Amazon.com Widgets
factmag.com
via jerry beck at indiewire.com
architizer.com
via silver platters and queenanneview.com
This “Seattle” product is made in Korea and imported by a Lakewood company.
If you see it at a local Korean mini mart, observe but do not eat.
ap via nwcn.com
beth dorenkamp via grindhouse theater tacoma
and nope, not *this* kind of sonic either.
No.
Though the rumor mill keeps a-grindin’ with word that Chris Hansen’s plan buy and move the Sacramento Kings has been submitted to the NBA’s Relocation Committee.
When, you might ask, would I answer the title question above with a “yes”?
When a sale and move, or a plan for a sale and move, has been publicly announced; then when such a two-part plan has been approved by the league’s Board of Governors (a.k.a. all the other team owners).
Until then, this department might not appear each day; only when there’s something to be said (seriously or otherwise) about the topic.
via nutshell movies
For the 27th consecutive year (really!), we proudly present the MISCmedia In/Out List, the most venerable and only accurate list of its kind in the known English-speaking world.
As always, this is a prediction of what will become hot and not-so-hot in the coming year, not necessarily what’s hot and not-so-hot now. If you believe everything hot now will just keep getting hotter, I’ve got some Hostess Brands stock to sell you.
There was a spot on lower Fourth Avenue downtown on Sunday afternoon where the cheers from the gay marriage celebrants at City Hall and the cheers from the Seahawks fans in CenturyLink field were equally loud. And, with the Seahawks game a total rout, the cheers from both sources were about as frequent.
The City Hall scene was a big, one-time-only, spectacle of civic self-congratulation (the sort of thing Seattle does as often and as chest-thumpingly as possible).
But at the heart of this circus were the 137 couples who were legally wed, at five different chapels set up in the building, by a corps of judges working off the clock for free (including the aptly named Judge Mary Yu). Only the couples and their immediate guests were let inside the building.
Then the couples all got to descend the big exterior stairs and be congratulated with cheers, signs, and music.
Where there are mass weddings, there will be mass receptions. One was held at the Q bar on Broadway. Another was at the Paramount. The latter had its main floor all in flat seatless mode, with tables and tablecloths, and complimentary cupcakes and candies and wine and cider, all donated by local merchants.
Then the celebrity well wishers came on stage. Singer Mary Lambert, then Mayor McGinn, then State Sen. Ed Murray and fiancee (left).
A singer named Chocolate came on to sing a dutifully soulful rendition of “At Last,” leading the ceremonial “first dance” for all the couples.
At this time of year, when superficial wishes of love and joy are repeated to the point of meaninglessness, let us all heed the example of these couples, all all their gay and straight supporters who worked to make this happen, and to all before them who strove to have their love officially recognized in this way, and all who will marry (or simply know they can) in the days and years to come.
steven h. robinson, shorelineareanews.com
(NOTE: For reasons unknown to me, the first version of this post completely disappeared from the site. I’m rewriting it as best as I can remember.)
I have always called Seattle’s Dexter Avenue “Dextrose Avenue.”
That’s in honor of one of its major attractions, the Hostess Bakery.
Since some time in the 1930s, it has been a mainstay of the originally industrial, now posh-ified Cascade (now “South Lake Union”) neighborhood.
It had its logos built in to its concrete-block architecture.
Day and night, it enveloped the surrounding environs with the glorious smells of sugar, flour, egg whites, chocolate, etc. being poured, mixed, baked, and packaged.
At one time, they separated eggs and re-ground flour by hand; before the treats fully became the automated factory products they’d always appeared to be.
As a child during the early years of kids’ TV, I remember the live local kids’ hosts performing commercials, with the big cutaway props of Hostess Cup Cakes, Twinkies, Tiger Tails, etc.
(My favorites were always the Sno Balls. Even at a tender age, two side by side pink hemispheres meant something to me.)
Later on, after the FCC stopped local kids’ hosts from appearing in commercials (a move that essentially killed most of those shows), Hostess created animated talking versions of its goodies—Twinkie the Kid, Captain Cup Cake, Fruit Pie the Magician. (Unlike Will Vinton’s later M&M’s spots, these ads never addressed the implications of these “baked” toons inviting you to eat their relatives.)
Hostess treats will still be sold here (see below).
But they won’t be made here anymore.
The Seattle plant, and two others, will be closed.
Management blamed an ongoing bakers’ strike. (However, the mayor of St. Louis, whose Hostess branch is also closing, says he’d been informed of the closings months before the strike.)
The strikers refused the company’s demands for wage cuts and big layoffs; after the company already erased pension accounts.
That was as part of a bankruptcy procedure, the company’s second in a decade.
Hostess Brands has been slowly dying for longer than that, under three different owners.
Too many parents in recent years have demanded only “healthy” foods for their kids.
In response, Hostess re-targeted its advertising at adults, with little success.
And there are so many, many newer snack product brands, local, regional, and national.
Also, let’s not forget the impact imposed on all consumer-products companies by Walmart. It regularly sets ever smaller wholesale payments, which companies dare not challenge.
The Hostess site will surely be redeveloped, probably as a posh condo project.
A lot of these places are named after the things they’d replaced.
In this case, we should all demand the condo be christened “Twinkie Towers.”
UPDATE: Hostess Brands’ next bankruptcy move might be a staged “liquidation.” That could take several paths, but probably would involve Hostess Brands disappearing (and taking many obligations and all labor contracts away with it), then transferring assets to a shell company that would start a nonunion “new” Hostess.
via kathrynrathke.blogspot.com
All good tidings and shout-outs to my fellow Stranger refugee and prominent commercial illustrator Kathryn Rathke. She’s created the new official logo for Wendy’s restaurants. The deceptively simple mascot caricature took three years of client approval and market testing.
We continue now to reminisce about the last Puyallup Fair (or the first “Washington State Fair,” since the new name was phased in during this year’s advertising). Of course, if you’re reading this in standard blog order, you’re seeing this second part first. Ah, the Web’s particular slant on the time-space continuum…
Some performers, such as these young fiddlers, were there for the purpose of preserving cultural traditions.
Some tried to turn old traditions into new audience-pleasers.
And some were just for fun.
Of course, all the familiar food stuffs could be had. Some of the same concessionaires have been at the fair for decades; some have no other business activities but this.
Kitchen-gadget demonstrations were everywhere and nonstop; as were booths selling stuff (below).
As were people selling ideas, including the idea of a better future.
As mentioned in our prior installment, fair officials are trying to strengthen its roots as a celebration of agriculture. Part of the plan includes year-round community and demonstration gardens, that would display produce in its “living” form.
The new plan would also replace many of the venerable livestock barns.
Veterinary regulations meant sheep and cattle could not be on the premises the same day. Instead, there was a milking demonstration with a plastic cow. (This, I believe, is where non-dairy creamer comes from.)
No such restriction was needed for the horses, or the young horsemen and horsewomen competing in the equestrian finals. The sign on the fence: NO PARENTS OR COACHING ALLOWED.
No months of training and grooming are required to ride the plastic Wally Gator vehicles in the fair’s massive amusement-park area. Damn, I still want this kind of fun within the Seattle city limits again.
These clean-cut young gents had won a huge-ass plush bear at the carny games. But they didn’t have room (or just didn’t want) to drive it home. So they tried to sell it off to passersby outside the grounds. They even proclaimed the bear was really a magic genie that would grant the purchaser’s every wish.
Sound Transit has a bus from downtown Seattle to downtown Puyallup (via Federal Way, Auburn, and Sumner). It ends at the Puyallup Sounder commuter-rail station, right by a classic small-town downtown garnished with street-corner public art works.
Civic authorities have restored this brick-wall painted sign advertising the company that created both the Puyallup fair scone and KOMO-TV.
A brisk ten-block walk took me to the fairgrounds entrance, guarded over as always by the noble cow heads.
While marketed since 1978 as “The Puyallup Fair,” the event’s official title has always been the Western Washington Fair. A new name, “Washington State Fair,” was phased in starting this year. This will surely lead to confusion with the smaller Evergreen State Fair in Monroe.
But I, along with almost every local old-timer, will always think of the fair as “The Puyallup,” thanks to a TV/radio jingle that has been embedded in our minds for more than three decades.
Along with the revised name, fair officials showed off a plan for a revised fairgrounds. The master plan would rein in the commercial exhibits that have sprawled over more of the grounds, and install outdoor agricultural demonstration areas. The idea is to re-emphasize the fair’s roots as a showcase for people of “the land.”
Other exhibits included a mini “factory tour” honoring the 100th anniversary of a Tacoma legend, the Brown & Haley candy company. Booth ladies outside were selling special commemorative Almond Roca tins. I asked if any of them contained Bjork’s life savings. They didn’t get my reference to the film Dancer in the Dark, alas.
In the fair’s Hobby Building, someone installed a private collection of memorabilia relating to another Tacoma institution, Nalley’s Fine Foods. The diversified processed-foods giant had made everything from pickles to potato chips; it closed last year, after decades of mismanagement by various out-of-state owners.
As a pop-culture compulsive, you know I always adore the collection showcases at the Hobby Building. This year folks showed off their stuff relating to the Girl Scouts (above), Lego, Dr Pepper, Sailor Moon, the Seattle World’s Fair’s 50th anniversary, Starbucks gift cards, and the Happy Face symbol.
I’ll have some more of this lovely stuff in a future post; so stay tuned.
As promised, here are my observations of Bumbershoot 2012, Seattle’s annual big culture buffet.
As others have noted, it was a sunny but not unbearably hot three-day weekend, bringing out strong-sized crowd despite the steeper than ever ticket prices. (It was either charge $50 a day, or go back to having no musical stars bigger than Hall & Oates.)
Behold, my first ever deep fried candy bar (a Snickers). Gooey. Messy. Yummy.
How are curly fries made? With good old American industrial knowhow, that’s how.
They may call it the Seattle Center Armory now, but to me it will always be the Center House and/or Food Circus.
In this post-record-industry age, live gigs are more important than ever to a band’s financial model. So are gig posters, as lovingly seen at the latest Flatstock exhibit.
The historic video games exhibit (still up) shows the young’uns what real entertainment was like, 8-bit style.
But amid all the fun there’s some deadly serious stuff. World Vision International would like you to know AIDS is still devastating much of Africa.
This “House of the Immediate Future” was named after a model home full of futuristic devices at the ’62 World’s Fair. The new one exemplifies affordable-housing designs that could be factory-built, then installed on small real-estate footprints.
A few inflatable rides are no substitute for the late, great Fun Forest.
The Toyota-sponsored “Whac-A Hipster” game. Hipster-bashing has become corporate,and therefore beyond passé.
The heart of the “Put the Needle on the Record” exhibit, a mini-recording studio where you can record your own music and/or voices for a time capsule, is this recording lathe that cuts real phonograph-record masters.
Today’s greatest ETA (“Elvis Tribute Artist”), El Vez, does his massive act with a massive in-house video production (like all the big music stages had this year).
An inflatable icon of the original Elvis stood over two exhibits.
To the right, the Record Store, a display of classic vinyl LPs with DJs and live small combos.
To the left, the Elvistravaganza. Marlow Harris and Jo David applied their kitsch curatorial touch to the World’s Fair’s most enduring celebrity visitor. I contributed my (quite modest) ETA talents at the all-day karaoke stage.
As I departed the Center grounds to the soothing strains of Hey Marseilles, I regretted the many acts I hadn’t seen but felt enlivened and revived by the ones I had seen.
