• More remembrances of the Cafe Racer shooting victims come from the blog of Georgetown bar 9 Lb. Hammer and from 14-year-old Sam David, whose parents Marlow Harris and Jo David curate Racer’s “Official Bad Art Museum of Art” permanent exhibit.
• Memorials and benefit shows for the surviving victim and the families of the deceased victims continue to be scheduled and put together at a rapid pace. They include a service at St. Mark’s and a jazz jam outside the cafe, both on Sunday evening.
• What the 1 Percent do in their free time: Ex-Microsoft bigwig Nathan Myhrvold has got his own whole newly-created cooking genre. It’s called “Modernist Cuisine,” and it’s got a professional staff, a huge six-volume manual, plus a best-of cookbook for home use.
• The several people who’ve left SeattlePI.com in the past year have, to a person, declined to comment on the understaffed “online newspaper” or why they left it. Until now. Cartoonist-columnist David Horsey, now syndicated thru the L.A. Times, has written a “future of news” piece in which he mentions his ex-employer, and implies that that site has become a “click whore.”
• The reason news sites behave so desperately to gain every single “page view” is that ad revenues per page view are low and getting lower. Meanwhile, Michael Wolff says any fiscal hope for ad-supported content sites is about to implode and soon. The immediate culprit, according to Wolff, is Facebook, with its vast “inventory” of spaces and its investor expectations. But he claims that even without Facebook leading a race to the bottom,

…the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people’s behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising’s impact.…

I don’t know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn’t engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn’t manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.

As many of you know, I’ve been at least a semi-regular customer at Cafe Racer on Roosevelt, ever since it opened almost a decade ago as the Lucky Dog Cafe.

It’s been a food, booze, and coffee joint, the site of Marlow Harris and Jo David’s “Official Bad Art Museum of Art,” a space for more ambitious art works, a home to comix-drawing sessions, and an eclectic live-music live music. It was the latter role that got it a big front-page paean in the Sunday NY Times arts section.

The music booker at Racer also led its house band, performing at the space at least once a week. He’d been a sword swallower in the long-running Circus Contraption troupe.

He, and another member of the band, were among the three who died from a gunman’s madness. Even if a motive for the shooting gets discovered, it will still be, and will always be, senseless.

I wish all condolences and serenity to Racer’s staff, its owner Kurt Geissel, and the many communities that coalesce there.

• Five days and counting until Wash. state’s booze biz goes all private. Expecting greater competition to lower the price of getting besotted? Guess again, my fun-loving friends.
• Social media: a great way to organize group bullying episodes.
• David Lowery has a long, detailed, snark-filled rant about how today’s music-download biz is often worse for indie musicians than the old record biz had been. It’s also got relevance for our ongoing “future of news” topic, because part of Lowery’s shtick is to dismantle the “web gurus” and their evangelical pronouncements for/defenses of today’s online content business-as-usual.
• Yes, the Twilight series makes Emily Temple’s list of “epidemically overrated books.” But so do The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and even Finnegans Wake.
• Arun Gupta at AlterNet ponders whether the Feds are planting violent agitators among Occupy activists in order to discredit the whole movement.
• New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was quoted as saying that it’s harder to get a minimum-wage increase past his Legislature than gay marriage. To me that’s perfectly understandable, if the politics of gay rights are anything there like they are here (i.e., as a nice, clean, upscale, white “minority” movement).

pleasantfamilyshopping.blogspot.com

• What’s the world’s most prolific retail brand today? 7-Eleven! And, after a few years of retreating from parts of the U.S., it’s expanding like mad.
• Coming next month and tons more exciting than any ol’ glass gallery, it’s Seattle Center’s first Seattle Science Festival! Hear Steven Hawking’s voice box live and in person!
• Nearly 40 percent of Puget Sound homeowners owe more money on their homes than the homes are now worth. Nearly nine percent owe twice as much money as their homes are worth (twice the national average).
• Anthony Robinson explains “how to talk politics with religious voters.”
• How does the Seattle LGBTQLSMFT pride parade thank the politicians who helped pass marriage equality in Wash. state? By charging them almost twice as much money to appear in the parade as it charges corporate entrants.
• Amazon’s quitting the virulently far-right lobbying group ALEC, and will make its warehouses more hospitable workplaces.
• Oregon native nations say they don’t mind high schools using Indian sports-team names, and that they do mind when PC whites try to ban such names.
• Comcast/NBC Universal might buy up all of MSNBC.com. The web site is still half owned by Microsoft (and still has a major editorial presence in Bellevue), even after NBC took full ownership of the same-named cable channel.
• The TV networks would really, really like Dish Network to not offer an “ad skipping” feature on its DVRs.
• Jonathan Chiat parses the “conservative fantasy history of civil rights,” in which the likes of Ronald Reagan and Strom Thurmond were supposedly not the racists they really were.
• Yes, a sexually demeaning image of a woman is still wrong even if the woman being insulted is anti-choice.
• Single-load “laundry pods,” delicious but deadly.
• The province of Quebec now demands that all political protests get official police approval first. Protesters immediately protested the law, in a big way.

east baton rouge parish library

The decline of newsprint has reached the point of the first proverbial dropping shoe.

A major U.S. city will be without a seven-day local printed newspaper.

Hurricane Katrina could not stop the 175-year-old New Orleans Times-Picayune from printing (or at least putting out an online .pdf edition). But the Newhouse/Advance Publications chain (which also owns the Oregonian and the Puget Sound Business Journal) just did.

Starting later this year, the Times-Picayune will only appear in print on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday.

(Advance’s Alabama papers in Birmingham, Mobile, and Huntsville will also cut to three days.)

One third of the Times-Picayune’s remaining reporting staff (after several years of previous cuts) will be laid off.

The company’s official announcement says it will “significantly increase” its NOLA.com news site, augmented by “enhanced” print editions.

But if you believe that, then you’ve probably paraded too often with Krewe Delusion.

This is the Great Wheel, now taking shape at Pier 57 on the waterfront. It is already the greatest addition to Seattle public architecture since the Koohaas downtown library. The rest of the waterfront should be redeveloped around it.

• Is Mike McGinn becoming just like all Seattle’s other recent mayors, a “progressive” who totally sucks up to the real estate developers?
• The state liquor stores won’t all close on May 31. Most will close one to four days earlier. A few have already closed. The stores that are still open have dwindling inventory. Since the supermarkets don’t start selling booze ’til June 1, consider stocking up for the Memorial Day weekend now.
• Getty Images, the Seattle-based king of stock photo licensing, may be up for sale (again).
• The Chicago head office of the company now calling itself Boeing got shut down by anti-NATO protesters. That almost certainly wouldn’t have happened if they’d stayed in Seattle Tukwila.
• South Lake Union is finally getting something useful (besides the Ace Hardware franchise): a Goodwill store!
• The proposed new basketball/hockey arena will work out just fine traffic-wise.
• Breaking news: people like to get stuff if they don’t have to pay for it.
• Hewlett-Packard announces huge layoffs; blames declining demand for PCs in favor of other digital-media devices.
• Paul Krugman, seemingly effortlessly, totally dismantles the Romney economic platform….
• …while author Charles Ferguson explains how “Wall Street became criminalized.” (As if it hadn’t always been so.)
• Unlike author Patricia Williams, I don’t blame book bannings and other assaults against public education on an “anti-intellectual” American people, but on the right-wing politicians who actually committed the assaults. Just as I don’t blame the megabanks’ crimes on their depositors.
• Knute Berger offers some “Simple Rules for Staying Sane in Seattle.” My own first rule: make sure you were already sane before you got here.
• The company whose merged predecessors gave us such great product names as Cheez Whiz, Cool Whip, and Chicken in a Biskit announced it’s de-merging. The spinoff company’s new name: “Mondelez.” Doesn’t quite fall trippingly off the tongue.
• In science fiction and astrology, “Planet X” (as in the Roman numeral for 10) is a hypothetical tenth planet orbiting out beyond Pluto. Now, some astronomer says he’s found it, and it’s three times the size of Earth. No word yet on whether it holds massive deposits of illudium phosdex, the shaving cream atom.

dangerousminds.net

• With the death of Robin Gibb, only one Bee Gee (Barry) is still with us. I could try to say something about this tragic loss; but, you know, it’s only words.…
• The UK mag NME lists “50 Massively Depressing Facts About Music.” Most of them have to do with great artists who’ve sold a heckuva lot fewer units than mediocre artists with great marketing. In other words, the same gripe the oldsters used to say about that teenybopper “rock n’ roll” crap pushing out quality material like “How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”.
• As SIFF moves into full gear, a UK film critic has pot out a book listing 100 Ideas That Changed Film. I haven’t seen the full book, but I have seen the list. Not included in it: product placement, Tyler Perry, or “soundtrack” records that don’t include the actual music in the movie.
• The downtown condo biz is apparently back from the dead.
• Wearing hot pink duct tape in lieu of a top in a bar: cool. Freaking out and attacking cops: not so cool.
• The big Facebook IPO is apparently a failure. The offering’s megabank underwriters had to step in and maneuver in order to keep the stock’s price at or near the offering price through the course of the first day. Perhaps “retail investors” felt Facebook was too reminiscent of the first-wave dot coms (no real “product,” just a lot of site visitors (for now; that could drastically change). Or perhaps there just aren’t as many suckers who still have money to waste anymore.
• Thanks in part to our country’s innumerable tax loopholes, the U.S. has done better than some countries at keeping its own super-rich, instead of losing ’em to citizenships-of-convenience in the Caribbean or Singapore (or wherever Mick Jagger officially resides these days).
• “Black bloc” anarchist protests are getting more violent. Official reactions to them are getting more violent than that, on a virtually logarithmic scale.
• Radical playwright Bertolt Brecht had some caustic caution words against folk who considered themselves too good to be involved in politics. (I don’t know whether Brecht said these words before or after he became a stooge for the East German regime.)

u.s. geological survey

Happy Mount St. Helens Day!

• Catholic anti-right-wing-archbishop protests: they’re now held every Wednesday, and they’re not for Catholics only.
• Opponents of liquor privatization in Wash. state are making one last-ditch legal challenge. They might get a decision in two weeks, after the state liquor stores will have already closed.
• There are now fewer non-Hispanic white babies in the U.S. than there are all other ethnicities of babies put together.
• The TED speech by an early Amazon investor about economic inequality and how the rich aren’t really job creators? The speech that wasn’t put up on TED’s site? It’s now been put up on TED’s site.
• And here’s the video of Children’s Hospital cancer patients lip-syncing a Kelly Clarkson anthem.
• More than 30 percent of British adults plan to buy an e-book in the next six months.
• Is North America approaching “peak car“?

zgf architects via seattle times

• If you’re gonna build a condo tower that’s utterly, totally out of scale with the historic district immediately adjacent to it, it might as well be a real PoMo monolith.
• UW researchers say they may be able to prove the existence of “gaydar.”
• With a little over two weeks to go before the state liquor stores go away forever, some of the auction sales of the outlets fell through. Eighteen stores will be re-bid.
• Now we know why they call it Bitter Lake. It’s had raw sewage flowing into it for at least a decade.
• The dream is over: Dennis Kucinich won’t run for Congress from Wash. state.
• Amazon’s first non-Bezos-family investor gave a hot speech about income inequality in America, and how rich folks like himself really just aren’t “job creators.” (It was given at a TED conference, but isn’t one of the videos posted on that organization’s site. But you can read it; which I prefer doing anyway.) (And to be fair, here’s a different economic-inequality speech that was posted on TED’s site.)
• Is this the beginning of the end for soft drink sales in America? If the fizz really does die out, remember: Those who forget New Coke are doomed to repeat it.

The recession has claimed another victim, the Betsey Johnson boutique on Fifth Avenue.

• King County Exec Dow Constantine was caught with an email revealing he’d had an affair with a co-worker. At a press conference, “No Drama Dow” (who has an unmarried live-in partner) quietly admitted the indiscretion.
• The city and county could announce they’re signing off on the Sodo arena plan as early as today.
• KOMO’s Ken Schram insists that the poor (and everybody else) should still get to buy things with cash.
• A community activist group says light rail has accelerated the gentrification of the Rainier Valley, making the mixed-race neighborhood a lot paler.
• Video footage helps a May Day protester escape prosecution.
• The wages of not supporting the iPhone: T-Mobile USA‘s laying off another 900 workers.
• First it was nuns. Now the right-wing Catholic bishops are harassing the Girl Scouts. (Make your own joke about how everybody knows they prefer boys.)
• ‘Future of News’ Dept.: A spokescritter for Rupert Murdoch’s iPad news app The Daily (no relation to the infinitely more distinguished UW Daily) insists the online newspaper is on the road to profitability.
• Even with health insurance, medical care is getting prohibitively expensive.
• America’s real first gay president? Buchanan.
• Michael Lind at Salon asks, “Why do conservatives hate freedom?”…
• …while “MinistryOfTruth” at Daily Kos makes brutal accusations toward your sterotypical teabag conservative:

I don’t think you do love America. At least, not as much as you hate everyone in America who isn’t exactly like you.

• Here are some lovely pix of a Kansas City amusement arcade circa 1968. Not a single video monitor in sight.

sobadsogood.com

This is from Sunday’s “Color Run” downtown, a 5K benefitting Ronald McDonald House. Runners were splashed with “color dust” at points along the route. (Note: This is not at all to be confused with the 2005 teen novel The Rainbow Party, or with the false rumor that that novel depicted a real-life fad.)

• Forbes calls Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer the “worst CEO” of a major U.S. company.
• Is the time right again for huge, dense residential mega-projects? The Seattle Housing Authority thinks so. It wants to rebuild Yesler Terrace (a WWII-era low-income apartment site) with a whopping 3,000 privately developed “market rate” units plus office space. That would help subsidize at least as many low-income units as are there now. It would also create a huge new upscale neighborhood just uphill from the International District, and would sop up perhaps 20 percent of new housing construction activity in the whole city.
• Item: A Seattle restaurant’s basement was one huge pot growing operation. Comment: Once again, life imitates the Young Fresh Fellows.
• Guess what? The hedge fund tycoon who wants to own a Seattle basketball team might use the team and the arena deal as hedge fund opportunities!
• Tragic news: Tacoma’s selling two closed library buildings in low income neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ acquaintance Trimpin has another mechanical music/art installation. And it’s even more haunting than his previous works.
• Lit-blogger Nicole Cushing has a beautiful interview with a Seattle treasure, horror author and punk/goth scene vet Willum Pugmire.
• Dept. of Forgotten American History: Author/activist/songwriter Julia Ward Howe created Mother’s Day as an antiwar statement.
• Here’s a concise explanation of just why “business people are terrible at governing.”
• From Cleveland to Pittsburgh and even Detroit, the young and hip (but not rich) are flocking to the Rust Belt cities!
• There’s a new iPad-only online satire magazine called “Punch!”. But it has absolutely nothing to do with the legendary UK satire magazine Punch (published from 1841 to 1992!). Instead, its makers are inspired by the 1980s-1990s U.S. snark mag Spy.
• Publishers of e-books have determined that the best way to keep their authors’ names in the public eye is to have new stuff by them two or more times a year. This means established “name” authors are busier than ever churnin’ out the product.
• Do you, like these e-book authors, desperately need writing inspiration? Take random gibberish letters. Run them through a spell checker. Boom! Random words and phrases to trigger your imagination.

“Supporting traditional marriage” as an excuse for banning gay marriage is like “supporting lettuce” as an excuse for banning cabbage.

npr.org

• NPR’s Lam Thuy Vo has made a lovely infographic about the billions in earnings resulting from America’s “exports of ideas.” Movies and TV shows bring in $13 billion in overseas revenue. Software: $35 billion. Trademark licenses: $14 billion. “Industrial processes” (patents): almost $36 billion. Now you know why the “intellectual property” industries are so extremely adamant about sealing any potential leak in their legal privileges.
• Elsewhere in infographic-land, here’s a visual essay delineating how marketers, and those who sell services to marketers, have always gamed the system in both “old” and “new” media.
• Obama came to Seattle right after outing himself as a gay-marriage supporter. Yes, there was a lot of cheering for a calculated, Clinton-esque “triangulation” move, carefully strategized to gain more votes than it would cost. And I’m fine with that (the announcement and the local rave reactions to it).
• Tim Eyman: Complete tool of Big Oil and the 1 percent.
• A non-native redwood tree was planted in Tacoma more than 100 years ago. It was recently cut down, executed for the crime of having roots undermining nearby sewers and house foundations.
• Note to news sites: Editing stuff before you post it is a good idea. Especially with headlines involving the name “Dicks.”
• I’ve defended Amazon about other things, but they really oughta keep the HVAC in their warehouses in working order.
• Couldn’t happen to un-nicer guys: Chase loses a cool $2 billion on a single hedge fund.
• A Seventeen reader is petitioning the not-as-classy-as-it-used-to-be magazine. She wants it to depict models more realistically, without excessive Photoshopping.
• The singer for the band Against Me! says he’s going to become a woman. I can just imagine the package tour with Jayne County, Genesis P. Orridge, and Wendy Carlos.
• Public-sector unions in the UK (a place where such institutions still have a big measure of clout) have staged massive protests against government “austerity”…
• …while here at home, two TruthOut.org contributors claim U.S. conservatism has “hit rock bottom,” having devolved into “an unappealing philosophy of political exclusion, environmental degradation, and economic hopelessness.”

Thriller author Barry Eisler, a born-again proponent of self-publishing (and the first established author to sign with Amazon’s publishing division), told a local audience that :

1. The book industry has badly needed a forced overhaul for ages;
2. everyone in publishing who’s neither an author nor a reader is just a “middleman” (yes, even bookstores; yes, even indie bookstores);
3. authors who defend the industry’s business-as-usual are like prisoners who suffer from “Stockholm syndrome;” and
4. Amazon is no “Great Satan,” as it’s been portrayed by the NYC book biz and its NYC media pals. Rather, Eisler claims the e-tail giant is simply “injecting competition into what has been a moribund industry.”

Needless to say, in many parts of the book establishment (the most tradition-bound establishment in all the lively arts), them’s fightin’ words.

•

Meanwhile, authors Sarah Weinman and Maureen Ogle have put up separate online essays. Each questions the future of “serious non-fiction” in the digital age.

Under the old regime, profitable publishing houses subsidized this work with large advances against royalties. In many cases, the publishers knew authors would never earn these advances back. It was the companies’ way of subsidizing prestigious “loss leader” works.

But if self-publishing becomes the new business-as-usual, Weinman and Ogle ask, what will become of long, research-heavy projects—projects that could take as many as five years of an author’s full-time attention?

There’s always Kickstarter.com. That’s where local comix legend Jim Woodring is raising funds so he can work full-time on his next graphic novel.

And there are always grants, fellowships, teaching gigs, and working spouses (for those authors who can land any of them).

And there’s another answer, one that’s right under Weinman and Ogle’s proverbial noses.

Both essayists note that the most successful e-book self-publishers, thus far, are fiction writers who churn out several titles per year.

Non-fiction writers can do likewise.

They can chop up and serialize their longer works, one section at a time.

When it comes time to put out the full book, authors can still revise and re-sequence everything.

•

In another sector of the digital media disruption, music-biz attorney Ken Hertz reminds you that even (or especially) with the new marketplace, bands still face tremendous odds against “making it.”

It is with a heavy heart that we must say goodbye to Publicola, for three years the go-to site for insider wonk-knowledge about Seattle political minutae.

Josh Feit and Erica C. Barnett studiously roved the corridors of City Hall and associated parties, fundraisers, caucus meetings, and planning conferences, always coming back with clear, engaging reports.

But, as we previously noted in regards to the equally ambitious SportsPress Northwest, local content sites just can’t make in on banner ads alone.

Goodness knows, Feit and Barnett did all they could.

They added arts and entertainment reviewers (officially billed on-site as the “Nerds”), then dropped them when their contributions didn’t lead to added revenue.

Later they did the same with veteran crime reporter Jonah Spangenthal-Lee.

More lately, their initial financial backers pulled out. Feit and Barnett asked for donations from readers to keep the site going. That helped them to meet an immediate cash shortage.

But Feit, Barnett, and their initial backers knew the site’s long-term prospects as a for-profit, stand-alone entity were poor.

So Publicola, as its own thing, is shutting down.

But Crosscut.com, Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster’s nonprofit local commentary/analysis site, is bringing Feit and Barnett on board. Their coverage will continue at Crosscut in twice-daily installments. Brewster and co. will stage a fund drive to support permanent employment for the two.