storebrandsdecisions.com

• The Capitol Hill Seattle blog has a handy dandy map showing the retailers who’ve applied to sell hard liquor as soon as the state liquor stores close. They include Safeway, Kroger’s QFC and Fred Meyer, Walgreens, Target, Albertsons, and of course Costco. Indie stores that have applied include Pete’s Wines on Fairview, Full Throttle Bottles in Georgetown, Ralph’s in Belltown, Pioneer Square Market, Madison Market Co-op, Wine World in Wallingford, and Viet Wah in the International District. Bartell’s, PCC, Whole Foods, Rite Aid, and Trader Joe’s have not applied, at least not yet.
• We must say goodbye to David Ishii, who owned a leading Pioneer Square bookstore for some 30 years.
• Finally! Some Dems in the state Legislature are suing to overturn the “supermajority” requirement for any tax reform bills.
• Higher parking rates in greater downtown: could they actually be increasing business at local merchants?
• A wholesale donut bakery in Georgetown was found with flies, rat poop, and snail near the food products. (Doubles the nutritional value.)
• Andrew Breitbart RIP: The far-right blogger, speaker, and all around bully died of an apparent sudden heart attack. How does one humanely grieve a man who did the exact opposite to others?
• Playboy wants to run a nightclub on Richard Branson’s proposed private tourist space station. Because nothing says gentlemanly posh quite like being stuck in a steel tube which may or may not feature artificial gravity.

twenty-flight-rock.co.uk

Remember, we’ve got a free Vanishing Seattle presentation at 2 p.m. Saturday in the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park, 319 2nd Ave. S. in Pioneer Square.

• MISCmedia is dedicated today to the memory of Davy Jones, one Tiger Beat heartthrob who aged gracefully and remained true to the spirit of life-affirming pop music. Until today, the Monkees were among the few ’60s bands whose original members were all still alive. And despite their reputation as a prefab creation of little depth and less staying power, their music and comedy have remained vibrant. A goodly number of the tracks they churned out between filming TV episodes, over tracks laid down by the L.A. “Wrecking Crew” session musicians, are acknowledged classics.
• Sadly, we must also say goodbye to Daniel “Eric” Slocum, a familiar news face/voice on KOMO-TV and radio for some 16 years, and a sometime amateur poet. In recent years, he’d come out as both gay and a chronic depressive. He apparently died by his own hand.
• Bill Lyne, a member of a college teachers’ union, speaks out on behalf of K-12 teachers’ unions. Lyne calls out corporate-sponsored “school reform” measures as union busting drives, part of a larger strategy to put K-12 firmly under corporate control.
• Seattle rides transit more than Portland.
• We previously mentioned Amazon has guidelines for erotic ebooks, including a few verboten fetish topics. Now, independent e-book distributors are refusing to handle a wider range of sex books. The censorious force putting on the pressure to silence these voices? PayPal.
• The first African American director to win a feature-film Oscar is a Seattleite. His parents were in the punk band Bam Bam.
• The Thunderbird Motel, once one of Aurora Avenue’s many affordable hostelries before it became one of Aurora’s most notorious drug and crime zones, is being demolished this week, to be replaced by a Catholic low-income housing project.
• This one’s several months old but still haunting—Seattle Met’s story about the last Aurora Bridge jumper.
• Three Republican staff members in the state legislature claim they were fired for not working on GOP campaigns and fundraisers. There are no allegations that the staffers were asked to do campaign work on state time.
• NPR now says it will urge news reporters and producers to seek out “the truth” on any given topic, rather than merely repeating two sides of a dispute as having equal merit. Or something like that.
• Wanna help fund the next Jim Woodring graphic novel?
• The next incarnation of clueless marketers trying to be cyber-hip: QR codes where they shouldn’t be.
• Rediscovered (though still out of print): It’s highbrow Brit novelist Martin Amis’s 1982 user guide to early arcade video games!

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.

• 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.

• 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!

freecabinporn.com

• This site of nothing but pictures of countryside cabins (rustic to postmodern) reminds me of my young adult years, when all writers were supposed to want to live in cabins. I never did. To me, the countryside was something to escape from.
• On a similar thread, some of the same “writerly lifestyle” folks who’d demanded that I be a mellow back-to-nature lover also kept laundry lists of everything they hated about the modern world. Meet today’s incarnation of that trope, Jonathan Franzen.
• NHL hockey in Seattle: even more likely?
• Here’s something novel for ya: Scenes of women in superhero comics that female readers actually like!
• When a Google attorney goes on a Time Warner site to advocate for less draconian copyright laws, something’s going on. I don’t know exactly what, but something.
• A young Brit couple Tweeted® about their upcoming trip to the States. They said they were gonna “destroy America” by, among other hard-partyin’ things, “digging up Marilyn Monroe’s grave.” Agents arrested ’em on their arrival at LAX, detained ’em, and shipped ’em back home. They insist they were just joking. Memo to Homeland Security: Anyone who actually wants to destroy America probably won’t Tweet® about it.
• If the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation wanted to keep selling itself as the voice of defiant courage, it shouldn’t have caved to the phony right wing smear campaign against Planned Parenthood.
• Don’t watch porn on your laptop in a public library where kids can see it. Make ’em find the really good sites on their own.
• Just why do restaurant websites so consistently suck?

• Clever entrepreneurs in Philadelphia have a line of T-shirts and posters exhorting what I and many of my fellow writers and artists have been shrieking lo these many years to cheapskate dot-com and media execs: FREELANCE AIN’T FREE!
• Good idea in the legislature #1: Looking into the abundance of “special taxing districts” around the state, with an eye toward paring them down.
• Good idea in the legislature #2: Getting rid of a Cold War-era ordinance that authorized state government to persecute, blackball, and ban “subversive” people and groups.
• Let’s all welcome the Houston Astros to the American League West (the Mariners’ division), not this year but next year. Except they might not be called the Astros by then.
• Shepherd Fairey, that “radical chic” Obama and Andre the Giant portraitist, didn’t just steal from AP wire photos. He’s regularly “borrowed” even entire images from sincerely political artists around the world, completely uncredited and uncompensated.
• SeattlePI.com is even more short-staffed than before, but it’s still got some good stuff. Like Vanessa Ho and Joe Dyer’s excellent feature on homeless people sleeping under the Alaskan Way Viaduct, who are being kicked out of there by the state. As Anatole France wrote back in 1894,

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.

• All right, fans of glass buildings and obscure dangerous plants, you all have one year to figure out how to save the Volunteer Park Conservatory.
• Update: That 83 year old activist Tacoma priest, who was on a hunger strike while in federal detention? He’s still detained, but off the hunger strike.
• Another of those silly surveys claims Washington DC has surpassed Seattle as the nation’s “most literate” city.
• A Republican state legislator introduced a bill to scuttle any enforcement of the feds’ prescribed remedies concerning excessive force by Seattle police, and shunt the matter over to “a bipartisan taskforce.” Where, presumably, Republican politicians would hold veto power on any policy changes.
• In other legislative news, farmers and farm workers both back a bill to slow the local spread of “E-Verify,” the federal background-check program for immigrant workers.
• The new Businessweek’s cover story discusses Amazon’s latest move into publishing its own e-books—the opening of an NYC office intended to issue bigtime books by bigtime authors. The headline (“Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business”) and the cover image (yes, a burning book, straight outta Fahrenheit 451) depict the viewpoint of an NY publishing cartel both scared to pieces and smugly defensive of their old time business-as-usual, now threatened by this dot-com upstart. And just as you’d expect, the piece quotes the industry’s Big Six conglomerate-owned mega-publishers defending their wasteful, slow traditional practices by hyping their “role as nurturers of literary culture.” As if the commercial book biz had ever been about that.

Without any further ado, the big new product announcement promised here on Tuesday.

Actually, it’s an old product.

But a new way to buy and enjoy it!

It’s The Myrtle of Venus, my short, funny novel of “Sex, Art, and Real Estate.”

It’s now out in ultra handy e-book form, for the insanely low price of merely $2.99.

Yes, that link goes to the “Kindle Store.” But you don’t need a genuine Kindle machine to read it. They’ve got free apps for Macs, PCs, iPads, and lots of mobile platforms.

Why should all of this site’s loyal friends and true download it?

Because it’s alternately sexy, hilarious, and poignant.

Because it takes you back to those heady days of the real estate bubble.

Because it’s a rollicking tale of eleven lively characters who combine, clash, and re-combine.

The action all occurs amid the dying days of an artists’ studio cooperative. The artists’ new landlady, the World’s Blandest Woman, wants them out. But the artists have a plan. They’ll seduce her into becoming one of them.

But their best laid plans don’t get her laid the way they plan.

What happens next is as wild as it is unpredictable.

To find out, you’ll just have to get the thing and read it already.

revel body, via geekwire.com

• Seattle’s really got some high-tech hardware geniuses. Among them: the folks who’ve taken the same principles behind the Sonicare toothbrush and applied them to create advanced 21st century vibrators! (Really.)
• We’ve previously mentioned the strong presence of women’s erotica among Amazon’s e-book sales. Now come charges that some of the self-published smut books are stolen from stories posted for free viewing on erotica websites. (These allegations are against the small-time publishers, not Amazon.)
• Crazy Wall St. idea of the week (thus far): A local corporate-buyout analyst showed up on CNBC and said Microsoft should buy Barnes & Noble.
• Here’s one way to make money off of the walking renaissance. Make a big venture-funded software thing to help folks find homes to buy in walkable neighborhoods.
• Our ol’ pal Geov Parrish believes the state budget mega-crisis might, just might mind you, lead to talk, or even actual action, toward reforming Washington’s mighty regressive tax system—by far the principal failing of a local “progressive” politic that never dares challenge big business.
• On a related matter, state House Speaker Frank Chopp is floating the idea of Wash. State running its own bank, just like North Dakota. Or something as close to a bank as the state constitution now permits.
• The Mariners lose one really good pitcher, gain one maybe decent-hitting position player. What could possibly go wrong?
• Who knew the original Ladies’ Home Journal was so prescient? A 1911 list of “What Might Happen in the Next Hundred Years” predicts “telephones around the world,” airplanes used as “aerial war-ships,” automobiles “cheaper than horses,” “trains one hundred and fifty miles an hour,” grand opera “telephoned to private homes,” photographs “telegraphed to any distance,” “cameras electrically connected with screens at opposite ends of circuits,” ready-to-eat meals in stores, genetically modified foods, and even global warming. Writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr. did get a few things wrong, such as “hot and cold air from spigots,” the deliberate extinction of mosquitos, and the removal of C, Q, and X from the alphabet. Watkins also didn’t predict that his magazine would still be in business today, after many of its compatriots went to the great newsstand in the sky.
• Clever videomakers in Montana have released a thoroughly obliterating parody of a particularly dumb “rebel lifestyle” pickup truck commercial.
• And a great big thank you for those who attended the Seattle Invitationals Sat. nite, at which I performed what I hope was a respectful, straightforward rendition of the Presley classic “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care).” Since this is the 50th anniversary of the Seattle World’s Fair, I’d wanted to perform the best song from It Happened at the World’s Fair. But the live band didn’t know it. So here it is for all of you, in the original rendition.

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.

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.

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.