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….)

art thiel, sportspress nw

In an unfinished 1997 TV pilot partly set at a bowling alley, I remarked that in baseball, a perfect game is when nothing happens; while in bowling, a perfect game is when everything happens.

What I didn’t say was that baseball’s “nothing” can be a thrilling, suspenseful, even joyous nothing.

Baseball, as the philosophers of the sport (and it’s the only U.S. sport that has philosophers) say, is the game where the defense controls the ball. It’s not based on metaphors of insemination, but on control vs. chaos. The star of any particular moment of any particular game is the pitcher, high on his dirt pedestal in the center of the field.

The fly-by-night fans root for lots of cheap home runs, for moments of high action.

The hardcore fans, though, they love the control. They love that near-oxymoron, a “pitchers’ duel.” (They never actually combat one another, and in the AL they’re never on the field at the same time.)

They love the intricacy of a pitcher’s “arsenal” of different styles of pitches. They love a pitcher who doesn’t just have speed and power, but also finesse and versatility and endurance.

Here, in what had previously turned out to be yet another Mariners season of futility (capped with the anticlimactic loss of Ichiro, the team’s only other superstar, to the damn Yankees), pitcher Felix Hernandez accomplished the sport’s rarest and most prized single-game feat.

He made history.

Heck, he even made Wikipedia.

And yes, the damn Yankees (or at least damn Yankee fans) now want him. Figures.

ted s. warren, ap via seattlepi.com

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.

seatacradio.com

So shortly after the death of Chris Wedes (J.P. Patches) comes the loss of another beloved local media icon. Taken too young, after too many years of stoically living through pain and surgeries and chemo.

Goertzen’s natural charm and adept on-air skills made her one of the longest running local news anchors in the nation.

She survived in a field that is often unkind toward formerly-young females. But she couldn’t survive the tumors that wouldn’t stay dead.

geneticist.tumblr.com

• Artist Lisa Nillson creates elaborate human-body cross sections using “only pieces of rolled paper.”
• Here are links to the musical numbers left out of NBC’s Olympic closing-ceremony telecast, including Ray Davies.
• Magazine single-copy sales in the U.S. are down 10 percent from a year ago. Expect more stupid “stunt” covers as the desperation sinks in.
• Game of Thrones creator George R.R. Martin really dislikes voter suppression drives.
• Last Picture Show writer Larry McMurtry has become one of America’s biggest used-book superstore operators. Until now.
• Joe Kubert, 1927-2012: The master of gritty realistic comics and illustration was best known for war comics such as Sgt. Rock. He was equally adept at superhero titles (Hawkman), personal and autobiographical works, graphic journalism, and art-instruction courses. His impact on the art cannot be underestimated.

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.

wikimedia commons

• The warm weather’s speeding up the life cycle of the aphids spreading “zebra chip” disease to Washington’s potato crops, making the spuds unsalable.
• Let’s raise a thousand guitar picks to the 10th anniversary of Seattle’s All Ages Dance Ordinance, and the repeal of the infamously restrictive “Teen Dance Ordinance” (which had banned almost all all-ages live music shows for nearly two decades). A lot of people worked a lot of years to make that happen. They can tell you that change doesn’t really happen any other way.
• It began in ’10, took last year off due to funding problems, but is back this weekend. It’s Seattle Founders Days in Belltown, a weekend celebration of one of America’s liveliest neighborhoods, its spectacular past and its portentious future.
• When truly affordable housing remains in short supply anywhere in Seattle, should the Seattle Housing Authority sell off huge chunks of Yesler Terrace to “market rate” developers?
• RealNetworks, after many losses, turned a profit this past quarter. But it’s only because they sold a bunch of patents to Intel.
• Now that the reservoirs are all lidded, your best chance for a peek at Seattle’s water supply comes with a “Tap Tour” to the Cedar River Watershed.
• Romney outrage of the day (this will probably be a regular department for the next 90 days): Bain Capital’s original investors included figures tied to El Salvador’s murderous right-wing death squads.
• One more reason why no state can afford a Republican one-party government: Louisiana’s set to dole out public education bucks to anti-science fundamentalist private schools.
• The Susan G. Komen Foundation announced new national bosses, who might (just might, mind you) end the homophobia and Planned Parenthood-bashing of the group’s recent past. But it’ll probably remain an outfit less interested in health care than in big-bucks corporate sponsorships.
• We here in BlueStateLand like to scoff at slimy voter suppression tactics elsewhere. But why aren’t Washington’s own majority-Hispanic pockets seeing more majority-Hispanic voting profiles?
• You could live directly above the future U District light rail station, as soon as 2021.

pitchfork media via cartoonbrew.com

The third most famous band from Aberdeen, the Melvins, talk about their “disastrous” first tour, accompanied by appropriately simple Flash animation. (The second most famous band from Aberdeen, of course, is Metal Church.)

• When an apartment tower goes up on the Lung Association site in Belltown, across from the existing Seattle Heights condo tower, that will be Seattle’s densest residential block (for the time being).
• It’s a sad day for local radio listeners. KMCQ of Covington, the freeform oldies station that had been one of the last commercial music stations worth listening to whatsoever, has switched to a strict-playlist, ’70s-’80s “classic rock” format. Damn.
• Bartell Drugs’ HQ is moving to the West Seattle Corporate Center in Delridge. That building was originally the HQ of Bartells’ onetime arch rival Pay n’ Save, which disappeared several mergers ago. (Some former Pay n’ Save locations survive as Rite Aid outlets.)
• A stock photo of the UW campus is being used in a creepy poster for a potentially creepy romantic comedy movie. (The movie in question was neither filmed, nor apparently set, in Seattle.)
• More state education money without raising taxes, as both gubernatorial candidates promise? Not bloody likely.
• Marvin Hamlisch, 1945-2012: So it’s the laughter that we remember, whenever we remember the way he was.
• Robert Hughes, 1938-2012: I’ll always remember the Australian-born art critic for a scene from the BBC series The Shock of the New. He pointed to an abstract-art chair and noted that “no human bottom” could fit in it comfortably. (Little known fact: He co-hosted the first episode of ABC’s news magazine 20/20, with ex-Esquire editor Robert Hayes.)
• Happy eighth birthday to one of my fave sources of cool and strange music clips, PCL LinkDump (née Pop Culture Links).
• Charles Mudede quotes three other pundits who suggest the only way out of today’s global economic blecch is to revive the ancient Hebrew concept of a “debt jubilee” (or something like it).

coregallery.org

If you want me to spend $5,000 for a painting of words outlining an image, the words had better be spelled properly. They should read “More Than Its Weight In Gold.” No apostrophe dammit.