Thriller author Barry Eisler, a born-again proponent of self-publishing (and the first established author to sign with Amazon’s publishing division), told a local audience that :

1. The book industry has badly needed a forced overhaul for ages;
2. everyone in publishing who’s neither an author nor a reader is just a “middleman” (yes, even bookstores; yes, even indie bookstores);
3. authors who defend the industry’s business-as-usual are like prisoners who suffer from “Stockholm syndrome;” and
4. Amazon is no “Great Satan,” as it’s been portrayed by the NYC book biz and its NYC media pals. Rather, Eisler claims the e-tail giant is simply “injecting competition into what has been a moribund industry.”

Needless to say, in many parts of the book establishment (the most tradition-bound establishment in all the lively arts), them’s fightin’ words.

•

Meanwhile, authors Sarah Weinman and Maureen Ogle have put up separate online essays. Each questions the future of “serious non-fiction” in the digital age.

Under the old regime, profitable publishing houses subsidized this work with large advances against royalties. In many cases, the publishers knew authors would never earn these advances back. It was the companies’ way of subsidizing prestigious “loss leader” works.

But if self-publishing becomes the new business-as-usual, Weinman and Ogle ask, what will become of long, research-heavy projects—projects that could take as many as five years of an author’s full-time attention?

There’s always Kickstarter.com. That’s where local comix legend Jim Woodring is raising funds so he can work full-time on his next graphic novel.

And there are always grants, fellowships, teaching gigs, and working spouses (for those authors who can land any of them).

And there’s another answer, one that’s right under Weinman and Ogle’s proverbial noses.

Both essayists note that the most successful e-book self-publishers, thus far, are fiction writers who churn out several titles per year.

Non-fiction writers can do likewise.

They can chop up and serialize their longer works, one section at a time.

When it comes time to put out the full book, authors can still revise and re-sequence everything.

•

In another sector of the digital media disruption, music-biz attorney Ken Hertz reminds you that even (or especially) with the new marketplace, bands still face tremendous odds against “making it.”

udhcmh.tumblr.com

• The above vintage paperback cover comes from a blog located in a college town—Columbus OH, not Spokane WA. (Found via Pulp International.)
• The Seattle Police have an on-staff graffiti interpreter. And he says only 3 percent of Seattle’s graffiti has anything to do with street gangs.
• State Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna may have found his most potent nemesis—not election rival Jay Inslee but 90 women who are suing McKenna for participating (in the name of the people of Washington) in the right wing’s anti-Obamacare crusade.
• Scott North at the Everett Herald looks back to Wash. state’s own U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and his role in making forest conservation a real thing.
• Amazon, continuing in its quest to become kings of all media, is starting its own movie production company. And it’s soliciting concepts for “TV style” web shows—sitcoms and kids’ shows, live-action and animated. And unlike some online “screenwriting contest” scam sites, they don’t keep the rights to works they don’t use.
• “He who controls the Spice controls the universe.”
• As the Seattle arena proposal moves forward quickly, ex-City Council member Richard McIver suggests putting it instead in the Rainier Valley, near the Mt. Baker light rail station and I-90. (It would also be near the former site of Sicks’ Stadium, home of minor league baseball for 30 years and Major League Baseball for oen year.)
• Meanwhile, a member of the ownership team that stole the Sonics has lost his chairman role at Chesapeake Energy, due to alleged conflicts of interest. Couldn’t happen to an un-nicer guy.
• From the verdant town of Corvallis (where I spent two formative years of my life) comes the tale of a bright young woman who became a hit with a sports-gambling blog, then became a top contributor to ESPN.com, and then allegedly used this fame to scam would-be business colleagues.
• Ashton Kutcher sure can get all high-horse righteous when he’s denouncing the sex industry. But perpetuating racist stereotypes in commercials—that’s something he apparently doesn’t mind at all.
• Some people don’t want to be Americans anymore. They’re one-percenters trying to flee tax evasion charges.
• Former Wall Street operative Alexis Goldstein describes the milieu of Big Finance as a place where people strive…

to earn enough money so that you can behave in a way that makes the very existence of other people irrelevant.…

Wall Street is far too self-absorbed to be concerned with the outside world unless it is forced to. But Wall Street is also, on the whole, a very unhappy place. While there is always the whisper that maybe you too can one day earn fuck-you money, at the end of a long day, sometimes all you take with you are your misguided feelings of self-righteousness.

escapistmagazine.com

• The Star Wars universe is explained in handy infographic form.
• Rob McKenna is given an opportunity to prove he’s not part of the War on Women. Result: Epic Fail.
• More details about the big waterfront renovation plan have been released. They show a great improvement over the original concept (which, as you may recall, was essentially just a bunch more “world class” windswept plazas, a commodity greater downtown already has in abundance). These proposals actually include stuff people can recreate with. Like a climbing wall, and a swimming pool on a barge in the water.
• The Real Change-sponsored protest against homeless-camp removals went off without a hitch. Now let’s get our officials to do more for the homeless instead of merely against them.
• Wash. state now has over 700 wineries. Twice the number in ’07.
• The first Boeing 787s you’ll be able to get on from Sea-Tac will go from here to Tokyo starting later this year.
• How does DC Comics’ plan for a Watchmen prequel series gibe with the original graphic novel’s creator Alan Moore? If you know anything about Moore, you’ll know he doesn’t much care for the idea.
• Obama is picking his fights carefully, choosing for whom he’s going to strongly fight. Pot users: it’s still not your turn.
• Rex Huppke at the Chicago Tribune announces the “Death of Facts,” following one too many tea bagger fabrication.
• The newest thing to be paranoid about: what employers think about your Klout score. (Yes, the hereby linked article explains just what a “Klout score” is. It has something to do with how active you are on Twitter, or something like that.)

foodbeast.com

• Margarita flavored Bud Light: sign of the apocalypse #6 or #7?
• Winning bids for the state liquor stores (or rather, for the right to apply for licenses, negotiate leases, and take over inventory at the stores) are now in. Individual winners have apparently not yet been posted anywhere, but the store at 12th Avenue and East Pine Street went for a cool half million. The state’s total take (should all the sales go through): over $30 million, more than four times estimates reported just last Friday.
• Yesterday, we mentioned how Deluxe Junk, the lovely vintage everything store that’s one of the last remnants of “Fremont funk.” faced a sudden eviction by the Masonic lodge that owns its building. Apparently there’s a settlement; alas, Deluxe Junk will still leave the premises, at the end of June.
• The Real Change folks will get their protest camp in Westlake Park after all.
• One little-publicized event at the big Space Needle anniversary gala: a protest by Needle restaurant workers.
• The Canucks have made sure there won’t be riots in the Vancouver streets this June.
• Here’s a long, loving profile of ex-Seattleite and comix genius Lynda Barry.
• Google and Facebook: They’re hot now, but could they stumble as computing goes mobile?
• Author Michael J. Sandel places blame for the market-ization of almost all of western society. He says the economists did it.
• Paul Krugman blasts Romney, assuredly not for the last time.
• A Georgetown prof really dislikes the Facebook-spawned overuse of the verb “Like.”
• Toby Litt in Granta wonders whether long-form literature can hold an audience, or even be considered relevant, in an age of multitasking and incessant distraction. I say bah. Folks who can finish umpteen-level video games or watch entire TV-show seasons in one weekend can enjoy a story of a few hundred pages.
• Sorry, but I can’t trust any list of the “ten most harmful novels for aspiring writers” that excludes Bukowski.
• The top black women’s magazine hired a white guy as managing editor. What could possibly go wrong? Oh, that he turned out to be a not-so-secret racist wingnut.
• Steven Pearlstein reminds you that some politicians actually want you to be turned off from politics. Remember: Not voting = voting a straight right-wing ticket.
• Making stuff in China will cease being cheap sooner or later. China’s other outsourcing advantages might remain (lax environmental enforcement, autocratic government, brutal suppression of dissent).
• TV ratings, both broadcast and cable, are way down, especially among younger viewers, and especially in terms of “real time” viewing (i.e., without DVRs; i.e., with the commercials). The hardcore TV haters will naturally ignore this, and will continue to insist that Everyone Except Them is a vidiot sheeple.

david eskenazi collection via sportspressnw.com

And a happy Friday the 13th (first of the year) and Mariners home opening day to all of you!

• Richard Beyer, 1925-2002: The Waiting for the Interurban sculptor didn’t invent Fremont’s image as a funky/artsy neighborhood. But his work publicized this image as much as anything.
• Something You Might Not Have Known Dept.: Seattle gets a small but impressive portion of its electricity from methane at an Oregon landfill.
• You’ve got two more chances to have your say about Metro’s plan to ax the downtown Ride Free Area, at County Council meetings on the 16th and the 25th. Let ‘em know you want/need/demand robust free downtown transit service.
• Third Avenue in Belltown now has those “daylight-like” street lights. Next step in resurrecting Third: making the street and its buildings look cleaner.
• With the legislative session finally over, Rob McKenna can legally raise campaign money. Thus, Washington’s gubernatorial campaign is now truly underway. Watch for McKenna to simultaneously run with and against the national Republican agenda—something Jay Inslee will try to stick onto McKenna at every opportunity.
• St. James Cathedral is among the churches that won’t take part in the Catholic archdiocese’s initiative petition campaign to overturn gay marriage.
• When can you start getting a legal drink in Wash. state after 2 a.m.? Perhaps in November (just perhaps).
• Bizarre Patent Application of the Day: GeekWire says Microsoft wants to patent “monetizing buttons on TV remotes:”

It’s called “Control-based Content Pricing,” and the basic idea is dynamic pricing of video content, based on the preferences of the user at any given moment—essentially setting different prices for different functions of the TV remote.

• Frances Cobain still can’t get away from her mom’s meddling.
• A Spokane nursery put up a billboard reading “Pot Dealer Ahead.” The ad was complete with an image of some flower pots, in case people didn’t get the joke (it being Spokane and all). Some people are vocally not amused (it being Spokane and all).
• The U.S. Border Patrol in this state continues to behave like a gang of racist tools.
• North Korea just can’t keep it up.
• Reversible male contraception is finally in the domestic testing stage, despite Big Pharma’s longtime disinterest.
• Jed Lewison at Daily Kos parses the anatomy of a Mitt Romney lie, that over 90 percent of U.S. job losses have gone against women. In reality (instead of Fox News Fantasyland), most folks laid off in the Great Recession were men. But new or revived jobs the past two years have also gone mostly to men (56 percent).
• The Murdoch media empire’s phone and email tapping scandal is reaching the U.S. But Murdoch’s domestic properties are not implicated, at least not yet. This is still about Murdoch’s U.K. papers, tapping into Hollywood celebrities’ phones and emails.
• Ari Rabin-Havt at HuffPost claims right wing racism no longer bothers with coded “dog whistle” messages, but now spews its hate openly and proudly.
• What Omar Willey says about seeking good web comics applies to just about all web “content”: “How do you find all this stuff?” (The stuff worth reading, that is.)

gjenvick-gjonvik archives

Three of the Big Six book publishers (Hachette, News Corp.’s HarperCollins, and CBS’s Simon & Schuster) have settled with the U.S. Justice Dept. in the dispute over alleged e-book price fixing.

The publishers still insist they’re innocent; but they agreed in the settlement to not interfere with, or retaliate against, discounted e-book retail prices.

Apple, Pearson’s Penguin, and Holtzbrinck’s Macmillan have not yet settled; they also insist they did not collude to keep e-book prices up. Bertlesmann’s Random House was not sued.

This is, of course, all really about Amazon, and its ongoing drives to keep e-book retail prices down and its share of those revenues up. The big publishers, and some smaller ones too, claim that’s bad for them and for the book biz as a whole.

In other randomosity:

• Thanks in no part whatsoever to regressive cuts-only Republicans and their pseudo-Democrat enablers, Wash. state has a budget, and not nearly as horrid a one as we could have had. The real issue, fixing the state’s ultra-regressive revenue system, was again kicked down the road.
• The Legislature also failed to approve new means to pay for transit. However, it turns out Seattle still has the transit-funding mechanism approved a decade ago for the scuttled monorail campaign. That’s what the group called “Seattle Subway” hopes to use to fund more in-city rail miles (which, despite the group’s name, wouldn’t necessarily be below ground).
• Emily Pothast has unkind, not-nice, really un-positive things to say about the Kirkland developers who want to gut Pike/Pine’s anchor block.
• At the formerly Microsoft-owned Slate, Tom Scocca explains, in detail, just why today’s iteration of Microsoft Word so greatly sucks.
• Matt Groening reveals, 22 years later, that yes, The Simpsons‘ Springfield is based on Springfield, Ore. (also known as Eugene’s evil twin).
• Another crack in the edifice of Homophobia Inc.: The guy who first promoted the idea of “curing” gay people through “therapy” says he now believes it’s a crock of shit.
• Meanwhile in the world of Incarceration Inc., two Penna. judges admitted they took bribes from a private prison operator to sentence juvenile suspects to terms at said private prisons.
• A 25-year-old bride got herself a lavish wedding for free by pretending to have terminal cancer. The marriage has already crumbled; jail might be next.
• Someone’s posted to Facebook a cartoon chart-graphic about “How to Focus in the Age of Distraction.” Rule #1: Get the heck off of Facebook.
• Sometime in the mid 1990s I made a throwaway music-scene prediction, as part of a larger rant that the future is seldom linear. I said, “There could be a big hammered dulcimer revival in the 2010s, causing teens in the 2020s to yearn for the good old days of techno.” Speed up the timeline, substitute the recent “beard bands” for the dulcimers, and we seem to have gotten there.

artist's rendering; via kiro-tv

• Millions in the making, the big Seattle waterfront roller coaster is finally on the way! Estimated opening: July 4th.
• You all need to read Judy Lightfoot’s piece at Crosscut about people forced to live in their vehicles at highway rest stops—even people with full time jobs.
• On a related note, the state’s (official) jobless rate has dropped just enough to disqualify the state’s unemployed from 26 weeks’ worth of extended benefits.
• The state’s finances, services, and basic sense of humanity are swirling down the drain. Tim Eyman, of course, doesn’t give a shit.
• Dept. of Correction: It turns out public breastfeeding is already legal in Wash. state. Yesterday’s “Random Links” piece implied otherwise.
• Queen Anne Books has got itself a lucky new owner.
• It’s official: there’s a whooping cough epidemic in our state.
• Seattle Center asked the public for input on new public-space designs for the place. Only they announced it on Tuesday with a deadline of Wednesday. And we’re asked to choose between three plans, all designed by out-of-state firms, and all reeking of “world class” emotional coldness.
• Three deserving local theatre troupes will get to share the performance space at the bottom of a new mixed-use development on Capitol Hill.
• Who doesn’t look at a bizarre press release issued on April 1 with at least a little skepticism? The Puget Sound Business Journal, that’s who. (The hoax was from Ivar’s, announcing a 100-flavor chowder dispenser to rival the Coca-Cola Freestyle pop machine.)
• The Mariners are acting all NIMBY-y about getting a basketball/hockey arena next door.
• As the Seattle Times finishes up its recounting of every complaint anyone’s got against Amazon (including some pretty serious allegations), labor advocacy group Working Washington is inviting people to register their own snark on the etailer’s sales page for a “Fair Share Pie Cutter.”
• Despite the plethora of comic book-based movies and related merch, actual comic book sales have collapsed in recent years (even more than newspapers). But one reviewer sees a ray of hope emerging amidst the pall of gloom. It’s the new higher-res iPad.
• Just declassified and in hot demand, it’s all the data from the 1940 Census.
• Celebrity-snark writer Dustin Rowles depicts sitcom has-been Kirk Cameron as a complete douchebag, albeit one of the pseudo-Christian rather than the regular Hollywood variety.
• Morley Safer snarks at the bigtime art world. New York mag’s Jerry Saltz snarks back.
• Your daily dose of political outrage: Paul Buchheit at Buzzflash lists some “preposterous but persistent conservative myths;” Stephen D. Foster Jr. at Addicting Info lists 40 particularly disgusting quotes by GOP politicos demonstrating the “values Republicans want to destroy America with;” and Laura Clawson at Daily Kos recounts the utter failure of a particularly dorky would be right-wing sting operation against a commuity organizing group.
• And let’s all get ready for Easter with (direct from the Betty Crocker Kitchens) the original “Bunny Butt Cake.”

via shelligator.tumblr.com

You will note we posted nothing on 4/1. We’ve had enough trouble over the years with people thinking the stuff posted here’s just made up.

• SyFy premiered a set-in-Seattle, filmed-in-LA cheesy horror flick at the local Comicon, somehow expecting folks here would love it. They were wrong.
• (By the way, from my brief visit to the Comicon, the most popular costume inspiration this year is Cartoon Network’s playful series Adventure Time.)
• We must say goodbye to local landscape painter Christopher Martin Hoff, known for setting up his easel around town and painting street scenes on and at the spot.
• Also gone this week is Georgia/Florida novelist Harry Crews, who deftly made the most improbable scenarios seem as normal as everyday life in those states (which, admittedly, already includes some mighty improbable stuff).
• On the one hand, Amazon continues to put down roots in the Heart-O-Seattle; while most U.S. tech and dot-com outfits headquarter themselves in far-flung exurban office parks. On the other hand, the company gives damn little to local arts and charitable groups, and maintains a lower-than-low-key civic presence  (even regarding its own real estate moves).
• The Arizona-founded company now calling itself Village Voice Media turns out (thanks to an investigative campaign by another wannabe anti-Backpage.com crusader) to be half owned by its top two execs. The rest of the stock is also privately held, with a fund managed by Goldman Sachs having a 16 percent share.
• A Zoroastrian sect in England has gotten preliminary approval to build a 300-foot funeral tower, to be called the “Tower of Silence,” next to a popular seaside beach. More than just a memorial, it will actually have believers’ remains hoisted atop it, in keeping with the group’s belief that dead bodies “pollute the earth.” The local authorities say they hope to revive the town’s sagging fortunes via “funeral tourism.”
• It’s been 50 years since Michael Harrington’s book The Other America spread the idea that poor people were some “Other,” a different tribe than you and me, trapped in a “culture of poverty” rather than simply not making enough money to go around. As Barbara Ehrenreich puts it, Harrington helped perpetuate the dangerous meme that poor people were lazy and ignorant, when they really often work their asses off just to barely get by.
• Finally, here’s local pastor Catherine Foote with a Palm Sunday address against what she calls the “divisive fear” threatening to tear U.S. society apart.

early 'new yorker' writer janet flanner photographed by bernice abbott; tacoma art museum

• Tacoma’s getting what was too hot for the Smithsonian, a photo exhibit of 150 years of gays in America.
• There’s an art vending machine in Ballard now! But, despite what this story says, it’s not the first in town. There’s already one at the Hideout bar on Boren and Madison.
• Local animator Drew Christie asks your sympathy for the poor, put-upon Nutria.
• The Voice of America (yes, they’re still around) reports about beloved local artist Ginny Ruffner and her courageous comeback from a horrific car crash.
• The UW men’s basketball team has won “the championship of the West” and is still in the running for U.S. sports’ most famous consolation prize.
• Folks are still trying to bring Dennis Kucinich to run for Congress in Wash. State.
• Auto racing in King County has apparently been saved.
• Who’s profiting from America’s health care system and its runaway costs? Not Swedish Hospital. They’re losing a quarter million a day.
• Microsoft’s giving police departments a software tool to create “digital fingerprints” for any online image. They say it can be useful in tracking down the sharers of child porn. But as we’ve learned, “cracking down on child porn” can be invoked as an excuse for every creepy Big Brother tactic.
• Will the Florida teen shot for apparently no other reason than walking while black ever get real justice?
• This Raw Story piece about an FCC decision, setting aside hundreds of new low-power radio frequencies for actual local stations instead of mere repeater transmitters, exaggerates when it says the move represents “a critical blow to right wing radio dominance.” After all, these new local stations could host their own homegrown right-wingers.
• A Bloomberg Businessweek reporter who wrote about what he calls “the real Foxconn” insists the massive Chinese high-tech subcontractor is actually a pretty good employer, considering.
• Dyske Suematsu asks rhetorically why more Americans don’t like jazz. Suematsu’s rhetorical answer is just standard square-bashing elitist yawn city. Look: Advanced, specialty versions of ANYTHING are going to mainly appeal to niche audiences. Light aircraft. Eighteenth-century history. Foreign film. French wrought-iron sconces from the 1930s. And so on.
• UK author China Mieville wants you to frustrate and “unsatisfy” him. Preferably now.

The cherry blossoms agree with the calendar that spring has arrived. Why does the weather argue?

• Today (Tuesday 3/20) is half price Amazon gift card day.
• Seattle’s apparently on the cutting edge of privacy-free office interiors.
• Who wouldn’t love a local art exhibit of classic electric mixers, model cars, and miniature Space Needles? Nobody, that’s who.
• Who still supports Mike Daisey’s not-entirely-true “exposé” of Apple’s subcontracted Chinese gadget factories? Would you believe Steve Wozniak?
• More bad news for everybody who thinks web ads could eventually support professional online news. Turns out that 68 percent of all online ad spending goes to Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, and AOL. Only the latter two employ any journalists (Microsoft through its half interest in MSNBC.com; AOL through HuffPost, Patch, and other sites).
• Meanwhile in Maine, one of the most aggressively hyped “digital first/print last,” “hyperlocal,” “new media business model” companies has crashed, taking some almost 200-year-old weekly papers with it.
• Jonathan Chait at New York mag insists that Obama’s aborted budget compromise with John Boehner’s House Republicans last year was an attempt “to sell out liberalism,” which only failed because Boehner was “too crazy” to go along. I have a different interpretation. I believe Obama made a show of offering Boehner almost everything the latter wanted, knowing full well the latter would reject it anyway, as a part of the grand strategy of rendering the GOP utterly irrelevant on the national level and turning the Democrats into the new “party of business.” (Which could still be seen as “selling out liberalism,” if you want to see it that way.)
• Meanwhile, said House Republicans are desperate to keep the 1 percent’s loyalty by proposing a near total re-deregulation of Wall St. funny-money practices.
• To end on a fun note, here’s some animated “3D .gifs” by local artist Dain Fagerholm.

After you’ve had your Caesar salad to celebrate the Ides of March, join me in celebrating the ghosts of meals past.

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks), Broadway and East Roy on crunchy Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

• Good News Dept.: It looks like the Volunteer Park Conservatory is a lot closer to being fiscally preserved than was implied in previous reports.
• The Husky men’s basketball team had to settle for playing in the NIT, despite winning its conference’s regular season title. But that wasn’t as demeaning as the team’s ultra-lousy attendance at its first round NIT game.
• Whatever patina of respectability the megabanks had is peeling off in the late-winter rains. There’s the blistering breakup letter by the ex Goldman Sachs exec. And there’s Matt Taibbi’s even more blistering exposé of BankAmericrap as “a hypergluttonous ward of the state whose limitless fraud and criminal conspiracies we’ll all be paying for until the end of time.” And yet Megan McArdle at the Atlantic insists what we really need is a “massive deregulation” of banking. What?
• Meanwhile, here’s another good-riddance letter by a techie who left Google for Microsoft, claiming the former had devolved from “an innovation factory” into just another “advertising company.”
• The copyright police have convinced U.K. authorities to ship a Brit college kid to the U.S. for prosecution, all for the supposedly heinous crime of running a TV-episodes linking site.
• Some Catholic bishops in Missouri have decided the best way to respond to continued exposés of child-abusing priests is to mount vicious legal attacks against the exposers.
• To end this batch on an upbeat note, here are four illustration books and a comic-strip collection based on classic literature.

stephen crowe via brainpickings.org

Learn how we and our immediate forebearers ate!

I’m participating in a History Cafe session about old Seattle restaurant menus. It’s 7 p.m. Thursday at Roy Street Coffee (the off-brand Starbucks) at Broadway and E. Roy on curvaceous Capitol Hill. It’s sponsored by KCTS, HistoryLink.org, MOHAI, and the Seattle Public Library.

Be there or be yesterday’s “fresh sheet.”

• The World Trade Organization (remember them?) sez Boeing gets unfair subsidies from the U.S. gov’t.
• Are an ad agency’s “homeless hotspots” at the SXSW music festival really more demeaning than the Seattle company that  still calls itself “Bumvertising“?
• No, Michael Medved. We’re not secretly jealous of Rush Limbaugh and his awesome power. We’re disgusted by his puerile stupidity, bullying, and bigotry (and yours too).
• The Oregonian won’t run the Doonesbury comics about the GOP’s war against women. A local cartoonist responds by depicting the paper’s readers choosing to “abort” their subscriptions.
• Is there really something particular about the training of soldiers at Lewis-McChord that’s led to these dreadful stories about abuses of power in the Afghan field? Or is it just a coincidence, based on the fact that the base has grown so big, with so many troops transferring in and out of it?
• One of the 1980 American hostages in Iran would rather not see history repeat itself thank you.
• Blogger/editor Maria Popova believes websites should formally adopt a “curator’s code” identifying direct and indirect links via special unicode symbols.

esquire.com

Welcome to daylight savings time. Welcome to the “light” half of the year. Welcome to the little piece of manmade trickery that tells us the worst of the cold, dark time is over. Even though it sure didn’t look or feel like it today.

• Esquire’s “Eat Like a Man” department ran a survey asking readers’ “most life changing burger joint.” The winner: our own Dick’s, by a mile. (Also note the beautiful Dennis Hopper-esque photo topping the story.)
• Danny Westneat notes that the Republican state senate coup-mongers’ state budget cuts essential services even more brutally than the competing Democratic house budget. Westneat concludes that this totally destroys the longstanding Republican meme that all you need for a balanced budget is to get rid of some vaguely defined “waste.”
• KOMO headline: “Car slams into dentist office, driver extricated.” It may take you a second to realize that’s not “extracted.”
• The Huskies, despite their regular season prowess, are not in the NCAA men’s basketball tourney. The only NW team in it is Gonzaga.
• More and more advertisers desert right-wing hate radio. Not just Limbaugh but the whole bigoted, bullying gaggle. Will the whole genre collapse under the weight of its own need for continued extremeness? (And remember, this is the only audience today’s Republican Party gives a damn about.)
• The next time some techno-pundit tells you that every organization (from the news media to local government) must become more like whatever’s the social media darling of the week, just remember the example of Twitter. A very famous name. A very popular site. A very pathetic business.
• Jean “Mobius” Giraud R.I.P.: The king of “clear line” Euro comix art seamlessly blended slick, sophisticated senses of draftsmanship and composition with classic fanboy adventure genre subjects (Sergio Leone-esque cowboys, space opera, sword and sorcery, erotica, even proto-steampunk). He also cofounded Metal Hurlant, the way-influential magazine known here as Heavy Metal. Too bad most U.S. media obits of Giraud only wanted to discuss the Hollywood movies he’d consulted on or which were “inspired” by his work (typical myopia).

supervillain.wordpress.com

american institute of architects—seattle

• If we must get rid of High School Memorial Stadium at Seattle Center, it ought to be replaced by a municipal “back yard,” not yet another municipal “front lawn.” Consider this while perusing some architects’ proposal to turn the site into a “Seattle Jelly Bean.”
• Back from the dead like a James Bond villain, it’s the Wash. state film tax-break program! Resurrected by the Legislature, just before the end of the regular session. Will this mean at least a few “set in Seattle” movies might actually, you know, be made here?
• We’ve said that one possible fiscal end game for the Seattle Times could involve it becoming subsidized by local business bigwigs, either directly or via vanity ads. Here’s an example of the latter: Boeing’s in-house magazine Frontiers, which will now be a monthly ad insert in the Times.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #1: Mr. Bellevue Square just lost another anti-public-transit crusade.
• Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy #2: Professional faux-populist power monger Tim Eyman just lost another anti-common-sense crusade.
• “Tukwila now has the most diverse school district in the nation.”
• Here’s another tribute to art director extraordinaire Dale Yarger, by my fellow Fantagraphics refugee Robert Boyd.
• Elaine Blair at the NY Review of Books compares single-male characters in novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women) to the male authors of these novels (deathly afraid of being spurned and belittled by women readers).
• Arts activist Scott Walters takes aim at the so-called “progressive” nonprofit arts community, in which a few big institutions grab most of the funding and expect the rest of us to wait for the wealth to “trickle down.”
• Here’s a wake-up call to all the defeatist lefties I know who still believe, as one friend once wrote, that “Fox News is the most popular TV channel.” In reality, “Jon Stewart Crushes Fox News in the 2011 Ratings.” (Yet still, this aging, shrinking audience is the only audience today’s Republican Party bothers with!)
• A long, cute infographic compares Apples® to apples.

stranger cover, 8/30/95, art direction by dale yarger, illo by neilwaukee

I haven’t gotten all the details yet, but it appears Dale Yarger, a mammoth force in Seattle publication design, passed away over the weekend.

He’d been living in California for at least the past four years. But his local work is still a huge influence around here.

Yarger was one of the Rocket’s several rotating art directors in the 1980s. He created many memorable covers there and also made an early iteration of the Sub Pop logo, back when that was the title of Bruce Pavitt’s indie-music review column.

During that time he also co-founded a gay paper called Lights, art-directed The Oregon Horse magazine, and collaborated with artist Carl Smool on a memorable anti-Reagan bus sign.

Yarger became one of Fantagraphics Books’ first Seattle hires after the comix publisher came here from L.A. He redesigned the company’s Comics Journal magazine (where I first knew him), and essentially did every visual thing on its comics and books that wasn’t done by the artists themselves. He instilled the appreciation for top-notch design, typography, and production that now marks the company’s admired graphic novels and comic-strip collections.

By 1995 he transferred over to that other hip bastion, The Stranger. In his three-year stint there, Yarger took the alt-weekly from the look of “a zine on steroids” into the slick product it’s been ever since.

He also had a hand in the visuals of Seattle Weekly, the University Book Store, and Dana Countryman’s Cool and Strange Music magazine.

I will always remember him as a cool head even when surrounded by hot heads, a perfectionist who still understood schedules and budgets, a man with a knack for making even the most mundane assignment sparkle.

UPDATE: Now I’m told Yarger had stomach cancer, for which he’d had surgery some time last year.