• Despite what Republican politicians would have you believe, Washington state actually leads the nation in new business creation these days.
• One of these new businesses will be a downtown JC Penney store, in the old Kress five-and-dime store building at Third and Pike. That’s just a block from the old (1930-82) Penney store (Target’s going in on that site later this year). It’s great news, but what will become of the loveable, and vitally needed, Kress IGA supermarket in the building’s lower level? Its operators insist they’ve got a long term lease and are staying no matter what.
• It’s not just the state civil payroll that’s ethnically un-diverse. The state legislature is only 6.8 percent nonwhite.
• Local theater blogger Jose Aguerra asks whether local troupes are being too coy and inoffensive, even in their depiction of female orgasms. (In my day, Seattle’s live theaters prided themselves on presenting edgy, daring material, even if the promise was grander than the product.)
• A UW Medical Center administrator got caught embezzling a quarter mil from the hospital. You’re only hearing about it now because the state auditor made a statement publicly praising the U for how it investigated and prosecuted the inside thief. A potential huge scandal was thus turned into a low-key moment of triumph for the administration. At least if you read the Seattle Times version of the story. KOMO offers a far more critical spin on the affair.
• Grist.org’s David Roberts ponders what the heck Friends of the Earth is doing getting involved with right-wing lobby groups in proposing a “green” federal budget slashing scheme.
• The link we ran last week about the electric-guitar company? The company that got raided by federal agents, who were supposedly looking for endangered imported wood? The company flatly denies all allegations. And the Murdoch Wall St. Journal, ever eager to bash anything environmentalist, claims the feds could next go after folks who own old vintage instruments that contain now-restricted components.
• Should any of us care about speculation about the new Apple CEO’s private life? Ars Technica says no.
• Birth rates are dropping in many countries, especially those where female fetuses are sometimes selectively aborted. The Economist calculates some countries, at their current rates of decline, could totally run out of people in 600-700 years. Of course, if you’re not a dystopian scifi fan you know trends don’t stay the same, at the same rate, forever.
• Sasha Brown-Worsham believes “we should parent more like they did in 1978.” More Boo Berry and daytime TV; less overprotectiveness and constant fear.

from bellevuebusinessjournal.com

• One of Bellevue’s truly worthy cultural institutions is closing, alas. It’s the doll museum.
• Organized flea markets and craft/vintage-wear group sales have been the rage this summer on Capitol Hill. One such enterprise took up shop on city sidewalks, which led City officials to crack down. Without a permit, that market (cleverly named “BadWill”) won’t be back.
• Certain Everett School Board members seem to need a time out period in the corner.
• Is it an attack on the poor to get rid of Metro’s ride free area? Or to drop one of the south end’s major artery bus routes?
• Forbes calls Melinda Gates the world’s sixth most powerful woman. Eight slots above Oprah, in case you’re counting.
• Some pundits predict that with Libya’s revolution down to the final mopping up, it’s time to look toward Syria for the next sequel.
• Remember when Iceland was going broke, having gotten too affected by the global banking kablooey? They’re poised for a big recovery/comeback. And without the enforced austerity or corporate welfare the global economic czars demanded.

• Seattle still doesn’t have its fully deserved NBA team back, or any fully formed plan to bring it back. But the promoters of a new LA pseudo-sport, “lingerie basketball,” say this will be one of the first places they hope to expand to. From first glance at this operation, the Storm has nothing to worry about.
• Seattle was named America’s #1 tech city, by a highly unscientific (hence less than geek-trusted) survey.
• Who loves (with their bucks) this year’s state liquor privatization measure? Costco (who started it) and Trader Joe’s. Who’s against it? Beer and wine distributors, who’d rather not see Costco gain the power edge them out of wholesaling. On the sidelines so far: Safeway, Kroger (owner of QFC and Fred Meyer), Supervalu (Albertsons).
• It’s smaller than the Gorge but at least as spectacular. It’s the new ampitheater at Mt. St. Helens.
• Intiman Theatre might come back from the grave. Just might, mind you.
• The US Dept. of Transportation has formally approved the deeply boring tunnel to replace the lovely, doomed Viaduct.
• Could JPMorgan Chase engulf and devour Bank of America like it did Washington Mutual?
• Network TV has fewer women in it this year, on either side of the camera.
• A Tea Party regional boss in South Carolina put up a “joke” on her Facebook page, about how cool it would be if Obama were assassinated. She’s now made her Facebook page private.
• Today’s “Google doodle” logo illustration is all about Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentinian author born 112 years ago today. Yeah, that’s a strange un-round number of an anniversary. But then, oddities, conundrums, things that didn’t seem to make nice round sense were found all over Borges’ stories. (He didn’t write novels, though some of his short stories were about novels in a meta, recursive way.)
• Author Simon Reynolds says enough-already to the 20th anniversary of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Grunge nostalgia, he feels, is worse than pop eating itself:

…The more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock’s glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.

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.

sorry, maude, you didn't make the list

• Julianne Escobedo Shepherd offers a list of 10 (American, prime time) “TV shows that changed the world.” It includes some of the usual suspects (Ellen, Mary Tyler Moore, the original Star Trek) but leaves out so many other possibilities. Where’s Yogi and Boo Boo in the same bed all winter, or all the early variety shows with interracial love-song duets?
• Seattle PostGlobe, the spunky li’l local news and arts site started by ex P-I reporter Kery Murakami (and for which I posted a couple of pieces), is closing up shop after two years and change. With Murakami gone to Long Island, NY and many other original volunteer contributors off in other jobs (or other careers), the site had mainly become a spot for Bill White’s film reviews. Without the funding to maintain the site’s operation, let alone to build it into a stronger endeavor, its current boss (and cofounder) Sally Deneen is pulling the plug. She’s keeping it up in archival form.
• In other local media news, technical workers at KIRO-TV have been at a labor impasse for some15 months now. The IBEW Local 46 claims they’re just trying to preserve contractual language “that respects their individual and collective rights that are afforded to them under federal law.”
• Copper thieves have no respect for anyone or anything. Not even for the local branch of Gilda’s Club. That’s the drop-in cancer support center, named after Gilda Radner and housed in that fake Monticello office building at Broadway and East Union.
• The bicyclist struck by a hit-and-run SUV Thursday? He was a photographer and office worker for an international health agency. And how he’s dead.
• Wherever there’s a business with a predominantly male clientele, there’s somebody trying to attract female customers. The latest result comes from the UK branch of Molson Coors (you did know those beer companies had merged years ago, right?). They’re test marketing a pink beer for women. Even stranger: It’s called “Animée.” Which begs the question, would Sailor Moon drink it? How about the Ghost in the Shell?
• Lee Fang sees a cartel of “shadowy right wing front groups” spending lotsa bucks to get Congress obsessed with “the deficit” (i.e., with dismantling anything government does to help non-billionaires) instead of the economy. I don’t think the drive is all that shadowy. These outfits, their funding sources, and their biases are well known and well documented—and still scary.
• Dan Balz sees today’s Republicans as being at war against Democrats, against the middle class, against women, against sanity, and now against one another.
• Remember: Tonight (Saturday the 30th) is the annual Seafair Torchlight Parade bisecting Belltown and downtown along Fourth Avenue. This year’s grand marshal is smaller-than-he-used-to-be TV personality and Sounders FC spokesmodel Drew Carey. (The organizers tried to get someone else for the role, but they bid over the actual retail price.)

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.

(in no particular order):

• Yes, I will want to have sex with you. Pretty much immediately. ESPECIALLY if I’m too timid to come out and say so. Be aware of this.
• I’d rather you didn’t complain to me about the guys you sleep with, whilst refusing to sleep with me.
• I have a large repertoire of firmly held, and occasionally contradictory, beliefs. You can try to change some of them if you want to.
• I watch TV. I eat meat. I don’t smoke pot. You won’t be able to change any of these.
• I have a lot of persnickety minor food allergies and strange food dislikes. I won’t expect you to know all of them right away. For now, just know that if you order the two of us an almond-encrusted dessert, you’ll get to eat all of it.
• I enjoy images of the female figure. This does not mean I hate women; it means I like women.
• I may have a “baby face,” but I’m over 50, under 5′ 10″, and beer bellied. Looking for a tall dark prince? Keep looking.
• I’m among the long term unemployed. I don’t think it’s romantic or noble. I want to change it. I want a real job. The specific real job I want changes. Sometimes what I want is an office cubicle with my name on it. I want to process data, perform boring routines, and get a deserved compensation.
• Some women have said they would be too intense for me to deal with. In the past, I have had capital-R Relationships with a D.I.D. patient, a bipolar alcoholic, and two women who expected me to casually agree that all males were intrinsically evil. I believe I can handle “intense.”
• People call me “A Writer.” I’ve always rejected that title, and the “romantic” stereotypes associated with it. I have no interest in living in a cabin on an island. I have no interest in becoming famous only after I’m dead. I have no interest in becoming dead.
• I don’t want to be your dependent, your co-dependent, your enabler, your user, your abuser, your enemy, your submissive, your dog, your platonic friend, your gay friend, or your girlfriend. I want to be your boyfriend.
• My sexual fetish is Love.

A Forbes.com story about lawyer/author/TV pundit Lisa Bloom asks the musical question,

How did women go from caring about the Equal Pay Act and Title IX to celebu-tainment and Botox, and what can we do about it?

Whenever I read such all encompassing remarks about “women,” I always respond, at least to myself: WHICH women?

There have always been women who translated their personal concerns and needs into society-wide issues.

And there have always been women who consumed escapist entertainment.

And, yes, there have even been those who did both.

Most of the Hooters restaurants in Washington, including the Seattle location at south Lake Union, are now closed. The parent company insists it’s not due to any lessened popularity in the chain’s concept. It’s just the matter of a regional franchisee that got into a lawsuit with an unspecified “third party.”

This sort of thing has happened before. Here in the late 1990s, a multistore Burger King franchisee suddenly folded.

Of course this could be an opportunity for some new, all local cleavage-themed restaurant. Perhaps with a neo-burlesque concept. After all, there’s nothing either novel or trademarkable about low-cut waitress costumes. The idea goes back at least as far as the serving wenches in English country inns. (And sometimes the food at Hooters tasted almost as old.)

At 2 a.m. this morning, I finished a book project that won’t earn me a cent for at least six months. I can now resume finding other excuses not to blog.

After I post a few entries I’d been putting off.

First, you might have heard of the big online buzz over what is supposed to be the only nude photo ever posed by Elizabeth Taylor.

It’s a photoshopped fake.

The original “body shot,” to which Taylor’s face was pasted on, is a “tasteful” Hollywood glamour nude, done in 1940 by photographer Peter Gowland and included in a photography guidebook he and his wife issued many years later.

The figure pictured in it doesn’t even remotely match the see-thru shots Taylor had made for Playboy on the set of Cleopatra. Those were published in 1963, less than five years after she was supposed to have posed for the nude. (The Playboy image does not appear to be online in any freely accessible place; here’s a tiny thumbnail of a similar shot.)

Current excuse for infrequent postings here: I’m on another book deadline, which means my computer time is going to real (albeit not immediately renumerative) work.

Once this is out of the way, I’ll again be out in the field seeking gainful employment. (Remember, I’m not looking for something to write about. I’m looking for someone to work for.)

And I’m so much more than a writer. I shoot and retouch digital photos. I design graphics and web pages. I enter data, process words, and do many of the tasks every office needs getting done.

Meanwhile, in the outside world in recent days:

• Mardi Gras came back to Pioneer Square, albeit in wimpy inside-the-bars-only form, on the same day as International Women’s Day. I see no conflict between the two traditions. That’s because to me, women aren’t just different from men. They’re different from other women. Some will want to be the next Miss Marple. Others will want to be the next Miss September. Some will want both. Some will want something completely else.
• Neo-vaudeville performer and promoter Hokum Jeebs was stabbed to death in an apparent botched burglary attempt at his West Seattle home. News coverage of the tragedy focused on two supposedly scandalous facts about this jovial, nostalgic local figure: he grew his own medical pot supply, and he had a thing for dangerous looking younger men. In my view, neither of these were all that scandalous. Though it’s a shame he apparently took the latter passion to the point of inviting his suspected killer into his life.
• Madison is revolting. The city where The Onion began (and from whence most of the original Stranger team hailed) became America’s biggest non-fake news story. It’s all because the right-wing politicians there had the guts to dare to be total suckups to billionaire campaign donors, and used deep dirty-tricks chicanery to try to force Wisconsin to become another Mississippi. This power grab shall not hold.
• Japan was attacked, not by a cute movie monster but by the earth itself. Many people deserve your thoughts today.

(Cross posted with the Capitol Hill Times.)

Thoughts on recent performance events, big and small, on the Hill:

•

1) The Capitol Hill Block Party.

From all accounts it was a smashing success. Some 10,000 people attended each of the event’s three days. Except for one no-show due to illness, all the big advertised bands satisfied their respective throngs. Seattle finally has a second summer attraction with top big-name musical acts. (I personally don’t consider an outdoor ampitheater in the middle of eastern Washington to be “in Seattle.”)

But as the Block Party becomes a bigger, bolder, louder venture, it can’t help but lose some of its early funky charm, and a piece of its original raison d’etre.

Once a festival starts to seriously woo major-label acts, it has to start charging real money at the gates. It’s not just to pay the bands’ management, but also for the security, the sound system, the fences around the beer gardens, and assorted other ratcheted-up expenses.

That, by necessity, makes the whole thing a more exclusive, less inclusive endeavor.

The street fair booths that used to be free get put behind the admission gates. The merchants, political causes, and community groups operating these booths only end up reaching those who both can and want to pay $23 and up to get in.

I’m not suggesting the Block Party shut down or scale back to its earlier, small-time self.

I’m suggesting an additional event, perhaps on another summer weekend. It would be what the Block Party used to be—free to all, but intended for the people of the Hill. An all-encompassing, cross-cultural celebration of the neighborhood’s many different “tribes” and subcultures. An event starring not just rock and pop and hiphop, but a full range of performance types. An event all about cross-pollenization, exchanges of influence, and cultural learning.

It wouldn’t be a “Block Party Lite,” but something else, something wonderful in its own way.

•

2) Naked Girls Reading: “How To” Night.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me about a strip club in Los Angeles called “Crazy Girls.” I told him I would rather pay to see sane girls.

Now I have. And it’s beautiful.

“Naked Girls Reading” is a franchise operation, originally based in Chicago. But it’s a perfect concept for Seattle. It’s tastefully “naughty” but not in any way salacious. It’s not too heavy. It’s entertaining. It’s edifying. It could even be billed as providing “empowerment” to its cast.

The four readers last Sunday night, plus the dressed female MC (costumed as a naughty librarian), all came from the neo-burlesque subculture. But this concept is nearly the exact opposite of striptease dancing. There’s no stripping, no teasing, and no dancing. The readers enter from behind a stage curtain, already clad in just shoes and the occasional scarf. They sit at a couch. They take turns reading aloud. When each reader has performed three brief selections, the evening is done.

Each performance has a theme. Last Sunday, it was “How To.” The readers mostly chose types of texts that are seldom if ever read aloud in public. Given Seattle’s techie reputation, it’s only appropriate that we rechristen instructional text as an art form.

Selections ranged from explosive-making (from the ’70s cult classic The Anarchist Cookbook), to plate joining in woodwork, to home-brewing kombucha tea, to deboning a chicken (from The Joy of Cooking), to the famous Tom Robbins essay “How to Make Love Stay.” The women performed these selections with great humor, great voices, and great sitting posture.

Despite what you may hear from the Chicken Littles of the book and periodical industries, The Word isn’t going away any time soon, any more than The Body. Both obsessions retain their eternal power to attract, no matter what.

“Naked Girls Reading” performances are held the first Sunday of each month in the Odd Fellows Building, 10th and East Pine. Details and ticket info are at nakedgirlsreading.com/seattle. The promoters also promise a “Naked Boys Reading” evening at a yet-unset date. (The participles won’t be all that’s dangling.)

Ruth Rosen at AlterNet ponders “Why Women Dominate the Right-Wing Tea Party.”

Rosen finds at least a half-truth in the conservative womens’ claim to be the true heiresses to Susan B. Anthony and co., who had campaigned for Prohibition with the same fervor with which they had fought for women’s suffrage.

In the ’80s, the late antiporn crusader Andrea Dworkin wrote an essay called “Right Wing Women.” She admired those women for many things. She particularly admired their sexual prudery and also their dream for a world driven less by macho posturing and more by rules and traditions.

The left-O-center conventional wisdom is that there is, or ought to be, a singular collective entity of Women. This big gender-encompassing entity would, by its very nature, be of one mind on most major sociopolitical issues. This mass of Women would always support gay rights, progressive politics, peace, ecology, humanitarian aid, legalizing pot, outlawing fructose, and every other left-O-center stance.

I say fifty-two percent of the species won’t ever think exactly alike.

Gender is but one of countless factors influencing a person’s social and tribal identity. There’s also family, education, religion, economic caste, nationality, ethnicity, culture, subculture, sub-subculture, et al.

Every culture has included women who identified themselves as traditionalists. These women have always sought relative security from a hostile world in the realms of home, family, and clear rules for behavior. The lobbyists and politicians backing the various non-unified tea party strands know how to market their wares to these women.

And so should we.

What do progressives have to offer to traditionalist women?

We offer more careful stewardship of the land.

We offer more economic opportunity for more people, including working-class families.

We offer greater personal freedoms for everyone, including those who follow various religious faiths.

And as (non-Hispanic) whites slowly lose majority status in this country, we offer a vision of cultural diversity that respects minority cultures, including minority cultures that used to be majority cultures.

Thanks to Jennifer Manlowe, I’ve heard of two researchers who’ve got a new book called Why Women Have Sex. I haven’t read the book itself, just the UK newspaper story about it.

The story claims the researchers have deteremined there are exactly 237 reasons for a (hetero) woman to do the sex—no more, no less.

You know most of the common reasons—lust, love, baby-making, social-ladder climbing, cash, barter, kicks, comfort, novelty, submission, empowerment, celebration, consolation, getting/keeping/dumping a guy, because all the other girls are doing it, because parents/teachers/preachers say not to, and so forth.

But let’s imagine some reasons that might land a little further down on the list of 237, some of the less-common reasons for sex:

• He cooked a really great dinner.
• He wore something so ugly, she had to get it off of him.
• There was nothing good on TV.
• The only good DVDs at the store were taken.
• Pilates just gets too repetitive.
• That church retreat weekend made her feel too clean.
• To crowd out the noise of the neighbors/kids/voices in her head.
• She wanted to try out a Sleep Number bed and he had one.
• She wanted to prove he wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she wasn’t gay.
• She wanted to prove she didn’t have implants.
• She wanted to prove the rumors about men of a certain profession/ethnic group/nationality/weight class.
• Hey, why not?

Then there are the “reasons” that would fall off the 237 altogether. For instance, I’m pretty sure no woman has ever had sex with a man just because he used a certain brand of deodorant body spray.

…a lot lately, letting interesting-sounding links take me any which where. While browsing the “Stores” page listings, I ran across something called “I Love ‘Boobs.'” Within the “Wall” (comments thread) was a lovely, loving ode to women’s self confidence. (Hint: It might have scrolled off of this particular page by the time you click on it. Keep going back through the thread.)

I like the idea that a woman telling other women how smart, daring, and beautiful they are can coexist, with seemingly no contradiction whatsoever, in an online discussion dedicated to the most superficial expression of admiration toward the female physique.