komo-tv

• More tsunami debris is showing up on Northwest beaches. Darn, I remember when all you’d find there were dead seals.
• Publicola, having just broken up with Crosscut, has announced its nuptials with Seattle Met. The lifestyle mag will own and host the local inside-politics blog, starting some time next month.
• The Downtown Seattle Association’s raising money to install a semi-permanent family playground at Westlake Park (which would just coincidentally make it a less hospitable locale for, say, Occupiers).
• Pearl Jam’s biggest nemesis isn’t Ticketmaster but its own ex-business manager.
• Seattle’s arts world is a nearly half-billion dollar business. And that’s just the nonprofit side.
• But the arts alone (or the gays or the hipsters) isn’t enough to drive a city’s economy, let alone turn one around. That’s the lesson from Minneapolis writer Frank Bures, who’s out to debunk pundit Richard Florida’s whole “Creative Class” shtick.
• KIRO-TV’s exposé of an elementary school janitor was a big hunk of lies n’ half-truths, according to some local “media watchdog” types.
• The president of the U. of Virginia was fired, allegedly for nothing more than insufficiently sucking up to corporate interests.

Band name suggestion of the month: “Premier Instruments of Pleasure.” (From the “Sexual Wellness” section of the Amazon subsidiary Soap.com.)

• The new Microsoft tablet device will be called the “Surface.” How, er, superficial does that sound?
• Plastic shopping bags disappear in Seattle on 7/1. You have 12 days to stock up on those magnificently reusable Bartell Drug bags while you still can.
• Local hiphop artist Prometheus Brown would like you to care about the victims of gun violence, and not only when those victims are white people from “nice” areas.
• Nick Eaton joins city and county officials in jeering at the Seattle Times‘ fact-stretchin’ anti-Sonics arena editorials. In other news, somebody still reads the Seattle Times editorials.
• The waterfront streetcars Seattle can’t seem to find a place for anymore, even though the folks loved ’em? St. Louis transit officials would like ’em.
• There’s a 20-year-old intern/blogger at NPR’s All Songs Considered named Emily White. (This is NOT the Emily White who used to work for The Stranger.) She recently wrote a confession that she’s almost never paid for the music she’s downloaded. In response, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker frontman David Lowery penned a screed denouncing her and people like her for shelling out bucks for computers and Internet connections but not for the content they thereby attain:

Why do we value the network and hardware that delivers music but not the music itself?

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself?

Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

• Elsewhere in piracyland, when last we mentioned The Oatmeal online cartoonist Matthew Inman, he’d complained about a “social media” humor site that had posted his art without credit or payment. Then an attorney for that site sued him for defaming his client’s character. Inman replied back by starting an online fundraising campaign for the amount of the lawsuit—only with the proceeds going to charities instead. Now, the attorney has re-sued Inman, and has sued the site hosting the fund drive and even the charities it benefits. To quote one of America’s greatest contributions to comic satire, “Whadda maroon.”

ford 'seattle-ite xxi' car display at the world's fair; uw special collections via edmonds beacon

• In the revived Baffler, self described “anthropologist and anarchist” David Graeber has a long “salvo” of an essay that starts out by asking some of the questions a lot of folks have asked during the World’s Fair semicentennial: Where the heck are the flying cars, missions to Mars, or other techno-wonders we were promised back then? Graeber smoothly segues from that into a more general modern malaise, in which nothing seems to be getting better except info-tech—and that’s turned us all into serfs to bureaucracy, even in our private lives. His answer: a more egalitarian economy. (I know, easier to say than to make.)
• Online Media Shrinkage Watch: The combo of Crosscut and Publicola turned out to be more of a springtime fling than a marriage. Crosscut’s cutting back. Not just on its new hires (Publicola founders and city hall insider reporters Josh Feit and Erica Barnett), but the site’s existing staff and freelance budgets. Three big funding sources are expiring around the same time. Crosscut founder David Brewster says a new funding scheme (and a reorganization, with Brewster stepping back from full hands-on management of the site) is on the way. And Feit’s talking about restarting Publicola with his own new reorg. Weezell see….
• As Wash. state’s privatized booze biz rolls on, could people actually start drinking less?
• Attendance at Occupy Seattle’s “general assembly” meetings has plummeted. Is the organization fading away? If it does, its range of causes has not and will not go away. Tactics change. Goals remain. Eyes on the Prize and all that.
• While the alpha-male hustlers running most all of America’s tech companies (and the equally estrogen-lacking tech journalists and bloggers) weren’t noticing, Internet usage has become majority female. So are the usages of GPS, e-book readers, Skype, text messaging, mobile-phone voice usage, and more.
• The Waterfront Streetcar might or might not run again. If it does, it won’t be for at least seven years.

fuckyeahtwinpeaksintro.tumblr.com

Something made more than 20 years ago can still spark creative responses. Cast in point: a whole blog devoted to “Things You Can Do During the Intro of Twin Peaks.” The intro sequence for the series episodes runs a full 1:32 (the pilot’s into was even longer). Compare that to modern network dramas that might barely flash a logo at you.

• Want more Eastern Washington-set dramatics? A year old but still vital, local author Jess Walter offers a funny/poignant “Statistical Abstract for My Home of Spokane, Washington.”
• Computing isn’t just gonna keep getting cheaper. It’s also gonna keep getting more energy efficient. That means the same hydro-power-eating server farms in Eastern Washington will carry ever-bigger data loads. And that’s gonna mean even more “creative disruption;” and not just in the businesses you think of as “high tech” either.
• Print Media Shrinkage Watch: The Los Angeles Times, once the wealthiest, most ad-laden daily paper in America, has taken a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation to pay a few beat reporters’ salaries.
• Self Publishing Boom Watch: A single e-book middleman company, Smashwords, has put out over 127,000 titles by 44,000 authors thus far.
• Some of these have been on a few sites before, but here ‘s one site where you get a whole cafeteria menu’s worth of forgotten tech sounds, from the dial phone to the dot matrix printer.

theoatmeal.com

Matthew Inman, known to all as The Oatmeal, is Seattle’s (the world’s?) greatest online satirical cartoonist.

He’s also, like so many of us, trying to make a living from his craft in an Internet world in which anything anybody posts is treated as fodder for reposting, revising, or just plain stealing.

Lately, commercial ad-supported dotcoms are using “social media” as their current excuse for taking, and making money from, other people’s creative work without paying those people for such work. “Hey, don’t blame us. We didn’t repost your work. It was one of our users (whom we merely encourage to repost stuff here).”

Inman publicly complained about one such “social aggregation” site, where dozens of his drawings had appeared. Some of his drawings had stayed up at that site, even after others were removed.

The site responded by suing him!

They wanted $20,000 in damages to the reputation of the site’s “brand,” or something like that. At the same time they sent a “cease and desist” letter, demanding Inman stop dissing them.

Inman’s posted response was hilarious; pure Oatmeal snark at its finest.

Inman vowed to start an online fund drive. (Yes, even though he’d already made a cartoon comparing such drives to street begging.)

Then, he vowed to take a photo of himself with the $20,000. The aggregation site’s lawyer would get the photo, plus an original cartoon of the lawyer’s mother (imagined as an unattractive slag) and a Kodiak bear.

The money, however, would be split between the National Wildlife Federation (hence the bear image) and the American Cancer Society.

The (real) fund drive’s title: “BearLove Good. Cancer Bad.”

The result: With 11 days to go, the drive has raised over $165,000!

The aggregation site and its lawyer picked the wrong funnyman to aggravate. (Though the lawyer says he’s thinking of responding with more suits.)

The Power of Oatmeal indeed.

A scene from the South Korean film Untold Scandal (2003; dir. Je-yong Lee).

• Gay marriage update: Now that the opponents of equality have filed enough petition signatures, Ref. 74 goes to the ballot in November. Pro-equality folks, who were asked to “decline to sign” the referendum petitions, will now have to vote “yes” on the referendum itself to keep marriage for all on our state’s books. (Too bad, though, about the “Approve R 74” campaign logo. It looks too much like a Hanford radiation leak.)
• Heads up, TV viewers in Comcast-less areas of Seattle. The full transition from the pathetic Broadstripe Cable to the much more promising Wave Broadband takes full effect on July 17. Soon to arrive at last: Current TV! IFC! Ovation! MLB Network! NFL Network! C-SPAN 2! And HD versions of HBO, TCM, CNN, MSNBC, Comedy Central, and Cartoon Network! (Still no Sundance or the French channel TV5, though.)
• In previous posts about the above topic, I’d called Wave Broadband “locally owned.” It’s now been sold to out-of-state private equity interests, but remains locally based.
• That Seattle Children’s Hospital patients’ lip-sync music video, based on the Kelly Clarkson song “Stronger?” The record label got it pulled from YouTube. You can still see it at the Huffington Post.
• CNN wants to pick a fight between Seattle and Portland, apparently in the name of regional bragging rights. Why bother?
• Some Shell Oil execs held a PR fest at the Space Needle, celebrating the opening of a new drilling platform in Alaska. Only the three-foot-tall “oil rig” drink dispenser malfunctioned, making a big mess. Lots of blogs snickered at the ill-timed fail. Except: It wasn’t real. It was all a hoax stunt, devised by anticorporate hoax-stunt devisers The Yes Men.
• We must say goodbye to Travelers Tea Co., the East Indian themed gift, food, and home-furnishings shop and cafe on East Pine, after 14 years. Travelers’ one-year-old second restaurant location on Beacon Hill remains.
• I haven’t seen ’em, but supposedly there are web-guru essays chastizing Pinterest for attracting a predominantly female user base; as if Grand Theft Auto discussion boards were valuable “mainstream” services but “girls’ stuff” was just too insubstantial for tech investors to put their money into.
• An ad man claims we’re heading into “the golden age of mobile.” He means media and advertising made for smartphones and tablets.
• Is an ex-Coca-Cola marketing exec really sincere about renouncing his junk-food-shilling past, or is he just trying to sell himself in a new shtick as a health-food marketing exec?
• The print magazine business has apparently stabilized, if you believe this account from, ahem, a print magazine.
• Colson Whitehead has a lovely memoir of his childhood as a horror movie fanatic.
• Black activist A. Phillip Randolph put out a short book in 1967 advocating A Freedom Budget for All Americans. Randolph and his co-authors claimed their plan, based on Federal economic incentive spending, would essentially end poverty in America within eight years. The whole document’s now online, and it’s full of economic-wonk language to support its claims.

My mother did so much more than simply make me. She was my anchor, my unconditional “home base.”

Others will talk about her as a tough lady of hearty eastern Washington pioneer stock, sturdy support system to friends and strangers, a bulwark of the Snohomish antique-shop strip, and a valiant survivor of condition after condition (breast cancer, macular degeneration, chronic bronchitis, two fractured vertebrae, and finally a series of heart attacks).

But I will think of her (always) as a gentle heart within a tough-as-steel soul.

I spent much of the past weekend at Providence Everett Medical Center. My mother, who would be 82 next month, is in a medically-assisted unconscious state following a relapse from her third heart attack. Her condition is currently stable; when it changes I’ll let you all know.

• Missed the transit of Venus? Fret not! You can still catch The Myrtle of Venus!
• The lovely graphic at the left of this site’s “sidebar” column, inviting donations for the Cafe Racer shooting victims, was done by our ol’ pal Nick Vroman, an ex-Seattleite now in Japan. He’s also got a lovely site reviewing Japanese cult films.
• With the arrival of Wednesday came The Stranger’s package of Cafe Racer shooting and mourning articles.
• Joel Connelly calls the “war on drugs” America’s “second lost war of the half century.”
• Contemporary art, product logos, graphic design, even web page design—all these fields and more are frequently invaded by rank copycats, whose thievery can be caught red-handed at the site You Thought We Wouldn’t Notice.
• Health Scare O’ the Week: the allegedly imminent arrival of drug-resistant gonorrhea.
• The next frontier in confronting idiot misogyny: Multiplayer gaming.
• Cell phone users are using their cell phones as phones a lot less. Companies plan to respond by raising rates. Huh?
• Our heroine Amanda Palmer wanted to raise $100,000 from a Kickstarter campaign, to release and promote her next record. She ended up raking in a cool million.
• Social-economy guru Richard Florida offers up some theories behind the revival of downtown retail around the country.

bradbury in a stan freberg-directed prune commercial (1969); via io9.com

The author who, as much as anyone, turned science fiction into a mass-audience genre kept at it until the bitter end. After his last stroke he could no longer operate a keyboard, so he dictated stories to his daughter via a landline phone.

•

In 2003 I participated in a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library, premised on Bradbury’sFahrenheit 451 and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. I argued against the ol’ grossly oversimplified stereotype of “books = good, TV = evil,” as advocated by Postman and others.

I said that words were more important to society than before (and they’re even more important now); and that the human race needs “entertainment” storytelling (the kind at which Bradbury was a master) as much as it needs more hi-brow cultural artifacts.

Bradbury’s works proved that commercial stories in formula genres could express tons of truths about the human condition.

The scene: A clear, warm-enough Memorial Day evening in Fremont. Among those in attendance are families, old timers, and members of the Fremont retail community past and present. Some were close friends; others hadn’t seen one another in years.

There are also a middle-aged male clown, a male bagpiper, a female cellist, and several ladies dressed as “mourners” in black dresses complete with veils, ready to sob loudly on cue. (NOTE: This took place two days prior to the Cafe Racer shootings.)

It is a funeral/wake, a memorial to an institution that had already been all about the remembrance of things past.

Fremont’s “funky” reputation was already established by 1978, when David Marzullo opened Deluxe Junk. “Funky,” at that time, meant low incomes, low profiles, low foot traffic, low rents—and lowlife.

A Seattle Times feature story published around that time described Fremont as a blighted land of empty storefronts, as well as “littered vacant lots, weathered plywood with torn flyers flapping in the wind, peeling paint and a giant disposal-service complex.” Among its 12,000 residents were retirees, street people, and “a number of artists and remnants of the hippie culture.”

When Deluxe Junk opened, it was one of 10 antique, curio, and “vintage trash” stores in the then-rundown neighborhood. The only thing Fremont had more of at the time was taverns.

After a fire made the store’s first location uninhabitable, Marzullo moved into a former funeral parlor on the ground floor of the Doric Temple, a Masonic lodge right on the arterial cusp of Fremont Place, between Fremont Avenue and North 36th Street. (In later years, the block would become home to the kitschy Lenin statue.)

Some of the vintage sellers in the ’70s had dreams that were bigger than their business acumen.

But Marzullo had a knack for the trade.

He priced his goods low enough to move but high enough to pay the bills.

He built a base of customers not only from around Seattle but around the nation and beyond. (In the 1980s, Marzullo was one of the first local dealers to sell American vintage wear and furnishings to dealers in Japan.)

He developed a great sense of what his customers liked.

He maintained a broad inventory range. He stocked vintage fashions, badges, advertising signs, costume jewelry, magazines, board games, kitchen appliances, and household trinkets.

But perhaps Deluxe Junk’s most important speciality was home furnishings from the early to mid 20th century. That’s also the era when most of Seattle’s single-family homes were built. This was the furniture that most truly “belonged” in these homes.

Over the years, the surrounding neighborhood became gentrified. Industrial buildings gave way to tech-company offices. Storefront taverns gave way to brewpubs, soccer bars, and live-music clubs. “Cheap chic” shops gave way to fashionable boutiques.

Deluxe Junk persevered, long enough to itself become a relic of “a simpler time;” even as the collectibles business went online and global (and, in many ways, more mercenary).

In April, a lease dispute developed between the store and the Doric Temple’s leadership.

Supportes of the store claimed Doric leaders wanted to kick Deluxe Junk out, in favor of more potentially lucrative tenants.

The lodge insisted it was willing to negotiate a new lease, as long as Marzullo paid up several months’ worth of back rent.

(UPDATE 6/18/12: Marzullo publicly denied the claim that he’d owed back rent to his landlords.)

After several days of highly public disagreement, Marzullo announced he’d reached a settlement. Without going into details, he said the store would close and he would retire.

And the store would close three weeks before the Solstice Parade and Fremont Fair, Fremont’s busiest days of the year.

Deluxe Junk’s loyal customers and friends took full advantage of a massive closing sale. An online-auction seller bought the store’s whole inventory of 1950s Christmas decor.

Still, there was a lot of cool stuff left in the store’s main room on the evening of the wake.

Some of that was sold on the spot to friends of the store, who were seeking one last remembrance of Deluxe Junk—and of the Fremont that had been.

(Cross-posted with City Living.)

The locally owned Wave Broadband is taking over the dreadful and bankrupt BS Cable (Broadstripe). Yay!

The first part of the transition is the switching of “on demand” program suppliers, effective Wednesday.

This means I’m looking over my current “on demand” lineup while I still can.

I didn’t know I received something called The Karaoke Channel!

I’m now listening to lead-vocal-less covers of the greatest hits of yesterday and today, accompanied by scrolling lyrics and generic stock footage of women twirling around on the beach.

Oh, why did I not discover this sooner?

(PS: I could list the songs from which I culled the above images, but I’m certain you know all of them, you pop-o-philes you.)

I’m still having trouble finding words to say about the Cafe Racer tragedy.

At least I can give you pictures of just a little bit of the near-citywide outpouring of grief, condolence, and mutual support.

The above images are from last Thursday afternoon.

The following are from Sunday evening, when the weekly jazz jam session went ahead as scheduled—in the alley between the cafe and the Trading Musician music store.

For up-to-date word about memorial and benefit shows for the victims’ families and the one shooting survivor (taking place all around town, just about every day), go to caferacerlove.org.

Owner Kurt Geissel (who was not on the premises at the time of the shootings) has said he will reopen. Just when, he hasn’t decided yet.

(from a Safeway microwave organic rice bowl)

CAUTION: CONTENTS ARE HOT AFTER HEATING.