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

wallace in a philip morris cigarette ad, circa 1957

The master of the “gotcha!’ interview had been a journeyman broadcaster since the days of old time radio. He’d been an announcer, a game show host (he hosted the unaired original pilot for To Tell the Truth), an actor in live TV dramas (and the film A Face in the Crowd), and a commercial pitchman for cigarettes and other assorted products.

Then in 1955, he started a New York local interview show called Nightbeat, renamed The Mike Wallace Interview when it moved to ABC. It established Wallace’s persona as a sensationalistic opportunist, more a tabloidy hothead than a newsman.

This rough edge was sanded down a bit when he became one of the original co-hosts (with Harry Reasoner) of 60 Minutes, putting a real news organization’s resources (including its lawyers) behind his shtick.

The rest is broadcast history.

Including his admission to long bouts of severe depression. The last on-air bit he did was a “CBS Cares” public-service spot about the illness.

Yet through it all he survived.

Now there are even fewer people left from TV’s early years, and fewer still (most notably Betty White) still working.

artist's rendering; via kiro-tv

• Millions in the making, the big Seattle waterfront roller coaster is finally on the way! Estimated opening: July 4th.
• You all need to read Judy Lightfoot’s piece at Crosscut about people forced to live in their vehicles at highway rest stops—even people with full time jobs.
• On a related note, the state’s (official) jobless rate has dropped just enough to disqualify the state’s unemployed from 26 weeks’ worth of extended benefits.
• The state’s finances, services, and basic sense of humanity are swirling down the drain. Tim Eyman, of course, doesn’t give a shit.
• Dept. of Correction: It turns out public breastfeeding is already legal in Wash. state. Yesterday’s “Random Links” piece implied otherwise.
• Queen Anne Books has got itself a lucky new owner.
• It’s official: there’s a whooping cough epidemic in our state.
• Seattle Center asked the public for input on new public-space designs for the place. Only they announced it on Tuesday with a deadline of Wednesday. And we’re asked to choose between three plans, all designed by out-of-state firms, and all reeking of “world class” emotional coldness.
• Three deserving local theatre troupes will get to share the performance space at the bottom of a new mixed-use development on Capitol Hill.
• Who doesn’t look at a bizarre press release issued on April 1 with at least a little skepticism? The Puget Sound Business Journal, that’s who. (The hoax was from Ivar’s, announcing a 100-flavor chowder dispenser to rival the Coca-Cola Freestyle pop machine.)
• The Mariners are acting all NIMBY-y about getting a basketball/hockey arena next door.
• As the Seattle Times finishes up its recounting of every complaint anyone’s got against Amazon (including some pretty serious allegations), labor advocacy group Working Washington is inviting people to register their own snark on the etailer’s sales page for a “Fair Share Pie Cutter.”
• Despite the plethora of comic book-based movies and related merch, actual comic book sales have collapsed in recent years (even more than newspapers). But one reviewer sees a ray of hope emerging amidst the pall of gloom. It’s the new higher-res iPad.
• Just declassified and in hot demand, it’s all the data from the 1940 Census.
• Celebrity-snark writer Dustin Rowles depicts sitcom has-been Kirk Cameron as a complete douchebag, albeit one of the pseudo-Christian rather than the regular Hollywood variety.
• Morley Safer snarks at the bigtime art world. New York mag’s Jerry Saltz snarks back.
• Your daily dose of political outrage: Paul Buchheit at Buzzflash lists some “preposterous but persistent conservative myths;” Stephen D. Foster Jr. at Addicting Info lists 40 particularly disgusting quotes by GOP politicos demonstrating the “values Republicans want to destroy America with;” and Laura Clawson at Daily Kos recounts the utter failure of a particularly dorky would be right-wing sting operation against a commuity organizing group.
• And let’s all get ready for Easter with (direct from the Betty Crocker Kitchens) the original “Bunny Butt Cake.”

t.j. mullinax, yakima herald-republic

• The Zillah, WA teapot gas station lives!
• Public breastfeeding may soon be officially legal in Seattle. (I’ve long believed the only good reason for anti-nudity laws is to help prosecute confrontational (male) flashers. Therefore, above-the-waist nudity should be legal; especially with Motherhood in its favor.)
• There’s a new custom made, locally made bicycle called the Kalakala. List price $2,375, depending on which custom features you ask for. If only that kind of money could be found to preserve the real Kalakala ferry boat.
• A new bio of ex-Sen. Slade Gorton has a part about the loss of the Sonics. The author’s chief point-O-blame lands on State House Speaker Frank Chopp.
• Land use attorney Charles Wolfe writes for the Atlantic explaining Seattle’s pro-density zoning schemes.
• The new King County sheriff used to be a Minnesota state legislator. That’s where he co-sponsored two particularly virulent bills to force “shaming” rituals on abortion patients.
• Thanks to inter-corporate wrangling over rights fees, DirecTV’s stopped carrying TV stations owned by the Tribune Co., including our own KCPQ and “JoeTV.”
• Congrats to local playwright Yussef El Guindi for winning a national “New Play Award” for his piece Pilgrims Musa and Sheri in the New World. I’m equally intrigued by the title of the second place winner, something called Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them.
• I’ve apparently been name-dropped in an Alberta grad student’s MA thesis. The title: This is Not For You: The Rise and Fall of Music Milieux in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, 1950s -1990s. Haven’t read it yet.
• There’s a tender memorial to Seattle painter Christopher Martin Hoff, written by a former close friend.
• Couldn’t happen in a more deserving place: There’s now a major oil boom in Mozambique. (Of course, oil booms don’t always benefit the people who live in the countries that have them.)
• Which book cover cliché is more tiresome, “women’s” novels with the heroine’s head cropped off of the cover, or gay-male novels with their parade of (also headless) naked torso shots? (Note: The latter link is to a snark essay from a gay book-review blog whose logo contains, you guessed it, a headless naked torso.)

• Can the lovely deco Harborview Hall be saved after all?
• Ex-Seattle Times arts writer Terry Tazioli and still-Seattle Times arts writer Mary Ann Gwinn have a new author-interview show on KBTC (the Tacoma PBS affiliate) and TVW (the state-owned cable channel). However, Gwinn errs in the hereby linked piece when she calls TVW a “public access” channel. Ordinary members of the viewing public cannot make their own shows and put them on TVW (the real definition of “public access”).
• KEXP’s Rachel Ratner has some fond words toward the now-threatened Funhouse punk bar.
• One big union of all the actors! And just in time for the return of filmmaker tax breaks in Wash. state.
• Keith Olbermann has quit and/or was fired again. This time it’s from the one channel that would give him a long-term home to do almost whatever he pleased. It was one thing to have his wrathful temper attacking the sleazemongers of the Bush era and their remnants. But he apparently maintained that same unrelenting ire toward his own coworkers; never good.
• In honor of the Wisc. recall election against sleazemonger Scott Walker going forward, let’s listen to the GOOD Scott Walker.

ap photo via newstimes.com

• At the time of this writing, the Seattle Mariners are in first place as the winningest team in Major League Baseball! (This may be subject to change by the time you read this.)
• In other sporting news, the Husky men’s basketball team valiantly lost its NIT semifinal game in overtime; thus tying for the status of this year’s 71st best college team.
• You might be able to ski on the Fourth of July around here this year.
• Two years in the making, the downtown Target is set to finally open on July 29.
• Metro Transit’s downtown Ride Free Area ends two months after that.
• Meanwhile, Washington’s first food-only Walmart store is about to open at an ex-Kmart site in Bellevue.
• One-third of all homes sold in King County these days are sold for all cash (i.e., to speculators or rental operators).
• An Army PR guy says Joint Base Lewis-McChord is “not having any issues that other Army bases aren’t having, too.”
• This is from October but still fascinating—an in-depth look at the Columbia River, its watershed, its hydroelectric industry, its fishery, and the people who try to balance the needs of each.
• Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon would really like you to know there really are non-wingnut Christians out there.
• The rumored Apple-branded TV set is still just a rumor. But Farhad Manjoo at Slate reports that Microsoft’s XBox already brings the magic of online streaming-video search to TV sets.
• Slate also has a fond remembrance to the inventor of the frozen bagel and a handy guide to Quebeçois cuss words.
• Now we know why Bud, Miller, and Coors all sold out to foreigners. Light-beer sales are in a nosedive, perhaps a permanent one.
• John Cassidy at the New Yorker claims the right-wing assault on health care reform, as seen this week at the Supreme Court, is “a very bad joke.”

• As a treat for those of you who actually read these things (and I know there are at least a few of you out there), here’s the original version of the song that was at the center of last night’s Mad Men season premiere. It’s “Zou Bisou Bisou.” It was originally recorded in 1960 by Gillian Hills. One of the stars of the French “ye ye” genre, she also appeared in the landmark British films Beat Girl, Blow Up, and A Clockwork Orange.
• Questionable medical study of the day: Somebody says regularly eating chocolate can make you thinner.
• Here’s the site for the folks who want to bring the Seattle monorail project back from the dead. (By sticking with the previous monorail proponents’ planned Ballard to West Seattle route, they’re also inheriting its high cost, requiring two major all-new bridges.)
• Here’s WashDOT’s CGI video of how the new 520 bridge will look. Without, you know, the highway noise or smell.
• And here’s what Amazon’s proposed three new high rises would look like.
• “Unemployed Nation” is a series of “hearings,” in which the mayor, city council, and others will “listen to the men and women who have lost their livelihoods and more.” The sessions are Friday afternoon at the UW’s Kane Hall and Saturday afternoon at City Hall.
• There’s a new site up helping locals find affordable rental housing.
• The fired transgender Miss Universe Canada contestant from Vancouver would like you to think of her as “a woman—with a history.” (The protest petition is now online.)
• How to make money despite being in the news business: A Houston Chronicle society reporter was outed for moonlighting as a stripper. Apparently at least as much for the money as for any undercover writing gig (though she has made a pseudonymous blog about her stripping life).
• Under the British common-law heritage, prostitution per se has been quasi-legal in Canada. But businesses facilitating prostitution have been banned. Now, the province of Ontario’s highest court has approved legalizing brothels. The common-sense reason: it’s better for a sex worker “to work indoors, in a location under her control.”
• Another country where hooking is legal, but making money from other people’s hooking isn’t: France. That’s where the ex-Intl. Monetary Fund boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn, already disgraced from sexual assault charges, has been accused of involvement in a pimping ring based at luxury hotels. (I know people who believe those IMF/World Bank guys have always been pimps for the corporate elite, but this is something different.)
• Big Brother Dept.: A public school district in Brazil is issuing school-uniform T shirts with computer chips sewn in, capable of tracking every student’s every move.
• If you believe the New Yorker, the most influential and sleaziest newspaper in Britain isn’t owned by Murdoch.
• Even before the Legislature revived state tax breaks for filmmakers, one feature project (from a local writer-director) was already underway. And it’s got such great stars—Lee Majors! Gary Busey! Margot Kidder! Edward Furlong! Seahawks player Marshawn Lynch! I tell you, I sense a date with Oscar!

benjamin day's new york sun, one of the original 19th century 'penny press' papers; via ricardoread.wordpress.com

Even before the online news “revolution” (that looks more and more like “creative destruction” without the “creative” part), newspapers and TV/radio stations, and especially local slick magazines and “alt” weeklies, had begun to ignore whole swaths of their communities, all in the name of the dreaded “upscale demographics.”

That means wanting only wealthy (or at least really affluent) people in your audience, the audience you sell to advertisers. (The original Seattle Weekly was particularly notorious at this. Its rate cards proclaimed, “Who are the Weekly’s readers? In a word, rich.”)

The age of dot-com media has only exacerbated this trend. AOL’s “Patch” sites deliberately only cover wealthy communities. The West Seattle Blog is apparently pulling in a lot more ad revenue than the Rainier Valley Post.

And the “future of news” bloggers, who demand that all news orgs conform to their formula of unfettered-access, ad- and pageview-dependent standard websites, sometimes seem to believe the entire nation is made up of people exactly like them—18-34-year-old, college-educated white males, with home broadband, smartphones, and techie jobs that let them browse the web throughout the day.

And now a Pew Research study claims “fewer than half of Americans who make under $75K a year go online for news.” If the online realm, as we now know it, becomes the only place to get written short-form journalism, a lot of Americans are going to be informationally shut out.

That last stat came from the page for “A Penny Press for the Digital Age.” That was a panel discussion at the digital media section of the SXSW music/media convention last week. You can hear it here.

Its aim: to explore “how low-income and working-class people–the majority of Americans–can be included in the future of online news.”

(Hint: Most of the solutions offered by the panelists involve non-profit, cooperative, and/or volunteer operations.)

It’s just one of more than a dozen “future of news” panels at SXSW you can hear at this link. They’re all full of “cutting edge” new-media concepts.

Indeed, the new-media world these days has more cutting edges than a blister pack of Bic razors (most of which will prove just as enduring).

•

Elsewhere in journalistic doom-n’-gloom land, Eric Alterman at HuffPost has collected a whole boatload of depressing industry statistics. Perhaps the most depressing of them all:

Newspaper revenue fell to its lowest level since 1984, although adjusted for inflation the income is actually worth half of what papers earned back then.

Many of these stats come from media-biz blogger Alan Mutter. Mutter also notes that retailers are putting up more “advertorial” content—and even ads for other stores—on their own sites (which would help negate the need for these stores to advertise in news-media outlets).

•

Meanwhile, the entertainment side of the media biz (at least the movie and TV entertainment side) continue to hold its ground against the “open web” demanders.

By continuing to insist on affiliate rights fees from cable providers and streaming websites alike, the big media giants have largely kept themselves surviving, if not thriving.

Could the news biz, including the news sides of some of these same companies, learn something from this?

• The demise of the (print) Encyclopedia Britannica has led the Best Week Ever site to recall the books’ still famous 1990s TV commercials. The site doesn’t mention it, but the spots were created by comedy/commercials genius Stan Freberg and star his son Donavan (he later ran a porn site, but now photographs actors’ and wannabe actors’ portfolio shots).
• What if they gave a shopping mall and nobody came?
• Goldy reminds you that you can’t support essential public services like education from state sales taxes (and little else) anymore.
• Ex-Seattleite Mike Daisey’s monologue show rallying against the labor practices of Apple’s Chinese subcontractors? It turns out to have been full of distortions and “dramatic license.”
• Nobody’s actually trying to move the Portland TrailBlazers to Seattle. Some guy at the Weekly simply thinks it would be a good idea.
• A self proclaimed Libertarian (you know, the dudes who think the oil companies and Wall Street don’t have enough power) says we must protect porn’s right to exist, because the next industry to be cracked down on would be advertising.
• Robert Reich reminds you that America’s “moral rot” isn’t gays and abortion, but rather “the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump.”

american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

I just watched (much of) the beginning-to-end Monkees marathon on Antenna TV (one of those digital broadcast sub-channels).

All 58 series episodes plus the feature-film epilogue Head were aired over 31 consecutive hours, in memory of the recently deceased co-star Davy Jones.

Things I discovered (or rather rediscovered) during this:

The series was both wholesome and subversive. It incoroprated both Three Stooges slapstick (shot on the same studio lot and occasionally using leftover Stooge props) and Bunuel surrealism. It’s no coincidence that the show’s makers went on to make some of the most groundbreaking feature films of the late ’60s-early ’70s.

If only the derogatory “prefab four” meme (the idea that, as primarily a comedy team playing scripted roles, they weren’t a “real” rock band) had not gotten around to denigrate both the show and the group, the show would have been seen at the time as what it was—a leap several steps beyond the standard Screen Gems sitcom, a bright and life-affirming piece of informed nonsense.

The four actor-singers had distinct comic personalities. No one of them was allowed to overshine the others. They played off of one another very well, especially when they weren’t in reactive mode against the guest characters.

They also had distinct singing voices, and they were all skilled musicians, even though the show’s shooting schedule (much more elaborate than that of your basic living-room sitcom) didn’t allow them to play on most of the backing tracks.

The Monkees series is a work of perfection. And thanks to the growing rancor between the stars, the producers, and the network, the show ended at its peak. It didn’t fall into a slow decline, like so many other series.

The group’s lightweight pop sound was already becoming rear guard by the time the show premiered. By the spring of 1968, when the show ended, that music was even more passe among the emerging rock snobs, and would soon fall under the damning label of “bubblegum.”

And the four co-stars were anxious to make more of their own music, which would inevitably lead them in different directions.

But the Monkees, and their producers Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider, would not leave without a proper goodbye.

•

Some reviewers have called Head a destruction of the Monkees’ image. Actually, it expanded the series’ absurdist premise to its natural extreme.

In the series, the Monkees always saved the day because they were even crazier than the villains, and because they knew that as the heroes they could bend the show’s fictional “reality” to their will.

But in Head, they’re trapped in a world that’s more complicated, even more surreal. No matter how many times our heroes break the proverbial “fourth wall” to escape a scene, they’re herded back into another. The Monkees could no longer save the day, or even themselves; much as the youthful idealism of the Camelot early ’60s was descending into foreign and domestic turmoil.

•

I was nine when The Monkees series began its original network run.

It made perfect (non)sense to me then.

And it still does.

The show’s music epitomized commercial pop at its best.

And it still does.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

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

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

wallyhood.org

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

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

Now, to catch up with a little randomness:

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

My pals at HistoryLink.org have put together a weighty historical coffee table tome called The Future Remembered.

It’s all about the Century 21 Exposition, the Seattle world’s fair that began 50 years ago this April.

It’s 300 pages of insightful prose and luscious pictures concerning what is still probably the single most important event that ever happened here in Software City.

It’s proof of what a physical book can still be—an object of desire. (And a handy blunt instrument, should you need one.)

It gives you most of the individual subplots of the fair’s story, from the miraculously perfect design of the Space Needle to the erotic puppet show (by the future producers of Land of the Lost!).

These sub-stories are woven around a main narrative line, about a cabal of squarer-than-square civic boosters who pulled off a staggering feat of a spectacle, something that melded both high art and mass entertainment into one vision of a sleek modern tomorrow (that mostly still hasn’t shown up).

And it even turned a small profit, and left a 74-acre arts-and-recreation campus in the middle of town.

You should all look it up, check it out, even get one for your very own.

•

Indeed, there’s only only one small mini-gripe I’ve got with the document.

There’s a two page spread saluting “Women At Century 21.”

It honors Gracie Hansen (the brassy small-town hostess who ran one of the fair’s burlesque revues), Laurene Gandy (wife of fair exec Joe Gandy and a tireless worker for both the fair and the subsequent Seattle Center), and the other male execs’ wives (billed collectively as “Our Fair Ladies”).

But one prominent woman is not mentioned in the spread. Or in the entire book.

Dr. Dixy Lee Ray (1914-1994) was a marine biologist, a UW prof, and a science-ed host on KCTS.

Ray worked as a “science advisor” to the United States Science Pavilion at the fair. In this role, she was the pavilion’s chief spokesperson to the local media.

She then became the first head of the pavilion’s post-fair entity, the Pacific Science Center.

From there she became the highest ranking woman in Richard Nixon’s Executive Branch (running the Atomic Energy Commission).

From there she successfully ran for governor in 1976 as a “flag of convenience” Democrat.

Then she proceeded on an anti-environmentalist agenda, alienated just about the entire state Democratic Party, and lost her re-election bid in the 1980 primary.

Ray left behind a lot of political opponents.

And, admittedly, her later role with the Science Center held more authority than her role with the Science Pavilion.

But she should not be written out of the fair’s history.

kono packi, the capital times (madison wi)

Independents, swing voters, “moderates,” “compasisonate conservatives”—the Republican Party, at the federal and state levels, officially doesn’t give a damn about any of these people.

Or more likely, the Republican Party has given up trying to bring them back into the fold.

The only audiences today’s Republicans have anymore are the people cocooned in the “conservative bubble.”

That is, the people who ONLY listen to and read conservative-ONLY media (Faux News, conservatalk radio, the Drudge Report, Regnery Books, etc.).

People who listen to nothing but the one-sided party-line right wing spin on everything.

Partly because these guys look, talk, and use the buzzwords of a particular “Real Americans” subculture.

These pundits and politicians, and the megabuck lobbyists who wholly own them, have real agendas that often run counter to the self-interests of their audiences, and especially counter to these audiences’ proclaimed moral/social values. (Joking about wishing you could murder all your opponents, then claiming to be “pro-life”? Really?)

I’m working on an essay for the general election season, tentatively titled Talking To Your Conservative Relatives.

One of its lines of reasoning will go as follows:

Don’t believe the hype.

To be more specific, don’t believe the demographic and psychographic marketing.

(Yes, I’ll explain what those things are. Essentially, they’re the schticks advertisers use when they talk about the “cigarette for women” or the “diet drink for men.”)

To be more specific, be EVEN MORE SKEPTICAL of politicians, pundits, etc. who claim they speak on behalf of your own values (including the values of family, hard work, faith, freedom, etc.).

The more these guys insist they’re “one of you,” the more you have to sniff out for the putrid scent of a confidence game going on.