fdin.org.uk

• Did you know Heinz had a soup factory in Kent? Emphasis on the “had.”
• Just when you thought you’d seen everything, something unexpected comes. Today’s edition: A poet who’s actually got people listening to him. Meet the Tacoma guy behind the viral video “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus.”
• A Facebook ad said an Issaquah heavy-metal guitarist with the stage name Steve Thunderbolt was looking for bandmates, but insisted on “no blacks”. Not ’cause he was a racist or anything; it was just “a drug issue and a safety issue.”
• It’s not just Ron Paul. The national Republican Party as a whole seems to just luuuuuv them some white supremacists.
• The UW president, the state’s highest paid employee, claims finding answers to education funding in Wash. state is “above my pay grade.”
• Soul divas aren’t supposed to die this young.
• Let’s hear it for last week’s #1 selling musical star on Amazon’s CD and download charts: Leonard Cohen! (Really.)
• Let’s close, just for the heckuvit, with Mike Wallace in a shortening commercial.

I’d mentioned that the Capitol Hill Times, the weekly neighborhood paper for which I’d worked in a couple of stints, is now owned by a legal services entrepreneur as a vehicle for legal notice ads.

The new-look CHT has now appeared.

It looks clean and modern.

And it looks like the new management is truly interested in providing space (if not much money) toward neighborhood news coverage.

And it’s got a locally based editor, Stephen Miller, who seems to really want intelligent discussion of the issues of the day.

That’s certainly what he says in his column for the Feb. 8 issue.

It’s about Seattle University’s Search for Meaning Book Festival, held the previous Saturday. Besides book sales and signings, the festival included speeches and panels by authors representing myriad flavors of religion in America.

Miller talks about the need for good questions instead of easy answers.

And he talks briefly about some search-for-meaning related trends in the news, as discussed by speakers at the festival. Among them:

The threat of Sharia law. A Mormon nearing the White House. Federal funds paying for abortions. A redefinition of marriage.

Except that trends 1 and 3 do not really exist.

Nobody’s trying to impose Sharia law in any part of the U.S.

There is no federal funding for abortions, and nobody’s proposing to start any.

These are merely right-wing scare campaigns.

They’re just as fake as the right-wing-only cable channel’s annual hype over a nonexistent “war on Christmas.”

If Miller did not want to address this complicating factor in his limited print space, he could have described these “trends” more accurately as allegations, promoted by some of the festival’s speakers.

Miller’s column asks us to pursue “intelligent discussion.”

A big part of that is distinguishing what’s really going on in the world from the spin and the bluster.

gasoline alley antiques

• Last time, we discussed what any potential Seattle NHL hockey team should be called. “Go 2 Guy” sports commentator Jim Moore has a simple answer—the Totems. That was the name for Seattle’s teams in the old Western Hockey League. (That league disbanded shortly after Vancouver, its marquee franchise, joined the NHL.)
• Mayor McGinn has promised that city tax money won’t go toward building a new basketball/hockey arena. This does not mean it will be an all private-enterprise endeavor, or that it would be cost-free to Seattle taxpayers.  The city will have to vacate at least one long block of Occidental Avenue South, essentially giving that land to the arena developers. It might also have to move in on any holdout landowners at the site, essentially forcing them to sell. The project might involve city-backed bond sales and/or tax breaks on construction and ticket sales. And certainly a new arena will compete with the city-owned KeyArena for the Storm, Seattle U basketball, the Rat City Rollergirls, concerts, corporate meetings, evangelical crusades, etc.
• David Meinert, meanwhile, believes McGinn might actually get a second term in ’13.
• The unionization drive at the new Longview grain terminal finally succeeded.
• The truckers’ strike at the Port of Seattle is having effects.
• The state legislature might approve textile-based traction devices, invented in Europe. Get ready for “tire socks.”
• A Vancouver USA attorney wants to overthrow the state’s Congressional redistricting scheme. He alleges the new districts are too incumbent-friendly.
• The one, way insufficient, state tax reform scheme in the current Legislative session is getting bogged down in the specifics.
• The pseudo-“religious” anti-gay bigots may not show up at the Powell children’s funeral after all. (The tragedy that led to this is, as we all sadly know, the work of a criminally insane straight guy.)
• Anthony B. Robinson ponders why Wash. state’s Democrats can accomplish gay marriage and other “social agenda” things, while the state government’s revenue system sends it, and us, ever closer to civic oblivion.
• Charles B. Pierce at Esquire is succinct: “Dear Ronald Reagan: Thanks for Destroying America.”
• Health insurance rates keep rising, as the insurance giants pocket more and more of that increased cash inflow.
• What happens to pizza-parlor robot rock bands after they die? Avid collectors, including some in Seattle, try to reanimate them.

west seattle blog

This Sunday’s Grammy Awards telecast will feature the three living original Beach Boys, reunited on stage for the first time in a couple of decades.

The performance kicks off a short tour promoting the group’s 50th anniversary and its recent Smile Sessions box set.

Probably the last major release by Capitol Records before Sony devours its parent EMI, the box set presents, in as complete form as possible, the most legendary unreleased album in pop history.

•

The story of Smile is long and convoluted. Whole books have been written about it.

To make this long story short:

In 1966, the pop music scene was changing. LPs and “album rock” FM radio were becoming more important than singles and top-40 AM. Pop combos like the Beach Boys were threatened with irrelevance.

Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ composer-producer, had already quit touring with the band to be in the studio full time. With the Pet Sounds LP, he’d turned away from the Boys’ early songs about surfing and cars, toward more complex subjects and arrangements.

Then with the single “Good Vibrations,” Wilson experimented with “modular recording.” Using L.A.’s top session players for all the non-vocal parts, he recorded (and re-recorded) different sections of the tune in different studios, then mixed-and-matched them for the final hit.

Wilson decided to make an entire LP the same way.

What’s more, it wouldn’t be a set of self-contained songs, but a concept album (the term was just coming into use).

The concept: a “teenage symphony to God.” Themes and motifs would flow, blend, cut away, and recur.

As with “Good Vibrations,” Smile’s instrumental tracks were recorded in the form of dozens of fragments, some as short as five seconds. Some fragments were more or less intended to be merged into standard-length songs. Others were stand-alone musical miniatures.

Wilson had composed and arranged these bits without a running order in mind (for the individual bits or for the LP as a whole), planning to figure that out later.

Wilson’s chief compatriot in the project was Van Dyke Parks, a young L.A. scenemaker. Parks wrote conceptual, sometimes surreal lyrics to Wilson’s melodies, and sat in with Wilson at the instrumental sessions.

These tracks were ready when the Beach Boys returned to L.A. from a long tour. At first, the Boys didn’t “get” Brian’s pop-symphony ambitions. Lead singer Mike Love especially felt Parks’ abstract, allegedly drug-inspired lyrics were too removed from the Beach Boys’ format (what would now be called their “brand”).

Vocal recordings were about three-quarters completed, then suspended.

Parks singed a singer-songwriter deal with Warner Bros. Records and quit the Smile project, with at least one song lyric unwritten.

A few months later, the Boys’ press agent issued a statement saying the album had been scrapped.

Some of its tracks were reused or re-recorded on later Beach Boys releases. Others made their way onto the tape-trading circuit, and eventually as CD bonus tracks.

Then in 2004, Wilson and his current solo band premiered a full reconstruction of Smile on stage, followed by an all newly-recorded CD.

Critics adored it. They called it a timeless work, beyond mere “oldies” status. It deftly mixed different pop sensibilities with modern classical and experimental “musique concrete” influences.

Now we have the “official” Beach Boys Smile CD, assembled in the order Wilson had used in 2004, supplemented with several discs of outtakes and alternate tracks.

•

Several factors contributed to Smile’s original scrapping, including Love’s opposition and the group’s ongoing beef with Capitol management.

The probable real reason, I believe: Wilson didn’t know how to assemble all the bits into a coherent whole. He was slowly but steadily “losing it” mentally, due to drugs and/or clinical depression. (I suspect the latter was the greater reason.)

Nobody else knew how to assemble all these bits either.

The following is how I conjecture it could have been completed (I’ve probably got some historical details wrong, but go along with me).

•

[alternate-history mode]

After Parks quit the Smile project, Capitol bosses examined the hours of recorded bits and pieces. They decided the project needed adult supervision, if the label stood a chance of making back its investment.

The label brought in a “record doctor.” We’ll call him “Mr. A.” He was familiar with both pop-rock and the outer reaches of modern jazz.

Mr. A’s nominal job was to replace Parks as Wilson’s uncredited co-producer.

His real job was to create a shippable product.

He was respected enough within the business to gain Brian Wilson’s trust, at least at first. The Beach Boys were more reluctant to accept him, but agreed under the condition that, once this quagmire was out of the way, the group would have their own (i.e., Mike Love’s) way on their next LP.

First, Mr. A scheduled two vocal sessions to wrap up Parks’ last unrecorded lyrics. Only the first session required the whole group at once, recording six group parts for four tracks.

The second session involved solos and duets, for three or four standard-length songs and three fragments. Love declined to sing any more of what he called Parks’ more “trippy” lyrics, so those parts were divvied up among the other group members.

While Brian conducted those sessions, a crew of assistants re-logged all the instrumental and vocal fragments, built “scratch track” vocal/instrumental mixes, then redubbed all these onto radio-station tape cartridges.

Mr. A sat Brian down in a mixing booth, where he used these “carts” to play the bits in different sequences. He started with the tracks that most closely resembled traditonal song structures (“Surf’s Up,” “Wonderful”).

Wilson signed off on each approved sequence, under daily and weekly deadlines imposed by the label. As this work dragged on, Wilson reportedly became less active in suggesting or rejecting different options.

Mr. A and Wilson eventually reached a track for which Parks hadn’t written a lyric. Pet Sounds lyricist Tony Asher was quickly brought in to supply words, under the new title “Hawaiian Islands.” Love agreed to sing on this one, because it updated the classic Beach Boys topic of wholesome recreation. Brian took advantage of this extra studio date to redo some already-recorded vocal bits, punching up some and smoothing out others. But the label steadfastly refused to budget any more studio time after that.

Next came the placing of the one-minute-or-less song bits. Mr. A labeled these “M&S” on log sheets, for “medleys and segues.” Higher-ups at the label, during interoffice chatter, unofficially reversed the initials.

Under Capitol’s dictates, the fragments were used more sparingly than Wilson wanted. This was particularly true of the all-instrumental bits. The label’s reasoning: This was a Beach Boys record, not a “Brian Wilson Orchestra” record.

What Wilson had vaguely planned as three sides running 49 minutes became two sides running 43 minutes.

During the tedious final mixing sessions, Wilson allegedly nodded off in the booth at least once. Later rumors claimed Mr. A forged Wilson’s initials signing off on some of the track mixes.

Upon hearing early versions of the mixes, Love allegedly felt surprised. This music wasn’t druggy; it was dense and cerebral. But that, he’s said to have said, still wasn’t Love’s idea of a proper Beach Boys record.

Smile was released in the fall of 1967, a year after the first instrumental sessions. The previously-printed LP covers got pasted over with sheets listing the final song titles in order, and including the small-type credit: “Mixed by Brian Wilson with Mr. A.”

Some critics called Smile a “flawed masterpiece.” Others called it a more intellectual, but less emotionally involving, work than the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper, released earlier in the year.

It undersold its predecessor Pet Sounds.

In later years, pop historians noted that many of the era’s “concept albums” supplied reassuring (even if loud) music to get stoned by. Smile failed miserably at this use, with all its abrupt changes of melody and mood.

The Beach Boys’ next LP was the back-to-basics Wild Honey. It was recorded without outside musicians, and mostly without Brian’s songwriting. It was the Boys’ last Capitol release.

In 1968, the group negotiated with Warner Bros. to distribute their own Brother Records. The Brother roster included Brian as a solo act. However, WB did the least it had to do in regard to funding (and, later, promoting) Brian’s solo debut.

That debut, You’re Welcome, didn’t come out until 1970, and included several leftover compositions from Smile (re-recorded, since Capitol claimed rights to the tapes).

Wilson, like Scott Walker (another top-40 balladeer who’d moved into loftier creations), would be viewed as a post-pop innovator whose releases steadily became more creative, less commercial, and much less frequent.

When CDs came along, Capitol reissued the LP version of Smile, in both the original mono and in a reconstructed stereo version. Several years later came a “director’s cut” version, with many tracks lengthened and restored.

[/alternate-history mode]

•

The later career and personal trajectories of the Beach Boys and of Brian Wilson would have probably been about the same as they wound up in real life.

The only difference was that Smile would have existed as a critics’ darling and as a curious artifact, not as a legendary unheard “ghost record.”

• My book Walking Seattle (you do all have your own copy by now, right?) just happens to take readers past five historic Christian Science church buildings in different parts of town. All are now occupied by others; two as other churches and three re-purposed to new uses. The last of these, a townhome redevelopment on 15th Avenue East on Capitol Hill, is finally done. Lawrence Cheek explores both the architectural and usage ironies in turning a house of worship into homes for the upscale.
• (By the way, Walking Seattle has its own online companion now, as an add-on virtual tour guide within the iOS/Android app ViewRanger!)
• (By the other way, North Sound readers who want to learn more about traipsing through the Jet City can attend a Walking Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Sunday Feb. 26 at Village Books in Bellingham.)
• Damn: J.C. Penney won’t be coming back to downtown Seattle after all. So let’s get Kohl’s in the old Borders space, and a full branch of the University Book Store upstairs in the Kress building (where Penney’s was supposed to have gone).
• In today’s wacky city survey of the day, Seattle ranks last in average pay raises last year. (Note to bosses, particularly in the tech biz: People can’t eat break-room foosball tables. Wanna hold on to those people you insist are so vital to your continued growth n’ success n’ stuff? Treat ’em better.)
• In a related story, the labor union UNITE/HERE is fighting to get a better deal for workers at the Space Needle, who’ve been offered the usual raw deal of takebacks and job insecurity.
• Megan Seling asks the musical question, if Seattle does get NHL hockey, what local standard should be the team’s “goal song“? I’m more interested in the team name. If we do get the currently league-owned Phoenix Coyotes, we wouldn’t really need to change that moniker. After all, this state is the birthplace of the creator of Wile E. Coyote.
• Somebody who claims to have done his research has come up with an online, annotated Seattle gang map.
• How to end police brutality? Studies? Consultants? “Process”? No?
• Sadly, there are still some pathetic, deluded dudes who want to turn the inland Northwest into a white supremacist “homeland.”
• You want to know how completely unpopular the far right’s social agenda is? Consumer marketing and advertising have completely ignored/rejected it. (Yes, many of you reject marketing and advertising. But advertisers want to sell by appealing to common contemporary values. And those are not the values either held, or paid lip-service to, by today’s rabid right.)
• I didn’t notice this when it came out, but New York magazine noted a couple months ago that e-books have become “a whole new literary form.” Specifically, the mag cited the fact that e-books can be any length, thus creating a market for long “short nonfiction” and short “long nonfiction.”
• Rampant, pathetic homophobia can pop up anywhere, even among the people you’d think were least likely to absorb it. Such as female tennis stars.
• The LA Times thinks it’s tracked down the world’s most unromantic tourist destinations. I dunno. I can certainly imagine the erotic symbolism of Australia’s giant earthworm museum.
• Our ol’ pal Jim Romenesko’s got a growing list of “words journalists use that people never say.” My own favorites include pontiff, solon, stumping, embattled, succumb, cohort, loggerheads, cagers, and, of course, moniker.

• Graphic designer Ben Crick is in the process of creating a manifesto for designers in the 21st century, to be communicated in the form of handsome posters. Crick’s name for the project: “I Am Designer.” He doesn’t have the URL for that yet, but he’s got the posters. The third poster happens to incorporate the logos of ATV and ITC, Sir Lew Grade’s TV production companies (The Saint, The Prisoner, Thunderbirds, The Muppet Show). The first poster, though, is the one whose message I identify with:

Don’t work for free under the guise of ‘good exposure’. It is bad exposure. If you don’t value your own work, neither will anyone else.

• It’s 10th Anniversary day today (Wednesday 2/8) at Top Pot Doughnuts. You know what that means: Free Old Fashioneds!
• As I’d previously predicted, the New York design firm contracted to design a new Seattle Waterfront has come up with a set of pretentious, windswept plazas and promenades, intended more to scream world-class-osity than to provide recreation and convenience for, you know, the people who actually live here. As I’ve said before, I don’t want a waterfront in good taste. I want a waterfront that tastes good.
• A Republican in the Oregon State Senate proposed a bill that would criminalize online invitations (even Tweets®) to events where crimes were later committed. As Goldy points out, it would essentially outlaw online organizing, under the guise of cracking down on “aggravated solitication.” The bill’s DOA in the Dem-controlled Ore. Senate, but it’s still damn close to what authorities in Egypt or Syria would like to stop.

entertainment weekly via getty images

Our ol’ pal, Posies singer-songwriter Ken Stringfellow, is quoted at the East Portland Blog as saying the Madonna/M.I.A. halftime show at Super Bowl LSMFT was all OK but doesn’t really signify “empowering women.”

That sort of “feminist victory,” Stringfellow claims, will only occur when “50 percent of the media companies are owned by women.”

“Ownership,” of course, is a slippery thing with NYSE- and NASDAQ-listed companies.

Such companies could easily be more than 50 percent “owned” by women. Overall, a sizable majority of all corporate stock shares officially are.

But this “ownership” is often filtered through pension systems, trusts, mutual funds, broker-managed accounts, and other schemes that don’t infer practical control.

Of the major media companies operating in the U.S. today, only a few have any significant degree of individual or family ownership. Among them:

• Viacom (Paramount, et al.) and CBS, now separately managed but both controlled by movie-theater mogul Sumner Redstone and family;
• Warner Music Group, now controlled by Russian-born chemical titan Len Blavatnik;
• Hearst Corp. (Cosmopolitan, A&E, et al.), wholly owned by that family’s fourth- and fifth-generation members;
• Advance Publications (The New Yorker, The Oregonian, Puget Sound Business Journal, et al.), owned by the S.I. Newhouse family;
• and, of course, News Corp. (Fox, et al.), controlled by the Rupert Murdoch clan.

Redstone’s and Murdoch’s daughters have taken major roles within their respective aging dads’ companies, and may take greater roles in the future.

But they’ve shown every sign of supporting regular showbiz-content gender roles, including the roles Stringfellow derides as “T&A” and “soft porn.”

I, and I suspect many of you, wouldn’t count that as a “feminist victory.”

shadow planet productions

• A Fremont video-game studio has won a national animation award for its Xbox game “Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.”
• Hoop-la dept.: Seattle Weekly believes the current hype over bringing men’s pro basketball back to town could potentially save Mayor McGinn’s political career.
• Central Cinema says it can’t survive sans booze.
• Intiman Theatre says it will rise again this summer.
• Facebook regularly deletes photos of nudity, even if they depict breastfeeding. Local moms went to the company’s Seattle programming branch-office with a “nurse-in.”
• Pioneer Seattle photographer Asahel Curtis (brother of the even more famous Edward Curtis) wasn’t just a great shutterbug. He was also a master at the art of hand-coloring his pictures.
• Sound Transit believes spending $24 million on blueprints for light rail to Federal Way could help grab Federal bucks to actually build the thing.
• In a new ad pitch, Microsoft says its online apps and tools are more privacy-friendly than Google’s.
• It’s worth saying again, those six words that usually define a bad movie: “Set in Seattle, Filmed in Vancouver.”
• Brock Howell has a simple catch phrase for the kind of communities we need to develop and support: “Coffee shop neighborhoods.”
• Keep on truckin’ strikin’. Local short-haul truck drivers are often immigrants, and are often treated as overworked, underpaid, benefits-deprived “contractors.” They’re taking action for a better deal.
• Univision and Disney are said to be planning a cable news channel for English-speaking Latinos. I presume that means no political analysis from Sabado Gigante‘s “Chacal de la Trompeta.”

treasurenet.com

• Remember, folks: “Rural estates” are not farmland. (And in my mind, vineyards only technically count.)
• Rumblings about a new SoDo basketball/hockey area heat up with revelations of high-level discussions between would-be developers/team owners and city bigwigs. The object: a development deal that wouldn’t need the city funds it legally can’t get. Also, the NBA’s Sacramento Kings could be moved, as early as next season.
• A tangible, physical Amazon store in Seattle? Believe it when you see it.
• A Seattle (and specifically Capitol Hill) institution, Phil Smart Mercedes-Benz, is being sold. The new owners plan to consolidate operations at the dealership’s newish Airport Way site, abandoning the East Pike Street HQ it’s held all these past 52 years. The Smart family will continue to own that property, one of the last remnants of the old Pike/Pine Auto Row.
• The Capitol Hill Times, a neighborhood paper for which I worked, off and on, in mostly part-time capacities between 1984 and 2011, has been sold to a foreclosure-services entrepreneur. His apparent business model for the paper is as a forum for legal notices, including his own.
• A tiny piece of the old Washington Mutual is left standing. It’s a mortgage reinsurance unit, and it could become profitable as early as, say, 2019.
• A few months back, we mentioned how the kind of artisanal video that used to be made for cable access is now made for YouTube. The latest example is a new online comedy series. It’s called Local Brew. The titular “brew” is Rainier Beer—which has not been a local product for more than a decade.
• Can today’s China be rightfully described as a fascist state? And if so, what kind of light does that shine on the “progressive” western corporations (from Redmond, WA as well as Cupertino, CA) who have all their stuff made there?
• I don’t always agree with Chris Hedges, but he’s spot on when he calls out violent “anarchists” as a “cancer” within the Occupy movement.
• Super Bowl SPQR: An actual exciting game, which went down to the final play. The commercials: the same old misanthropic “hip” violence. The halftime show: more “global superstar” over-the-top-osity, this time with Centurions. At least Madonna didn’t do the fake-English-accent thing this time.
• The folks at KCPQ would really like a Seattle Super Bowl. That is to say, a Super Bowl held in Seattle, not one in which the Seahawks would play (which seems even more remote these days). What would hosting the big game mean locally? Think of it as a big convention. Sixty thousand people (mostly people who can afford $16,000 tickets) descending here for perhaps a week. Oh, and some for-the-locals “fan fest” in the parking lot a couple days before.

sherilynn fenn in 'two moon junction'

The former bit actor (born Zalman Lefkovitz in 1941) made his first big career splash in 1988 when he wrote and produced the softcore classic 9 1/2 Weeks.

That film’s success led to a career as America’s premiere erotic filmmaker of the time, with the minor classics Wild Orchid, Two Moon Junction (Sherilynn Fenn’s springboard to fame), and Delta of Venus (arguably a better Anais Nin adaptation than the higher-budgeted Henry and June).

Even before Henry and June‘s disappointing box office led Hollywood’s theatrical distributors away from sex flicks, King had branched out into late night cable shows, starting with the still-famous Red Shoe Diaries (David Duchovny’s springboard to fame).

In a sub-genre known for some of corporate media’s shoddiest production values, King’s shows and TV-movies stand out. They display lush (if clichéd) lighting/photography and poetic dialogue/narration. The sex scenes are choreographed to convey warmth more than “heat,” accompanied by King’s trademark fusion-jazz sax soundtracks. King helped fund these projects by distributing them on video, emphasizing distribution at Blockbuster and other outlets that didn’t carry hardcore porn.

A devoted family man in spite of his subject matter, his wife and two daughters were key members of his production team.

From time to time he branched out beyond the skin-flick genre, including documentaries about dancers and surfers. But those were sidelines to the sex stuff. Battling cancer in recent years, he kept producing and sometimes directing more TV-movies and series. A pay-per-view website for these was announced last year but never launched.

And yes, he died at the age of 69.

Update #1: The Komen Foundation backed down from its previous blackballing of Planned Parenthood cancer screening services—or did it?

Update #2: In yesterday’s rant about the Komen fiasco, I mentioned how the organization had attracted negative comments even before this. But I failed to provide a good link to those previous criticisms.

Here’s such a link. It goes to the trailer for Pink Ribbons, Inc., a National Film Board of Canada documentary investigating the group. It opened today in Canadian theaters; a Stateside run starts in March.

Director Lea Pool’s film (based on Samantha King’s 2006 book) had, of course, been shot, edited, and scheduled long before this week’s right-wing cave-in by Komen management.

The film’s gist: Komen management allegedly cares a lot more about promoting itself, attracting corporate partners, selling branded merchandise, and, of course, raising money than it is about detection, treatment, or “the cure.”

All-new item: A Seattle gun merchant announced a Komen-authorized pink handgun. Komen management now denies any authorization, involvement, or even pre-knowledge of this.

• You know what else women do differently than men? Utilize public transit.
• Metro’s route #42 may be a goner, alas. Next on the chopping block for drastic cutting: the #2 route, one of Metro’s most heavily used and the only direct route from Queen Anne to First Hill and Madrona.
• Republicans in the state Legislature have a new plan to “reform” K-12 education: dump all that distracting stuff about civil rights and combatting gay-bashing.
• Goldy asks if the state legislature can pass gay marriage, why can’t it fix our regressive tax system? Here’s one potential answer: because the Seattle civic establishment (root of most “progressive” moves in this state) loves gays (“minorities” who can still be upscale and white!) and hates anything that might inconvenience big business.
• The newest e-commerce craze: selling breast milk online. (Make your own pun based on old dairy ad slogans if you like.)
• Mitt Romney’s dad was famous for two things: (1) running American Motors during most of its formative years, and (2) being in Nixon’s cabinet, where he helped devise the “mortgage backed securities” that helped bring down the nation’s economy in recent years.
• Another day, another plea for sympathy toward the (hidebound, ultra-inefficient, conglomerate-ruled) traditional book industry. This time it’s from the Authors Guild. They insist it takes tangible books, tangible bookstores, and old-style publishers to “break” new authors. Which would be an interesting argument if the (major) old-style publishers were still truly interested in “breaking” new authors (you know, with actual promotional budgets and marketing support).
• Graham Joyce at the Guardian scoffs at novelist Jeanette Winterston, who seems to want more novels with “daunting” and daring use of language for its own sake. Joyce insists that profound works can be deceptively “readable.”
• A guy’s going around the book-publicity circuit claiming to have “hooked up” (but didn’t always have sex) with 120 women over a year and a half; despite being bald, overweight, and non-wealthy. In other words, women exist who aren’t obsessed with superficial appearance. (This is news?)
• One more Don Cornelius tribute: Ryuichi Sakamoto on Soul Train!

More sordid details keep emerging about the Komen Foundation cave-in to the right wing sleaze campaign against Planned Parenthood.

At least one top Komen official had resigned in protest over the scheme. Other insiders report Komen bosses had been maneuvering behind the scenes to rewrite its bylaws, to explicitly allow defunding PP’s cancer-screening programs.

Komen’s leaders, who appear to be the sort of folk who only listen to conservative-only “news” media, actually thought this would settle down.

Then again, people who’ve followed the Komen organization before all this have described an outfit that spends relatively little on screenings, treatments, or research, and a lot on marketing and corporate promo tie-ins and forging ties with conservative power players.

seattle times, nov. 24, 2001; 8 wide sections for 25 cents

The Seattle Times suddenly raised its cover price to $1 today. Retailers had been notified in advance, but readers hadn’t. Not even a bottom-front-page “To Our Readers” notice. The paper’s corporate website still lists a single copy price of $.75.

What does the extra quarter get you? Not more content. Tuesday’s paper was a recent record-low 24 pages. It had been this thin a few times in the past couple of years, but only on Mondays or post-holiday Tuesdays (i.e., days without stock listings). When you factor in today’s narrower page sizes, the SeaTimes hasn’t been this small since the days of WWII paper rationing.

I hadn’t noticed when it happened, but the Sunday Pacific Northwest Magazine section now appears to be printed on cheaper paper, the same kind of stock used by the Varsity Theater film calendar.

Meanwhile, the paper’s editorial staff has completed moving into the former furniture warehouse next to the 13 Coins restaurant. Other departments (ad sales, circulation, management) will move in as their new, smaller office spaces get installed. For now, the John Street front office and mailing address remain.

•

To try to quantify the paper’s shrinkage, I’ve been looking up its past online staff-directory pages, as maintained at the Wayback Machine site (web.archive.org).

But first, let’s review the page’s current incarnation. It lists 134 editorial employees (not counting a few executives listed twice). These include 35 local news reporters and columnists (including two listed as “on leave” (unpaid)), 35 reporters and writers in the paper’s other sections, and 12 photographers.

This is the same as the final Post-Intelligencer staff list from early 2009. (The P-I had a couple more people in some sections, a couple fewer in others; but the total’s alike.)

Remember, the print P-I didn’t put out a Sunday paper, and hadn’t since 1983. The same staffing level at today’s Times is thus spread more thinly. Especially since the Times continues to support long, research-heavy, Sunday “cover stories.”

On Jan. 15, 2009, near the time of the print P-I‘s end, the Times staff page listed 150 editorial staffers. These included 37 local news reporters/columnists, 45 writers in the other sections, and 15 photographers. The Times was about to decimate its weekday “living” section, a move planned before the P-I closure was announced.

In contrast, the Times staff page for Dec. 4, 2001 boasts a whopping 281 names.

But this difference seems even more drastic than it is.

That’s because the 2001 staff page lists several job categories that got dropped from the page in later years. They include 10 “news artists” (map makers and illustrators), plus a total of 80 copy editors, wire editors, page-layout designers, researchers, and other assistants.

The P-I‘s 2009 staff page listed four artists and 36 of these other assorted personnel. Today’s Times probably employs at least that many or more, what with all the Sunday and Sunday-preview pages to fill with wire and syndicated matter.

In an apples-to-apples comparison, the 2001 Times employed 53 local news reporters and columnists, 66 writers in the other sections, and 15 photographers.

Those included separate Eastside and Snohomish County bureaus.

They also included such now exotic sounding job titles as “home economist” (recipes editor), “assistant metro editor, metro growth,” and “director, brand and content development.”

Also remember that in a 2006 lawsuit, the P-I (which was then trying to stay in business, despite its unfortunate position in a Times-controlled Joint Operating Agreement) alleged that Times management employed more people than it had to, so the Times could claim it was losing money and thus legally kill the JOA (and with it, the P-I).

During the JOA, the Times had to share profits with the P-I.

Now the Times gets to shoulder its losses alone. (Be careful what you etc. etc.)