Amazon.com Widgets
I stayed off of social media (except for my classic-cartoon Facebook groups) after the Seahawks’ devastating last-minute loss (or rather failure to win) in Super Bowl Eks El Eye Eks.
I’m still not ready to see any replays of that fatal last play, or to really discuss it.
But I will say this:
After cheating death so many times, the Seahawks’ lucky streak finally ran out with one ill-advised pass play at the game’s end.
But that single moment can’t erase the team’s great achievements this season and last.
And it can’t lessen how coach Pete Carroll and the players (including and perhaps especially Marshawn Lynch) have performed, both on the field and as members of the larger community.
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The game telecast provided an intriguing addendum to our recent story about Anheuser-Busch taking over the local Elysian craft brewery and brew-pub chain.
Just over a week after the Elysian announcement, AB ran a Super Bowl commercial touting Budweiser as the drink of choice for real beer drinkers, not those artsy craft-beer snobs who go for “pumpkin peach ale.”
I.e., just the sort of product that Elysian has made, marketed, and championed.
Jim Vorel at Paste calls the spot “hypocritical” and “anti-craft-beer.”
I call it big corporate pseudo-anti-elitism.
You can just call it dumb.
Super Bowl Eks Ell Eye Eks begins some time after 3:30 p.m. our time on Sunday. By 7 p.m. the mighty Seahawks will either “Re-Pete” as NFL champs (a slogan based on the name of beloved head coach Pete Carroll) or not (perish even the possibility of the thought).
This time the whole civic zeitgeist about the game seems different.
Nothing can compare to the city’s first major men’s pro sports championship of the century, of course, for collective excitement, enthusiasm, and pride.
This time the civic experience (on the streets, on sports talk radio, in the sports bars, in social media, at home-game tailgate parties, etc.) seems more familiar, even rote.
It sure wasn’t expected, though. Not by everybody here; not during all of the season and post-season.
Yeah, right after last year’s game, the team and the 12s were full of confidence that our boys would be the first in a decade to win consecutive Super Bowls.
But then the ’14 season began with the Seahawks going 3-3.
But then the team got its collective act together, and sealed the top seed in the conference by the regular season’s end.
But then the Packers looked invincible for three and a half quarters of the conference championship game.
But then the Seahawks, who’d come back from halftime deficits throughout the regular season, pulled off the Miracle on FieldTurf®, sending them (and, by extension, us) straight into the Big Game.
So here we are, back at the biggest event of the year (in either sports or entertainment) in this country. The eyes of the sports world (or at least the U.S. and Canadian sports world) are upon our noble and valiant gents.
Even The Nation, a publication that seldom pays any attention to sports (or, despite its name, to anything beyond the NY/DC corridor), is chanting “Solidarity and Seahawks Forever.”
Writer Dave Zirin admires how Seahawk players have spoken out about racist cops, racist sports-media, and college sports’ frequent neglect of injured players.
Zirin likes how Marshawn Lynch has consistently defied “that walking, talking corporate crime spree Roger Goodell.”
Zirin even likes coach Carroll (“that rare football coach who does not think he’s the reincarnation of General Patton”).
So sleep tight, 12s, secure in the knowledge that we, and our champions, are in it for more than just a game.
When I took an unplanned, unscheduled blog break last summer, I also neglected maintenance on the web links at the left side of this page.
I’ve gone back to some of them today.
Turns out I’m not the only one who just drifted away from writing on the Web.
Plenty of the links that had been on this page now lead to “404 Not Found” alerts, or to other enterprises altogether.
Then there were the sites that, like mine for much of last year, were neither closed nor updated.
I’ve removed most of them from the link list.
But there are a couple of more ambitious group sites that I wish would come back:
If their reasons for going away are anything like mine were, these sites’ operators simply had other lives, other things to do (or attempt to do). Continuing to send words and/or pictures out into the ether (or the cloud), with little to no compensation or hope of any, just ain’t something some people want to keep doing forever.
In other words, today’s Web 2.0 status quo isn’t just killing most of the “old media” industries.
It’s also killing creativity in its own online “space.”
There will still be four Elysian brewpubs in Seattle.
There will still be various Elysian beers on tap and in bottles at bars, restaurants, and stores in the region and beyond.
There will still (probably) be an Elysian Brewery on Airport Way South, not far from the old Rainier Brewery.
But they’ll all be owned now by AB InBev (doing business in this country as Anheuser-Busch).
The Belgian beer conglomerate that bought Budweiser (and commands 47 percent of the nation’s total beer sales) is now buying up craft brewers around the country. Just weeks ago, it snapped up Oregon’s 10 Barrel. It already owns 32 percent of the now-merged Redhook and Widmer Brothers.
And now, Elysian has joined the empire.
The craft brewers’ national trade group, the Brewers Association, automatically expels any member company that sells out to AB or MillerCoors. (However, the group altered its rules a few years back to allow Boston Beer (Sam Adams) to remain in the group.)
For almost 19 years now, starting with a single (albeit spacious) brewpub in the Pike/Pine Corridor, Elysian has steadily become a big fish in the no-longer-so-small pond of regional craft brewers. Its product line has included over 350 different brews over the years, many of them short-term and seasonal (like its annual pumpkin ales). Its products are distributed in 11 states and two Canadian provinces.
One of those products is Loser Ale, originally introduced as a promotional tie-in with Sub Pop’s 20th anniversary in 2008. Its slogan (based on Kurt Cobain’s hand scrawled T shirt on a Rolling Stone cover, which in turn was based on SST Records’ old slogan): “Corporate Beer Still Sucks.”
Many “craft beer” drinkers see their choice of drink as meaning a lot more than just a matter of quality product. They think of indie beer (just as many think of indie music) as a crusade of the Regular Folk fighting back against a bland, monolithic corporate culture.
But should they?
As Kendall Jones writes at the Washington Beer Blog:
The sky is not falling. This is not a sign that the end is near. There are still over 3,400 breweries in America that Anheuser-Busch does not own…. As craft beer lovers, we’ve been taught that Anheuser-Busch and the other big beer companies are our enemies. So what gives? Is Elysian now evil? Not in my mind, but that’s a decision you’ll have to make for yourself.
Another view on the Elysian sale comes from Jeff Alworth at the Canadian blog Beervana, who ties Elysian’s past success to its savvy local management:
It’s long been my favorite Washington brewery, and it’s always my first stop when I hit Seattle. It has always seemed the most Seattle of the Seattle breweries—an extemporaneous brewery that could be equal parts gritty and urbane and credibly support local sports teams or indie bands. Elysian always seemed to be right where Seattle was at the time…. Just because a brewery is local doesn’t mean it can channel the local mores, culture, and zeitgeist. Elysian could and did—which is a big part of why they were so good. Can they still do that as a division of AB? In the short term, almost certainly. But I fear we’ve lost a little bit of what made Seattle Seattle.
It’s long been my favorite Washington brewery, and it’s always my first stop when I hit Seattle. It has always seemed the most Seattle of the Seattle breweries—an extemporaneous brewery that could be equal parts gritty and urbane and credibly support local sports teams or indie bands. Elysian always seemed to be right where Seattle was at the time….
Just because a brewery is local doesn’t mean it can channel the local mores, culture, and zeitgeist. Elysian could and did—which is a big part of why they were so good. Can they still do that as a division of AB? In the short term, almost certainly. But I fear we’ve lost a little bit of what made Seattle Seattle.
If, as Elysian’s owners publicly insist, joining the big boys was the only way to support the company’s continued growth and to fund further expansion, maybe there’s a natural business limit to how big a microbrewer can be and still remain independent (if no longer truly “micro”).
neonsign.com
In other news:
via the hollywood reporter
Once again, I’ve fallen behind on my idealized blog posting rate. And not for any good reason. (Though I am working on a new (kinda-sorta) project, to be announced at a later date.)
It’s sure not for a lack of things to write about. Goodness knows, dudes n’ dudettes are always suggesting those.
Here are some of the topics I could have blogged about in recent days:
yep, she married the guy in the top picture.
usa today chart listing the odds of a seahawk victory in the nfc championship game at one percent
Of course, I have to write about the Seahawks Miracle Win in Sunday’s NFC championship game.
Even if I don’t have much new to add about it.
You already know the story (or rather, the instant legend):
For most of the game, the Seahawks’ offense could no nothing right. (The team’s only score through three quarters had come from special teams, on a fake field goal executed for a surprise touchdown.)
Then with the clock inexorably winding down toward certain doom, Russell Wilson and co. suddenly could do everything right.
With impossible play after impossible play, they got a touchdown, a successful onside kick, another touchdown, and a two-point conversion, taking a three-point lead with less than a minute and a half left.
After the Packers re-tied it with a field goal in the last minute of regulation, the Seahawks won the coin toss for the first possession in overtime. Then they quickly scored a sudden-death touchdown to win it all, send the Seahawks to their second consecutive Super Bowl Game (the first time in more than a decade any team did that), and cause more jubilation all the way up First Avenue and throughout the region.
KOMO’s Eric Johnson calls it “not a game, but a metaphor for life.”
So what lessons could be learned from it? Perhaps these:
the kalakala in 2007, from wikipedia
During my long “blog silence” last year there were many things I could have written about, for sure. Some of them I mentioned in my little space in the little paper City Living Seattle (I’ll repost those soon here). Others I didn’t get to there either.
Among them:
this year's space needle fireworks were sponsored by t-mobile and heavily emphasized the color 't-mobile magenta.'
As promised previously, MISCmedia is back for two-ought-one-five with a new commitment to try and make sense (or at least document the nonsense) of Life in the Demitasse Size City.
To start things off, and for the 29th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most trusted (and only accurate) list of its kind in this and all other known media relay systems.
As always, this list operates under the premise that the future is not necessarily linear. It compiles what will become torrid and tepid in the coming year, not necessarily what’s torrid and tepid now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some RadioShack stock to sell you.
frederick & nelson christmas display, via 'patricksmercy' on flickr and sandra bolton on pinterest
I’ve not been in the mood to make blog posts for the longest time.
The mood I’ve been in has been something other than the positive, assertive persona I’ve maintained in the blog and its print precursors over the years.
Besides, the ultra luxury-obsessed, alpha-techie ruled city that is much of modern-day Seattle is, in many aspects, so different from the funky, spunky, and, yes, grungy city I had known and loved. To truly cover the “pulse” of such a place, one would need to care about hedge-fund-financed dotcoms and hundred-dollar-a-plate bistros a helluva lot more than I ever will.
And then there’s the matter of trying to convince people, even long standing acquaintances, that I need a job.
NOT an idea for something to write about, but a job.
NOT an unpaid writing “opportunity” for a commercial website, but a job.
It doesn’t have to be “writing” work, just paying work.
I’ve told this to everyone, sometimes repeatedly.
But some people I’d known for years didn’t get it.
They seemed to believe that, since they had identified me as “a writer,” all I needed was to “write” all the time.
(“Don’t worry about the money,” one dude sincerely exhorted me one evening, after I’d almost lost my second apartment in one year.)
The only way I thought I could convince these folks that I needed actual monetary income, not sub-minimum-wage (or, worse, “for the exposure”) freelance crap, was by ceasing to “be a writer.”
It didn’t really work. Either at convincing these well-meaning but ignorant folk, or at getting me a real for-the-money job. (I have gotten a long-term-temp, part-time dishwashing gig, but that’s it.)
So I’m quitting the quitting.
Actually, I have been posting on so-called “social media” sites all this time. I like the knowledge that someone’s at least reading my stuff when I post it there.
But the MISCmedia site, I promise for real this time, will be back in full force in Two Ought One Five.
I’ve got a major publishing project in the works (still), and a plan to revamp the site into a daily local news “aggregation” and commentary source (still).
But we’ll start the year, as we always have, with the mellifluous MISCmedia In/Out List, always the most accurate list of its type seen anywhere at any time.
And, as always, we need YOUR input to make it happen.
In the comments box below, please recommend what will become hotter and less-hot in the twelve months to come, in the fields of music, fashion, food/drink, the arts, architecture, socio-political trends, etc. etc.
The list’s simple rules, as always:
Good luck, and good predicting.
Went to the ol’ hometown on Tuesday. Marysville had never been a particularly “fun” or “friendly” place. Even the tiny “old” downtown has essentially no “street life.”
You drive, or are driven, everywhere, across long and increasingly crowded roads between subdivisions, strip malls, churches, schools, the golf course, the casino, the surviving still-rural patches, and the relatively low-density sidewalked streets of the original central town.
Still, there is a sense of community.
And it comes together in times of crisis, of which last week’s is the biggest in years.
These ribbons are in the Marysville-Pilchuck High School colors. When the old Marysville High (in the old town) was merged with the newer Pilchuck campus (out further into the suburban sprawl), the combined institution took Marysville High’s colors (strawberry red and white) and team name (Tomahawks).
We now know a little more about the boy who committed the murder-suicide shootings at Marysville-Pilchuck High. He’d had an emotional breakup with a girlfriend (who didn’t go to MPHS); and he may have wanted to get back at the same-age relatives and friends whom, he may have decided, had helped to cause that breakup.
But it still doesn’t really make any sense.
mark mulligan, ap via seattlepi.com
I had to break my three-month unplanned blogging hiatus to write about this.
But it’s been more than three days since the event, and I still haven’t figured out what to say.
As a few of you know, I went to the old Marysville High School. After I left, it merged with the newer Pilchuck campus. The combined Marysville-Pilchuck school took Marysville High’s red-and-white colors and “Tomahawks” team name.
My younger brother attended MPHS. (The campus is just up the road a bit from the family’s old house.) He knew many of the families involved in last Friday’s horrible shooting, including the extended family that included the shooter and the shooter’s cousins (two of the victims).
Marysville was never much of a town. The half-mile square old town (grid streets, sidewalks) was just a centrifugal point for miles of suburban and exurban sprawl, and for the Tulalip Indian Reservation.
“The Rez” was where dozens of tribes (some of whom hated each other) had been forcibly relocated in the second half of the 19th century. While the Tulalips as a whole were not as impoverished as some other tribes, they still had to deal with issues of cultural identity, drug/alcohol abuse, and the rest.
I left Marysville long before the shooter, Jaylen Fryberg, was born. But Everett Herald writer Andrew Gobin did know Fryberg. Gobin can’t figure out what happened either.
But if he or I don’t have a clue, at least we’re more knowledgable than the wingnuts who are already spreading so-called “false flag” conspiracy theories and blaming, of all people, New York ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg. (The premise being that gun-control advocates would hypnotize boys into shooting people, in order to promote taking guns away from other people.)
It’s patently false and ridiculous, but it’s more of a “rational” explanation than anything you can find in the reality of the tragedy.
76th and aurora, 1953; seattle municipal archive
Seems every week, something important from this once fair little seaport city is taken away from us in the name of density, development, or “disruption.”
Cool old bars and restaurants and shops, yes. But also a men’s pro basketball team, a daily newspaper, a radio host, a live theater space.
And the new things that replace the old things tend to be costlier, louder, hoity-toity-er. Dive bars get turned into upscale bistros; cheap apartments become luxury condos.
For someone who came of age loving the old Seattle, for all its faults and limitations, today’s city seems more and more like an alien land.
The Soul of Seattle is a hard thing to define, and different people have defined it differently. But this is how I define it.
Seattle’s soul is not loud or pushy. It doesn’t scream at you to order you to love it.
It’s quiet and confident; yes, to the point of dangerously smug self-satisfaction.
Yet it’s also funny in a self-deprecating way. Seattle’s sense of quirky humor can be seen in Ivar Haglund, J.P. Patches, John Keister, the Young Fresh Fellows’ songs, the comic art of Jim Woodring and The Oatmeal.
It believes in beauty, in many forms. The delicate curves and perfect proportions of the Space Needle; the slippery warmth of a bag of Dick’s fries; the modest elegance of a Craftsman bungalow.
It believes in old fashioned showmanship. The fringe theaters of the ’70s and ’80s; the burlesque troupes of the ’90s; the alternative circus acts of the 2000s.
It believes in old fashioned fun. Boat races; cream cheese on hot dogs; tiki parties; comics conventions.
Yet it also believes in schmoozing and in deal making. Boeing got on such good terms ith the airlines of the world that Lockheed never sustained. Microsoft made deals to put MS-DOS and Office on almost every desktop computer.
And it believes in civic progress, however it’s defined. It created monuments to its own “arrival” (the Smith Tower, the Olympic Hotel, the Century 21 Exposition). It built public spaces more beautiful than they had to be (the UW campus, the Volunteer Park Conservatory). It leveled hills, filled in tide flats, raised streets, lowered Lake Washington, and put up parks everywhere from freeway airspace to an old naval base.
There are several places around town where this Soul of Seattle still lives and even thrives.
Here are just a few of them:
(Cross posted with City Living Seattle.)
fix.com
To date, I have turned down all requests to allow paid “advertorial” content on this site. (You’re welcome.)
However, I am accepting (unpaid) the following request to link to a commercial site:
Hi there, as you may or may not know, July 23rd is National Hot Dog Day! To celebrate, we have designed this commemorative graphic that I thought you might enjoy: http://www.fix.com/blog/national-hot-dog-day/ I saw you had linked to HotDog.org in the past and wanted to suggest this for your readers. If you decide to share, all I ask is that you credit the source and I can send visitors to your site as a thank-you if you are interested. Thanks, Kelsey Phillips
Hi there, as you may or may not know, July 23rd is National Hot Dog Day! To celebrate, we have designed this commemorative graphic that I thought you might enjoy: http://www.fix.com/blog/national-hot-dog-day/
I saw you had linked to HotDog.org in the past and wanted to suggest this for your readers. If you decide to share, all I ask is that you credit the source and I can send visitors to your site as a thank-you if you are interested.
Thanks,
Kelsey Phillips
waterfrontseattle.org
Bertha, the humungous deep-bore (or deeply boring) tunnel digging machine, is still stuck under the ground, and won’t resume creating an underground Alaskan Way Viaduct replacement highway until perhaps some time next year.
But that delay won’t stop the rest of the total central-waterfront makeover from going forward.
A new seawall (which won’t protect us from long-term rising sea levels) will resume construction any month now, following a summer hiatus.
And the planning stages for a post-viaduct remake of Alaskan Way’s real estate, combining a surface street with a mile-long pedestrian/recreational “promenade,” continue apace.
At the end of May, the Seattle Office of the Waterfront (waterfrontseattle.org) released a new set of drawings and paintings depicting the project’s latest plans.
Unlike the project organizers’ previous set of sketches, which some online pundits snarked at for depicting all lily-white citizens enjoying the sights, these new illustrations show a healthy variety of skin tones on their make-believe happy citizens.
But the images still depict sizable groups of adults and kids walking about and enjoying sunny, warm days near Elliott Bay.
Days which, as anyone who actually lives here knows, are both precious and rare.
What would this landscaped playground look like the rest of the time?
It would probably look as barren and windswept and unpopulated as the waterfront mostly looks now during the wintertime, only prettier. (Which would, at least, make it friendlier to early-morning joggers and bicycle commuters.)
And, unlike some of the Waterfront Project’s earlier conceptual images, these new paintings don’t make the place seem too precious, too upscale, too (to use a far overused term these days) “world class.”
This is good.
It’s not so good that the fictional laid-back and mellow waterfront enjoyers in the images aren’t doing much of anything.
One image shows some kids splashing around a set of small, floor-level fountains (officially called a “water feature element”) at the planned Union Street Pier (to be built between the Great Wheel and the Seattle Aquarium).
Another image shows a few mellow aging-hipster couples (apparently all hetero) waltzing to the tunes of a small acoustic combo at the same Union Street site at dusk (with the “water feature element” turned off).
Otherwise, the fantasized open-space enjoyers are seen mostly just standing, sitting, strolling, bicycling, and talking on cell phones.
We don’t need a civic “front lawn;” the Olympic Sculpture Park already serves that function.
We need a civic “back yard.”
If we can’t have industry on the central waterfront in the container-cargo age, we can at least have industrious leisure there.
I want (at least seasonally) food trucks and hot dog carts, art fairs and circus/vaudeville acts. I want a summer concert series like the waterfront had years ago. I want a roller coaster to complement the Seattle Great Wheel, and smaller amusement attractions and rides nearby (finally replacing Seattle Center’s sorely missed Fun Forest).
Some of these events and attractions would require ongoing funding. The Waterfront Project doesn’t have that funding authority; its duty is only to design and build the promenade and to rebuild piers 62-63, using a part of the funding for the viaduct replacement.
So activities in this area, along the promenade and the rebuilt piers 62/63, would need to be supported separately. The Seattle Parks Department is having enough trouble supporting its current operations. But a semi-commercial amusement area, with concession and ride operators paying franchise fees, could support a variety of warm-weather-season activities and at least some off-season events.
addictedttaddiction.wordpress.com
Following are some of the acts performing today at the Warped Tour, at the White River Amphitheatre outside Auburn:
