(Just a little dose of random-osity for you all today.)

• Everyday household chemicals (antihistamines, cleaners, flame retardants) become toxins when they get into our rivers.
• Flu and whooping cough have closed an entire high school.
• My colleague/compatriot/rival in the local history trade, Paul Dorpat, got named a “Living Landmark” by the preservation group Historic Seattle.
• The next waterfront traffic reroute begins today.
• The (Ron) Paulines may make procedural trouble at the state GOP convention.
• Noam Chomsky warns the Occupiers they’d better prepare to be in it for the long haul.

meowonline.org

• Music/performance-art goddess and ex-Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer explains the secret to her astounding success at raising a recording budget thru Kickstarter. It’s all about the long work of gathering and nurturing as many online supporters as you can:

Every person I talk to at a signing, every exchange I have online (sometimes dozens a day), every random music video or art gallery link sent to me by a fan that I curiously follow, every strange bed I’ve crashed on… all of that real human connecting has led to this moment, where I came back around, asking for direct help with a record. Asking EVERYBODY.… And they help because they know I’m good for it. Because they KNOW me.

• After nearly a decade of study and planning, Seattle’s finally giving up on the idea of a city-owned broadband network. Pathetic.
• Time is running out for any hope of saving the historic streamlined ferry Kalakala. Estimated cost of a full restoration: $50 million.
• Ah, if only the Mariners still had some of the players they’d let slip away. If only….
• A Long Island, NY woman is accused of using her hot-dog truck as a cover for arranging “compensated dates” (to use a recent Japanese euphemism). No “sausage” or “buns” puns here, at least not today.
• A Utah woman claims to have found cocaine packed in a box of tampons. Just think of it as an extra measure of pain relief that also leaves you feeling fresh.
• Bill Maher says what everyone except Fox News viewers already knows—that many of the most fervent Obama haters are racist, with different degrees of denial.
• Meanwhile, a Washington Monthly writer believes the Presidential election will be decided by Hispanic voters (i.e., one of the groups the Rabid Right is most virulently bigoted against).
• There’s an anonymous novel out of Portland (originally self published by the author, who only calls himself “The Author”). It’s getting a lot of attention. It’s about a young man’s doomed relationship with “someone who considers Courtney Love to be her role model.” What makes it extra-special is it’s formatted like one of those old “Choose Your Own Adventure” kids’ books. Only every choice “you” make leads to the same miserable ending. I also like the title: Love Is Not Constantly Wondering If You Are Making the Biggest Mistake of Your Life.
• Not only are grad students getting buried in piles of student-loan debt, they might not even get into the careers for which they’re studying (cf. the rising number of Ph.Ds on food stamps).
• A marketing analyst calls 2012 “the year of inverse retro-futurism.” Whatever the heck that is.

art chantry-designed poster for coca (1991), available at gigposters.com

The Center on Contemporary Art (COCA) was Seattle’s premier venue for avant exhibitions and performances in the 1980s and 1990s.

Then COCA lost its last downtown space to development. Its visibility and funding slowed down.

In recent years COCA has existed in semi-exile, on the ground floor of the Elks lodge in Shilsole. (It’s also had a Belltown “gallery,” a glass display case outside a condo building on a little-walked stretch of Broad Street, and occasional temporary spaces elsewhere around town.)

But now COCA’s roaring back with a full-time space in what’s become a major art neighborhood, Georgetown. Specifically, it’s at the Seattle Design Center. (The huge showroom building for furnishings consultants and interior decorators has had its own troubles during the housing crash. It has a lot of spare square footage these days.)

The big opening party is Friday after next (5/18; also the 32nd anniversary of the Mt. St. Helens kablooey).

Let’s welcome COCA back into Seattle’s “outside the mainstream” mainstream.

liem bahneman, via komo-tv

• There’s a moon! It’s in the sky! It’s called the supermoon!
• From the Sunday Seattle Times: The Smith Tower is on the rebound; there are sympathetic words toward Occupy Seattle sympathizers; the ex-Kleenex factory in Everett is a toxic waste site; and local students are learning to compose soundtracks for movies and video games.
• We knew it was coming. Now the original QFC supermarket on Roosevelt Way closes on Saturday.
• What the heck does Jay Inslee gotta do to get some press?
• Silicon Valley analyst Farhad Manjoo can’t figure out Amazon’s long-term business strategy, and ponders whether the company even has one. Hey, I don’t fully understand gravity, but I still know it’s there. Of course Amazon has a strategy. Several of them. It aims to be the world leader in online sales of tangible physical stuff, plus intangible digital stuff; to be the go-to company for online retail back-end functions and fulfillment; to rule “cloud computing” and outsourced computer services; and to remain the 500-lb. gorilla of the book biz. There now, wasn’t that simple?
• At the same site, Trevor Gilbert believes he’s figured out why Seattle has so many leading video-game companies.
• The voters of France, like the protestors of Greece, have utterly and thoroughly rejected recession-extending “austerity” regimes. They’ve elected their first Socialist government in 16 years and sending Nicolas Sarkozy packing. Will this send Sarkozy’s wife, ex-supermodel Carla Bruni, back on the runways?

designboom.com

• The resurgent micro-car movement has a new achievement, the micro RV!
• Lightning, mudslides. Just another mid-spring day in Seattle.
• Gov. Gregoire takes the bold step of insisting Wash. state needs new tax revenue, now that she’s no longer running for anything.
• A (female) anti-choice activist was invited to speak at the UW by campus Catholics. The lecture’s deliberately provocative title: “Do Women Have Too Many Rights?”. Pro-choice women, naturally, showed up to protest and to put the truth to the speaker’s lies. Things did not go smoothly.
• Roger Valdez at the Seattle Transit Blog suggests citizens take control of preserving neighborhood landmarks by getting together to buy them.
• Developers of the big (175-foot) waterfront ferris wheel are making sure it’ll attract riders year round. Riders will be in “enclosed gondolas, equipped with heating and air conditioning.”
• Darn, those proposed new Amazon office towers would be mighty big n’ slick.
• Boeing’s Wash. state employment may peak this year at about 83,000, then dwindle.
• Health Scare of the Day: Wazzu researchers believe exposure to toxic chemicals might lead to a risk of ovarian cancer, a risk that could be passed on to your great-granddaughters.
• It’s the end of an era for non-NY/LA/SF based national media. Playboy is moving its last Chicago-based operations to LA. The Chicago Tribune even published an editorial about it.
• I don’t always follow ’em, but you might try blogger Barb Sawyers’ “15 Ways to Write Tight.”
• The Starz series Magic City is having a hard time finding actresses and extras in Miami who could pass for women living in 1959 (i.e., without implants).
• I was at the Prole Drift art gallery this past First Thursday. Saw a big painting of what looked a lot like a dead mall. A desolate exurban landscape. A big, nearly empty parking lot. Long, lo-rise buildings with neither windows nor signs. A main entrance at the center. I told the gallery owners I was in a Facebook group of dead mall enthusiasts. They quickly told me the painting was really of a modern prison.

buddy bunting, via prole drift gallery

udhcmh.tumblr.com

• The above vintage paperback cover comes from a blog located in a college town—Columbus OH, not Spokane WA. (Found via Pulp International.)
• The Seattle Police have an on-staff graffiti interpreter. And he says only 3 percent of Seattle’s graffiti has anything to do with street gangs.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna may have found his most potent nemesis—not election rival Jay Inslee but 90 women who are suing McKenna for participating (in the name of the people of Washington) in the right wing’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
• Scott North at the Everett Herald looks back to Wash. state’s own U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his role in making forest conservation a real thing.
• Amazon, continuing in its quest to become kings of all media, is starting its own movie production company. And it’s soliciting concepts for “TV style” web shows—sitcoms and kids’ shows, live-action and animated. And unlike some online “screenwriting contest” scam sites, they don’t keep the rights to works they don’t use.
• “He who controls the Spice controls the universe.”
• As the Seattle arena proposal moves forward quickly, ex-City Council member Richard McIver suggests putting it instead in the Rainier Valley, near the Mt. Baker light rail station and I-90. (It would also be near the former site of Sicks’ Stadium, home of minor league baseball for 30 years and Major League Baseball for oen year.)
• Meanwhile, a member of the ownership team that stole the Sonics has lost his chairman role at Chesapeake Energy, due to alleged conflicts of interest. Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy.
• From the verdant town of Corvallis (where I spent two formative years of my life) comes the tale of a bright young woman who became a hit with a sports-gambling blog, then became a top contributor to ESPN.com, and then allegedly used this fame to scam would-be business colleagues.
• Ashton Kutcher sure can get all high-horse righteous when he’s denouncing the sex industry. But perpetuating racist stereotypes in commercials—that’s something he apparently doesn’t mind at all.
• Some people don’t want to be Americans anymore. They’re one-percenters trying to flee tax evasion charges.
• Former Wall Street operative Alexis Goldstein describes the milieu of Big Finance as a place where people strive…

to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…

Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

• Brendan Kiley tries to parse out what exactly we should call the busters up of stuff on May Day. How about “testosteronic dorks”?
• Joel Connelly, meanwhile, calls the window-breakers “the worst enemies of worthy change.”
• Seattle Times business writer Jon Talton proclaims that “what we have witnessed in recent years in America is not capitalism,” but rather destructive cronyism.
• Ex-Microsoftie turned political activist Jeff Reifman has launched an initiative campaign called I-103. It would establish a “community bill of rights” and a set of workers’ rights, take a symbolic stand against “corporate personhood,” and restrict corporate campaign contributions for city elections. We’ll see how far it gets in a town that likes to be “progressive” only as long as business interests don’t feel threatened.
• Could Microsoft’s investment in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division finally give MS a toehold in the tablet market?
• The thing about Amazon Kindle e-book readers is that people really need to see them in person in order to understand/appreciate/want them. That’s the one thing Amazon’s not built to provide. So it sells Kindles through chain stores. Only these chains are getting tired of folks looking at stuff in their stores then going to buy it online. One of ’em, Target, will stop selling Kindles in retaliation.
• There’s a new intercity bus line in town. BoltBus will take you straight to Portland in 3.25 hours. Buses leave four times a day from 5th Avenue South near the transit tunnel station. Fares are $27 but with discounts for early reservations and low-demand runs. It’s not really a competitor to Greyhound, because the latter is operating the route under contract.
• Another female teacher, another teenage male student, another sex scandal. This is getting beyond the cliché stage.
• In today’s China, HuffPost blogger Tom Doctoroff writes, many forms of non-marital sex are still illegal; but more and more people engage in them anyway, often openly. Doctoroff says this illustrates China’s current vacillation between “prudence and prurience,” between “‘comfortable’ domesticity and extra-curricular indulgence.” What Doctoroff doesn’t mention: sexual behavior is like that everywhere, in all eras.
• A creative-writing prof claims he’s isolated the 12 winning ingredients of successful bestselling novels. Only thing is, those same ingredients also appear in a lot of works that don’t sell.

Darn, this is gettin’ retro. And not in a good way.

Just like on N30, a serious mass protest against the rule of big money was the target of an attempted hijacking.

Yep, another “black bloc” of masked vandals claiming to be anarchists busted stuff up.

As if that was any more a “political” act than the busting up of stuff last June in Vancouver.

Meanwhile, many thousands more people participated in real May Day protests.

They made statements, made banners, spoke, sang, rapped, networked, and forged connections.

Their goal was not to feel powerful, nor to get their testosterone rocks off, nor to “live without dead time.”

It was, and is, to change the direction of the world.

Socially, politically, and especially economically.

That’s a mighty tall order.

But that’s what Occupy ____ is about.

No single demands.

No simple solutions.

No instant utopias.

No small dreams.

Nothing less than the end of greed, cronyism, and megabuck-influence-peddling; and the revival of democracy.

The latest Audit Bureau of Circulation figures are in for the six months ending in March.

They show the Seattle Times‘ circulation continuing a steady decline, to 237,000 daily and 300,000 on Sunday. That’s 6.6 percent lower than one year ago.

What’s more, each figure includes about 30,000 paid subscribers to the Times‘ print-replica .pdf edition (the only paid online product the Times offers so far).

So the daily print Times is now beneath 206,000 buyers. That’s just a few thousand more than it had in 2009, when it added the P-I‘s former subscribers. (Back in 2000, the Times and P-I had a combined circulation of 400,000.)

Elsewhere in the report, the NY Times now has more paid online readers than print readers.

• “Black Sun,” Isamu Noguchi’s donut shaped sculpture at Volunteer Park, hasn’t just inspired a Soundgarden song. Now it’s also getting its own postage stamp! (UPDATE: Turns out the stamp was issued way back in ’05. I’m even less astute about philately than I am about other topics.)
• Funhouse update: Yes, the defiantly un-cleaned-up punk club in Lower Queen Anne will be evicted, and the building razed for redevelopment, effective this Halloween. Th Funhouse owners are looking for a new location.
• When last we looked, Microsoft was suing Barnes & Noble, claiming its Nook e-book machine violated MS-owned patents. Now, MS is buying a piece of the Nook operation.
• What’s harder to find around these parts than a Thunders fan? A non-geezer-age Republican who liked Romney more than Ron Paul during this primary/caucus season.
• The rainy winter = plenty of hydro power in the coming months.
• As we remember the Seattle World’s Fair and its vision for a World of Tomorrow, a real-life “City of the Future” is being built from scratch in Portugal. Intended to house 150,000 residents, it’s planned to be a “techno-paradise of energy conservation.” Thousands of sensors will monitor and regulate everything from traffic on the streets to faults in the water supply.
• Courtney Love can’t get “completion insurance” for film roles, and the music business is in freefall. With only fashion modeling left to actively maintain her celebrity presence, she’s added a new line, that of visual artist. Samples of her debut exhibition could invite comparisons to the crayon drawings of a child-psychiatry patient.
• Delta Airlines hopes to cushion itself against high fuel prices by buying its own oil refinery.
• Last month was the 60th anniversary of the first toy ad on U.S. television. It was for the original version of Mr. Potato Head (kids had to supply their own potatoes).
• The latest print mag in fiscal rough seas: The American Prospect, for two decades one of progressive America’s top sources of news n’ analysis.
• Anti-dumping tariffs work. They’re causing Chinese companies to open factories in the U.S.
• A London department store’s offering a “luxury champagne lollipop” covered with real gold flakes. Of all the one-percenty things in the world, could this be the one-percentiest?
• Amazingly, I still have to explain to people that I hate existing in freelance-writing hell and I want to get out of it by any means necessary. Perhaps this item, by a guy who got out of the racket, will help these folks get it.

last.fm

Pere Ubu founder, noise-rock legend, and great Clevelander David Thomas is, by his own admission, a middle class boy.

And in a recent interview he claims that…

…all adventurous art is done by middle-class people. Because middle-class people don’t care. Because middle-class people don’t care. “I’m going to do what I want, because I can do something else better and make more money than this.”

At the Collapse Board site (started by ex-Seattleite Everett True), blogger Wallace Wylie begs to disagree:

It surely does not need pointing out that almost every adventurous musical innovation of the 20th Century came from working-class origins. The blues, jazz, country, rock’n’roll, soul, reggae, disco, r&b, hip-hop, techno, house; the list goes on. It would take a mixture of ignorance and arrogance on a monumental scale to appropriate all of these innovations for the middle-classes.

You can probably think of your own exceptions, in music and other artistic fields as well.

Then the Scottish-born Wylie goes on to repeat the longtime meme that most American middle-class teens didn’t know about large swaths of American blues and R&B, until they heard them from British rockers:

…While British bands were playing Chuck Berry, embryonic American garage bands were cutting their chops on ‘Gloria’ by Them. In other words, rock music is a British creation that Americans subsequently copied. Bob Dylan named his fifth album Bringing It All Back Home in reference to the fact that British bands had shown Americans music from their own country that they didn’t know existed and now it was time for an American to take these influences back.

That familiar tale neglects the role American “hip” whites (including Cleveland’s own DJ legend Alan Freed) played in bringing R&B across the color line, leading to the commercial teenybopper variant Freed billed as “rock n’ roll.”

It neglects the white garage bands (such as Tacoma’s own Fabulous Wailers) who studiously covered and imitated their favorite R&B sides, especially during the pre-Beatles years.

Methinks Wylie has his own cultural blinders with which to deal.

may1stseattle.org

The whole Occupy movement is staging a nationwide spring “season premiere” Tuesday.

Mayor McGinn has personally warned the local protests just might turn violent, deliberately invoking memories of the WTO riots. (Yes, those really were 12 and a half years ago!) That’s an odd thing for a self styled progressive to do.

Local organizers, in contrast, are billing their events as a “Day of Solidarity, Wonderment, and Merrymaking.”

They’ve got a whole day of speakers, rappers, and musicians at Westlake Park, and a march to the Wells Fargo tower.

And they’re calling for folks to leave work and school, refrain from shopping and banking, to think of Tuesday as a one-day general strike.

•

May Day has been principally a Euro-radical thing for so long, it’s hard to remember it started with the American labor movement, in its first courageous drives for basic workers’ rights (and the corporate/governmental violent reactions to same).

•

Meanwhile, BBC economics commentator Paul Mason takes a gander at the new wave of protest-related visual art (a movement accelerated, but not started, by the Occupy protests). Mason believes this populist underground work could be the start of a new art movement, one that could render obsolete “contemporary art” as we know it (i.e., something made within a rarified bohemian elite for sale to “the multimillionaire-oriented art market”).

irwin allen's 'the time tunnel' (1966), via scaryfilm.blogspot.com

• If a Seattle attorney was really involved in government time travel experiments when he was a boy, like he claims, why couldn’t he have brought back the lost episodes of the original Doctor Who?
• Zillow.com predicts local housing prices will continue to fall for another year before they “hit bottom.”
• The Seattle Times has a where-are-they-now piece about the former 619 Western studio artists.
• Spokane would really like to keep its biggest employer, Fairchild AFB.
• Marketing-trends analyst Faith Popcorn insists the economy would be a lot better off today if the big Wall Street firms had more women in power roles.
• Koo Stark update: Prince Andrew’s actress ex-girlfriend is using the Rupert Murdoch organization in a U.S. court over phone tapping. (Her complaint is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, not his stateside operations.)
• Kashi cereal eaters were shocked to learn (1) the soy in Kashi’s products uses Monsanto seeds, and (2) Kashi’s really owned by Kellogg’s.
• The Great Vinyl Comeback isn’t just for indie pop anymore. Classical artists are now getting in on it.
• Nick Harkaway at the Guardian sees Amazon and the other big e-book sellers as “the new gatekeepers,” steering consumers toward select choices rising from the “rabble.”
• In terms of paying as little in taxes as legally possible, Apple turns out to be just like any other big company.
• Longtime online analyst Dave Winer suggests there’s another Internet bubble going on, involving social-media and content-based sites. Winer says those sites’ funders are…

…building businesses whose only way of making money will be through advertising. Are there as many different ways to slice things as all the startups, collectively, would have you believe? And when they’re done, what will happen to them?

• Lindy West’s recent putdown of “hipster racism” reminded Channing Kennedy at the Colorlines site of a similar rant, given in 1979 by the late great rock critic Lester Bangs.
• Alas, we’re not really going to be rid of Newt Gingrich; only of his Presidential campaign.
• Noted author E.L. Doctorow traces how 12 years of right-wing power grabbing has left America an “unexceptional” nation.

Our ol’ acquaintance Timothy Egan has a nice piece about the book and reading scenes here in Seattle.

One statement is particularly important.

Egan notes that even while e-books have boomed, print book sales in the U.S. have remained steady or declined just a little.

This means the book biz has weathered the simultaneous trends of the Great Recession and the Internet convergence a helluva lot better than other media genres—theatrical movies, DVDs, radio, broadcast and cable TV, magazines, and especially newspapers and recorded music.

This totally contradicts the incessant whines of those “book people” who insist that they are a disappearing elite.

joybra.com, via seattlepi.com

• Dept. of Things You Never Knew You Needed: UW business students have designed a bra with a pocket for an iPhone.
• Seattle’s (the nation’s? the world’s?) longest running serialized stage play, the Asian American-centric Sex in Seattle series, ends after 12 years with episode 20, opening this weekend.
• Amazon’s quarterly profits are 35 percent lower than a year ago. To Wall Street, that’s seen as good news somehow.
• The Sacramento Kings’ arena deal is apparently dead. The team might or might not be put up for sale any week now. Seattle has a wannabe majority owner, a perfectly functional arena, and the land and initial plans for a new arena.
• Vancouver punk legend Joey “Shithead” Kiethley sez he’ll run next year for a seat in B.C.’s provincial legislature. He’s done this twice before, on Green Party tickets. But this time he’ll run on the ticket of the New Democrats (Canada’s official national “opposition” party). He’s putting into practice his old motto, “Talk – Action = Zero.”
• Gay Divorcee Dept.: A B.C. judge has ruled that a split-up lesbian couple has to split their jointly owned sperm-bank deposit.
• Are outspoken homophobes really gay but suppressing it? All I know is for me, other men’s bodies are like eggplant casseroles. I don’t wanna eat ’em but I don’t mind if you do.
• Will the Arab world need a full-scale “cultural revolution” before women have rights there?
• Nutella: not as “healthy” as some consumers apparently thought.
• The story about Egypt legalizing sex between widowers and their dead wives? A complete hoax.
• In an interview promoting her new film Hysteria (about the first electric sex tools for women and the “medical” excuses advertised for them), Maggie Gyllenhaal talks about why there are so few emotionally powerful sex scenes in U.S. movies. My theory: Most sex scenes in mainstream films are escapist in nature. Many serve as breaks from the plot, like the songs in many musicals. These include scenes choreographed to emphasize the woman’s responses. To use such a scene to reveal a character’s personality, emotions, and vulnerabilities, to show a female character with her sense of public decorum stripped away, is a rare feat.
• Did Romney only tell 10 major lies last week?