” a site of community-gathering and conviving. It’s threatened with demolition, for nothing more than a gas station.
• As you might know, the cover model for Herb Alpert’s classic LP Whipped Cream and Other Delights is an ex-Seattleite now living in southwest Washington. And she’s still a charmer.
• The Young Fresh Fellows, deans of Seattle power pop, have a new album coming out! And you can access an online stream if you follow the band’s clever little marketing gimmick.
• Rep. Jim McDermott, for most of his political career, has been a man only a Republican could dislike. Until his wife became his ex-wife, that is.
• Just as I figured would happen, a compromise with the Port of Seattle may enable the Sonics arena scheme to go forward.
• Getty Images, Seattle’s king of stock photos, is being bought by the Carlyle Group. That’s the D.C.-based private-equity outfit with strong ties to the Bush family and to the Saudi royals.
• During the Olympics, Nike put out a T-shirt with the slogan GOLD DIGGING. A sexist slap or just good clean fun?
• Maria Konnikova at the Atlantic explains just how famous quotations get mixed up, rearranged, or misattributed.
• Among the publishing old-timers trying to make sense of the Internet age: onetime Sassy editor and “perpetual teenager” Jane Pratt.
• Angela Neustatter at the Guardian would really like married people to be a lot more accepting/forgiving of cheatin’ spouses. It’s only natural, she says. (There goes half the subject matter of classic lit and country songs….)
• Americans are having fewer babies, too few to maintain the population size. This has been happening in Japan for a while, to the point that kids’ manga and related media are in financial freefall. But what’s bad news for the makers of baby clothes could be good news for an overextended planet.
• PBS’s Frontline goes Jesus-freaky. In the process, a lot’s revealed about cultural cross-pollination. Long before hip white kids pretended to be Buddhists, Romans disgusted by their corrupt society embraced the simple love-and-respect teachings of a tiny Jewish splinter sect.
• Whites are still far more likely than minorities to have home broadband connections. But Hispanics, Asian Americans, and African Americans are more likely than whites to have smartphones. This is what could be known as burrowing under the Digital Divide.
• Cheating at tournament-level Scrabble! Is nothing pure anymore? (On the other hand, it allows me to revive the tagline from the Scrabble game show: “It’s the crossword game you’ve played all your life, but never quite like this!”)
• When the teen offspring of the One Percent post Tweets® and photos of their obscenely opulent lifestyles, it’s all fun and snark. Until somebody figures out that potential burglars/kidnappers could be reading them.
• As I keep telling you, if you don’t vote, you’re doing exactly what the extreme right wing wants you to do.
• Political spending this season has been swamped by Karl Rove’s and the Koch brothers’ Super PACs, and their oh-so-anonymous donors.
• Paul Constant describes Paul Ryan as:

A wealthy young white man who refuses to, for one second, consider what it must be like to be a woman, or a minority, or a member of the lower class, or old. A man whose words mean less than nothing.

For reasons known only to the Gods, I not only didn’t read David Guterson’s novel Ed King (Oedipus as a Seattle software mogul!) when it came out, I also didn’t notice last November, when it won a British lit magazine’s annual Bad Sex In Fiction award. Don’t be as ignorant as I was—check out an excerpt from the “winning” scene.

Elsewhere in randomosity:

• Today’s lesson in what’s horribly wrong with the Romney/Ryan economic plan comes courtesy of Al Franken.
• Matt Hasselbeck doesn’t like the CenturyLink Field visiting-team lockers; says they’re so small they risk violating “man-rules.”
• What happens when allegedly pro-pot people try to start a political campaign against the legalizing-pot initiative ain’t pretty.
• In Illinois, a Bain Capital-controlled company is not only firing its workforce and shipping the equipment to China, but is making the fired workers train their Chinese replacements.
• Consumer scandal of the day: “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10-Year-Old Daughter and Didn’t Care.”
• Folks under the age of 33 are now buying more books than the legends-in-their-own-minds baby boomers. The boomers will almost surely ignore this, and will continue ranting about how everyone younger than themselves is a subhuman idiot.

theatlantic.com

Brown was already 40, and settled down in marriage with the future co-producer of Jaws, when her breakthrough book Sex and the Single Girl came out. It took the Age of the Pill for Brown’s simple message (sex is fun, for both genders, with or without a wedding ring!) to be considered major-publishing-house material.

(Imagine: Women sleeping around, and not only not heading toward certain doom but having good, clean, healthy fun!)

That led to a stint of over 32 years helming Cosmopolitan magazine.

In those pages, behind the cleavaged “Cosmo Girl” cover models, Brown forged a solid formula of libido and materialism mixed in with traditional women’s-mag fashion and self-help fare.

Whole books have been written about the world of Brown’s Cosmo, its influence, and its contradictions (independence/man-pleasing, confidence/size-ism).

I’ll just say it’s hard to imagine the First Avenue bar scene, with its gaggles of high heeled, well heeled young ladies out for FUN, without Brown’s aesthetic and social vision showing the way.

buzzfeed.com

• As we leave the mythical Mount Olympus, let us attempt to forget the particularly bizarre spectacle that is synchronized swimmers’ makeup.
• The first big motif of the Olympic closing ceremony: nostalgia for newspapers.
• By now you’ve heard all the deliciously inappropriate, wrong-for-America economic and social stances of would-be-veep Paul Ryan. And you know that Ryan is a rabid disciple of selfishness goddess Ayn Rand (as are so many right-wing operatives these days). What it all adds up to, according to Markos Moulitsas:

Democrats are campaigning with a swagger, having fun. They know they’ve got the advantage.… We need to embrace reality and shove reality down the GOP’s throats. Because yeah, we are ahead, objectively so. We’re winning and we’ve got to own it. They can whine about biased polls and biased media and biased everything that doesn’t conform to their little Fox News bubble world, all the while we do the work necessary to seal the deal.

• Meanwhile: “Decline of good jobs linked to workers’ decreased bargaining power.”
• Meanwhile, meanwhile: Kudos to Jon Talton for getting the phrase “depredations of the plutocrats” into the Seattle Times.
• Wash. Post pundit Aaron Blake feels GOP deliberate distortions and misquotes of Obama constitute exemplar horse-race style campaiging. Jay Rosen feels, well, differently.
• Harvard’s Steven Strauss explains why the 21st century was supposed to bring us techno-utopia but instead meagerly spits forth gimmicky social-media sites promoted as “revolutions.” In such an environment of “incremental innovations,” Strauss adds, corporate bureaucrats will be more valued than hotshot entrepreneurs.
• Mississippi has a county where school kids who get in even minor trouble are automatically sent to prison.
• A Las Vegas Denny’s is going to feature its own in-house wedding chapel. “With this onion ring….”
• Port of Seattle officials were for (or at least indifferent toward) the Sonics arena scheme before they were against it.
• One of the West Seattle Water Taxi boats caught on fire.
• An ex-UW pediatrics prof is accused of waterboarding his own daughter.
• Google’s making it harder to search for free downloads of copyrighted media. Finally: a market advantage for other search engines.
• Austrian archeologists, rummaging through an ancient castle, found some 15th-century vintage bras. No, they weren’t worn by (insert name of over-40 female celebrity here).
• I disagree with the Sight & Sound magazine poll putting Vertigo atop the greatest films of all time. But I understand why the poll’s “programmers, academics, and distributors” would pick it. Vertigo is eminently open to academic interpretation. It’s full of “meta” themes about identity and illusion; all within the context of a big-budget Hollywood thriller in luscious Technicolor and VistaVision (Paramount’s sideways-film process, a precursor to IMAX).

• To be celebrated this weekend: one hundred years of Volunteer Park.
• Paul Constant attends an “American Idol for Startups.” He finds a bunch of hopeful entrepreneurs showing off gimmicky little smartphone apps based on “tiny little ideas, ideas that are almost petty in their inconsequentiality,” and promoted using jargon “as tepid and lifeless and dumb as any language that ever existed.”
• Now that all companies, nonprofits, and individuals in the western world have been exhorted to revamp their entire existences around the Web, they’re about to be exhorted to forget all that and re-revamp their entire existences around “mobile media.”
• We knew it was coming (it’s in the way of Amazon’s TriTowers HQ project), but it’s still sad to see the King Cat Theater closed for good.
• The “24 hour news cycle” is sooooo day-before-yesterday. But it does make for a lot of fun reporting mistakes.
• Meet this election’s top right wing attack groups (or at least as much about them as has been uncovered to date, which isn’t much).
• A Portland motivational blogger meets one of the original computing pioneers, and gets, well, motivated.
• Media reports about Olympic champion Gabby Douglas have been loaded with racial dog-whistle jargon.
• A self-professed “skeptic” and “rationalist” claims to be more skeptical and rational than other self-professed “skeptics” and “rationalists”:

Let’s admit it, skepticism does have a way to make us feel intellectually superior to others. They are the ones believing in absurd notions like UFOs, ghosts, and the like! We are on the side of science and reason. Except when we aren’t, which ought to at least give us pause and enroll in the nearest hubris-reducing ten-step program.