from boobsdontworkthatway.tumblr.com

• Comic and fantasy artists, and their fans, have long been stereotyped as guys who don’t know anything about women. Here’s visual evidence supporting the allegation, in a blog entitled “Boobs Don’t Work That Way.” (And here’s some advice from artist Max Riffner on how to draw women as if you paid attention to them.)
• Wu’s boo-boo puts Wu in deep doo-doo.
• If all-electric cars take off, how will we make and distribute the electricity needed to run them?
• Author Robert S. Becker is one of the commentators who sees the ideological roots of American conservatism in the heritage of the Deep South, in its economy of big corporate farms led by self-styled “rebels” and operated by cheap and/or enslaved labor.…
• …while Paul Krugman has had it up to here with the myth that there’s a “centrist” silent majority, made up of “swing voters” who somehow happen to completely agree with the D.C. pundit caste.
• Phony debt “crisis” conspiracy theory of the day: Are Republicans luring Obama into unilaterally raising the debt ceiling, as an excuse to impeach him?
• The post-lockout Seahawks will do without the star quarterback who stayed a little too long.
• Councilmember Nick Licata would like a city park dedicated to Seattle writers. I might have a snark about this a little later on.
• This year’s Burning Man festival in Nevada will be the last. Now, all the Seattle artists who only show their work at Burning Man might have to actually exhibit it to (gasp!) locals.

• Among the Plan Vs, Plan Ws, and Plan Xs to resolve the Republican-invented “debt ceiling crisis” (which, as pundit Eric Byler notes, is “as fake as professional wrestling“) is a joint House/Senate committee that would have extra-ordinary powers to shape legislation that the full bodies would not get to amend. Huffington Post calls it a “Super Congress.” Now if we only had a “Super President,” like the one in a 1967 TV cartoon of the same name. (Yes, I am old enough to have seen the show during its one network run, and yes, I did.)
• Speaking of fantasy entertainments, Hong Kong scientists claim their tests with photons prove nothing can go faster than light. Then, they extrapolate from that to claim that therefore, time travel is impossible. Well, there are any number of Whovians who would argue about that.
• The King County Council failed to vote on Monday about the utterly necessary plan to save Metro Transit. Let’s hope the delay means enough votes are being attained.
• Who (heart)s, or at least partly defends, the Oslo terror killer? There’s Glenn Beck. And there’s a Wall St. Journal op-ed imploring its readers not to let a little thing like a mass murderer dissuade them from the true paths of racism and Islamophobia. Andrew Sullivan, meanwhile, identifies the shooter as an example of “Christianism,” which he defines as “the desperate need to control all the levers of political power to control or guide the lives of others.”
• Good news for all of us who’ve been totally bummed out by the Mariners’ record dive—turns out there will be pro football this year after all.
• If you’re going to the UW campus, don’t masturbate in public. Leave that to the profs.

seen outside the capitol hill block party

• The Norwegian mass murder suspect allegedly claims he did it to publicize a manifesto, which (besides pasting in big parts from the Unabomber’s manifesto) exhorts his countrymen toward further violence in support of racism, nationalism, and general jingoism. Look: Slaughtering innocents is not what any truly “superior” person ever does.
• Meanwhile locally, the Nordic Heritage Museum will host a vigil for the shooting victims this Tuesday evening.
• Dan Bertolet’s got a nice roundup of anti-waterfront tunnel arguments. And there’s going to be an anti-tunnel rally next Monday (Aug. 1).
• A poll shows 71 percent of Americans dislike the Republicans’ creation and bungling of the made-up “debt crisis.” Of course, polls like this one don’t matter, since today’s Republicans don’t give a hoot about anybody except the billionaires and lobbyists who own them.

oh, NOW they get customers.

• SeattlePI.com is moving, away from what had been the Post-Intelligencer building on Elliott Ave. The new office space is said to be “larger” than the space the news site had been occupying. (Let’s hope that means the site’s going to add staff, to get at least slightly closer to a comprehensive local news source.) The P-I globe’s staying put, for now.
• The Seattle weekly that’s not Seattle Weekly gets the big fawning establishment treatment as it approaches its 20th anniversary in September.
• The alleged Norwegian mass murderer (mostly of teenagers) is shaping up to be a right wing “Christian,” a virulent racist and anti-Muslim, and a member of at least one nationalist cell group. None of this has stopped right wingers in other countries from falsely attributing the murders to Muslim terrorists.
• Looks like the ’04 Presidential election may have been just as rigged as the ’00 election may have been, though with operational differences.
• Fans descended on a low-key charity basketball event to proclaim their unflagging desire to see men’s pro b-ball back in town. I also want the Seattle Supersonics back, and I want them in Seattle.
• Amy Winehouse, R.I.P.: Let’s put this succinctly as possible. Drugs suck.

• Seattle artist Ginny Ruffner’s giant plastic robotic flower pot is now fully operational at Seventh Avenue and Union Street, across from ACT Theatre and in front of the back end of the Sheraton Hotel. Any resemblance to “Wilting Willie,” the puppet flower pot from the old local kids’ TV show Wunda Wunda, is purely coincidental.
• Update #1: Upon the request of the Tulalip Tribes, Microsoft has removed the internal code name “Tulalip” from its otherwise not officially announced social networking project.
• Update #2: There will indeed be one last art party at the 619 Western studios, before all 100-or-so artists in the 101-year-old building get evicted. The hastily arranged event is “Last Thursday,” to be held, yes, on July 28.
• The state Liquor Board’s response to Seattle’s request to let bars stay open after 2 a.m.? They’ll “consider it.”
• War on Working Americans Dept.: Someone allegedly turned on heat lamps beamed at a picket line outside an on-strike Hyatt hotel in Chicago, in the middle of the worst heat wave America (except the Pac NW) has seen in years.
• There’s now a foosball table with female players! And they’re not Barbies!
• Today, we are all Sons and Daughters of Norway.

first 'weekly' cover, 1976, from historylink.org

The late investor and arts patron Bagley Wright lived just long enough to see one of the local institutions he jump-started, Seattle Weekly, descend from troubled to pathetic.

First, the paper got caught up, through no fault of its own, in the PR campaign against its parent company Village Voice Media and VVM’s online escort-ad site Backpage.com. Mayor McGinn has ordered the city to not advertise in the Weekly until VVM closes Backpage.

Second, and this is something local management’s responsible for, was a cover story about an S&M practitioner accused of turning a consensual encounter with a streetwalker into a non-consensual violent assault. Feminist blogger Cara Kulwicki has called the story’s writer and SW’s editors “rape apologists,” citing the author’s speculating that the event might have simply been “a bondage session gone haywire.”

Now, they’ve put out a cover piece about local true-crime author Ann Rule. The article’s writer (who’d never written for the Weekly before) claimed Rule had written lies and/or conducted sloppy research about an Oregon woman convicted of murder, in Rule’s 2003 book Heart Full of Lies. The issue was published before SW editors figured out the article had been written by the convicted woman’s boyfriend.

Setting aside the matter of Backpage, over which the SW staff has no power, the once solidly establishment Weekly is drowning in sensationalism. Maybe it should swim back toward safer areas like politics (oops, VVM cut way back on the Weekly’s formerly formidable news staff) or arts coverage (oops, ditto).

• The Tulalip Tribes don’t like it that Microsoft is allegedly using “Tulalip” as the internal code name of a rumored social networking project—even though anything the project produces will be renamed before it goes public. There are worse things to name a software project after than a group of disparate indigenous communities shoved onto a single reservation, where there’s now a big casino resort with a whale statue fountain.
• Nobody might walk in L.A., but bicycling there might be easier now that that burg’s city council has banned motorists from harassing bicyclists.
• More trouble for Puget Sound orcas—experts say the local whales show dangerous signs of inbreeding. Insert your own comparisons to the royal family here.
• Thurston County detectives nabbed a man suspected of stealing Hot Pockets from a local woman’s freezer. Isn’t this how Dr. Evil from Austin Powers got started?
• Gay activists, dressed as “barbarians” and armed with glitter to throw about, stormed Michele Bachmann’s hubby’s “ex gay” “therapy clinic.” (Mr. Bachmann has been quoted as calling gays “barbarians” who need to be “disciplined.)
• R.I.P. Lucian Freud, 88, British figurative painter extraordinaire, master of lumps and wrinkles and frailty and corpulence. Even when he painted young, “sexy” models, he showed them as the old people they would become.

I knew I was going to attend the final group exhibit opening/closing party at the 619 Western art studios.

I didn’t know, until Wednesday, that I already have.

The city’s Department of Planning and Development suddenly proclaimed the building’s tenants have to get out by Oct. 1, six months earlier than the previous eviction date.

And, what’s worse, the tenants can’t hold public events in the building by Aug. 1.

That means no August First Thursday openings.

from sightline.org

• Congrats. Seattle’s been named America’s sixth most walkable city by WalkScore.com. It’s absolutely purely coincidence that WalkScore happens to be based in Seattle. Why, just two months ago, the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center named Seattle America’s first most walkable city, and that outfit’s in North Carolina or somewhere like that. (I’ll have more to say about this greater topic any week now.)
• The $20 emergency car-tab surtax to save King County Metro Transit stands a good chance of becoming a referendum to the voters, now that a fifth County Council member says she’s considering it.
• Long-shot City Council candidate Dale Pusey wants to keep the viaduct, at least as a park. I heartily agree.
• If our current postal system is snarked at by the digerati as “snail mail,” what will they call it if it cuts back to three delivery days a week?
• R.I.P. Alex Steinweiss, 94, who first had the idea of making original cover art for record albums back in the 78 era, and for decades continued to be the greatest practitioner of the art form he’d invented.

• When better toilets are designed, the Gates Foundation will design them.
• R.I.P. Bagley Wright, 1924-2011. A Princeton grad from Georgia who married into the Bloedel timber family, Wright was one of the five original Space Needle investors (hence the Needle’s original corporate name, the “Pentagram Corp.”). He also helped run the Seattle Art Museum and the Seattle Repertory Theatre, cofounded the medical-devices maker Physio Control, was a key player in downtown real estate development, was a major early investor in Seattle Weekly, and sold the house where Kurt Cobain died. He and his wife Virginia amassed a large contemporary-art collection, some of which is on view at their own gallery space.
• Anand Giridharadas believes it’s all well and good for bright minds to go to work at “social entrepreneur” projects, but he insists that “real change requires politics.”
• Buried in a story about PopCap Games boss Dave Roberts is an important lesson that always needs re-teaching:

…Making simple products is way more difficult than making complicated products…. Simple is more complicated, simple is elegant, simple is harder.”

happy bite of seattle consumers

• Food vendors, start your engines. The City Council likes you.
• A Vancouver news site describes last month’s Canuck riot as a desperate attempt by the city’s young males to momentarily escape “a state that could be described as a deficit of the real, which is dangerous and unstable place, full of unfocused outrage and an overdeveloped sense of personal entitlement that constantly simmers just below the surface.”
• As past allegations of phone tapping, computer hacking, and other dirty dealings resurface against Rupert Murdoch’s U.S. businesses (which still aren’t directly implicated in the current U.K. phone hacking scandal), Peter Cohan at Forbes suggests News Corp. shareholders would have themselves a much more robust business if it weren’t for Murdoch, his kinfolk, and their insistence upon continuing to run newspapers.
• One anti-tunnel measure stays on local ballots; a second gets kicked off by a judge.

No matter what you think of big box retail chains, I always find it sad to see one go.

Especially when it’s in an industry for which I have particular fondness (and in which I’ve invested much of my life).

This is the case this week. Borders Books and Music, not too long ago one of the Big Two of bookselling, didn’t find a buyer and will probably shut down. Going out of business sales at the remaining 399 branches (down from 1,249 in 2003) may start Friday.

You can read exhaustive histories of the company elsewhere. If you do, you’ll learn how the Borders brothers of Ann Arbor, MI started a book superstore operation that was bought by Kmart, which merged it with the mall chains Waldenbooks and Brentano’s; then the whole “books group” was spun off into a separate company.

“My” Borders, the downtown Seattle location, opened circa 1994, during the Kmart ownership. At the time, it was considered a major vote of corporate confidence in a downtown that had lost the Frederick & Nelson department store  two years before.

It seemed a warm and friendly place despite its size. It had downtown’s best CD selection, including a healthy stock of local consignments. It had a children’s section that served as a play area for shoppers’ tots. It had in-store events nearly every weekend, ranging from readings to acoustic musical performances and chocolate tastings. Its charity gift wrap table helped many a bachelor such as myself every Christmas season.

But the local store, no matter how cool it was, could not escape the parent company’s troubles.

As local staff was cut back, the in-store events disappeared. The up-only escalator to the mezzanine level was removed. The music and DVD departments were severely shrunk. The various book genres were shuffled around, and a huge section of floor space was given over to long-shelf-life stationery items and even iPhone cases.

Now it will be a brief bargain store, then get gradually emptier, then go dark.

There will still be physical places to acquire physical books, including Barnes & Noble and Arundel Books downtown.

But what of the Borders downtown space?

It’s not like there are a lot of other big chain stores itching for a two story space like that. (Though if you’re listening, University Book Store? Powell’s? Even JC Penney?….)

•

A secondary loser in the Borders shutdown: Starbucks. Its Seattle’s Best Coffee subsidiary had dwindled in the past few years, mostly to a string of coffee stands inside Borders stores. Will the rest of SBC’s stores survive this?

About three weeks ago, I wrote about the long term decline of cable access TV, once one of Seattle’s most fertile loci of creativity.

Today, of course, we have online video streaming.

This is so much more convenient for niche-audience programming in several ways. Viewers don’t have to tune in at any specific time. They can easily catch up with past episodes. They can watch wherever they have a computer (or tablet or smart phone) and a broadband or WiFi connection.

And with contemporary digital video gear so much cheaper to buy (or rent) these days, low-budget and no-budget producers can accomplish quite a degree of slickness.

Take for example The Spit Show with Indus & Raquel (produced by Indus Alelia, written and directed by Dan Desrosiers, hosted by Alelia and Raquel Werner).

Like many cable access comedy shows of the 1990s, The Spit Show consists of comedy and music bits, with continuing characters and a loose storyline.

But unlike those older shows, it has fancy production values and is edited with brisk comic pacing.

And without a weekly time slot to fill, it can put out episodes of any length (more or less 10 minutes) at a relatively leisurely frequency (four episodes since February).

Alelia and Werner aren’t asking you to be home at any particular time. They’re not asking you to invest 29 minutes into deciding whether you like their work.

But if you do like their work, they’d like you to keep coming back.

• A Japanese American community activist wants part of S. Dearboarn Street rechristened “Mikado Street,” the name of one of Dearborn’s 1890s predecessors. The question not raised in the linked news story: Can ethnic pride be boosted by the use of a name associated with British comic stereotyping? Or, conversely, could this move help “reclaim” the word?
• Tacoma’s biggest private employers these days? Hospital chains.
• Is Microsoft trying to build its own social networking site? Heck if I know.
• State Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown sez Wash. state just might be ready to approve gay marriage.
• Simon Reynolds finds a lot of retro classic rock n’ soul tributes on today’s pop music charts. And he’s sick and tired of it.

• How I misspent my Saturday—getting lost in the Seattle Public Library’s historic 1962 World’s Fair pictures. I’m particularly fascinated by the name of a fair exhibit, the “Home of the Immediate Future.”
• Sable Verity wants the Seattle Urban League to come back strong from its recent misfortunes, and believes its once-and-future leader is not the man for the job.
• Close a hillside road. Bring in a dump truck, pre-loaded with 10,000 tennis balls. You can guess the wondrous spectacle that ensues.
• One positive result of the viaduct and 520 highway projects—the discovery of lots of pioneer garbage!
• Everybody in or near Seattle: Go see Mad Homes. It’s a site specific art installation occurring in a group of Capitol Hill houses set to be razed for apartments later this year. The 11 invited artists, given free rein to make “permanent” changes to the structures, have filled them and their front and side yards with fun and fanciful works. It’s up until Aug. 7.