auroramills.com

• Sad news in junk-food land. The makers of Hostess cakes and Wonder Bread, once known as Continental Baking but now the privately held Hostess Brands, is filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. A needed step for survival, or a ploy to get out of pension obligations? No matter what happens, I will always remember my early fondness for Hostess Sno Balls. Even at a tender age, two white hemispheres meant something to me somehow….
• Let’s welcome the newest member to the Northwest online news family, Olympia Newsriver. Its mission: to track the legislative progress (or lack thereof) on “key bills supported and opposed by Washington’s progressive movement.”
• Microsoft received a patent for a smartphone-based GPS system, aimed at pedestrians instead of drivers. Part of the patent application stated the software would help walkers avoid “unsafe neighborhoods.” Disguised racism, say some detractors.
• Occupy Seattle is not only without a campsite, it may also be breaking apart. One contributing factor: ideological radicals within the movement won’t commit to strictly nonviolent actions.
• Ex-Seattle mayor Greg Nickels says he might run for Wash. secretary of state.
• Seattle’s second anarchist squat house in the past year has been forcibly evicted.
• Not only is Wash. state failing its commitment to fund public schools, it’s not even trying to fund previously passed reform plans for the schools (class size reduction, etc.).
• Amazon news item #1: “Celebrity librarian” Nancy Pearl is teaming up with the e-tail giant to reissue worthy out-of-print books.
• Amazon news item #2: One or more individuals in South Lake Union have put up street posters calling out a noisy minority of the company’s workforce there, calling them inconsiderate “Am Holes.” Trust me: a certain percentage of socially deaf dorks can be found at any tech company. During the early dot-com days of the mid 1990s, such dorks seemed to be everywhere.
• Get set for more rich/poor class conflict in the coming year, just as the Republicans and many Democrats place themselves firmly on the “rich” side.
• The Gannett Co.’s local newspapers may start charging for web access soon, according to buzz within the biz. The subscription fee would kick in beyond a certain small number of pages accessed per month, the way the NY Times does it. Of course, the NYT is a big, substantial product with global reach. Could the Salem, OR Statesman-Journal (the Northwest’s last Gannett-owned daily) similarly command a price for its online presence? (No word yet on whether Gannett’s flagship USA Today will also go behind a paywall.)
• The self styled “Father of the Internet” claims online access is not per se a human right, but rather “an enabler of rights.”
• Workers at a Foxconn electronics assembly plant in China threatened mass suicide, standing on the factory roof for two days until they were coaxed down. It follows 14 suicides (plus four unsuccessful attempts) at the company’s plants in 2010. They died, and countless other workers have cracked or burned out, so western companies can get the absolute cheapest price for product.

smith tower construction, from seattle municipal archive

• The 1914-built Smith Tower is up for sale in a foreclosure auction. It comes four years after a condo-conversion scheme for Seattle’s first skyscraper was born, and three years after the scheme died. Let’s hope someone shows up who can bring the classy place back to glory.
• Could it be? Could it be? Could there really be snow in Seattle next week? I hope I hope I hope….
• One of those silly magazine surveys ranked Seattle as America’s fifth “gayest” city. Number one: Salt Lake City!
• Update: When we wrote last week about a scheme to bring the National Hockey League to Seattle, we noted a state legislator with a plan to help fund a new arena. The state rep’s name is Mike Hope (R-Lake Stevens). His plan: Have visiting teams pay a licensing fee to play there. No local taxpayer funds involved.
• David Goldstein again righteously picks apart the Seattle Times editorial board for its near-right-wing hypocrisies.
• The headline says it all: “New York Times Crossword Puzzlemaster Schooled on Definition of ‘Illin”.“
• Fun with reactionaries: “Rick Santorum Quotes as New Yorker Cartoons.” (Well, actually as new captions to pre-existing New Yorker cartoons.)
• You don’t have to be a gamer to get valuable schooling in non-linear narrative design from the original Legend of Zelda.

Here’s one way to get a large audience for a literary reading. Invite so many readers that they, and their individual dates and/or entourages, will fill the room by themselves.

That’s what happened at Town Hall last Saturday night with “60 Readers.”

The event’s organizers scheduled it to tie in with the Modern Language Association’s convention in town that week. But the reading was not officially connected with the MLA. This meant the general public could get in.

Town Hall’s 300-capacity lower room was nearly filled for the free event. Readers were limited to three minutes max. The whole thing came in on time, at just under three hours.

The readers picked included both locals and MLA attendees. They ranged from the wild and the experimental down to that squarest of all literary sub-genres ever created, ’70s style nature poetry.

They read in alphabetical order. They opened with Greg Bem, whose “piece” was a listing of all the readers’ names.

As it happened, most of my favorite bits came in hour three:

• Doug Nufer (above) telling a tall tale of a circus freak, who had been the knife thrower “before the accident.”
• Judith Roche repeating a “blessing” she’d given to a new waste treatment plant, praising the cycle of life as the cleaned up biosolids get trucked to the Palouse to fertilize the wheat fields (really!).
• Nico Vassilakis howling raw phonemes.
• Christine Wertheim enacting an orgasmic childbirth(!), then with equal passion mourning the murder victims from Mexico’s drug wars.

• Half of Mt. Baker Adams’s glaciers are gone. Will the Republicans exhort us to let them finish the job?
• Sue Basko from Occupy L.A. has a guide to stop your protest from getting “hijacked,” either by peripheral single-issue groups, cults of personality, or opponents who want to make you look bad.
• Retired TV news producer Sandy Goodman calls today’s Republican Party “The Single Biggest Threat to America.”
• Harold Pollack reminds us that Ron Paul has more baggage, beyond the racist diatribes issued under his name.  Seems Paul’s purist devotion to the “you’re on your own” social meme extends to hating Medicare, Aid to Dependent Children, and other safety-net mainstays.
• The question shouldn’t be whether Pat Buchanan’s out at MSNBC. The question should be why the channel kept him on for so long, as a Morning Joe panelist and pundit/interviewee on other shows. If I were a conspiracy theorist (which I’m not), I’d suggest he was the channel’s house conservative because its leaders liked to make conservatives look bad.
• PoMo alert: Here come buildings designed vaguely like trees, but which are not in trees and do not directly incorporate trees (except to the extent that they have lumber in them).
• The most wholesomely erotic sight you’ll likely see this week: underwater stills of one naked Russian woman and two whales (also naked).

iloveyoubluesky.blogspot.com

• How-the-mighty-have-fallen dept.: Last year folks mourned the end of Kodachrome slide film. Now, Eastman Kodak itself may declare bankruptcy. The only thing that could delay that move: a fire sale of Kodak’s patents, its only remaining valuable assets.
• The Wash. State Supreme Court ruled the state Legislature is failing in its constitutionally assigned task to fully fund K-12 education. But the court didn’t prescribe any specific action to remedy this. I’m hoping this means the days of brutal, all-cuts state budgets are finally over.
• Speaking of which, some legislative Democrats have another state income tax proposal going, as part of an overall tax reform package. We’ll see how far this one goes.
• The movie biz had a lousy ’11, but music sales (led by commercial downloads) were up 6.9 percent. Non-major-label releases, however, were stuck at about 12 percent of total sales.
• The folks who created the “phone book art space” Gallery 206 tried to give it away to the Seattle Art Museum. They said no, expectedly.
• Not as gruesome as you might have thought: The guy who tried to drive alone in the HOV-only freeway lanes by having a dressed-up skeleton in the passenger’s seat? It was just a plastic skeleton.
• Yesterday when we said Boeing Wichita’s demise was Seattle’s gain? Nope, not really. Blame the obsession by corporate hotshots with outsourcing everything, even if it costs more in the long run.
• Update: That smashingly good sounding “Electronic Literature” exhibit in town, tying in with the Modern Language Association convention at the Convention Center? If you live here, forget about seeing it. It’s only for ticketed convention goers, despite what its web page says.
• R.I.P. Robert Jenkins, a figure in the Seattle music scene for more than three decades. I knew him in the ’80s, playing guitar for Audio Leter, Officer Down, and the New Art Orchestra, among many other combos. Lori Goldston’s obit says Jenkins…

…had an otherworldly timbral and expressive range with both guitar and voice, ranging from beautifully sweet to guttural monster-from-Hell.

There’s more turnover at SeattlePI.com. The site’s “executive producer” Michelle Nicolosi is leaving to start her own outfit, an e-book publishing imprint called Working Press.

Nicolosi had been one of only 16 names left (out of an initial 20, plus interns) on PI.com’s content staff list; and one of those, cartoonist David Horsey, has already decamped for the LA Times. Another mainstay, ace reporter Chris Grygiel, split for the Associated Press last autumn.

Website-metrics ranking company Teqpad estimated last May that PI.com was earning about $1,000 a day from online ads. If that’s true (and it could be an undercount), it would be, at most, a quarter of what the site probably needs to support its content and sales staffs.

This means online ads, by themselves, still can’t support any but the very biggest and very smallest original-content sites.

The search for a business model for 21st-century journalism continues. None of the big media conglomerates has figured it out yet (except for business-info brands like the Wall St. Journal).

Nicolosi believes one solution could be for journalistic entities to publish short, one-shot e-books, based around single specific topics.

But that’s not the same as paying for an ongoing staff keeping tabs on the big and little parts of a community’s life and times. So the search continues.

I’m actually working on my own proposed solution.

But more about that later.

4cp.posterous.com

• John Hilgart has a whole web-gallery site of old-time comic book art, in the form of enlarged details from individual panels. And he’s got an aesthetic essay praising the medium as it had been in the pre-“graphic novel” days. Hilgart’s specifically talking about the comics’ crude, now obsolete, four-color printing process. His essay’s title: “In Defense of Dots.”
• Paul Constant offers up a long, devastatingly funny essay on the Iowa Caucuses, without once mentioning Dan Savage’s successful re-definition of “santorum.”
• Chauncy DeVega’s take on the caucuses: The GOP has now fully coalesced around a platform of “‘common sense’ racism.”
• You might not have heard lately from “Walden Three,” Greg Lundgren’s scheme to put a multimedia arts center into the old Lusty Lady building, and to privately fund it all under the auspices of a documentary film shoot. Lundgren’s still at it.
• In the fixed game of job blackmail, Seattle’s gain is often some other burg’s loss. That’s what happened when Russell Investments moved north from Tacoma. Now it’s happening again with the demise of Boeing Wichita.
• Blogger “Rottin’ In Denmark” has posted a love letter to Seattle, entitled “My Hometown Is Better Than Yours.” Much more than a mere series of tourist photos, it’s a series of municipal one-upsmanship boasts captioning each still:

Seattle invented bricks and mortar in the 5th century BC. Then in the 20th century AD, it invented Amazon.com and made them obsolete.

The sun is literally always shining. Those clouds were artificially pumped in because there were out-of-towners visiting and we didn’t want them to stay.

(beneath a shot of an Olympic Sculpture Park installation) This is a totem we erected to protect us from Courtney Love.

1917 seattle metropolitans; from seattlehockey.net

Could Seattle actually get a National Hockey League team before it gets another NBA basketball team?

That’s what CBC Hockey Night in Canada commentator Elliotte Friedman seems to believe.

Friedman notes that the NHL wants to stop collectively owning the fiscally imperiled Phoenix Coyotes.

Friedman also says one of the top Coyote contenders is a Chicago minor-league hockey owner, who’s helping assemble land for a new arena in Seattle’s Sodo area, just south of Safeco Field.

Seattle’s hopes are supported by a move in the Legislature to somehow finagle state support for a new arena during this upcoming session.

What Seattle’s got in its favor:

• A large regional TV market. (Seattle would have the only U.S. NHL franchise west of Denver and north of San Jose. It’s already the second biggest U.S. metro area without an NHL team, after Houston.)
• Several rich potential investors.
• A natural rivalry situation with the Vancouver Canucks.
• A populace that’s supported minor league hockey for several decades (including current junior teams in Kent and Everett), and which includes many CBC hockey viewers.

What Seattle’s not got in its favor:

• No past NHL heritage; especially when compared to Quebec City, Friedman’s other pick for a likely new Coyotes’ home. The Seattle Metropolitans of the old Pacific Coast Hockey Association did win the Stanley Cup back in 1917. But compared to the former Quebec Nordiques’ fan memories, the Metropolitans are a mere trivia answer.
• No suitable place to play in town. Ex-Sonics owner Barry Ackerley made sure KeyArena would be only barely hockey-capable; its awkward hockey configuration requires temporarily removing the entire southern lower seating area. Quebec City already has the ex-Nordiques rink and is building a new bigger one, even without a team to play in it.

Despite these reservations, Friedman suggests it might be in the league’s financial best interest to place the Coyotes in Seattle, ready or not, and then award an expansion team to Quebec.

So, where would any Seattle Ex-Coyotes play, until a new specially built arena is ready (at least two seasons)?

• There’s KeyArena, such as it is.
• There’s the Tacoma Dome, which hosted minor league hockey from 1991-95. It seats a good 17,000 in its hockey configuration, though sightlines can be darn poor in places.
• There are the junior-hockey rinks in Kent and Everett. The latter seats 10,000 people, about as many as KeyArena’s ice configuration.
• And, of course, there’s Paul Allen’s Rose Garden in Portland.

My own favored option would be to simply expand KeyArena to the south; even though that would displace its current main tenants (the WNBA Seattle Storm and Seattle U. men’s basketball) for one season apiece.

But if an all new building is deemed really necessary, it should be (1) in Seattle proper (like the current Sodo arena scheme is) and (2) built with as little state or municipal subsidy as possible.

As a postscript, here’s a circa mid-2000s essay from the fan site SeattleHockey.net, detailing past attempts to bring the NHL here.

1944-era logo of the first seattle star, now topping the new seattlestar.net

• With the new year we must say goodbye to Swerve, the downtown retail core’s last speciality music and video shop. Its owner had insisted the store was profitable, but she had a new opportunity out of state. With Borders gone, and new Target, Nordstrom Rack, and J.C. Penney outlets still unfinished, Swerve’s loss just adds to the number of holes in downtown’s shopping spectrum.
• Also gone is Seattlest, the locally run but out-of-town owned culture and entertainment site. Its contributors have gravitated to some new all-local startups, including SEA live MUSIC (the name says it all). Another new refuge for Seattlest vets is the cross-genre arts site The Seattle Star. Its founders deliberately chose a name previously used first by a small but spunky afternoon daily (1899-1947) and then by Michael Dowers’ still fondly remembered comix zine (1985-89).
• The indie Greenwood Market, after several years of uncertain future, is finally being razed so Kroger can expand its adjacent Fred Meyer.
• As another dreary Legislative session’s about to start, ex-State Rep. Brendan Williams bashes Oly Democrats as professional cavers.
• R.I.P. Ronald Searle, 91, satirical illustrator ne plus ultra and “Britain’s greatest graphic artist.”
• The feisty-as-ever Roger Ebert has a list of reasons why movie revenues were way, way down in ’11. “Too many sucky movies” isn’t even on the list.
• We’ve linked in the past to gadfly pundit Glenn Greenwald and his diatribes against those he believes are too capitulant toward the right. He’s added Obama, and anybody who supports Obama, to his targets. But Greenwald went too far when he alleged that Obama could “rape a nun” on live TV and his supporters would still back him.
• Speaking of rash allegations, Bloomberg.com’s got a UK academic who claims Wall Street, and perhaps U.S. business in general, has been taken over by “corporate psychopaths.”
• We close with a lovely picture of the highly unofficial “Occupy the Rose Parade” float, a 70-foot octopus made from plastic grocery bags. Looks just like an oversize version of something you’d see at any Fremont Solstice Parade.

The Modern Language Association, those ol’ guardians of the university English department as the supposed nexus of all thought and creativity in America, are meeting in town this week.

Besides the members-only conferences and seminars on surviving campus budget cuts and why doesn’t America appreciate the greatness of English profs, there are a couple of major peripheral events open to the general public.

On Saturday (1/7/12), Town Hall hosts mini-readings (three minutes max) by “60 Writers,” including “upstart, altertative” scribes. Some are local; some are in town for the conference. It’s free and starts at 7:30.

And Washington State University’s Creative Media and Digital Culture Program is organizing a display of “Electronic Literature.” Its curators describe the exhibit as featuring:

…over 160 works by artists who create literary works involving various forms and combinations of digital media, such as video, animation, sound, virtual environments, and multimedia installations, for desktop computers, mobile devices, and live performance.

The works in the exhibit were all “born digital.” That is, they were designed to be experienced as digital media spectacles, not merely adapted from straight-text products.

The exhibit is open Thurs.-Sat. (1/5-7/12) in the Wash. State Convention Center Room 609. There’s also a free tie-in reading event, 8 p.m. Friday (1/6/12) at Richard Hugo House, 1634 11th Ave. on Capitol Hill.

(UPDATE: Even though the Electronic Literature exhibit’s web page says it’s free, it’s really only open to ticketed MLA convention goers. Locals can attend the Hugo House reading, however.)

It’s only appropriate that all this is happening this year in Seattle, ground zero for the big transition from dead-tree lit product to the brave new digi-future.

Be there or be pulp.

Local news items, and my one-take comments on them, should return in greater quantity starting Wednesday. Meanwhile, some more stuff from here and from the larger online world:

• Eric Scigliano says Seattle can’t inspire a comedy like Portlandia or the old Almost Live! because we’re no longer lovable “underdogs.” I say bah. If that were the case, there would be no great comics from New York. (Of course, a lot of New York comedy is about individual lovable underdogs trying to survive life in New York.)
• David Goldstein gently chides SeattlePI.com’s most famous remaining employee, political commentator Joel Connelly, for suggesting that (1) Seattle liberals should be more kind and appreciative toward moderate Republicans, and that (2) moderate Republicans still exist.
• Here’s one person who defends Village Voice Media’s sex-ad site who doesn’t work for Village Voice Media. She’s Jill Brenneman, a self described sex-workers’ advocate.
• A blogger about “natural health and freedom” sees ordinary folks becoming more violent in ways that remind him of corporate/governmental/military brutality. He calls it “trickle down tyranny.”
• A writer of space-opera novels pens a “private letter from genre to literature,” in which he says highbrow-lit fans should learn to appreciate the world of the bestsellers.
• Glenn Greenwald believes that despite his racist legacy, Ron Paul still offers up some ideas progressives should listen to. As for me, a white supremacist who wants to legalize pot is still a white supremacist.
• Mental Floss offers a list of nostalgic sounds of yesteryear—the sounds of rotary phones, manual typewriters, and TV channel selectors.

Once again, the Space Needle held a fireworks spectacular to ring in the new year. It almost makes me forgive ’em for their role in the Chihuly gallery fiasco.

This year’s boom-boom lasted a healthy eight minutes, with a vast array of colors and effects.

My wishes for the year to come:

• Health and financial stability for you all.
• Serious progress toward revenue reform in this state at last.
• At least one local sports team with a winning season.
• And the total repudiation of the Rabid Right this election season, nationally and in each state.

Hurry hurry! Get your nominations for MISCmedia’s 2012 In/Out list in TODAY!

Now for your dose of randomosity:

• The UW Huskies sure scored them a ton-O-points in the Alamo Bowl. Now, if only the defensive squad had made the plane trip.
• Glenn Greenwald insists Obama’s playing Clintonesque strategy games by governing as a “centrist Republican.” Through this, Greenwald surmises, the actual Republicans are forced to move so far to the right that they’re alienating everybody who doesn’t only listen to the right-wing-only media. I would say that’s a nice theory, but a little too simple.
• Instead of sailing on the air currents in a balloon, why not on top of a balloon? On a bunch of balloons stuck together? Oh, and with no motor, so you go wherever the winds take you?
• After three decades of wishing and working toward it, we might actually be near the end of AIDS.
• There’s an alleged under-the-table campaign underway to get the current federal nuclear regulatory boss fired. His crime? Not caving to industry lobbyists.
• Winner of today’s screw-the-consumer “convenience fee” scam: Verizon.
• IFC network boss Evan Shapiro does a better job than I’ve done at answering the anti-TV snobs (you know, those dudes who boast of having never watched a second of the medium in 10 years, yet who also claim to know enough about it to make blanket statements about its unmitigated evilness).

The holiday ad season was pretty good for the SeaTimes. Relatively speaking. The Black Friday edition was weighted down with some five pounds of circulars. Ad space within the paper itself also grew, to at least 10 pages most days before Christmas.

Then the season ended. Tuesday’s paper was back to 26 pages, and with only five local news stories.

The paper’s remaining staff is moving over the inter-holiday week into the ex-furniture warehouse next to 13 Coins, out of its 81-year-old Fairview Avenue HQ. With this relocation, the SeaTimes‘ longtime nickname of “Fairview Fannie” becomes a misnomer.

My suggested replacement: “The Bore on Boren.”