2005 fremont solstice parade goers at the lenin statue

• The Lenin statue in Fremont is privately owned, and is for sale. But nobody apparently wants to buy it.
• Minorities: Bellevue’s got a lot more of ’em these days, sez the Census. Seattle’s got a lot fewer.
• Art Thiel wants you to know the big Husky Stadium rebuild, to begin this winter, involves no taxpayer funds. Just private donations and bond issues to be repaid out of UW Athletics income.
• Ex-State Rep Brendan Williams wants Washington state’s progressives to “get some backbone” about preserving vital services in the state budget.
• Starbucks boss and Sonics seller Howard Schultz’s latest big idea: Big election-campaign donors like him should vow to boycott funding election campaigns. Of course, if Democratic donors like Schultz are the only ones doing the boycotting….
• There’s a plan to create a “Jimi Hendrix Park,” next to the African American Museum at the old Coleman School. It would be the fifth Hendrix memorial of one type or another (not counting the Experience Music Project, which parted ways with the Hendrix heirs during its development). Cobain still has just that one unofficial park bench in Viretta Park and a city-limits sign in Aberdeen.
• Rolling Stone put out a reader poll declaring the top punk acts of all time. The list put Green Day on top and included not a single female. FlavorWire has come to the side of justice with its own in-house listing of “15 Essential Women Punk Icons.” The NW’s own Kathleen Hanna, Beth Ditto, and Sleater-Kinney are on it, as is onetime Seattleite Courtney Love.
• Many, many indie-label CDs were in a warehouse that burned during the London lootings. Some labels might not survive the blow.
• Mike Elgan at Cult of Mac sez Apple’s invented all the big things it’s going to invent for a while. We’ve heard this one before.
• And for those of you heading back into the working life (you lucky stiffs, you), take heed Peter Toohey’s thoughts (partly inspired by the late David Foster Wallace) on “the thrill of boredom:”

Boredom should not be abused, exploited, ignored, sneered at, rejected or talked down to as a product of laziness or of an idle, uninventive and boring mind. It’s there to help, and its advice should be welcomed and acted upon.

illo from the 1962 world's fair guide book

• Knute Berger looks back at predictions for 21st century greater Seattle made during the 1962 World’s Fair. Surprisingly, population growth in the region is a bit lower than was then predicted. Still no flying cars or domed cities, though.
• The grownup Frances Bean Cobain has posed for a fashion shoot. All thin, dark haired, and attitude-y. But all those cigarettes? They’re not rebellious, just icky.
• Joni Balter, a member of the SeaTimes‘ “all taxes = bad” editorial board, surprisingly issues an essay decrying politicians who sign on to simplistic pledges, such as GOP operative Grover Norquist’s “no new taxes ever” pledge.
• Could the revised, Costco-invented, liquor privatization scheme actually increase state revenues? And, more importantly, would any extra revenues be eaten up by alcoholism-treatment costs and DWI prosecutions?
• Somebody’s prediction for where home prices will rise the most in the next year? Tacoma.
• If AT&T gets to take over T-Mobile USA, the latter’s 30,000 employees (including the 3,000 or so at its Bellevue national HQ) could be essentially done for.
• The state’s economy’s not getting any better any time soon.
• The plea-bargained “barefoot bandit” has a movie deal. All the proceeds will go to his crimes’ victims.
• A “revolutionary collective” has announced plans to protest Metro’s threatened service cuts by refusing to pay bus fares. Somehow I think this won’t help.
• Bert and Ernie are as (officially) non-gay as Laverne and Shirley.
• Standard & Poor’s and its fellow investment rating agencies have spent millions on lobbying to keep the financial markets unregulated. We all know how well that’s worked out.
• Bee Lavender at HipMama (the site based on the alt-culture parenting zine) has her own first person perspective on the London riots:

Many of the people out on the streets this week are usually invisible. They are part of an underclass, an underworld, where the rules are different and you have to take what you can to get through the day. Given the chance, many would in fact make something better out of their lives – but they don’t get the chance. What little equilibrium existed even a year ago has now vanished, and they are raging. Because they have no hope, no future, nowhere to go and nothing to do.

from furnitureminiature.com

• It’s the official best time ever to buy a house in Washington. Just set aside some of that vast expendable income you’ve got—what, you don’t?
• Before you rant about the presence of so many UW and WSU athletic brass on this list of the state’s highest paid employees, remember these coaches aren’t paid by the taxpayers, but by their programs’ self-generated revenue streams. And many of the other five UW officials on the top 10 get some or all of their salary from grants or other non-state sources.
• The state’s going to forcibly evict the homeless who’ve set up sleeping quarters alongside I-5, again.
• You ready for the repositioning of canned coffee as a hipster nostalgic comfort item?
• Remember that Rick Perry religious rally last weekend, with all the fringe-right-wing and racist/homophobic preachers? Turns out more than three times that event’s audience went to a free school supplies giveaway in the same city that same day.
• One of those “a new study reports” stories claims rich people are “less empathetic” than lower-class folk. One of the study’s makers concludes that “our data say you cannot rely on the wealthy to give back.”
• The English riots: It’s the income disparity, and the despair of the non-zillionaires.

• Those newfangled “3-D printers” can even be used to make motor-powered small airplanes.
• A judge knocked down the feds’ long-term plans for Columbia River salmon restoration, calling them vague and insufficient.
• The Belltown P-Patch cottages, the neighborhood’s last remaining “single family home” structures, are getting their old lead paint stripped off and replaced.
• Thanks to federal funding cuts and other snafus, 400 otherwise homeless people could get kicked out of local shelters soon.
• Dominick Holden has a handy primer on why you should reject the deep bore tunnel.
• You don’t have to go to the “whole paycheck” store to know “healthy” food can be costly.
• What’s really wrong with American discourse? Tabitha Justice believes it’s the “argument culture.”
• Ending on a lighter note, here’s some hilarious-in-retrospect images of completely ineffectual “disguising” by the East German secret police.

from sightline.org

• Congrats. Seattle’s been named America’s sixth most walkable city by WalkScore.com. It’s absolutely purely coincidence that WalkScore happens to be based in Seattle. Why, just two months ago, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center named Seattle America’s first most walkable city, and that outfit’s in North Carolina or somewhere like that. (I’ll have more to say about this greater topic any week now.)
• The $20 emergency car-tab surtax to save King County Metro Transit stands a good chance of becoming a referendum to the voters, now that a fifth County Council member says she’s considering it.
• Long-shot City Council candidate Dale Pusey wants to keep the viaduct, at least as a park. I heartily agree.
• If our current postal system is snarked at by the digerati as “snail mail,” what will they call it if it cuts back to three delivery days a week?
• R.I.P. Alex Steinweiss, 94, who first had the idea of making original cover art for record albums back in the 78 era, and for decades continued to be the greatest practitioner of the art form he’d invented.

• When better toilets are designed, the Gates Foundation will design them.
• R.I.P. Bagley Wright, 1924-2011. A Princeton grad from Georgia who married into the Bloedel timber family, Wright was one of the five original Space Needle investors (hence the Needle’s original corporate name, the “Pentagram Corp.”). He also helped run the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, cofounded the medical-devices maker Physio Control, was a key player in downtown real estate development, was a major early investor in Seattle Weekly, and sold the house where Kurt Cobain died. He and his wife Virginia amassed a large contemporary-art collection, some of which is on view at their own gallery space.
• Anand Giridharadas believes it’s all well and good for bright minds to go to work at “social entrepreneur” projects, but he insists that “real change requires politics.”
• Buried in a story about PopCap Games boss Dave Roberts is an important lesson that always needs re-teaching:

…Making simple products is way more difficult than making complicated products…. Simple is more complicated, simple is elegant, simple is harder.”

• How I misspent my Saturday—getting lost in the Seattle Public Library’s historic 1962 World’s Fair pictures. I’m particularly fascinated by the name of a fair exhibit, the “Home of the Immediate Future.”
• Sable Verity wants the Seattle Urban League to come back strong from its recent misfortunes, and believes its once-and-future leader is not the man for the job.
• Close a hillside road. Bring in a dump truck, pre-loaded with 10,000 tennis balls. You can guess the wondrous spectacle that ensues.
• One positive result of the viaduct and 520 highway projects—the discovery of lots of pioneer garbage!
• Everybody in or near Seattle: Go see Mad Homes. It’s a site specific art installation occurring in a group of Capitol Hill houses set to be razed for apartments later this year. The 11 invited artists, given free rein to make “permanent” changes to the structures, have filled them and their front and side yards with fun and fanciful works. It’s up until Aug. 7.

pittsburgh post-gazette illo by anita dufalla, 2009

• Census data says even more of Seattle’s low-income population (some 68 percent) now resides in the suburbs. However, I’m not ready (as this linked article is) to declare the likes of Tukwila and Skyway to be “suburban slums.”
• New fun word of the day: “blagging” (defined by the BBC as “obtaining personal details by deception,” as in the Murdoch UK tabloids’ nefarious gossip trawling).
• R.I.P. Theodore Roszak, who was 35 in 1969 when his book The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society professed to know just what Those Krazy Kids were up to.
• Pyramid Hefeweisen is now called Pyramid Hefeweisen again, following a three-year failure to rebrand the wheat ale as “Haywire.” I could repeat my hefeweisen riddle here, but I won’t.
• There is such a thing as wearing too many clothes. If you’re in a mall. And you didn’t pay for some of those clothes.
• Amazon’s own tablet computer—look for it this autumn.
• The local ski season is finally over.
• Oh, all right: What do you call the last hefeweisen that causes a yuppie to total her new car? (Answer tomorrow.)

street food vendor, 1930s, singapore; from the-inncrowd.com

• More kinds of yummy street food could soon come to Seattle, as a deregulation proposal makes its way to the full city council.
• Also, the city’s asking the state Liquor Board for the authority to let some Seattle bars stay open after 2 a.m.
• Those toll-happy state bureaucrats are thinking about charging for the I-5 express lanes.
• Playboy has a natty profile of fast rising music/comedy/performance-art star Reggie Watts. Unlike New York mag’s Watts profile from last year, this piece gives full credit to his long formative years in the Seattle music scene.
• Lynnwood motorist sees ducks crossing the freeway, slows down. Semi driver behind said motorist doesn’t see ducks, doesn’t slow down.
• Hanford could become America’s newest, glow-in-the-darkiest national park.
• In nanny-state news, some doctor in Boston said obese children should be taken away from their parents.
• Clever Brit engineers have devised a $25 computer (basically a memory stick with a cheap little CPU attached; no screen or keyboard included) that schools could just give out to kids.
• Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell does turn out to have a larger agenda behind his offer to say “uncle” for now on the debt ceiling nonsense. He wants to bring back the “balanced budget amendment,” one of those recurring ideas that sounds hot on right-wing talk radio but doesn’t work in real life. The amendment McConnell wants would impose the same budgetary rules on the federal government that have already made California ungovernable.
• Those right-wing governors and state legislators around the country—how, you may wonder, do they simultaneously introduce the same brutal anti-labor, anti-women, anti-middle-class, anti-voter legislation? A lot of it comes from the same right wing think tank. And yep, the Koch brothers are in on it, big.
• American progressive pundits still seek a connection between the News of the World phone hacking scandal and Rupert Murdoch’s US media operations. Until they find one, let’s remember that the London-based NOTW aggressively spied on plenty of Hollywood movie stars. Its targets included actors working for Murdoch’s 20th Century-Fox—and even the Murdoch family’s celebrity friends.
• As he has a few times in the past, Jean-Luc Godard has again declared that “film is over.”

• The city’s looking into bringing back the soda tax, repealed in a state initiative last year.
• And our desperate-for-quarters city leaders have decided to extend paid-parking hours until 8 p.m. in just about all of greater downtown, including Belltown and the ID, plus the U District.
• But drivers in Seattle will get $3 million worth of pothole-fixin’, funded by the city selling a vacant lot on lower Aurora Avenue to the state.
• Another day, another 787 Dreamliner delay.
• AddictingInfo.com has a list of popular public services that anybody who claims to hate “socialism” should detest, in order not to be hypocritical—the post office, public schools, parks, etc. The thing is, some of the purist libertarians infiltrating the GOP do overtly hate these things.
• The Atlantic Monthly, that reliable source on all things rockin’, proclaims the new way for bands to become famous—remain as anonymous and obscure as possible.
• Michele Bachmann’s “doctor” hubby: He’s not an MD, just an unlicensed “therapist.”

• 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.

This holiday, as I do on this holiday every year, I sing our nation’s song the way it was originally meant to be sung.

Which is to say, as an ode to the eternal, worldwide, ‪joys of drinking and screwing‬‏.

And if you like your poetic homages to the grape mixed in with a little faux-Terry Gilliam animation, try this version.

• City Council president Richard Conlin claims “Seattle’s Legislative Strategy Worked.” This essentially means urban planning and human services agencies were decimated a lot less than they could have been.
• Meanwhile in Minnesota, Rep. legislators and the Dem. governor just couldn’t get it done. Or rather, the legislators demanded big giveaways for the rich and big cutbacks for everybody else, and the governor refused to cave.
• Speaking of enforced austerity, the Int. Monetary Fund leader whose career has involved imposing such shock treatments onto whole countries? His sexual assault defense team is doing a swell job at discrediting the victim.
• Margaret Kimberly reminds us that proudly backing (upscale white) gay civil rights is not the same thing as building a fairer society for the non-upscale and the non-white.

Back in the alleged good old days of American journalism, chain-owned newspapers would often be ordered by corporate HQ to run the same chainwide stories. (The Hearst papers were particularly notorious for this.)

Now, the Arizona-born company calling itself Village Voice Media has just done this at its papers, including Seattle Weekly.

They’re running the same expose piece, entitled “Real Men Get Their Facts Straight.” It’s an attack on Ashton Kutcher’s “Real Men Don’t Buy Girls” PR campaign, which claims “100,000 to 300,000” underage girls are trapped in street prostitution in the U.S. every year.

In contrast, the article claims the real number, while unknowable, is probably much, much smaller. The big number, says the story, comes from a highly flawed academic research piece about kids “at risk” for becoming hookers, a figure that pretty much includes the entire teen populations of U.S./Mexico border towns.

A sidebar item acknowledges a VVM corporate interest in combating anti-sex-work scare campaigns. The fear mongers pressured Craigslist to stop running (unpaid) online sex-work ads, and are now setting their rhetorical gunsights on providers of (paid) sex-work ads, including VVM and its Backpage.com site.

To summarize, the article’s “good news” is: A lot fewer girls (and boys) are underage hookers than you might think. If you hire an escort, you and she/he are breaking some laws, but most likely statutory rape isn’t one of them.

The bad news remains: There still are some minors trapped in underage hooking, even if they’re a lot rarer than Kutcher and co. claim. In Seattle we had our own highly publicized pimping scandal last year, involving a few young-adult males and perhaps a dozen underage females.

(I happen to believe escorting and other sex work should be legal, and regulated. When it is, it will be much easier for law enforcement and social workers to find underage participants, divert them into other lives (perhaps in supervised group homes), and to prosecute any madames or pimps employing them.)

•

UPDATE #1: As if right on cue, Mayor McGinn and police Lt. Eric Sano held a press briefing on Friday denouncing VVM’s Backpage.com and supporting Kutcher’s PR drive against it. Sano claimed “there have been four documented cases of child prostitution openly advertised on Backpage.com.” Seattle Weekly editor Mike Seely, while not directly involved with Backpage’s operations, insists the site’s staff does all it can to reject and/or remove ads offering erotic services by under-18s.

UPDATE #2: Elsewhere in that company, the Village Voice itself has cut 60 percent of its staff in recent years. The New York weekly’s remaining employees threatened to go on strike this past week over wage and benefit cuts. Now comes word the strike may have been averted.

UPDATE #3: John Spangenthal-Lee at SeattleCrime.com said on July 5 that the VVM article was wrong about Seattle Police records concerning juvenile prostitution arrests. Spangenthal-Lee claims there were about twice as many such arrests in 2007-2009 than the article counted. Seattle Weekly managing editor Caleb Hannan, whose staff supplied research for the chainwide VVM article, told Publicola they got their numbers from the SPD.

UPDATE #4: The Sex Workers Outreach Project, an organization supporting legal and civil rights for sex workers, issued a statement “responding” to the VVM story. The statement approves of the article’s reality-checking regarding the extent of the situation. But SWOP goes on to state the real issue here isn’t Kutcher vs. VVM and Backpage.com:

…There are three overlapping issues here: the trafficking of youth into the sex industry, the service needs of youth with experience trading sex for survival and the rights of consenting adult sex workers.

UPDATE #5: Ryan Hodgson pointed me in the direction of a Seattle Weekly item from last October. It seems that before the Kutcher Krusade or the chainwide VVM counterattack, SW editors publicized the FBI’s claim that Seattle was “Ranked Worst City in U.S. for Child Prostitution.”

It’s been months since I reviewed any performance art here. But thanks to the urging of Katie Johnson, I witnessed The Harlequin Hipsters‘ dance/music/theatre piece Passion, Or Death. It occurred last weekend at the Hale’s Brewpub’s back room.

It’s presented by six dancer/performers (evenly split M/F), with a little music (mostly synth with a live violin and guitar) and a few snippets of monologue and dialogue. The premise, set up in these vocal interludes: A mystery illness is overtaking the whole planet. No apparent epidemiological cause. A male newscaster and a female doctor discuss the pandemic with us. The doctor sees sadness and depression as the cause, and dancing and loving as the cure. The newscaster delivers a monologue about becoming a careerist to get the material things he wants out of life, then collapses and dies. We’re then given the moral of our story: Don’t lose yourself making money to get a house and family and fine store-bought foods. Live with Passion, like these dancers.

The color is fading from faces. What are we to do to keep alive? Merely surviving is not enough. We wish to thrive; to not only realize our dreams and passions, but become them.

In truth, it is our only hope.

At the end an enthusiastic alternative marching band (the Titanium Sporkestra) enters the room and invites the audience out into the back parking lot for a short dance party.

It was all very well executed, performed with both with and precision.

And as one who has been neither “thriving” (emotionally) nor “surviving” (fiscally) for much of the past several years, I could readily receive the show’s message.

But can I believe it?

Lots of folks don’t have the option to drop out and be bohemians. They’ve got spouses and kids. They’ve got retirement to worry about. They need health insurance. They can’t run off and join the circus (let alone start their own).

Where do the rest of us find, and healthily exploit, our respective Passions?